Today I spent some of my day at a prayer sharing session at the house of a friend who is in hospice care. We spend most of the time just saying “where we are at”. It is in this group that the idea of ‘wasting time with God’ came up. One of the persons in the group, who is a poet, told us about a poem he is writing about ‘waste’. My friend, who is dying but feeling fairly good, spoke about how the group is for ‘healing’. Medical persons cure persons but healing is done with nature and friends. At the end of the session, I opened my “The Little Book of Archbishop Romero” and saw this quote which was right for the session. “We must save not the soul at the hour of death but the person living in history.”
Another good part of my day was spent having lunch with a friend and then driving him out to visit his mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. The women who live in this residence basically sit around the TV room and smile at everyone. My friend’s mother seems to remember him but not me. I just joke with her that I am her substitute son or her son’s driver. She gets the joke and smiles. While my friend and his mother went off to her room for something I sat in the sun room and started to read a new book: “Freedom Made Flesh” by Ignacio Ellacuria S.J., one of the Jesuit martyrs in El Salvador. In the introduction he states God is revealed in history “not directly but in a sign: humanity in history.” On the way back, my friend, who is elderly himself, started talking about how he is seeing life in a whole new perspective. That fit in well with my constant prayer to have “eyes to see and ears to hear.”
Also today our group “Breaking the Silence”, which is just getting ready to talk about doing a nonviolent action but has done nothing yet, won a small victory.
To some talking with and listening to others about where they are at, visiting an elderly woman with little memory, or being in group for nonviolent action not doing anything, is not doing much. I have to admit that is true. But often doing nothing is something.
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