Bedside

Bedside

We like to talk, we are wont to hear ourselves think aloud, and we use a lot of words in our everyday lives. We turn on our iPods, MP3 players, Netflix, YouTube and fill the silent spaces with noise and distractions. It’s part and parcel of our context. It’s neither good, nor bad: yet, it’s important to explore the need for balance when one thing is more predominant in our lives than another. The reality is we live in a fix-it, extroverted world that often does not leave space to simply be in days that moves through the continuum of joy -> challenge, tears -> laughter and happiness -> anger.

And into this human conundrum, the Christian experience names and walks into moments of illness and death. With all of our different and competing doctrines and theologies, in all of our ecumenical imagined or real dissimilarities about ideas like Grace and Atonement, liberation and exile, and who we experience Jesus to be – fully human and fully divine – we endeavour to be present throughout the full cycle of life. That cycle inevitably ends in death and, not infrequently, with doubt, anger and gnashing. And just as inevitably, it is often those of us who are left behind that must wrestle with those sweeping emotions that threaten to lift us up, unmoor us from the known & predictable: times of tempest when we are tempted into places of isolation, fear and discord.

Grip

Our Sacred Stories are filled with images of these experiences: ones that remind us that suffering, though not inevitable, is consistently present in our shared experience and journey. And in all of the tensions that brokenness and hurt bring, we are called to be with the ill, the harmed. We are invited to live out this sense of God-Among-Us by walking into places that most would avoid, would rather not experience, and would prefer to deny lest one’s own mortality be considered. We live in a human world that has sanitised the cycle of life. Whether through an idyllic advertisement, an over-the-counter antibiotic or antiseptic wipe that make everything seem to glisten with the illusion of constancy, sameness and eternal predictability, we are removed from dirt stained finger nails and the septic tanks that need emptying on a regular basis.

For all of the finery of institutionalised religion, for all of the significant social justice work before us, the advocacy that must and will occur, it is at the bedside – in the moments when death hovers – that the Holy is clearly manifest in the heavy, sacred weight of silence. Words are saccharine when breath is shallow. Touch speaks more than poetry, and a smile conveys grounded presence in the midst of uncertainty.

In those moments of witness, when ear bends to hear the whisper of regret, an intuitive jest at the folly of it all, a message to share, that we become more than simply two people embraced in the final dance. In the intimacy of the passage of birth and death, trivialities are abandoned; the moments that hang for an eternity (when there is clarity beyond a Creed or pro-this or anti-that) where we are united in the midst of God’s presence. Where tears fall unashamedly, when grasping breath lets go the journey, death passes and at the bedside, those left behind hover and wait in the midst of the Holy …