Humble Works

Archived in my mind is a thought about our frantic race into the high-tech world of healing. The instantaneous use of powerful drugs experimenting their way into depleted veins feels blindly offensive. Where is the documentation that proves collateral damage is not being done while we delay departure of a body laboring to stop living?! With privileged witness I understand the world of the dying more than most and feel a kinship in the words of Bishop Spong when he writes, “No one should die alone. No one should seek high tech solutions to medical problems without a community to provide high-touch environment of love.” This statement burrows in my mind as I recall moments before a friend’s death I acquired an impossible feeling that I needed to let down the bed railing and crawl into bed with her. My hesitation to hold her outlasted her life as I debated about “if” that attempt might cause her pain. In hindsight, it revealed itself as a silent conversation between her soul and mine about the care she needed in her last moments. Human reason emptied me of being able to meet that sacred comforting need. As a mother, I recall those tender moments when nothing else would suffice than for me to lay with my feverish child and tuck him or her close to me. It is pure instinct when holding another to stroke the hair or rub the back with meaningful solidarity which, for my sick child, often led to complete relaxation of the body and then into sleep. Would that we could shrink ourselves in needful moments into that kind of maternal love and compassion; the world and its problems would streak across the night and disappear like star. 

The energy generated in purposeful human touch, I believe, houses an elixir for the transition of the body out of this life much like it aids in our instinctive care of a sick child. We can even take it further when dissecting what Mother Teresa said, “Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.” The art of humble work weaves its thread into our environment one person at a time. Let us wear our responses with eager hands barred not by discrimination, but, instead; obedient in allowing the soul to guide us through the needs of others. Hold more, hug longer, touch often and bring your heart to life under the theater of the soul. 

Mona McPherson