That seems to sum it up, for a first post. Hello world…as if the world were really listening to this middle age Midwest mother of five. And that seems to me to be the crux or “cross to bear”, of most women my age. Is anyone really listening? Ah.. teenage angst come full circle, except this time around, we really might have something worthwhile to say, something worth listening to. And so, if for no one else but myself and perhaps my daughters..I shall write to the world.
I led church this morning at the long term care facility where I work,,and as I looked around the circle of aged residents in various states of health and decomposition..I saw vacancy of mind and worse yet, vacancy of life and soul. It left me stunned, this realization of the solitary emptiness of their lives and how little I could really do to ease their pain. The greatest shock came when I flashed to a surreal image of myself sitting in a wheelchair some day in a nondescript future world of a nursing home.
Our American culture has “renamed” nursing home to the more politically correct – long term care center. You know..it isn’t a end life sanctuary..a place to go and stay before we die. It’s now a care center,,for long term..where you go and stay before you die. Changing the name did little to change the reality. It rarely does.
Life all the shifting metaphors around me these days, I see through a glass darkly..at a future when what I have to say will matter to no one. How do we matter to anyone? Where do we find loving ears to hear us? And how do we hear with love those so unlovable amongst us? I once wrote about how the greatest challenge in the world was just to learn to love and be loved..and then I heard that thought repeated back to me in a famous musical..and I knew it to be the kind of truth that resonates throughout time.
As a progressive Christian thinker, it is the essence of my faith and so I believe in this little diary blog of mine, I shall write about how we love in this world and how we are loved. Because to do so well makes any life worth living, even one creeping toward the anihilation of old age. I have failed so many times to love those in my life well and perhaps the empty vacant hearts and faces I saw this morning are witness to lives that have in some way failed this test also..or at the very least witness to the inability of those in their lives to love them well.
Amen on this Sunday evening, April 6 2008
