What do we do with God’s love?
Megan's sermon, on Simeon and Anna with the baby Jesus and family in the temple. concluded by pointing out that Jesus is here, love is here and asking what are we doing about it? The more nuggety element of that question is "what more could we be doing about it"? I found it to be a hard question to answer but reflected on observations of two people who are already acting by reaching out to total strangers.
This is a perspective of the unknown people who are around us every day. Think of a queue at the supermarket or jostling to get into the pump at a service station. We all take people for granted, yet we do not know of their needs nor their attributes and mostly we are too preoccupied or too busy to wonder. Do we reach out to them? Do we actually even see them?
Story #1. Ward B1 at Burwood Hospital is dedicated to the elderly and infirm and has a lounge with comfortable seating for TV watching, family chats, exercising and an open kitchen in which patients can be coached about how to make a cup of tea etc. It has a crappy piano but one never knows who is listening, so I play my best. Sometimes it is only the click-clack of metal that tells me that a patient using walking aids is nearby. I am enriched by some of their life stories. One old dear in her nightie could tell me the opus number of the Chopin prelude that I had just played.
So, there was a recent period of nothing. No awareness of any patients or staff. Nothing at all for the 30-40 minutes that I would have played. When leaving I became aware of a lady, a visitor, who had been standing up working on a jigsaw puzzle. Without any discussion she turned and "downloaded" on me, telling me at length that whilst there might be times when I felt that nobody was there or even cared, there were so many who knew and appreciated what I was doing. What prompted that total stranger to say what she did, and so supportively, I will never know. She reached out.
Story #2 One Thursday in the main lobby area at Burwood, where staff, patients of all kinds including spinal injuries, kids and stressed family members can have a chat, often privately troubled, over tea/coffee/lunch or even have a formal meeting, I played a chunk of my classical stuff. Whilst I was playing, a staff member placed a table napkin alongside my music and backed away.
Fortunately, I could pause and engage with her lovely, got-to-get-back-to-work smile, and was able to say thank you. It was very humbling because the carefulness that she deployed to write and do those hearts on a bit of soft paper table napkin was incredible. She reached out.
Emotions can be embracingly heavy but so so rich.
Oh, and I am still struggling with Megan's question. Prayer time? A paradigm shift?
Pat Dolan
