Year of Mercy Reflection

Friday, Oct. 07, 2016

In 2007 I was working as a volunteer in a Salt Lake City hospice when a nurse asked me to sit with a patient who was unusually anxious and agitated. I knew this patient. She was a lovely lady in her 60s, lucid, intelligent and spirited. On occasion she dismissed me when I tried to visit her, saying firmly, “I do not want visitors!”

When I entered her room that day, she was lying in bed, eyes wide open. I sat close by, took her hand, and inquired, “How are you?”

She replied simply, “Afraid.”

Thinking, ‘Well, almost everyone is afraid of dying,’ I asked, “What are afraid of?”

“God!” she retorted.

I knew that this person did not appreciate volunteers who tried to pray with her; by her name on the hospice census, under the category “religion,” was “None.”

I prayed silently for a moment, asking the Lord to help me find the right words.

“Oh, no!” I blurted out. “God loves you! You don’t need to be afraid – he is right here, with you!” (I was certain that I had breached Church doctrine somehow. Oh, dear.

 She pressed on, “Would you sing a hymn for me?”

This seemed harder, but I began softly singing my favorite hymn, “The King of Love My Shepherd Is” by St. Columba. The lilting Celtic melody calmed both of us. When I finished, she was sleeping.

That encounter was a gift. I realized that, with God’s grace, we all can disclose his mercy to one another in so many situations, the ordinary or the unexpected. As St. Teresa of Avila wrote 400 years ago, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours. … Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world.”