Today, on the Feast of the Presentation we are especially mindful of the Simeons and Annas in our midst; those who are faithful present awaiting Christ's appearing, and those who are consistently absent who must be sought out by the Light of Nations.
A dozen or so years ago I faced a doubling of the "shut in" list in less than three months time. Some were quite legitimately incapacitated. Others were not. The piece that follows was one that I published in the parish newsletter around A.D. 2001:
HOW OFTEN DO YOU GO TO SEE .....?
The subject of when does a parishioner become a “shut in” is a very sensitive one. Sometimes an illness or disability strikes suddenly and severely; as, for example, with a stroke that causes one to be placed in a long-term are facility. Or Hospice is summoned for terminal cancer. There little doubt: the parishioner is unable to go anywhere.
But these circumstances are the exception, not the rule. Far more frequently the aging process causes a gradual decline in activity. The decline may occasionally be reversed; but few who go from cane to walker ever return to cane, and fewer still who go from walker to wheelchair ever walk again.
My premise is that in all but the sudden and severe cases, the ministry of the Church is to encourage restoration into as full a participation as possible in the worshiping community. To quote from the Lutheran World Federation study Baptism, Rites of Passage, and Culture
Christian rites for healing must offer what God offers us in Christ. In these rites, it must be clear that it is God who is acting, by his Word, by his Spirit. The healer is God, not the minister Healing is seen as a revelation of God’s victory, not ours...The healing is mediated through the community which God has create, the Church....A Biblical understanding of healing will include as of first importance attention to the restoration of the person’s dignity. This dignity, conferred at Baptism and underlined at the eucharistic table, is threatened when a person is ill. A Christian healing rite must work to reassure us of that dignity. Also, it is clear from [the New Testament book of] James, for example, that healing is a function of the Christian community.
Healing ministration and the sharing of the Holy Communion can, and should, and does, occur everywhere. “It is indeed right and salutary that we should at all time and in all places...” begins the Preface to the Great Thanksgiving. The places include hospital bedsides, nursing home rooms, and private homes.
But these places are never quite as fitting as the place that has been consecrated for the gathering of the congregation, the Church. It is here that we first receive new life in Baptism; it is here that we receive God’s refreshing grace week after week through Word and Sacrament; it is here that we confess our faith to Affirm our Baptism.
To reduce the obstacles for those whose health is in decline many costly improvements have been made to the Church building in recent years. These make the facility more accessible to persons with special needs. There are no longer any steps from the parking area in front of the Church doors into the the Narthex.. A wireless hearing assistance system has been installed. Large print Bibles and bulletins are always available. Air conditioning relieves humidity. There is even a supply of cushions on hand for those who find wooden pews too uncomfortable.
Yet another way of making the gifts of God more assessable to the people of God has been the institution of a half-hour service at Noon on the Second and Fourth Wednesdays of nearly every month.
Why all these efforts to encourage folks, even as they decline, to come to the house of the Lord? Because just as few who go from cane to walker return to cane, and fewer still who go from walker to wheelchair ever walk again so also few who absent themselves from the services of God’s house through advancing age ever resume again..
Decline in physical activity should not be “enabled” through he misguided sympathy of caregivers who may, for example, find it easier to push a wheel chair than to move at a slower pace accompanying a walker; or by doing for another what he or she could do, albeit much more slowly and with greater difficulty. This misplaced “kindness” only hastens the coming of the day when dependency is total and irreversible.
So likewise for spiritual care. Dependency is to be avoided--participation--even if labored and less regular than before--is to be encouraged. Home visits and Communions begin gradually and occasionally, rather than immediately occurring monthly.
I must add a personal reflection at this point. I grew up in a “four generation” household consisting of my parents, my mother’s parents, and my mother’s two grandmothers. My grandmother was a “C and E” (Christmas and Easter) Christian most of my life, in part because of recuperation from a massive heart attack when I was 2; in part because she was not encouraged to make her way back into the community of faith on a more regular basis.
But “Nana” was adamantly not a “shutz-in” Indeed, when a church directory came out that listed her as such she spent the next several hours telephoning all of her friends with great indignation saying “They say that I'm a shutz-in.....I’m no shutz-in!”
I admire Nana’s honest assessment of her condition. She did not drive, but she went on frequent car-trips to visit friends and relatives. She took car rides to her monthly “class meeting” and to the Golden Age club. And, of course, to the weekly appointment at the beauty parlor. She would travel on Lincoln tour line trips with my grandfather and take the train to Pittsburgh for the Pennsylvania League of Cities convention. No, she was not a “shutz-in”.
Her assessment was in perfect agreement with what the late Pastor Kenneth Ehrhart wrote in My Church, September 1969: Note: Pastor Ehrhart served this parish from 1935 through 1969]
NOTE ON COMMUNION
Private Communion
We cannot give home Communion to any except the home-bound and the bed-bound. If you can go to a picnic, a reunion, a viewing, the barbershop, a store, a car-ride, you can be brought to the church in the afternoon for Communion. Don’t feel badly if I don’t come to see you, if you can do any of the things mentioned above. I gladly go to those who are home-bound or bed-bound. Make a special effort, please! Thanks.
Every summer there are some who otherwise like to consider themselves “shut-in” that tell me of their outings to the family reunion. How tragic it is that there is not an equal determination to be united with the family of God at the table where Christ reunites us to Himself! How dispiriting to consider that in some cases the “shut-in” has been driven past the Church on the way to the reunion grounds--and on a Sunday at that! How dismal that one can endure the heat and flies and uneven ground of a picnic grove but not the air conditioned comfort and smooth, steady walking of the house of God!
Like the late Pastor Ehrhart, I gladly go to those who are home-bound or bed-bound. I sadly go to those who somehow manage to get to just about everywhere else they want to. I go sadly because restoration seems an almost insurmountable challenge. I go sadly because I may be “enabling” a dependency and, even worse, an indifference to being restored to the worshiping community; that I may be aiding and abetting sabbath breaking. I go sadly because when I faced my own disability I only left the house to go to Doctor or to Church--and I hoped that in so doing I would be preaching without words and teaching by example.
But I go
And I continue to hope, and to pray, and to encourage that they come
