Failure of Memory

In the last few days I have sat with two people with failing memories. One could not remember that their spouse had died in the last few hours, could not remember being there, the time and place, the last conversation. The other, who plaintively, anxiously asks for a sibling who visits every afternoon with a friend, thinks that no one ever comes. I repeat every few minutes that it is not visiting time yet, there's 30 seconds relief, then it's back to the question. Over and over I am met with my failure to make an impression, to make them see. Nothing I say sticks around.

Memory is fundamental to our conception of the human person. What chance for psycho-spiritual movement, growth, journeying and coming to new understandings of life if a person has no memory of an occurrence and their changing relationship to that occurrence over time? How can I grieve if I can't remember that my love has died?

One of my all-time favourite films is Memento. A man, suffering from short-term memory loss, uses notes and tattoos to hunt for the man he thinks killed his wife. He is prey to self-and-other deception. It is a commentary on the postmodern world with no metanarrative: if we have no story to live in, then we have no story to live from, and we go round in ever-decreasing peregrinations, making the same old, or increasingly disastrous mistakes. We're like the Israelites having forgotten Babylon: lost without knowing the fact.

How then meaningfully to be with two people lost in their own Groundhog Day who, unlike Phil Connors, cannot remember yesterday and so cannot make today different and, just maybe, better. How am I to let go of the desire to offer the opportunity to think and feel through the consequences of life's happenings? I know that when I leave it will be as if I had never walked through the door: nothing has changed, nor can it.

I am constitutionally unable to believe that God is anything other than good – so God unavoidably, ineluctably is with and for us whatever, whether or not we can remember, whether or not we can pray. I have to believe in the fragile, fleeting and blessed present moment where my being there and my prayer are communion and a relief for loneliness. I have to let go of that modern illusion of progress, and the satisfaction of making something happen. I have to be silent before my failure.

Thoughts at a bedside

What are we doing when we sit in prayer with a person as they are dying? The prayer, the blessing, is in the particulars: these lines and wrinkles; this graying hair; these tired, baggy eyes; this pattern of breath; this body, these cells that hold all, all, all that this person is. Has this person given their life to Jesus? I don't care; Jesus gives his life for them: that is sufficient. Here is a life of richness — of thought and feeling and deed — of love and for love. Are we at this moment, as Saint Teresa of Ávila suggests, the human presence of God helping to hold all that this person is, from the moment of their birth — the brief flowering upon the Creation that they are?

We will soon be gone for good, but the Life of God remains forever marked by our brief, little, precious lives, and we witness and honour this.

Thomas and Friends

<rant>

I was listening to a patient (RIP 7 June) this morning talking about how useless she feels just lying in bed all day without anything to do, feeling guilty that everyone is looking after her, being so kind, and that she can't help anyone in return.

I was reminded of the stories of Thomas the Tank Engine originally by the Revd W Audry that my children like so much both in books and on the TV. The greatest (in fact, only) praise that the Fat Controller can give, and which makes an engine so happy, is "Very Useful Engine". Engines that are not useful are scrapped or sent away or, in one distressing story, bricked up in a tunnel.

This is a pernicious doctrine and it pains me as much to read the stories to my children as it does hearing it come out of the mouth of a dear, sick woman. There is nothing wrong with being useful, but it is not what human (or any other) beings are for. What all great spirituality teaches is that we are for love, and this is a trick that the Fat Controller, along with all whose highest good is Economic Growth and those who wish to provide our children schooling that will fit them for work, just do not get.

I barely get it myself

</rant>

On being a patient

Our new daughter, Esther Ruby, was born at 20:23, Saturday 29^th July. The antenatal care was wonderful — presence without unwanted interference — and, when Claire needed a caesarean section, wonderfully professional whilst remaining human.

For me, it was an interesting and important experience of living between two worlds: that of the patient and that of the NHS employee. Patient-care is something I experienced vicariously though Claire and Esther, and directly as a father. The postnatal care, both in this birth and with my other daughter, Hannah Lola, whilst good during the day, left a lot to be desired over-night. It made me wonder whether staff morale was low on the ward. It was also angering and taught me some lessons.

Nurses and other hospital staff (of which I am one) work in a public space with nowhere to flee from the constant presence of people's needs. It is very wearing and at times inhuman; but many of us hospital staff act as if the hospital were set up for us and patients are there on sufferance.

I truth, hospitals belong to patients: it is they who are at the centre. It is obvious really, but so easy to forget, to think that, as a member of staff, patients are coming into my space. In reality, I am a guest in their space.

While I am a patient in a hosptial (receiving hospitality) my bed-space becomes my own: it is my home, my shelter from the storm. Anyone — family, friend, nurse, doctor, chaplain — who enters that space is a guest to act, with politeness, as if they were entering my home at my request, with a service to be offered, ideally with the joy of being able to serve, but at least with care and a recognition of my vulnerability and indigence. Such a person I shall receive with gratitude.

Death

Yesterday, in A&E where I work, a 2 year old child died - or was already dead when she arrived. There are few things worse to witness than a dead child and the grief of parents. None, especially those of us with our own children, could fail to be moved deeply by sadness and fear.

On reflection I learnt, or had reaffirmed, some things from this:

• God did not cause this tragedy; God could not prevent it. God was present at every moment and never abandoned her. (God is present at every moment and never abandons us.) This child has not fallen out of God's hands — is still held firmly in God's loving embrace. She is not lost.
• Life on this Earth was and is formed out of cosmic forces of change too vast for us to grasp. A world without risk, without vulnerability to accident, is a world with out change, without possibility, without life.
• We humans create many of the conditions that lead to the death and destruction of our brothers and sisters. God has nothing to do with this: the culpability and the solutions are down to us.
• But, we can't escape the fact the world as given to us is not safe: it could not be otherwise.

On Illness and Punishment

When they fetch up in hospital because of an illness or old age, some religious people ask, "Why is this happening to me?" and might add "I've been a good person."

Some have never thought about their mortality. Illness takes them by surprise. They have made no preparation. Illness and death is an affront to them and is outside the order of the world.

For some, what is happening to them is a punishment. They search their lives for some fault or sin that would account for their illness. They might even identify some past misdemeanours.

It makes me sad when I hear people intimate that God is sending their illness to punish them. I am sad that they see God in this light. What an awful burden to bear; how terrifying! I wish I knew how to ameliorate the damage of a lifetime's worth of a certain sort of, usually Christian, teaching. People who teach this are doing terrible harm. It is not a Christianity: it is just the old, merely human, 'eye-for-an-eye' desire for revenge projected onto God. God does not punish us for our sins. Jesus makes that very clear in his story of the (so called) Prodigal Son in Luke's gospel. The father, who stands for God, welcomes the wayward son with open arms and has no need to listen to his plea for forgiveness. Forgiveness is already present.

Of course, illness may be a consequence of how we have lived individually or corporately. Bad eating / smoking / drinking / exercise habits / ...; the build up of resentments / bitterness / loss / anger / sadness / ...; the deplorable way we treat the Earth, our home: all these may be the direct cause of illness. We might well see the way we act towards ourselves and the Earth in these respects as sinful and our illness is the natural result of our lack of care.

A better question then is "What meaning does this illness have for me?" or "What can God teach me?" or "How can I change my life?" God is that in the Universe which has the potential to offer clarity of vision and a new way of living.

Behind all this is terror: we do not know why we get ill and die; we have no final control over mortality, try as we might to combat illness or to find meaning. We have to submit to what cannot be named or questioned and for which we cannot make meaning. It is with this that we have to come to terms.

In the face of this, perhaps any meaning is better than none. Perhaps it is more comforting to belive in a tyrannous God who makes us ill as a punishment, than to accept that life is beyond our understanding and control. Guilt is easier to live with than groundlessness.