This summer I said yes to something I'd been thinking about for ages: I learned how to take communion to nursing home residents. One of the deacons taught me what to do for a service at a nearby retirement village, where the residents are fairly independent, and it went fine. I was a little surprised when he said I should tag along with someone named Pat for a service at another facility, but he was right. It was really different.
I held the pyx in my lap as we drove together from the church to the county nursing home, and I thought again about the wonder of it: that the One who spread forth the universe has chosen to be contained in the host. It wasn't until we arrived that I learned why the deacon wanted me to tag along this time. The residents at the county nursing home are frailer and older than the folks at the retirement village; many of them are confused and no longer ambulatory. So instead of a corporate communion service, where the residents walk down to a little chapel, the EMHCs go to them. The activities director maintains a list of Catholic residents, and she walked us through the maze of hallways so we could see them one by one.
I've worked in nursing homes that emphasize getting better and going home, and in last-stop nursing homes. Although this facility had a modest therapy space, it mostly felt like a last-stop kind of place. It was a clean and reasonably pleasant last-stop place, but the people we saw were clearly in fragile health. What stood out to me was how close to the bone faith seems to be. There was the woman on oxygen, working to breathe but determined to say every word of the Our Father, and the woman who insisted that she would overcome her vertigo and sit up to receive. "My grandmother would roll in her grave if she knew I was lying down for communion," she said. There was the overtly dysarthric man we found in the therapy room. He had to struggle to say that he had left the Catholic faith for Islam because Jesus was not God, but he thought it was worth the effort. There was the confused woman we saw at the end-- she didn't know quite where we were, and she was a little worried about it, but she wanted to be sure to say an act of contrition before she received the host reverently. Afterward she kissed Pat's hand. "She always does that," he said, a little embarrassed. But it struck me as appropriate, an echo of the passage in Isaiah that says, "How beautiful are the feet of him who brings good news, announcing peace." To be a Eucharistic minister is to bring not just tidings of peace, but the actual good news, our actual peace, enfleshed.
Many of the residents were napping, and if they didn't respond when we called their names softly we would just pray for them. One of them shared my own Stella's name. I thought about her mother 90 years ago, trying to decide on the loveliest name for her lovely baby girl. In those days, as in these, her Stella's scalp showed through her sparse hair and her gums were toothless. And as I watched her sleeping I thought about my daughter, and wondered who would be praying for her 80 years from now. I hope it is engraved on her heart, now and then and in between, how deeply and everlastingly she is loved. I hope she can hold on to that truth, whatever age may take away.
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