Go, Go and Love those Hardest to Love

There is such a thing in the formation process on the road to becoming a priest called Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE.

For those in the ordination process, this is the part where we “learn” how to speak to people in a pastoral way, how to be with them in times of sorrow and grief, heartache and pain.

Normally, the program is of two parts, the first being where we are sent out to visit folks, usually in a healthcare setting, to sit with them, be with them, hear their story.

There is no judgement, there is no trying to justify their situation before God, we are there to listen.

We are there to help people process all that is going on in their lives, but we are not counsellors, we are not psychologists, we are with people to listen and process and love.

The second part involves the folks in the program gathering together to review each other’s interactions, we criticized and praised each other.

We strove to understand how to process the stories we were hearing, how to leave them in a place where we did not have to carry the grief we were hearing and feeling.

It is hard to love people, listen to their suffering stories, and continue on.

It is hard to love people and separate their grief from ourselves.

It is hard to love people and not take on that grief.

We were learning how to not take on that grief.

But in community, when we are in community together, when we share meals and stories and prayers in the quiet that God provides, our grief becomes each other’s.

We are already here, we are already holding up each other in quiet conversation on the phone and in the hospital, we are serving each other as best we can and it can be hard.

It can be hard to visit with folks and not take on their grief.

It can be hard to love people and not take on the weight of each other’s needs.

It can be hard to be in relationship with one another and yet through God and within God’s embrace, we do love each other and we call ourselves a church.

As part of my training, I was asked to visit a physical rehabilitation center down at Elim Park in Cheshire.

I chose to perform my clinical hours there as I knew that place, my grandmother lived there before she died in 2006.

We, my extended family and I, would gather there on certain Sundays to share brunch with my grandmother when she was alive.

I loved being there with her, I loved hearing her stories, I loved her.

They were happy times, my children were but babies and the brunch was delicious.

We ate under the natural light of a large dining room’s, the skylight shone on our laughter, our retelling of the stories we told so often and always laughed at the same points.

And after my grandmother died, I spent time at Elim Park going room to room in the rehab portion of the facility after having walked by the elevator that would take us to my grandmother’s apartment in recent years now past.

And I realized that my grieving of her dying had not yet past; my memories of her stayed with, an addition to the cloud of stories I carry with me and make me who I am.

And so there I was, still grieving, being asked to visit with others in this facility for a number of reasons.

Strangers behind doors, room to room, Saturdays sometimes spent in sadness.

And before I entered each room to meet someone new, some new person with new and different ailments, I would pause.

I would pray.

I was nervous about meeting them, an introverted empath walking in the door to meet new people who might received me well or with anger or grief or silence.

Some were older, some were bordering on deafness, some couldn’t be bothered with me, I was interrupting their day, their thoughts and desires to get well enough to get back home, I was an impediment, an interruption to their reverie.

To this day, I am impacted by my time in CPE.

I will not forget the people I met and the stories they told.

A part of me will forever be in that position before a closed door, pausing, praying, nervous about what was to come next.

It is now part of that great cloud of stories I carry with me like Pigpen carries dirt in those Peanuts cartoons and make me who I am.

I cannot escape those memories and I know I am called on to do more.

I know we are called on to do more.

“He said to them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Go on your way.”

This should be enough.

Isn’t there already too much in our lives?

Are we not already overly busy with all of those things that take up our Sundays through Saturdays?

And Jesus calls on them and by them, I mean us, to go on our way.

In Luke’s gospel, he sent out the seventy.

He asked them to from town to town wholly relying on God’s provision to see them through.

They carried no purse, no bag, no sandals.

They were called on to stop before a stranger’s home and say “Peace to this house.”

And if that peace was returned, they would find rest and community.

If it was turned away, the nascent missionaries would leave that place, wiping the dust of the town away and moving on to the next.

This was not comfortable work and Jesus acknowledges that by saying he is sending out the 70 like lambs to the wolves, but it is necessary work and that is evident in the fact that he sends them out at all.

And it is not comfortable work and I acknowledge that with that pause and prayer before each door is knocked on, but it is necessary work and that is evident by the stories shared and the relief sometimes felt in being able to tell those stories.

Friends, we are called on to share the word and share it well.

We are being asked to go out and knock on the doors of those who need rest, who need to know they are loved in a world sometimes suffering from a dearth of love.

We evangelize God’s word through our actions, we are called on to act, we are commanded to act.

As much as it is easier to leave Sundays to God and every other day of the week to everything else, we are called on to do more.

How?

How do we share the message of God in a world as busy as this one is?

How do we find that time to knock on a stranger’s door and wish them peace, even give them our peace?

And I wonder, if making ourselves available, simply listening to the fears and joys of our neighbors who think they have no reason to share them is part of the evangelism Jesus calls on us to perform.

We can share Christ’s word by offering people our peaceful listening, our dustless feet.

We share in God’s love and we project God’s love by simply being, simply becoming one with each other.

How simple it is to listen to the cashier in a supermarket let out their frustration, how simple it is to be present, not solving a problem, not giving advice, but listening with Christ’s ear and God’s heart.

The hard part is pausing before that closed door, the act of opening it can be frightening, but behind that door is a child of God, the same as you and me.

So let us go, listen to those who feel unheard, love those who feel unloved, dwell in that cloud of stories that trails behind all of us and which we all carry.

Love.

Love and go.

Go and love those hardest to love.

Offer your peace, for in a world such as ours, it is often the one true thing we all have to give.