Lifting the Spirit
Excerpts from columns by The Rev. Dr. Walter J. Smith, S.J. in HealthCare Chaplaincy’s newsletter The Beacon and holiday letters:
In life’s darkest moments, it is always reassuring to find a source of light and peace, a halcyon day. Darkness tends to make us more appreciative of the light. A person facing the prospect of her own death once told me: “One benefit of this process of dying is that you learn how to live. Not perfectly, but better than you did before.”
There is a moving story, dating from the fifth century BCE. Kisa Gotami was a woman who, in the seasons of her young life, sustained several losses including the deaths of her husband and another close family member, and then her only son. Unable to be consoled in these losses, one of the villagers brought her to the Buddha, who was teaching in a nearby grove.
“Great master, please bring my boy back to life.” The Buddha replied that he would, if she would return to the village and bring back a handful of mustard seed—the most common of Indian spices. “From this,” he advised, “I will fashion a medicine. There is one thing more, though,” he added. “The mustard seed must come from a home where no one has died, where no one has lost a child or parent, a spouse or a friend.”
With renewed hope, the bereaved woman hastened back to the village and began banging on her neighbors’ doors, begging for mustard seed. Seeing her grief, people were only too happy to help, until they heard the condition imposed by the Buddha on their contribution. “Has anyone in this home died?” she would ask. Over and over she received the same reply. “Yes.” From house to house she went, seeking a family unit that had not known death. There was not a single one. Kisa Gotami sat down in her great sorrow and realized that all who are born will also die.
She returned to the Buddha, who helped her to bury her son and begin to properly grieve his death. The Buddha, in a real sense, became her chaplain, and she—so the tradition goes—became a wise woman and a great and compassionate teacher herself.
How often do we hear people exclaim: "It’s a miracle that I got to work on time, given the cross-town traffic this morning.” A miracle should stir up awe and help us to appreciate more deeply the special ways that G-d is at work in our lives.
Miracles happen here and there and everywhere. Not too long ago, I was attending a Jewish prayer service celebrating a Bar Mitzvah. As I followed along in English, I discovered that tucked within the liturgy was a prayer thanking G-d for the “miracles of every day.” Jewish tradition invites its members to thank G-d not only for extraordinary survival moments but also for “ordinary” miracles. I recall a visit to the bedside of a terminally-ill woman. It was a particularly frigid day and I was relieved by the warmth of her hospital room. Noticing the redness of my frosty cheeks, she asked for a special favor. “Would you permit me to touch cold one more time?” Quickly, I knelt down next to her bed and allowed her hand to touch “cold”. How often do we fail to recognize the presence of G-d in those ordinary events, which prove to be extraordinary?
At those paradoxical moments when God may seem absent or remote from the world or when the world grows increasingly more distant from God, we see his presence. Christmas reaffirms God’s pledge never to leave or forsake us, especially in those times when we experience life’s greater challenges. Yes, God has become one with us and for us; we shall never be alone again.
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