On Falling in Love with the Least of These
They say Christianity has a ‘preferential option for the poor.’
I’ve been reflecting on this as I reach my first anniversary as a nursing home minister. In all honesty, when I applied for the job I was only doing it for that; the job. As in, just needed money.
I didn’t expect to even get an interview, let alone a second interview, and then suddenly for the first time in my life I was negotiating a salary.
When I sent the email saying I’d take the offer I still didn’t believe I was actually going to work there, not out of gratitude and amazement that I had just been handed what would become my dream job in ministry, but in total incredulity that I would be working for a nursing home. Ugh, how lame!
Well it turns out the joke was on me, as is usually the case when God is involved.
Over the past year I have come to really understand something essential to my own Christian faith that was previously a big fat eye roll.
In seminary I did a lot of intellectualizing about how Jesus came to fight for the poor, to uplift the downtrodden, to heal the sick, etc. etc. The most I could imagine that meaning was something about volunteering in soup kitchens and donating clothes to the winter coat drive.
When I got on my various religious soap boxes, the Christian ‘preferential option for the poor’ simply meant I was spiritually justified in protesting police oppression, evictions, and health care bankruptcies. And I was, but I did it from a position of self-righteousness and anger and a kind of deep self-centeredness about being ‘one of the good guys.’
MODULE THREE OF HOW TO BE A HEALER: THE POWER OF THE BASICS
Foundational tools of healing
Coming back to the basics
Staying out of the story and the drama
Healing through word/logos and praying in pictures
Healing with song and vibration
The power of starting with Essence
*Teachings are based on a blend of gnostic and mystical Christianity, the Christ consciousness teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda who has his lineage from Babaji Krishna, the clairvoyant trainings and teachings of the Boulder Psychic Institute, and healing techniques from direct lineage teachers in the NAC tradition, the Wixarika tradition, and the Shipibo tradition.
My first week at the nursing home, an activities aide told me she was here because she fell in love with the residents.
Looking around at a dining room full of dementia-riddled old people sitting in wheelchairs with bits of lunch clinging to their clothes, I thought “No way in hell.”
And yet in the past year somehow miraculously the scales of judgment have fallen from my eyes and when I look around that same dining room I see it full of people I love showing me - the dang minister herself - what it means to shine with the light of Christ.
In one of the most quoted scriptures of all time, Jesus the King of Love says “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
Now of course he goes on to say that he’s referring to housing, clothing, and feeding people who have no home, clothes, or food. You know social justice-y kind of things that I often take as a lightly suggested ministerial job description.
And social justice for the poor is essential to Christianity, no doubt about it.
In the year I’ve been at this job I did start with that very advisable social justice attitude. I tried to advocate for the residents against medical insurance companies who wanted to cut their benefits. I worked with nurses and CNAs to help cut up people’s food when their dentures were broken.
I tried to educate the team about appetite changes at the end of life and could we please stop trying to push protein drinks on a resident who was ready to die. But social justice is only a branch on the tree Christ was desperately pointing to; the tree of Love.
I felt useful but more or less emotionally untouched. Then one day after the closing prayer of Sunday worship these strange and mysterious words came out of my mouth; “Thank you for coming…and I love each and every one of you.”
Imagine my surprise!
But I realized immediately that it was true. I loved these people. I loved the trio of pals who never missed bingo. I loved the lady who lined up 30 minutes before the fake little general store opened to get her Dr. Pepper. I loved the guy who was still cranky about the 1962 Vatican II changes and wanted me to contact the Pope to complain. I loved the people with strokes who found ways to read books and paint their nails one handed. I loved the gal who screams at me every time I come in the room but still compliments my sweaters as I’m leaving.
Oh my God, I said to myself. I have fallen in love with these people.
From then on my whole plan of care changed. Yes, I still advocated in clinical meetings. Yes I still cut food. Yes I still packed boxes for families when residents died. But now I did it because I loved them.
Each resident now appeared to me as a spiritual giant and I realized that perhaps I - in my self-righteous hyper-intellectual spirituality that didn’t even quite reach my own heart - was in fact the least of these that Christ was referring to.
I’d always had this unconscious idea that I was the one doing the ministering, from my place of mental and literal privilege. But since then I have realized that perhaps I was the one receiving the ministry after all.
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