I Was Wrong

A year ago I decided to become a communion minister for people unable to attend mass. My ninety-four-year-old mother was a semi-invalid in an assisted living community. My thought was to have a regular role bringing the eucharist to both her and her Catholic friends.

Nice thought, and a great way to bring us closer in the waning days of her long life.

Unfortunately, there ensued an administrative mix-up that left me looking for a call back. That call never came, and by the time I took the initiative my mother’s community was already taken, and shortly thereafter my mother passed away. I was encouraged to get in line for whatever facility might come next, and eventually one did.

My mom’s community featured multi-room apartments that were nicely featured, the food in the dining room was good, activities were various, and she had an outside patio. But these amenities came at a steep price amounting to several thousand dollars a month.

Yet, despite that steep price, over the years I allowed myself to think of her community as the norm. Her experience morphed into my expectation. For no good reason I assumed she was living in a way quite like what most others experienced.

I was wrong.

The first day I visited my newly assigned facility I realized the pleasant façade facing the street was only a decoration. If you wanted access, it didn’t come through the front door, but through a basement entrance that led into something resembling a utility corridor. The florescent lights broadcast a harsh hue, the hallways were narrow, and the heavily scarred walls were more grey than white.

The staff was good humored and pleasant, but there were too few of them. I was given a list of room numbers for those wanting to receive the sacrament. As I took that list, I was told that the elevators didn’t work and I’d need a code to access the stairwell. The facility was not populated with apartments, rather, it had rooms of various sizes with doors perpetually open to the hall. All that distinguished one room from the other was the number of beds it contained. The sole access to the out of doors was covered by a parking lot.

This, dear friends, is what lies in store if you are lucky enough to get old, and unlucky enough to survive only on social security.

Honestly, my first unworthy thought was, “My God, the parish failed to give me my mom’s community, and then remedied their oversight by assigning a penal colony for the elderly.”

Soon I matched the first room number on my list with a short Hispanic fellow who stood there expressionless. I’d walked in while he was talking with a female staff member of average height who stood a few inches taller than he did. I started to back out of the room saying to him, “I’m here to offer communion, but I could come back. You’d probably rather talk to her anyway.”

He searched for words but couldn’t find any. However, his body language expressed a preference, and the staff member took her leave. This was the very first time I’d offered the sacrament to someone outside a church. Even if I’d practiced the brief service at home, this situation was novel to me and I found myself standing there in the middle of a room with a man I did not know feeling uncertain how to relate, how to begin, or even where to put the small container that contained the hosts.

I noticed that the walls surrounding his corner of the room were decorated by photos. There was one picture of a fat little boy probably too young to walk, and I asked him if this was his son, his grandson maybe? “No, he said, that’s me.”

Since he provided no more elaboration, and there were no other photos of children on his walls, I assumed he had no children. One wall, however, did have an old black and white photo of a beautiful young woman. Her image would stand out in any collection of assorted photos. She looked happy and had a smile that appeared unposed and authentic to who she was.

I smiled and said, “Who’s this?” with an emphasis common to most men when they see a beautiful woman.

“That’s my wife,” he said in a tone that lacked any response to my own enthusiasm. “She lives here too, but they won’t let me see her.”

He then drifted into a series of remarks that relayed the fact that they had once lived together at another facility, but now, here, she lived in another section. Evidently, they were at the same address but now in a state of mutual exile. His voice was a mumble; that and his accent made much of what he said indecipherable. What was decipherable was his sadness, his angst, and his helplessness.

Our short conversation was taking us to a personal place; a place where I didn’t have the skills or resources to help. Looking for an off ramp I responded to his misery with, “Shall we begin?”

And begin we did.

We moved through the brief service that I had transcribed on a sheet of paper so he’d have a guide to his responses. Two things became instantly clear. First, his ability to read wasn’t obvious. Second, his responses didn’t really matter. He had surrendered to a faithful place and the turmoil creating his suffering was now in retreat.

In a short space of time he went from someone whose agitation made him seem like an unlikely candidate for a religious service, to someone in graceful repose. In this whole dynamic I came in as the minister, and he the supplicant, but now I could only wish that the sacrament resulted in the same transformation for me as it did for him. This man’s desolation became a poor veil for the central fact of his faith.

He opened his mouth, I fumbled as I removed the host from its brass container and then I placed it on his tongue. “May the good Lord bless us,” I said, “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

I made a few more visits before I left, each with its own experience to recommend it, but this one continues to have a place in my thoughts. I had undertaken this ministry simply to console my mother and reach out to her friends — great friends who were a source of company in the loneliest phase of her life. Then an oversight deprived me of that opportunity and instead substituted it with responsibility for strangers in a place I would never choose to visit.

All of that made me feel disappointed. I had the sense of being cheated out of something impossible to duplicate — something that could never match what I had lost. I had suffered a choice Jesus would never make.

I was wrong.