Chaplaincy – in the twilight of life

(Ed. I am very pleased to welcome a new blogger to Blogging Chaplains. Anna Fischer is an aged care chaplain from Queensland, Australia. Anna (not her real name) has asked for anonymity to protect the vulnerable people she works with.)

Anna Fischer

June 2017

“You know, Anna, this place really is God’s waiting room, they now come in older, and more incapacitated and they are not ever going to leave here – that’s what aging-in-place really means!”.  I guess I was a little shocked by this statement but then I’m not sure what I really expected.

We live in a world that so deftly sidesteps death that it’s something that occasionally happens to other people – but not to us. We have outsourced death. We have handed the responsibility over to a sector called ‘the providers of aged care’. These providers bear the full weight and responsibility of an entire community’s aging, frailty and death. When this sector is doing it’s best work, it is caring for people with dignity, as they prepare for their impending death.

Now, in one sense, all of life is God’s waiting room. We are all born – and to borrow Heidegger’s somewhat obvious phrase – and we all exist as beings-towards-death. But the environment of a residential care home tends to foreshorten the time scale between being beings-towards-death and death itself.

The poignant poem of Ecclesiastes 12 deeply captures the fleeting nature of life as it enters the end stages. With a solemn beauty, we glimpse the possibility of insubstantiality and fleetingness being encapsulated and transformed, before all becomes mist and is dispelled again.

Remember the Creator in the days of your youth:

Before the days of adversity come,
and the years approach when you will say,
“I have no delight in them”;
² before the sun and the light are darkened,
and the moon and the stars,
and the clouds return after the rain;
³ on the day when the guardians of the house tremble,
and the strong men stoop,
the women who grind cease because they are few,
and the ones who watch through the windows see dimly,
⁴ the doors at the street are shut
while the sound of the mill fades;
when one rises at the sound of a bird,
and all the daughters of song grow faint.
⁵ Also, they are afraid of heights and dangers on the road;
the almond tree blossoms,
the grasshopper loses its spring,
and the caper berry has no effect;
for man is headed to his eternal home,
and mourners will walk around in the street;
⁶ before the silver cord is snapped,
and the gold bowl is broken,
and the jar is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel is broken into the well;
⁷ and the dust returns to the earth as it once was,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it. (HSCB)

The poem captures the depression that accompanies so much aging, the gloom, the tears, the regrets. It captures frailty, and shuffling along on a walking frame, that supports shaky legs and a bowed back.  Teeth fall out, eyes grow dim, visitors are few and sleep elusive. The world fades and grows distant through poor hearing.  The sprightly step is gone the frail-aged fade away, and then suddenly, connection with this world is severed. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

It seems that in the end the teacher can only say “Absolute futility. Everything is futile.” From the perspective of the view of life under the sun, this is truth. Life runs its course and ends in death.

Can a chaplain do or say anything helpful here, in the world of beings-towards-death?

There is just one more thought from Ecclesiastes, the teacher closes his book in another voice. (Ecc 12:12-14)  The teacher returns to the Creator, whom he also calls God, and claims that there is a different type of wisdom, which differs from the usual wisdom that fills so many books about life. This is a wisdom that lies beyond life and death, and endures even across the grave. This is the wisdom that a chaplain brings. The wisdom that has that task, of helping people remember – or even find for the first time – the Creator of their youth and make peace with him, so that there is nothing hidden, good or evil that lies between them and their maker.