Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

The hospice for which I volunteer has been having lots of vigils lately. Fortunately, we have many volunteers. Still, over the course of the month I've been called on several times to sit with and comfort a dying person. Normally the hospice sets up vigils when no family members are available to sit with the patient, or when exhausted family members need to be relieved for a bit so that they can take care of some of their own needs. So it's often just me and the patient, holding hands and  listening to quiet music. I speak words of comfort, sometimes say prayers, and just generally offer a ministry of presence. Last week I was called to vigil with a patient I'll call "Lillian," whose daughter badly needed a break. Lillian was actively dying, and was sleeping soundly with the assistance of morphine. Her daughter was so happy to see me, because she had not gotten away to eat anything since breakfast. She told me some other family members might stop by briefly, a

Sure looks like spring in our town! I think to myself every year that there's no prettier place in May than southern New Jersey (I realize that this is open to debate). All the fruit trees are in full flower, the azaleas are going wild, and the rhododendron are beginning to burst into bloom. And it's no surprise, is it? Because it hasn't done anything but bloody rain, it seems like for weeks. I have several friends who are pluviophiles -- they love rain in any circumstance. Now, I leave you to make your own decision -- but it seems significant to me that both these friends lived for periods in Britain. I've been there several times, and I did see the sun there. But not for long. It made a cameo appearance, let's say. Rain isn't a bad thing, unless you're in Texas, where flooding has been out of control lately, and that's been tragic for Texans in some cases. I could cope with rain. I could sit on my porch with tea and a book, listening to the pit

Look at those sweet cartoon figures to the left,   still in love, after all these years. Haven't we all known sweet old couples who've been married so long that they can finish each other's sentences? And there are even those couples who don't even seem to have to speak. It's almost as if they have telepathic abilities. I've been married nearly 36 years, but my spouse and I are not at this telepathic point yet. Not having to converse would be an attractive option, given some of the crystal-clear interchanges we've had recently. HE: Where'd you put my thing for work? SHE: What thing? HE: The thing I use to work in the dining room. SHE: I didn't put anything anywhere. HE: But my thing is gone. You had to have put it away. SHE: What THING? What is the THING? HE: The plug thing. For the wall. SHE: You mean the CORD? It's the CORD you want? The ELECTRIC CORD? HE: Yes. SHE: I never touched it. Of course, no one is immune to communicatio

Last week I participated in an evening vigil for a woman (let's call her Laura, not her real name) in one of our sadder local nursing homes. I've been to this location a few times, and each time I come away from the experience really and truly depressed. Not because the patient is dying -- we all will have to do that -- but because this facility is so very different from others I've visited. This place is where the indigent and lonely go to die. My volunteer coordinator informed me ahead of time that Laura had no family, none at all, no one to sit with her. Entering her room, I noticed how different it was from other rooms I'd sat vigil in recently: there were no flowers, no family photos; the walls were blank; the TV, which was not on, was a small portable resembling one I had in the 1970s; and there was no electric light, aside from the typical fluorescent fixture found above hospital beds. I left it off. It was 6:30 when I arrived, so there was plenty of natu

Despite a couple of cold blasts from Canada, we've had a very mild winter here in the mid-Atlantic region. I can count the number of times I wore my down-filled parka -- few enough that it won't need cleaning for next year -- and I haven't used my fireplace at all. Christmas Eve found us at 70 degrees here in New Jersey, a most un-Christmas-like temperature. It's hard to burn the Yule log when you have to open the windows at the same time! I have often wondered about Christmas in Florida. I suppose our neighbors to the south have created their own warmer-weather traditions for that festive time of year. We noticed daffodils coming up at church about two or three weeks ago, and tulips will not be far behind. And today we are approaching 80 degrees!  Aside from the problem of what to wear on these unusually warm days (do I tough it out with a light sweater, or go rooting through the closet like a pig looking for truffles -- in my case, a tee shirt?). But the real