I believe that there is no more sacred or important work being done anywhere on this Earth than the work being done inside nursing homes.
In a nursing home, there is no hiding from death, no retreating to comfortable illusions of immortality.
There is no denying our finite and broken nature.
There is no false and self-serving heroism, no tranquilizing oneself with the trivial, as Kierkegaard put it.
A nursing home is an existential crucible that brings every single person within it face to face with the great mysteries of life and death. In the “outside world,” the Leap of Faith is a divergence, a detour off the beaten path taken as a matter of personal choice. In a nursing home, all roads lead to the jumping off point. One cannot avoid it; one can either continue forward and make the Leap, or one can turn back. Those are the only choices.
This is why I have the highest respect and love for everyone who works inside a nursing home: from the housekeepers who keep the linens fresh and the floors clean to the CNAs who perform the most intimate and difficult tasks imaginable, and from the nurses who keep the operation running to the administrators who are answerable for it all before God and man.
I recently finished reading an incredible little book called The Wounded Healer by a now deceased priest named Henri Nouwen. The book was about how to minister to a broken and wounded world. In the final chapter, Nouwen recounts and then interprets a conversation between a young chaplain-in-training, “John,” and a dying man “Mr. Harrison” held in the latter’s hospital room. Though neither man knew it at the time, it would be their last conversation, as Mr. Harrison died the next day.
It is not a picture of the chaplain-as-hero! In fact, John utterly failed to reach Mr. Harrison, or even to recognize the true nature of his situation. The young theology student wanted to use his words to show Mr. Harrison the light. Mr. Harrison, an illiterate farmer and childless widower, wanted no part of it. So Nouwen uses their conversation instead to show what “might have been,” had John truly entered into Mr. Harrison’s suffering as a healer.
The missed opportunity was for John to enter into what Nouwen calls “the fellowship of suffering:”
“This service requires the willingness to enter into a situation complete with all the vulnerabilities one human being has to share with another. This is a painful and self-denying experience, but is an experience that can lead us out of our prisons of confusion and fear…The paradox…is that the way out is also the way in, that only by entering into communion with human suffering can relief be found.”
If only John had done this, both he and Mr. Harrison might have been healed, for then “John is no longer a chaplain trying to do a good piece of counseling and Mr. Harrison is no longer a farm worker doubting he will [live another day]. Rather, they are two human beings who reawaken in each other the deepest human intuition–that life is eternal and cannot be made futile by a biological process.”
Apropos of nursing homes, Nouwen believed that “loneliness [had] become of of the most painful human wounds” in modern society.
“But the more I think about it, the more I think that the wound of loneliness is actually like the Grand Canyon–a deep incision on the surface of our existence that has become an inexhaustible source of beauty and self-understanding.”
Nouwen sensed that ministers and chaplains often experience this wound of loneliness most acutely. “The painful irony is that ministers, who want to touch the center of people’s lives, find themselves on the periphery, often pleading in vain for admission. They never seem to be where the action is, where the plans are made and the strategies discussed.”
But what if their wounded loneliness is actually a gift? What if it is something not to be “cured” or taken away, but to be protected and cherished? What if loneliness and other wounds are precisely what is needed to be an effective healer?
“Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames? Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in their own heart and even losing their precious peace of mind? In short, ‘Who can take away suffering without entering it?’ It is an illusion to think that a person can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.
And so I think of our frontline workers and the sacred work they do every day. How lonely and difficult it must be at times! How painful and raw! How personally risky! All of them carry their wounds into work. Many of them leave work with new ones. In the world to come, all of these wounds will be healed and redeemed, but what about this world?
In this world, their wounds are holy. They have purpose. They are a source of healing because, in Nouwen’s words, they “rise from the depth of the human condition that we all share.”