Compassion From the Gut
I WAS A YOUNG PASTOR in my first parish, and a family in the church was nursing a dying grandmother. I did not visit the family. I wasn't lazy, I was scared. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know that doing something was the very thing I shouldn't do, and all I needed to do was be there. When the lady died, I was so embarrassed that I never visited the family or even called them on the phone. I was not asked to do the funeral. Over the years the family never mentioned it, and as far as I could tell, they never held it against me. They knew I was a young buck without a brain in my head. I can see now why I failed, but I can't forget the failure. Thankfully. When I want to ignore a hospital call, I remember that circumstance or ones like it—and I get up and make the call. I'll admit it: a lot of times I make calls on the sick because doing so is my job, not because I feel compassion for them. Visiting someone in traction just to keep my proverbial hind end out of the sling isn't the high standard I'm reaching for in ministry, but it keeps me out of trouble. I don't quake at the thought of a parishioner scolding me for missing his or her stay in the hospital. Apologizing is never pleasant, but most people are quite forgiving. The real trouble I get into when I don't visit the sick is with my guilty conscience. It is more difficult to assuage than an angry parishioner. My parishioners forgive and forget, but my conscience does not suffer from Alzheimer's! Visiting the suffering to satisfy the conscience is low-level pastoral work. As a form of following Jesus, it beats disobedience, but it never escapes tepidity, which left to itself cools to bloodless apathy. Granted that it is pathetic to make whipped-dog pastoral visits, should ...
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