Time is not money. It is the gift of God. Live in the moment and assign value to the present. Be with people.
Visit the sick, especially demented folks.
Dementia sucks.
Hospitality among strangers is an important concept to bring to bear on all relationships, especially those with demented folks.
We are all contingent, embodied people.
Hanging out and friendship can change the world.
God remembers us in the present even when we forget who we are.
[edit June 9, 2023] Our windows into the conscious experience of folks suffering from dementia are quite foggy, so we can’t assume to know what they’re thinking and feeling. Even if someone’s dementia is so far progressed that they can’t even talk or move, their inner life might still be quite rich. And even if they’re expressively tetchy, they might be hating that on the inside and unable to express as much. Don’t assume. Always with interact with tenderness and patience and love. One of the main things they need is plenty of good company.
God still speaks today as he spoke to our forefathers in days gone by, before there were either spiritual directors or methods of direction. The spiritual life was then a matter of immediate communication with God.…All they knew was that each moment brought its appointed task, faithfully to be accomplished. This was enough for the spiritually minded of those days. All their attention was focused on the present, minute by minute, like the hand of a clock that marks the minutes of each hour covering the distance along which it has to travel. Constantly prompted by divine impulsion, they found themselves imperceptibly turns toward the next task that God had ready for them at each hour of the day.
— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, as quoted by John Swinton in Dementia (256)
This excerpt floored me because it sounds just like how Carla does things. And it strikes me as right. It’s how I want to walk through life.
One of the things that can serve as a guideline to discerning God’s leading: Do I feel hurried? It’s probably not God’s way. Do I feel obsessed with something about the world, like finding an Airbnb to stay in for on our way trip to Florida or finding good, vegan walking shoes again? It’s probably not God’s way. I might have to do that thing, but I don’t have to do it in that way. It’s not being in the present.
Swinton has rearranged how I approach time: It’s a gift that I have received, all my time. Freely I have received, freely I shall give, waste, live my time with others.
After reading page 169 of Swinton’s Dementia, it strikes me again that all the different parts of creation are like different organs and cells and organelles in God’s body. We are literally the body of Christ, the body of God. In Him indeed we live and move and have our being. How indeed can the eye say to the foot, “I don’t need you”?
God acts in the big stories in history—those of the Exodus, the Cross, and redemption. But God also acts in and through the smaller stories of human life. If we take time to listen and to reflect, we can discover God’s practices of revealing and acting in the strangest of places.
Once again I gravitate toward the moral performance side of this beautiful Psalm about looking only to God for strength and salvation and love. It’s a good precept, but why not journal about the God-as-source part?
At a very basic level, well-being within Christianity is not gauged in the presence or absence of illness or distress. Religious beliefs and practice may well have therapeutic benefits, but that is not their primary function or intention. Nor is the efficacy of a “spiritual intervention” theologically determined according to criteria such as reduce anxiety, better coping, or a reduction in depression, important as these things may be at a certain level. Theologically speaking, well-being has nothing to do with the* absence or reduction of anything. It has to do with the presence of something: the presence of God-in-relationship. Well-being, peace, health—what Scripture describes as shalom*—has to do with the presence of a specific God in particular places who engages in personal relationships with unique individuals for formative purposes. Rather than alleviating anxiety and fear, the present of such a God often brings on dissonance and psychological disequilibrium, but always for the purpose of the person’s greater well-being understood in redemptive and relational terms.
“More than anything else I am thankful to Jesus for being patient with me and for remembering me when I have forgotten whose I am” (John Swinton, Dementia, x).
“I don’t know if it’s a success, but I do know it’s good.”
— myself, quoted despite the gaucheness of doing so instead of just journaled because it seems a multi-purpose saying: I said it originally to Aaron about his running club, but I could say it equally about our church
You know the allure of your own little child first thing in the morning, how it’s irresistible to give them all your loving attention, to hold them, coo over them, think the world of them, and feel ready to give the world to them? Two notes about that:
This is the way God feels about you.
This is the way God wants us to feel about each other, not just our own kids.
The sin Jesus addressed via the Cross was our sin against God, not our sin against one another. The latter still requires the hard work of reconciliation. If we understood this, our track record in handling abuse situations would be vastly improved. Jesus’ work on the Cross is not license to bludgeon victims toward cheap forgiveness of their abusers.
God does not need us to “make good” to him in order for him forgive us. However, humans may need us to do so. There is such a thing as manifesting (bringing forth) fruit of repentance. This makes hyper-Protestants nervous. It need not be so.
Here, Crosby makes the point I’ve been approaching by asserting that the sin God deals with on the Cross is our sin against Him, not our sign against others.
God has given (perfect middle participle– a present reality affecting us at the moment) us, everything necessary for life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). We just need to get on with well-executed consistency in basic things, rather than lusting for some ill-defined new level of spiritual catharsis or illumination (Stephen Crosby, “It’s 2019 and God is Not Taking You to New Levels”).
That articles like these still speak to me proves that I’m still a post-Charismatic.
“Not one of those men had ever suggested that a person could be ‘called to anything but ‘full-time Christian service,’ by which they meant either the ministry or the ‘the mission field’” (Jayber Crow, 43).
You can be called to anything in which you can love.
Is it scripturally defensible to claim that the Cross handles our sin(s) against God but does not do anything about our sin(s) against other people? And that even God’s forgiveness of our sin against Him does not preclude the possibility of rehabilitative action on His part, even punishment? (Restitution would be impossible, of course.) Is this a good way to avoid the pressure to forgive and forget or forgive quickly or superficially and a good way to keep perpetrators from getting off easily and without restitution and without reconciliation and without humbling?
Perhaps the joy is lost from listening to and making music largely because it feels desultory: There’s no goal. At least, that’s what it seems like the Spirit may be saying as I possibly discerned on my walk to and from Gary Abdullah’s house to drop off an apology note written by Sullivan for his having tripped over an electrical cord and unplugged Inflatable Christmas Countdown Santa. So, here’s a goal in the absence of a relish for musical theatre, anthem gigs at college basketball games, Puddintown Roots, and the Choral Society: Build your repertoire book.
And yet part of the ambiguity surrounding the human experience of creatures’ diversity is bound up with the fact that the multiplication of creatures is coupled with (and from a purely biological perspective, needed to compensate for) their regular destruction; rather than persisting in the capacious environments that God provides, living creatures, whether considered as individuals or as classes, die, so that, for example, only a small fraction of the terrestrial species that have existed in the half-billion years since the emergence of multicellular life survive today. Yet this fact in itself need not be viewed as inconsistent with creation’s goodness. Although death has most often been viewed in Christian tradition as a punishment for Adam’s transgression, Genesis 3:19, 22 (cf. 6:3) may also be read as teaching that humans (and by extension, other earth creatures) naturally return to the dust from which they were taken unless some other factor intervenes (see Gen. 2:7, 17 Ps. 103:13-16; Eccl. 3:19-20). Certainly there is nothing inconsistent with the goodness of creation that the “place” occupied by every creature should have temporal as well as spatial boundaries, entailing a limited life span no less than limited bodily dimensions; indeed, such temporal limits actually enhance the capaciousness of creation, since two creatures can occupy the same space if they do so at different times. Death can certainly be experienced as a violation of life and so as a curse, but Scripture also can speak of a kind of death that is a life’s natural conclusion, in which an individual dies “old and full of days’ (Gen. 35;29; 1Chr. 29:28: Job 42;17; cf. gen. 25;8; Isa. 65:20). Insofar as extinction of a species is the analogue to the death of an individual creature, one might equally conceive of classes of creatures—trilobites or dinosaurs, say, both of which thrived for tens of millions of years before becoming extinct—as having experience this sort of death. In this way we can understand death as temporal finitude, as a means by which the fullness of creation is arranged along a temporal axis as well as within contemporary physical spaces….
— Ian MacFarland, From Nothing: A Theology of Creation