Great is Thy Faithfulness

On Sunday, with Dad, we attend worship services in the Home. 

All the residents are in wheelchairs. One at a time, they're ushered in by the weekend help to take their places behind long tables set on angles before a pulpit and a couple of lighted stained glass windows built into the meeting room especially for Sundays. 

The hymnal, bound by a red plastic hinge, is printed with its own economy--no more than three verses from any selection because you can only get so much on the page with all that over-sized lettering. No notes, no music, nothing obscure, only the favorites too. Every week we sing, "Great is Thy Faithfulness." If one of the residents don't choose it, the visitors do.

Some residents sing. Some can, some can't, some are tuned elsewhere, if they're tuned at all. Some slump, several sleep.

Dad can't read the hymnal's words, but he turns to the right numbers. Besides, there's remnants of the old standbys in his memory, enough so that mostly he stays with the program. A really active mike might pick up a word or two if you held it up close, but I'm thrilled just to see his lips move at all on "Amazing Grace."

An old man who spent the war in England, he told me, developing pictures created by Allied bombers over Germany, comes with his wife every Sunday. He pushes her into the room himself, and they sit up front. He sings, not well. He turns his wife's hymnal to the right page for her, then shoves it at her, as if by force he can prompt her to sing. She seems oblivious, rubs her fingers over her forehead as if her worries have left her voiceless. Eventually, he gives up.

The woman front-and-center has been in a wheelchair for most of her life. Once she was a teacher. Once she was married. All of that ended with a withering diagnoses already decades ago. She appears to know all the words, and she smiles when she sings, her face uplifted as if what's up there above is all that she needs to see. 

Years ago, a friend and colleague told me how his senile mother, a woman who long ago stopped speaking altogether, would speak only in song, in the hymns she'd learned as a child. Otherwise, her condition seemed to have left her mute. "It's as if  'Jesus Loves Me' was all that was in her in those last years," he told us.

I never forgot that story. To believe that each of us has a battery that never runs out of childhood inspiration, even when the now is a blur or nothing at all, is a blessing, whether or not it's true. 

Did I mention? He's here, too, that very friend who told me about his mother's singing. Forty years after she surprised him by singing along when he'd visit her, he's here too. Sometimes. When he is, he's strapped in his chair, always bent over. If he sings at all, I don't know.

There's a distance in the faces of the residents that might make you think their singing is a chore. It may be for some--I don't know; but when I sit there among them, I think not. 

Last Sunday, the visiting church group brought some children along, and one of them, a four-year-old darling, stood up front and sang "Jesus Loves Me." In the Home, children are just about the best medicine a doctor could prescribe. Where there are so many years, few years are a blessed miracle. Her mother, holding the mike, stooped beside her to help.

She knew nothing of the second verse, but then "Jesus Loves Me" was a favorite when her grandmother was a girl. Today, every Sunday there are new songs. Little tyke stood up front mouthing words that didn't match, just like the whole room of patients who were, just then, joining her in making wordless music all the same. Blessed harmony from all that mumbling.

And me?--I was no help. I was trying to hold myself together. What those voices raised in the meeting room with the stained glass wasn't much really. But I never doubted for a moment that we were--all of us, even in our mumbling--making music.

Great is thy faithfulness.