My old friend George was in the rehabilitation hospital, I had been told. He was there to recover from recent surgery and would therefore not be present at the assisted care community where he has lived for the last two years. That meant George would not be there for talk I was asked to give at the residence in honor of Father’s Day.

So I decided to visit George at the hospital. There I found him looking well and in remarkably good spirits for a person in his middle eighties who had just endured major surgery. As he explained it, he had fallen and fractured his femur, the thigh bone that bears much of a person’s weight. Now he was anticipating the physical therapy needed to get him walking again.

George expressed much pleasure at my having come to see him. In conversation, I reported on some mutual friends whom neither of us had seen for a long time but with whom I had enjoyed a reunion the previous weekend. Back in 1972, George and I had concelebrated their wedding, an event that he has always loved to recall.

George is a distinguished scholar who held the oldest professorship of theology in the United States, the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard University. As a leading Protestant religious historian, he had been an official observer at the Second Vatican Council (1963-65), an event that initiated profound changes in the Catholic Church and, in fact, in other Christian churches as well.

Now in physical decline, as he himself acknowledges, George continues to be vitally interested in religious issues and loves to talk about such matters. In recent months he completed the last major work of his career, a long history of divinity at Harvard, a manuscript that has not yet been published.

My visit with this colleague of many years standing passed quickly because we found so much to talk about. It also helped that, despite his physical crisis, George was not fixated on his own needs but took pains to make me feel welcome. When his dinner was served, I took the initiative and stood up to leave.

As parting words I promised George that he would be in my thoughts and prayers. When he heard this last word, he asked if I would pray with him there and then. So we clasped hands, and I asked God for a blessing upon our friendship and especially upon George. We prayed for healing and for the well being of George’s wife who lives in the same assisted care community.

In leaving his bedside, I felt myself to have been blessed. I had arrived unaware that my visit would be a source of grace for me. Through receiving me so warmly and by placing our visit in an explicitly spiritual setting, George had helped me to draw much value from this experience.

The Christian Church has traditionally listed visiting the sick as one of the seven “corporal works of mercy.” These actions are seen as part of the spiritual person’s response to other people when they find themselves vulnerable. Anyone who is sick or hungry or homeless needs the support of others because they are in crisis.

This approach to the needy has a solid foundation in the Bible. In texts such as Isaiah 58: 6 –1 0 and Matthew 25: 34 – 40, God identifies himself with those who have basic human needs. When we reach out in these situations, the tradition says, we touch not only our brother or sister but the Lord hmself.

The beauty of my visit with George is that each of us turned out to be both giver and receiver. To his credit, George did not remain passive, open simply to receive my sympathy and concern. He accepted these gifts from me but he himself gave me much value, too. Perhaps he had the vision to see me also as a needy person, one who lacks the spiritual insight that I must have to live a full life.

So the visit resulted in an exchange of gifts that seemed to buoy up both of us. I walked out of the hospital that day with my morale high. To quote lines from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “So great my happiness / That I was blessed .  .  . and could bless.”

Richard Griffin