Two stories this week suggest the presence of spirit at work in the lives of people.
A few days before his older brother Paul died at home in a mid-west city, Jack called him on the telephone from his residence in Boston. Concerned that her husband was too sick to take the call, Paul’s wife, on the other end of the telephone, tried to make Jack give up the effort to reach Paul. However, with urging from his own wife Susan, Jack insisted that he had to talk to his brother.
When he did get through to his brother’s bed, Jack explained to Paul that he had called to say goodbye. He wanted to bid his brother farewell until the two of them should be reunited “wherever we are going to go.”
Then Jack told him, “I love you, Paul.” As if with his dying breath, Paul replied, “I love you too, Jack.”
This true story (only the names have been changed) shows the power behind the urge to reconcile. In this instance, the rift between the brothers had not been deep. Rather, it had resulted from a gradual growing apart over many years. They had remained on speaking terms but their feelings for one another had grown cold and their personal contact rare.
Jack’s impulse to call his brother at a time of crisis, as Paul lay between life and death, can be seen as the spirit of reconciliation at work. As a result of one brother following this spiritual impulse, two men came closer together emotionally than they had ever been previously. By reason of this bold action, one of them became better prepared to die, the other to go on living.
Jack, the survivor, suffers from dementia in his old age. His future does not offer much expectation for anything but continued decline, painful for him, his family members, and friends. Given his mental condition, the initiative he took with his dying brother takes on even greater meaning.
By acting this way, he was doing something that will soon become impossible for him. But now this reconciliation has been sealed in his soul. Even if he gets to the point where he cannot remember having done it, this spiritual action will retain its value.
Another evidence of spirit at work came to me last week in the form of a sermon written by a friend. Charles, a Protestant minister, serves a church in the northwest part of Oregon.
Recently the parish sent Charles and several lay members to visit Los Cimientos, a remote village high in the central mountains of Guatemala. They brought with them gifts for the desperately poor people of the village, along with the desire to share spiritual goods as well.
In a sermon that serves as a report to parishioners, Charles tells about arduously climbing up the mountain where most of the people live. At a certain point, the group of visitors and the villagers accompanying them sat down for a rest which the Americans desperately needed.
They also needed water so they pulled out of their bags the water bottles they had brought with them. Each of the visitors drank from his or her own supply, oblivious of their hosts’ thirst. One young woman among the visitors, however, rose, walked over to one of the local men, and gave him her water bottle. This woman, Fiona, was neither a member of the church back home nor a Christian.
When Charles and the others saw what the young woman had done, they were crestfallen. They suddenly realized how unfeeling they had been, how closed to the needs of other human beings. They were ashamed to acknowledge that they had not acted as Christians are supposed to. It took a person who does not believe in Jesus to show them how to put the teachings of Jesus into practice.
Charles’ own words complete our story. “When she sat down, one member of our team said to her, ‘How could you do that?’ And Fiona replied, ‘How could you not?’
“‘How could you not?’ The moment I heard those words I felt as if I had been shot. Here we were, having come thousands of miles to be with these people, of offer support, to establish relationship with them, and yet I had not done the most basic, simple, human thing of all: to share my cup of water with my new brother.”
Richard Griffin