TO BE NOTICED

This week I was presiding at mass at one of our senior living residences and, by the way, you should be aware of how generously the members of our community serve those places through regular visiting, leading prayer services, and offering communion to people who can’t leave home.  We attend to nine of those residences, at least a few of which are gigantic in size.  In any case, at this particular mass there was a woman sitting up front in her wheel chair right in front of me.  She was from the memory care unit. I was in the midst of delivering a short homily when she suddenly shouted out, “What are you doing here?”  She was confused, and seemingly irritated, and maybe afraid.  I stopped what I was saying in order to explain myself, and quickly one of our parish volunteers came to sit beside her to calm her down.  And that helped.  The woman just needed to be noticed and reassured.  This was such a small act of kindness that made such a large difference for her.  Our volunteers do it all the time.  The woman was quiet again until after communion, when she told the room that “I didn’t get one!”  I had just given her a host 3 minutes earlier, and again one of our group came to be at her side.  Again she was consoled.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to live constantly in a state of worry or disorientation like that. It must be a terrible trauma.  But so many of us know and love members of our families or among our friends who experience life that way.  We can’t heal them, but we can love them. We can be present to them and assure them that they are never alone, and that their voices have been heard and matter.

And so we come to the city of Jericho in today’s gospel of Mark.  Jesus is about to leave town with what we are told is a very large crowd of followers, headed for Jerusalem where they all expect Jesus will assume royal power and glory.  Still Jesus’ followers do not understand.  And, then, from the side of the road comes the lone voice of a blind man, Bartimaeus:  “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!”   And the response of the jubilant crowd?  They rebuke the blind man for speaking his truth and they tell him to be silent.  Bartimaeus is threatening to spoil the party.  But he cries out all the louder, “Have Pity on me!”  Notice me, hear me, help me.

Nobody else in the group is ready to pay attention to him until Jesus himself does.  Suddenly the folks take interest as well: “Get up!“ they say, “he is calling you.”  Only Bartimaeus truly understands who this is and what is going on here. This is the savior who prioritizes the victims, the suffering, the fearful, the desperate—one of whom Jesus is about to become himself when he is handed his cross once he arrives in the big city.  Only Bartimaeus gets it.  This savior came for me, not for those who merely wish to hitch their wagons to a guy who seems to be a success in merely human terms. Jesus came for that woman in the memory care unit of the senior residence.  He came for the rest of us too.  But those of us who are more able are required to follow him, not merely by basking in his great powers as beneficiaries, not by shushing the most helpless around us and anticipating our own rewards.  We follow by doing what he has done, but doing what our Pax Christi ministers do every week among the elderly, the victims of injustice, the poor, the stranger. This is what discipleship IS.

Certainly discipleship requires prayer and worship as well, but if it ends there then we too have failed to understand.  Many years ago, I was the pastor of St. Cecilia’s parish in St. Paul.  Compared with Pax, it is a tiny community.  The 110-year-old little church building holds about 230 people if everybody inhales. There were never more than a few hundred registered households in the community.  But the great gift of being there was that it was easy to notice when people went missing. It didn’t take long to figure out who should be there and who wasn’t.  And St. Cecilia’s great pastoral ministers could do something about it right away. It’s a lot harder in a very large place like Pax Christi to realize when people disappear and to know why, or what they need.  And it’s harder to know that it’s up to me to respond.

Bartimaeus in the gospel today refused to be ignored; refused to be silent; refused to just go away.  He knew that he had a claim on Jesus’ attention, and he was right about that. As people who ourselves wish to be faithful followers of Jesus, perhaps we could spend a little time this week remembering the missing—those who may have felt shushed or ignored or unworthy until they just gave up hope trying to belong.  I think pretty much all of us know them.  What do we do next?