Garden Communion
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by Joan Paddock Maxwell
Last Christmas I was privileged to offer the Sacrament to patients and their guests in the Intensive care Unit (ICU) at the hospital where I serve as a chaplain. I feel a special connection to ICU patients. Back in 1989 I was hospitalized for a couple of weeks, and a good bit of that time I was in the ICU on the critical list. I learned first-hand that a person near death has no capacity for abstractions. I could see sunlight, feel the touch of a hand, and breathe, one breath at a time. Pain surrounded me like air. Meaning lay in just two sources: human love and the Holy One.
Sometimes a patient is too sick to take anything by mouth and yet wishes to receive Holy Communion. The Church teaches that someone can receive by "spiritual Communion," whereby all the spiritual benefits of Communion are received even though nothing is actually taken by mouth. For a gravely ill person, however, as I experienced, words do not have the same impact as touch. My Rector taught me a way to include touch in giving spiritual communion. We tell patients who cannot eat that, if they wish, the consecrated wafer will be gently touched to their lips and then wrapped in linen and taken away to be returned to the earth. Patients sometimes say they are grateful for this physical contact.
On Christmas Day, in three cases the patient received spiritually. The first was a person on a ventilator. The family was waiting for one more member of the clan to arrive before removing life support. They asked that they and the patient be able to share Communion one last time.
The linen I use to keep a Host in after it has been used for spiritual Communion is a handkerchief that used to belong to my grandmother, who died long ago. Unfolding the handkerchief by the bedside, seeing my grandmother's initials, and then wrapping the cloth around the Host enlarges the communion of saints by one for me.
The second patient was a woman I had been following for a couple of months. She had been in and out of the ICU several times. On Christmas Day she had just been readmitted, and from the deep furrows on her husband's face it was clear that things were not going well at all. They were grateful to be able to receive together for what we all knew was their last Christmas. A second wafer for the handkerchief.
The third patient was a wild-haired man who had recently been admitted from the street. He was able to speak just enough to say that he wanted to receive but could not eat. He was by himself in a large room, surrounded by monitors and IV poles. After he received he watched me closely as I placed the Host in the handkerchief, raising his eyebrows when he saw the other two that were already there. "You are not alone," I said, and he nodded, both of us aware of the other suffering people nearby and of the sustaining Presence the Hosts symbolized.
After I completed my rounds I went home, the handkerchief and its cargo light in my pocket. It was raining and growing dark. For some reason I decided I needed to dig the hole with my fingers. I went to a garden bed near the base of an old oak tree and knelt on the soggy mulch to dig. The cold water seeped through my trousers to my bent knees. I parted the mulch and the earth opened easily to my hands. As I unfolded my grandmother's handkerchief and looked for one last time through the raindrops at the three wafers, I prayed for the patients for whom they had served as tangible reminders of God's loving presence in the midst of pain. When I let the wafers slip from the handkerchief into the brown earth, the rain and my own tears marked not only the sorrow of the present moment but also the hope for what is yet to come.
Note: Patients' identifying details have been changed to preserve their privacy.
Joan, a Shalem Board member, serves as a chaplain at an acute-care hospital in Washington, DC. A version of this article is being published in PlainViews:an e-newsletter for chaplains and other spiritual care providers.