Everything is holy
The old man’s wife died suddenly after 60 years of marriage. His priest, a much younger man, asked if he could come over for a visit. “I’ll come to you," said the old man. “Meet me down by the creek?”
The two of them sat on a bench perched on the bank of the little creek that ran through the park behind the church. The younger man asked the old man a question, “If you could do it all over again what would you want to be healed?”
He said, “That I wouldn’t take a single moment for granted. I’d want to be healed of letting a single second pass by unnoticed and unappreciated."
Neither of them said anything for a little bit, then the old man said softly but with conviction, “Christ is in our bones and the beating of our hearts. Everything is holy.”
The young man said, “What about the pain and the sadness?”
“Not a problem," said the old man, “it’s the simple price of deep love.”
“What about not getting to say, Goodbye to her?"
“It’s bound to happen, it’s not the big thing.”
“What’s the big thing?”
The old man said, “Being present. Not needing to rush and make things go my way. You miss the moment when you’ve got to be right. And you miss the actual beauty of a person when you need them to be something they’re not.”
The young man said, “So, if you could touch the fringe of Jesus' cloak and be healed of anything you’d want to be healed of what? Being distracted, or rushing through?”
“Yes. That would be miracle enough, don’t you think?" said the old man.
I thought of that old man when I read in the Gospel about all the people that were healed when they touched the fringe of Jesus’ cloak. And when I thought of him and what he said that day I thought of our trembling, broken world and all the yelling, and all the violence, and all the gunfire, and all the sadness, and all the power struggles, and I thought about how good it would be, how healing it would be for the whole world, if we could all touch just the very edge of Jesus’ cloak and be healed in such way that we would treat each moment and all the people in each moment like they are the most precious, fleeting holy thing. Because they are. It all is. Everything is holy.
