Thought for the week: Alastair McIntosh takes care
‘Each one of us can help to heal the hurts that a wider world experiences.’
Following the violence of the storming of the United States’ Capitol building, legislators there are considering their response to Donald Trump’s role in the events.
While the news was unfolding, I found myself in a strange situation: for I had just concluded sitting with my elderly mother as she went through her last days in a care home.
At both the global and the personal levels, things were in tumult; and yet, not for the first time in life, I experienced what I’ve come to think of as the spiritual light of death.
Through it I saw how much she’d loved me, how much I loved her; and moreover: this light shone out onto the sufferings of the world, and from a God who says: ‘I am with you always.’
The care home that we’d found is run by a Jewish charity, one that accepts people of all faiths, and there I’d witnessed an exquisite tenderness and presence of being in how the staff had nursed her.
A housekeeper told me: ‘It’s hard work, but we all love it here.’ And a carer mentioned how she’d sometimes drop in to the home on her days off, just to add a helping hand.
Most of the staff of the home weren’t Jewish, and neither is anyone in our family. The people taking care of my mother were just ordinary Glasgow folks; but in that light of death they appeared to me as spiritual threads that wove a scintillating fabric.
In the days that followed, as my mind glanced over to the developing situation in the United States, I thought of how each one of us can help to heal the hurts that a wider world experiences. To heal the hurts to democracy, the hurts that Donald Trump has caused, perhaps also the hurts to him, and in his followers; and all at so many levels.
The USA’s legislators may or may not take action against the former president in the coming weeks. But each of us can act. Each of us can weave a little love into the fabric of the world, and maybe ask what human beings are for. Maybe we could take a cue from care home workers and maybe even learn how to build a care society.
This text was first read on BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Thought for the Day’ (12 January).
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