It’s still in there

Years ago, as a newly ordained Episcopal priest, I received my share of pastoral calls to make.

Often, these calls involved visiting memory care clients.

Often, these calls involved people who wouldn’t know they didn’t know me. The staff called in a local pastor when they felt “something like that” might be helpful.

And I learned something I have held onto all these years.

Today’s Gospel reminds me of that truth. In a teaching moment with his disciples, Jesus taught them how to pray. 

If you’re a church regular, or maybe attended reliably as a child, the words Jesus offered a couple of thousand years ago are still in your heart. If someone starts them off, more than likely you find you can step into them as though it was yesterday.

Embedded in our souls as they are, these words can often come from memory care receivers—even when they cannot remember loved ones.

Old, familiar words, learned years ago through repetition, come rolling out of us as needed.

When my father was in the last days of a long cancer journey, he would say very vile things to my mother. Long, laborious recollections of her failures. Hurtful, biting things spewed forth from him. Sometimes things that were true, sometimes things that were not true, simply the result of a brain that was dying.

Sometimes she would call me in the middle of those tirades. Sometimes that helped, but I wasn’t always available. So, I asked what she does when she couldn’t get me by phone.

“I say the Lord’s Prayer, over and over. It calms me down.”

Over and over, written on hearts decades earlier, this prayer continues to console and protect:

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.