In the movie based upon Jane Austen’s classic novel, Sense and Sensibility, there’s a very poignant scene where one of her young heroines, suffering from acute pneumonia, is lying in bed hovering between life and death. A young man, very much in love with her, is pacing back and forth, highly agitated, frustrated by his helplessness to do anything of use, and jumping out of his skin. Unable to contain his agitation any longer, he goes to the girl’s mother and asks what he might do to be helpful. She replies that there’s nothing he can do, the situation is beyond them. Unable to live with that response her says to her: “Give me some task to do, or I shall go mad!”
We’ve all had the feeling at times when in the face of a dire situation we need to do something, but there’s nothing we can do, no magic wand we can wave to make things better.
But there is something we can do.
I recall an event in my own life several years ago: I was the Newman chaplain at Brockport College and had many parishioners who were retired professors coming to Mass. Late one evening, I received a phone call that Professor Walt, my spiritual mentor, was in the burn unit at Strong Hospital after a flash accident in his apartment. I immediately got in my car and drove to emergency. He was already transferred to the burn unit and when the nurse showed me his room, poor Walt’s had a healing salve applied to his face and head and looked red as a beet. However, in a whisper he said, “don’t worry I am with the Lord.” I felt helpless like that young man in the movie. I said the prayers for the Sacrament of the Sick and together I could see his lips move when we prayed the Our Father together. On my way home, I wanted to do more to relieve him of his pain and suffering.
Yes, there are those horrible moments when we feel alone, agitated, panicked, and desperately needing to do something but being absolutely helpless to do anything, We are driven to our knees. Not being able to do anything else, I started praying the rosary. When I’d finished, my sorrow hadn’t gone away, my friend Walt was still in the burn unit, but my panic had subsided, as had my desperate need to do something (when there was nothing I could do).
My prayer on the drive home gave me some sense that my friend who was suffering would be alright, his faith when he whispered those words, “don’t worry” also relieved me of the agitation and panicked pressure of needing to do something in the face of agitated helplessness. I’d done the only thing I could do, the thing that’s been done in the face of helplessness and death since the beginning of time; I’d given myself over to prayer and to the rituals of the community and the faith of the community.
Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who find themselves at this stage in life desperate from symptoms of Covid, or in fear of violence going to the work or the store or sending their kids to school or exhausted from working extra shifts because of the labor shortage. In these moments, prayer and ritual are at our disposal when like that man in Sense and Sensibility, we need to do something or we will go mad. Ritual: it’s what we have to do. It’s all we can do! It’s the right thing.
