“Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.”    –Rainer Marie Rilke

She was an octagenarian living in an advanced state of dementia. Completely bedbound and dependent, she no longer spoke except for increasingly rare one-word utterances. Mostly, she stared into space or slept but once in awhile held eye contact or smiled. I met her when I became her hospice chaplain. And for months I visited, sitting at her bedside in silence without much evidence that my presence mattered at all.

I am only learning to sit in silence–interior as well as exterior–because so much of my work as a hospice chaplain requires it. I don’t come by it naturally. As I have come to see it, my job is to be a steady, still point in the lives of my patients and their families, to always look–as one mentor taught–for the beauty that is present even in the midst of great suffering and loss and to hold the faith (if only quietly) that there is more to our stories than suffering or death and that we can sit in the quiet places of our hearts and know that we are not alone. But to hold that stillness for another requires knowing that stillness within oneself and to recognize it as one’s own personal entry point to the Ground of All Being. One of my favorite scriptures from the Hebrew Bible says: “Be still and know that I am God.” On the surface, it sounds so simple. But if our deepest knowledge of the divine lies in our ability to find inner stillness, then it’s no wonder so many of us feel lost and alone and bereft of connection in the unceasing loudness of our world. Or that it is easier to fight over systems of belief outside of us than to sit with the war within.

The effort to find inner stillness is a personal struggle I now accept as good and natural. But some days the struggle is exponentially harder than others, like the one day I came to visit this elderly dementia patient and tried to quiet my mind but couldn’t. Not for one minute, not for one second. At that time, I was living through the most difficult period of my life. The low-grade depression I lived with for years had finally fallen off the cliff into a new pit of despair as I watched my personal life unravel and my desire to live wane. A deep dread had settled into my heart for a good long winter and thought-demons ran amok in my head. I couldn’t find the stillness. I couldn’t even fake an attempt.

Watching this woman lying in her bed at the end of her life I knew I was supposed to be there for her but I couldn’t. I was her chaplain but I wasn’t. Calling her by name, I finally said to her something I had never told a patient in five years of hospice work. Offering both my confession and apology, I said: “I am so sorry that I can’t be here for you in the way I would like to be today.”  And to my astonishment this frail woman who for months barely showed a connection to the outer world or an awareness of my presence reached out her frail hand and took mine in hers. Without saying a single word she looked at me, her eyes radiant with tenderness and compassion. And I knew that she saw my pain and that she cared.

A week later, I returned to see her. I wanted to thank her for the healing she gave me and for what she taught me that I would carry for the rest of my life. But given her cognitive decline I also knew that she would almost surely not remember what had transpired between us the week before. I decided to thank her anyway. I sat down next to her and began to express my gratitude. I told her how she had shown me a face of God that I desperately needed to see just then and how I would always, always, always be grateful for the gift of her compassion and love. I didn’t expect any response.

But then she looked at me and said one single word: “Precious.”

I will never forget that moment. I will never forget her. Even if I grow old and face the end of my life as she did–with a brutal disease process that strips me of almost everything I have ever been–I know the part of my heart that was touched and healed by her kindness will not forget her.

Sometimes I think I ended up doing hospice work because I needed to learn how to live. I spent so many years of my life battling depression, hating myself and fighting the world and God that I needed to learn what it meant to choose life over death: to embrace joy, chase wonder, experience awe, live in peace, open to love, listen to your heart, and step out in faith. I have a long ways to go but I’ve also come a long ways. I wonder if God basically sat me down and said, stay here until you learn to be still. Because out of the stillness, you will learn something about Me. You will learn that there is something that does not die. You may not understand what this is but you will see it for yourself over and over again in impossible ways. It will destroy everything you thought you knew about the order of things but it will give you Life in its place. Stay here until you learn that I cannot die. And that I am in everything that lives. For today, you will see me in the eyes of an old woman who will love you at the very moment you did not think it was possible for her to do so. And tomorrow, I will find you in another way until you know that I am in you. Stay here until you learn to take my hand.

Indeed, precious.