The same ministers and carers reach out in various ways to the staff and patients at the St Luke’s Hospice (www.stlukes.co.za).
We enter St Luke’s as hallowed ground, with great reverence for the mystery of death and for the depths of human grief: but we also enter it as a people who try to live the spirituality of the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus means that you and I can hope in God without fear, without confusion, not considering only the things we see – God’s final word is not found there anymore than it was found in his Son’s sealed tomb. We have glimpsed the other side of Good Friday. We know that Jesus’ last word from the cross isn’t in fact his last word. There are more words to come, crucial words that Jesus will still add to our vocabulary, our story, our community. People can endure the most extraordinary things if they know there’s resurrection, if they know that beyond this life there’s more. We understand resurrection as a process, not just as a one-time event. It’s like an arc, bending toward justice and righteousness. God’s arc for our lives, for each of us is long, sometimes a bit chaotic, usually inexplicable and very often painful. But it bends toward hope. It bends toward life and love. Resurrection literally means to make something right again. Though we are bent, bruised and bloodied by life’s punishment and darkness, broken, battered, God’s love makes us upright once again. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But faith in resurrection means that our entire existence is bending toward God. We believe in the resurrection by believing in the possibilities for redemption and reconciliation that happen every day. We believe in the resurrection by making those moments happen. The resurrection is not about believing. It’s about what we do with that belief that makes us as children of the resurrection. This is the spirituality with which we enter the sacred territory of St Luke’s Hospice, bringing the comfort of the Sacraments or just the warmth of human care and contact.
