By Peter Holmes
OUR baby son Albert has recently come home from hospital after an extended recovery from pneumonia and open-heart surgery.
He has recovered well, if slowly, but he still requires a breathing mask fitted when he sleeps and we are still feeding him through a nasal gastric tube.
Since his feeds are every four hours, I have found myself kneeling beside his cot while he sleeps, watching his feed gradually drip through down the tube for about half an hour.
My knees and back are not what they used to be, particularly at the 2am feed, and so I often catch myself on one knee before his cot, as if genuflecting to his tiny sleeping body.
When I first noticed I had slipped regularly in this posture, my tired mind wondered if it was inappropriate, perhaps mildly sacraligeous, to be genuflecting to my sleeping son.
After all, we normally genuflect before the sacred body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Our act of reverence simultaneously declares our belief that Christ is truly present in body, blood, soul and divinity, and places us at the feet of our Lord as he suffers for us, gives himself for us on the cross.
Mary and John shared one of the greatest honours known to us, that of standing at the foot of the cross and hearing his last words.
Joseph of Arimathea was privileged to bind Christ’s body and place it in the tomb. Thomas and others were blessed to touch and see his risen body, and to believe. Christ has loved us all beyond any measure, and these few were given a privileged opportunity to express their love to him in small practical ways.
Before Christ went to the cross, he taught his discples that showing practical love for the least of his brethren was, in fact, showing love to Christ himself.
When a man asks Jesus who he was required to love, Jesus replied with the story of the Good Samaritain.
At the risk of over-simplifiying the parable, Jesus was asked “who do I have to love?” and he answered “who needs you to love them?”
Mother Teresa (Therese of the Cross) and St John Paul II both took up this theme in their lifetimes, declaring that they saw the wounded Christ in the broken and needy bodies of fellow human beings.
Mother Teresa did not tend the dying bodies of the poor because she was attempting to be Christ to them, but because she saw Christ in them, and counted herself privileged to have the chance to tend Christ’s wounds through theirs.
All this passed through my mind as I knelt before my son’s cot, holding his feeding tube and listening to the soft whirring sound of his breathing machine.
I watched his tiny lips twitch slightly at some baby dream, and remembered seeing them bloodless and grey as the doctors desperately tried to revive him a few months ago.
I watched his tiny chest rise and fall, and I remembered that he bears a scar vertically down his chest from his open-heart surgery.
I watched him kick briefly against his blanket and remembered that each of his limbs, and so many other parts of his body had been pierced by needles and tubes.
I have been privileged to serve many people in small ways in my life so far, but I have not yet encountered anyone so battered and weary, so desperately in need of constant and exhausting care.
In short, I have never had the privilege of being this close to a “little one” who brings me to the wounds of Christ.
In serving Albert’s needs, our family has been given a rare privilege to tend Christ’s wounds – to love Christ in small ways, for his inestimable love for us. It seems appropriate to be kneeling by his cot, as I perform this small, tedious yet privileged act of love.
Peter Holmes is an Australian theologian.
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