Remarkable...happens

Sunday 30th August, 2020

I just love hearing remarkable stories...well, all stories.

I heard this morning from a friend on a short break in Gloucestershire. She is having a wonderful time and has re connected with an old friend and reconnected other friends also.

I recalled Sister Barbina. I told her story this morning. For over 50 years she worked as a nun in a Care Home in Istanbul. She was an Armenean and had lost her family in the massacres. She also had her two big toes cut off. In the Home she was in charge of the laundry and washed over 250 sheets a day in great vats. She was hard working, dedicated, efficient and had a simple faith and a strong love of all people.

6 months before her death she went to see her Reverend Mother. She was suffering a little dementia. She told her Superior that she had had a message from Our Lady and was going to be taken home on the feast of the Assumption. She continued her laundry but a week before the Feast she said she had been told to remind the Superior. She in her turn was getting a little worried about the mental state of Sister Barbina. On the feast day as ever she went to the laundry. At 3pm she sought out the Reverend Mother and said she was feeling a little 'hors de combat" and could she rest. At 3.30 the Mother went to check on her and said she would get her a hot water bottle and a cup of tea. "You have not forgotten, Mother?" Returning with the tea and bottle the Mother found her dead with a smile on her face.

I remember Sister Barbina's funeral. The whole Home of unwanted, neglected old people whom the Sisters cared for were there. So were the local traders who knew her and many of the supporters of the Home such as my Mother and our family. Literally a thousand I would say. We clapped her to her grave, to her way home.

Then the priest called out on a hellish night of a storm in Kansas. A dying patient at the hospital, an old man without family, visitors or friends wanted the sacrament of the last rites. The priest got there and the nurses said they felt the man would love also 'just to talk'. The priest gave him the sacrament and asked if he wanted confession. No. The priest stayed and they talked for many hours. Finally the man said he knew he was dying. He said how he had lived with an unforgivable wrong for 30 years and had told no one. Her then related how as a railway man on one night he was inebriated and had changed some rail points to the wrong direction. The train had gone the wrong way and in so doing had hit a car and the couple and their two children in the car had been killed. "I have lived with that unforgivable mistake all my life". As he wept the priest took his arm, also weeping, and said " If I can forgive you as I do, so can and will God. That couple were my parents and the girls my elder sisters".

Food for thought.

Examples to ponder.

All our lives are remarkable stories.