Friday, April 3, 2020

In life's last moments, US clergy minister to the sick and dying via FaceTime and Zoom

From Stars and Stripes-

The Rev. Peter Walsh has always treasured the tactile job of performing last rites for his congregants before their deaths, noticing with awe the way that anointing a person with holy oil and laying his hands on their body seems to make them approach their last moments more easily.

But William Pike, a 91-year-old member of Walsh's Episcopal church in New Canaan, Connecticut, was dying of the novel coronavirus.

Walsh realized he would need to do something he had never done before: He administered the last rites by FaceTime.

Pike was unconscious, but a hospital staff member recharged his iPhone and held it up to him, and Walsh believed that his friend could hear him. "I told Bill I loved him, that he was mightily loved by his whole community. That he was a great man," Walsh said in an interview. "I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit to do things that we cannot make sense out of. I simply imagined that the hands of the Lord were laid upon him, and not my hands."

More here-

https://www.stripes.com/news/us/in-life-s-last-moments-us-clergy-minister-to-the-sick-and-dying-via-facetime-and-zoom-1.624617

No comments: