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Good Morning.
One of this year’s most talked about films, Still Alice, has put Alzheimer’s disease in the international spotlight. Based on a bestselling novel, it recounts the mental demise of a linguistics professor diagnosed with the illness when she’s just 50. She can see words hanging in front of her but can’t reach them. She doesn’t know what she’s going to lose next. She thinks this might be the last year she’ll be herself. So, to stay reconnected with who she’s been, Alice resolves to live in the moment which is, in fact, a deeply spiritual move.  To live a prayerful life, we have to live in what’s called ‘the eternal now.’ Only the present really counts. We’re so accustomed to regretting the past or becoming anxious about the future that we rarely become skilled at living mindfully in the present. When we live in ‘the now’, we experience eternity. So when we converse with people living with forms of dementia, that’s what happens – we live eternally.Alzheimer’s has been described as ‘a strange land between remembering and forgetting.’ So the present becomes a sacred time. Before my cousin died of a dementia-related illness, I found that occasions we spent together were holy. Despite the noise and distractions in the room, we were able to pray together just for an eternal moment or two. And although he always seemed pleased to receive a blessing, I was always aware that the blessing was really coming from him  So in the words of St Igantius of Loyola: ‘Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will …..Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me. Amen.