What can rollators teach us about the Higher Power in 2026?

The old wooden side door exit of Saint Gabriel Church in the Riverdale section of the Bronx has been part of my life since my brother and I were altar servers during the change of the Mass from Latin to English in the winter of 1964. As I was eating my scone and coffee with plenty of milk on a still cold, March Sunday in 2026, I was jolted by still another scene of transition.

The door had creaked open — and four different persons behind their rollators were leaving the church from the basement auditorium worship area. An older man was holding the door open for them in his apparently assigned duty as usher. All were elderly. Three were women and one was a man. They were conscientiously and gingerly pushing their rollators out to the sidewalk.

There was some conviviality, but it was of the constrained sort. They had been to Sunday liturgy, and one could sense that they came from the days of solemn obligation to give worship on the Sabbath to the Higher Power. I wonder what they had heard today — if anything — to make an impact on their aging routines. We were then in the fourth week of a war in Iran, and in the fourth year of the bloody mess in Ukraine. They would be aware that some of their neighbors would be finishing Ramadan shortly, or beginning Passover in a still Jewish neighborhood, as well as the Christian Holy Week with a new pope from Chicago.

What would any face of faith mean with the change of seasons, and the fears associated with the fragility of a once very confident country like the U.S., which once was very open to new blood?

What I sensed that I learned looking at a distance from a warm bagel shop was what I saw: to keep pushing the rollator and life forward. They had no need to live in the past, nor to deny the pain that their creaky bones revealed to them.

They were to give witness that they made it through another week. Silently and yet somehow loudly, they could claim some relationship with the Higher Power. They were not concerned with what name to whisper as the name of the Almighty, and they were wise when they did not criticize the next generation which did not follow the traditional norms of the world’s great religious traditions.

As they once pushed baby carriages through the shopping aisles of the stores, they could push their rollators to new dimensions. Life literally had changed, but not ended — not for them and not for us.

I sometimes believe that Islam, Judaism and Christianity would agree.

Rev. James Sheehan, Jr. is a priest of the Archdiocese of NY., and was raised in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, NY. He serves as University Chaplain of two community colleges, Hostos and Bronx Community College, in the City University of New York.