22 Year-Old Dave Gets His Hands Dirty
Once upon a time, my Jesuit novice confreres and I went to the Bronx to undertake our “hospital experiment”1 at Calvary Hospital. While most Jesuit novitiates have -- given the complexity of finding a suitable arrangement -- foregone more traditional hospital experiments in favor of some sort of retirement facility ministry,2 the Syracuse novitiate still sends its first-year novices to Calvary in order to wash the bodies of the dead and the dying for six weeks. Calvary is a unique institution among healthcare facilities; it is a palliative care hospital, a building where people go to die. While most of the patients had some form of terminal cancer, some were dying from other diseases such as AIDS and congestive heart failure. Calvary’s patients consumed such a ridiculous amount of morphine that the hospital had its own production lab in the basement in order to cut out the middleman.
In short, our ministry at Calvary did not consist of providing emotional and spiritual consolation. We simply met the physical needs of men and women who awaited their final breath, or whose final breath had already been expelled. Never before had work so physically and emotionally exhausted me, and never before had I so intimately encountered Death. The Triduum brings to blazing focus all the meaning of human existence found in the Cross and Resurrection, and the appropriately-named Calvary Hospital did the same, making incarnate the Paschal Mystery for us baby Jesuits.
Two Stories
It was Holy Week of 2011. A woman in her forties on our floor was dying of cervical cancer, which had eaten away the tissue between her uterus and rectal cavity, causing her waste to mix together. Her body remained incapable of processing nutrition, and her shriveled body rapidly deteriorated toward death. Her husband sat in her room all day and night, in a wild and constant state of enmity. This process had exhausted him (as it does most people), and had driven him to such a state of irrationality that he would not let Calvary’s staff clean his wife, hoping that this might expedite her expiration; she lay dying in her own urine and feces, and stench emanated from her room. Despite this, he adamantly remained entrenched in the vile atmosphere, resolved to prevent hospital staff from performing anything beyond pain management. One morning we came in, only to discover that bruise marks in the shape of hands covered her mouth and neck. Having arrived at the point of despair, this agonized fellow had attempted to asphyxiate his wife in her pained sleep, and at that point3 Calvary could forcibly remove him from the premises. Finally, she could be cleaned. Her body could be glorified, restored to dignity. This woman died a few days later.
That Holy Week, I attended daily Mass in the tiny hospital chapel. I sat a few feet from a woman and her husband,4 both in their late 40s or so. She lay in one of those beastly hospital chairs, missing most of her hair, comatose from chemicals that dripped into her bloodstream from plastic pouches hanging on a chrome rack. And throughout the liturgy, I could not remove my eyes from this couple. The husband gazed at his wife adoringly, with a love I have not yet experienced and therefore cannot yet understand. He stroked his wife’s arm, contemplating her face. When the priest came around to distribute the Eucharist, he tapped her cheek, “Holly, Holly, wake up,” he called, “Communion is here.” Holly did not awake from her slumber. I began to get all emotional as a grace collided with my reality, incinerating that little chapel. This is strong language, I know, but I’m trying to be accurate here. It burned. Was this not a manifestation of God’s relationship to humanity, beckoning us as we approach death at every moment of our lives, trying to awaken us to that Presence? Is my life not some sort of zombified slumber, a largely unconscious stumbling through sleeping and eating and working?5 Am I not largely unconscious of Love, that Font of all that I hope and dread? Does God want anything other than for me to awake, to become cognizant of His presence? In that hospital chair, there reclined Christ, his body riddled with cancer, losing his hair, intravenous fluids slowly working through his bloodstream as he died. In my eyes, Holly’s husband became Mary and John beholding their beloved.
The next week, Holly’s husband wheeled her around our floor, to break the monotony of existence in a palliative care hospital. I approached him: “Hey man, I’m sorry to bother you, but I was at Mass with you and your wife last week. I just really wanted to thank you, because your love for her brought me to tears. It was a graced moment for me, so thanks for your witness.”
“Well,” he replied shyly, “She’s not my wife.” This, needless to say, took me aback. I’m sure my jaw gaped open in shock.
“Holly and I met back in the 80s when she was touring with one of the first all-women’s punk rock bands. I followed her to all these venues and clubs -- you know, CBGB and all that -- and we were romantically involved, but time drew us apart. We reconnected a few years ago, and fell in love after most of life had passed us by. I proposed this past December, and then she was diagnosed with stage IV cancer. And now we’re here.”
I had no idea what to say, and he saw this. He looked at me, with the sort of pitying (though very real) love that Jesus offered the rich young man. He smiled a bit, probably concerned for my emotional fragility in that moment.
“Listen, could you pray for us? Could you pray that she regain the lucidity to marry me before she dies?” My insides churned more than a bit. Tears welled up. I stood there in muteness, just in stuporific awe. My brain started ticking again.
“Yeah. Yes. Of course. You bet. Well, again, thanks, and enjoy your walk.” I retreated into the bathroom to regain my composure so I could get back to work.
Choosing the Cross
I dunno if there’s anything I can really say that isn’t lukewarm, blasé inanity. It’s just that these memories haunt me each Easter, percolating. As I’ve come to learn by now, my approach to Christianity cannot help but be heavily informed by an existential encounter with the abyss, with the forceful absoluteness that I move closer to death with each moment. My former Jesuit novice brother Tim used to make light of this, celebrating each birthday with the sarcastic -- albeit truthful -- remark, “One year closer to death.” As one novel (which one I cannot remember) I read a couple years ago observed: even the smell of a sweet child’s breath starts to sour because their insides are beginning to rot.
If there’s anything I’ve come to believe about belief, it’s this: belief is a choice. Faith in Christ cannot predicate itself exclusively upon logic, because we are not exclusively logical creatures. We do not operate strictly according to reason. As I progress through this life, glued to this rock, pacing toward my demise (be it cancer, old age, a heart attack, or a dismembering impact of metal and flesh), what will I stake my life on? What will I choose? Despair, as the husband of the victim of cervical cancer had? Or hope, as Holly’s would-be husband so beautifully lived?
Do I choose the easy way out when confronting the potential engrossing absurdity of the universe, do I choose to forsake the Cross or the manifold crosses, those seemingly endless crucifixions that fill our world with grotesque cries of pain? Then again, perhaps unbelief isn’t so easy. Perhaps there is no such thing as true unbelief. As David Foster Wallace once remarked, we all worship something.
In light of all this stuff, do I choose the Cross, this instrument of torture and execution that becomes the deepest revelation of God’s love? This thing of things is a paradoxical reality. After all, the crucifix of Good Friday is a symbol of lovely horror, full of mangled flesh and rattling exhalations, though it overflows with horrific loveliness on Easter, full of infinite potential to transform humanity and the world. It becomes emptied by a miraculous kenosis, though irreversibly marked by the bloodstains of a tortured man who claimed to be God. We cannot forget that the body of the resurrected Christ remains pierced through,6 even though it be glorified.7
How do I go about choosing this to be the fixed center around which my universe spins? In staking my life upon the Cross being the axis of the cosmos, is my existence fundamentally different than it would otherwise be?
1 The Jesuit novitiate consists of a number of “experiments” in order to prepare novices for the Spiritual Exercises, and to test the long retreat’s graces upon its conclusion. One of these, the hospital experiment, directly stems from the experience of the first Jesuits caring for the infirm in Europe’s dilapidated hospitals.↩
2 I’m not knocking this at all, it’s just the way it is. I’m glad we did what we did, though.↩
3 Given that he had power of attorney or something like that (I’m no legal or medical expert), only when he evidenced that he posed a danger to his wife could action be taken.↩
4 For the life of me, I cannot remember what the name of the victim of cervical cancer was. However, I’ve changed the names of this story’s individuals; “Holly” is one of the main characters in the music of my all-time favorite band, The Hold Steady. It’s short for “Hallelujah”. Go listen to “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” and “How a Resurrection Really Feels” (both of which are about Holly), and thank me later. In the words of one YouTube commenter, “Closest thing to God you will see on stage swinging a few guitars around.”↩
5 I hyperbolize a bit here, but a Jesuit professor of mine once offered the insight that “faith is not so much about the constancy of the gaze, but rather the intensity of the glimpse.” Engraced moments certainly punctuate the life of a Catholic, and the ritual participation in the Church’s sacramental life forms the rhythmic heartbeat so that we might be roused to this Love.↩
6 There’s a lovely story from the early centuries of Christianity that I heard once, though I’ve never been able to track down its origins. It goes like this. On Good Friday, when Jesus descended into hell for its harrowing, Lucifer took advantage of this, assumed the appearance of the Christ, and approached the gates of Heaven. Awaiting the Son, the angels at the gates sung Psalm 24: “Lift up your heads, O gates, and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in!” Lucifer drew nearer, and the angels asked: “Is it you, Jesus?” The devil threw his arms wide open, proclaiming “It is I!” as the gates to Paradise opened for the Son of God’s entry. With this gesticulation, suddenly the gates slammed shut. The angels saw that the hands of Lucifer in disguise were not wounded. The lesson is this: love must become wounded in order to be salvific, and so the angels knew that this figure could not have been Jesus. This brings me to wonder...when the resurrection occurs, what wounds will we bear?↩
7 I also wonder...at the Transfiguration, did shadows of these wounds mark Jesus’ hands and feet?↩
Whoa.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.