Our lives are characterized by nondescript places like Division and Main where nothing much happens. And it is there, in the middle of the ordinary nowhere, that I am most alert to the promise of the holy, perhaps because my vocation as a deacon is to watch for the crossings of human space and sacred time.
Crossroads
One Sunday a month I am responsible for Morning Prayer at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan, where I am a volunteer chaplain. The services are broadcast live on closed-circuit television and then rebroadcast in patients' rooms throughout the coming week. The main chapel is a beauty, built when the hospital was emphatically Episcopal. It seats over 100! Hospital workers and patients went to church on Sundays and even during the week. Now, the balcony, which once held the choir, is used for services because it is smaller, the space more intimate. The stained-glass wall above the altar of the big chapel forms a glittering background for the camera.
Because my singing does not inspire holiness, I usually take along with me one or two people from my home parish as a "choir." One Sunday, I invited a resident of the AIDS care center which our parish sponsors to join me. George had a stroke a year before and is in a wheelchair, although lately he has begun to walk again with the aid of a cane. He sang professionally, but his effort to make it as an entertainer was cut short when he was diagnosed with HIV. A year ago he was in diapers.
When I arrive to pick him up, he is eating breakfast, wearing a white band-collar shirt with rhinestone buttons. At his neck is his mother's butterfly broach, which he always wears, he tells me, when he performs. Completing the outfit is a cream satin jacket trimmed in gold. I notice what appear to be blood stains on one of the sleeves. In the car that comes to pick us up, George rides as if he were rich and famous, a regal tilt to his head. At the same time he complains about the nurses who were not available to help him dress that morning. He admits his bad mood but promises to get over it. "We have the Lord's work to do," he says.
The volunteers are not in the chapel to pick up patients, although the cameraman is there setting up his equipment. The organist, who is also a security guard at the hospital and usually reliable, has not arrived. As I go down the hall, already vested, I hear George tuning up. He has a sweet voice that calms my nerves.
Wearing my alb in the hospital makes me feel like a someone from another planet. A doctor on the elevator takes a long look at my hospital identification. I want to say, "I am an angel," but restrain myself. I give him a holy gaze.
The patient is named Timothy. He is thin and shaky. He walks slowly. In addition to cancer, he has AIDS and is trying to stay off drugs. By the time we get back to the chapel, we have only a couple of minutes before the service is scheduled to begin. There is one other person in the congregation, a nurse who was with me the morning a patient threw up as I began to preach. After the service, she hugs and thanks me. We all hug each other, except for the cameraman who bows slightly to me and darts off on an errand before the Catholics come in. I leave the candles lit for them.
George is giving Tim advice. "Trust in God. Take your troubles to the Cross. It will work out."
An early arrival for the Catholic service overhears and says to me, "If only it was really like that."
"It is like that," I tell her. "That's why we're here."
George and I walk Tim back to his room, where he holds me against his chest and won't let go, clutching the remnants of the morning's sacred time as long as he can.
Making Connections
In my homily, I quoted Henri Nouwen, who writes in one of his books that the vocation of the minister is to make connections between the human story and the divine story. The issue for us as servants of others is not taking their pain away but showing it to them as part of what Nouwen calls "the greater pain," which includes our own.
I believe that this is true, that we need to know our lives as part of God's time and our sufferings, whatever they might be, as part of that larger story in which we can find meaning and healing. But at the same time, I am made uncomfortable by such facile talk, even when it is my own. Is God's time that neat? God's grace that clean? Is there any other time as real as the time that takes us inexorably to our end?
Monday morning, I am on the 7:42 from Grand Central. My shoulder bag holds ordinary stuff for an ordinary day: a tupperware container packed with lentils, rice, tomatoes, and cucumber, a copy of Leon Wieseltier's wonderful book Kaddish, and proofs for the next issue of the magazine Cross Currents, which I edit. As I walk, I begin to think about how much I have to do. I accelerate. My mind works. The bag bangs my hip. I plunge into the way of the world.
At the corner of Division and Main, the red light stops me. Suddenly, I hear George singing in St. Luke's run-down chapel. I can feel Tim's arms holding me. And I know exactly where I am. The holy is here.
This article first appeared in Episcopal Life (Vol. 9, No. 10, Nov. '98). Kenneth Arnold writes from New York City.