God in his mercy has given us this work to do, and so we do not become discouraged. (2 Corinthians 4:1)
Once upon a time---a
most extraordinary time in my life---a
friend and co-worker crafted a special bookmark for each of us on the staff of
the small inner-city clinic where I worked. On mine, she had stitched in red, on
a strip of fringed ivory cloth, a verse of scripture that she knew was close to
my heart, "God
in his mercy has given us this work to do."
I'd say
it with a sigh, a laugh or a scowl---whatever
the occasion evoked.
"This work," for me, was nursing at Community Medical Care. I'd helped to found the clinic as part of a group from the Church of the Saviour and have been there ever since. At first, I had been drawn to it as a sort of hobby, tangential to my "real" career in international health. When I decided to make a career switch, it was because of the unique professional opportunity it offered: a chance to do hands-on nursing using advanced clinical skills with gifted colleagues in a small, wholistic, neighborhood-based practice that would extend from our office into patients' homes. Only later did I come to understand it as vocation, call. By then I had already veered off the beaten track to follow this bumpy, brambly road to who knew where.
Fingering my lovely bookmark some 20 years later, I realize I'd
hardly stopped to wonder at God's
mercy in bringing me to CMC. Many times I've
wondered where the mercy was. Although caring for my patients gave me
great satisfaction, I worked in a rough and tumble neighborhood with people
whose needs I could never hope to meet and who consistently challenged my best
intentions. Our staff, though we considered ourselves family, had the inevitable
quarrels and personality conflicts. As clinic director, I was acutely aware that
we were continually short of money. Patients didn't
always pay their bills, but the landlord, utility companies, and tradespeople
never failed to present theirs. On several occasions we couldn't
meet payroll. I often felt discouraged and inadequate. There were days I simply
wanted to run away.
Where was God's kindness and compassion? In retrospect, it's clear. My 17 years at Community Medical Care is a story of deepening and ripening spirituality. My interest in CMC finally brought me into membership in a church that encouraged daily quiet time and weekly spiritual reports. As a result, I began to keep a journal. In that journal I would let the remains of a day with its celebrations, sorrows and frustrations spill out onto paper. When it came time to produce my contribution to the clinic's annual reports, I began to work some of this very raw material into poems that told stories of life at CMC. Finding myself drawn to poetry as a medium of self expression, I enrolled in workshops at the local writer's center.
The poems kept coming. Some I sent off to magazines, mostly journals of the health professions. Then, to mark our 15th anniversary, I selected several of my poems along with photographs of our patients taken by Jim Hall, CMC's physician, for a collection we published as Just Who. This little book seemed to connect with many of those who read it---supporters, colleagues, friends.
Now, six years later, I've
published a new book called Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill. I remember
the morning it was "born".
A man I didn't
know well---very
thin, very old---sat
on the table in an exam room at the clinic. I was listening to his heart through
my stethoscope, not at all sure what I was hearing except that this jumble of
sounds was not normal. It reminded me of a drum---a
talking drum like the ones I'd
heard on a memorable trip to Nigeria. Quite aside from the pathology, there was
poetry here, and a strength of heart that had sustained this old man on his long
difficult journey through life. He must have wondered why I listened so long.
Patients always seem anxious when I do. So I told him, "Good.
It's working hard though it skips a beat or two."
To myself, I said, marveling, "Why,
this is the language of hearts. It tells a story, just like the talking drum."
Only now have I fully grasped that learning the language of hearts and expressing it in poetry is the mercy in the work God has given me to do, the something for which to be thankful. In her book, Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris says of a poet, that "...her body of poems is her confession. It is in the poems where her deepest spirituality resides, where it is evident that God has confronted her." And so it is with me.
The title of this collection comes from Aretha, as complex a human being as I have encountered. At 60, struggling to recover from a series of medical and spiritual crises, there was only one place Aretha wanted to go: the Florida Avenue Grill. It's a 55-year-old landmark in Washington's African-American community, as famous for the friendly sass of its waitresses as for its Southern home-style cooking. I piled Aretha and her walker into my car and we went off to breakfast. The small drama I witnessed at the Grill that day taught me something new and profound about the meaning of rehabilitation and the language of hearts.
To honor the memory of Aretha and root the book firmly in the clinic neighborhood, I decided to call it Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill. It is my hope that those who read it, especially my fellow caregivers, will feel nourished by the soul food served up inside.
Check out these two poems:
The
Language of the Hearts
Rehab
at Florida Avenue Grill
Veneta Masson is a nurse and writer living in Washington, DC. She is a member of New Community Church, a faith community of Church of the Saviour.
Rehab at the Florida Avenue Grill is available from Faith@Work for $13.
Here is a list of recent articles & poems by Veneta Masson