Shiny!

In January, I learned that my novel The Necessary Beggar had won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. Ten of these are awarded every year to adult books with exceptional appeal to teen readers.

In June, I went to the ALA Conference in New Orleans, where there was a panel to discuss this year's awards. Five of us were there: me, Jeannette Walls, A. Lee Martinez, Gregory Gallaway, and Neil Gaiman. The panel was a lot of fun, and meeting this year's Alex-Award committee members was both a privilege and a pleasure.

Librarians rock. I'm now convinced that librarians are the Secret Rulers of the Universe. (I knew this when I was a dreamy bookworm of a kid, but I'd forgotten it as an adult.) Also, they know how to laugh at themselves. The official ALA gift shop was selling Librarian Action Figures, which raise a finger to their lips and say "Shhhhh!" when you press a button. When the Alex panel was about to start, a lot of people in the audience were still chatting, and other people started saying, "Shhhhhh!" I said, "We must be in a room of librarians," and everyone laughed.

So, anyway, today's mail brought my actual, physical Alex Award, the bronze medal you saw at the beginning of this post. It comes with a nice little wooden stand. It's a lovely object, and it will look great in my office at work.

I know I've been posting a lot of ego items the last few days, but really, this stuff doesn't happen to writers very often -- or not to most writers, anyway -- and we need to enjoy it when it does.

And to answer the inevitable question about New Orleans: the convention was in the French Quarter, the least damaged part of the city. The ALA was the first major meeting to come there since Katrina, and shopkeepers were falling all over us in gratitude. Everybody had a Katrina story. And no, I didn't venture outside the Quarter to look at hideous storm damage. Until just a few months ago, my father lived in Ocean Springs, Mississippi -- just east of Biloxi and right on the water -- and when I visited him after Christmas, I saw enough storm damage to last me a lifetime. When I was at the ALA, just looking at the books about Katrina in my hotel's gift shop made me start to cry; I didn't need more sensory input.

And yes, we were in that Convention Center. You never would have known from looking at the place that anything unpleasant had happened there.

Here's my favorite Katrina story, from my father's friend Darlene, who was an art teacher at a Biloxi high school. (I believe she's retired now.) The Friday before the storm hit, she'd been in her classroom getting it ready for the school year. She always decorated her room with her students' art, to give them pride in their work. (As I recall, this school served mostly lower-income students.) That Friday, she left a to-do list on the corner of her desk.

Then the storm came. She couldn't get into her school for three weeks, and in the meantime, the National Guard were billeted there. Darlene was afraid the place would be a mess. But when she got back into her classroom, it was spotless. The to-do list she'd left on her desk the Friday before the storm was still there, apparently untouched. And the National Guardsmen had written notes on the blackboard to Darlene's students, telling them how beautiful their artwork was.

Very few Gulf-Coast residents I've met have anything good to say about FEMA, but I haven't heard a negative word about the National Guard.

News of Mice

Today Jacob Weisman, my editor from Tachyon, called to talk about the table of contents for my story collection The Fate of Mice, which is coming out in February. (You'll find a link to its Amazon page in the sidebar. You can pre-order, if you want to. I'm just sayin'.) Of the eighteen stories I submitted, the collection will definitely contain ten, including three brand-new, never-before-published stories that I wrote between April and July. One of those, which I wrote in virtually one sitting when I was completely zonked out on muscle relaxants after throwing my back out -- kids, don't try this at home -- is probably the darkest thing I've ever produced. And if you've read my story "Gestella," you know that's saying something!

Jacob and I are negotiating over another two or three stories, pieces I'm fonder of than he is. Several older stories are being consigned to merciful oblivion.

I'm excited about finally having a story collection, especially with such a cool cover. Is that cover fabulous, or what? This is the first time I've gotten memorable cover art on the first try. Jacob tells me that books with cats on the cover tend to sell well, although this kitty doesn't look particularly cuddly (especially in the context of the title). He also reports that this is the first time Tachyon's had a feline cover; may it do well for all of us!

Yesterday's mail brought my contributor's copies of Jonathan Strahan's Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005, which includes my story "The Fate of Mice." As I mentioned in an earlier post, that same story's reprinted in Rich Horton's Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2006 Edition.

Okay, I think I've done enough self-promotion for one day. I'd better go lie down now.

Another Medical Miscellany

This week's Grand Rounds is up over at Hospital Impact. Tony did a great job with this edition, and we get to look at an adorable picture of his infant son!

Last night, Gary found this surgical resident's diary on Slate. It's from 1997, but still makes fascinating reading.

In the land of fictional medical narratives, we've now finished watching the fifth season of ER on DVD. Next up, the second season of Carnivale, which we're both hoping will make more sense than the first one. It's a visually gorgeous show with colorful and intriguing characters, but it's also utterly inscrutable.

The Gormless Brigade: A Medical Horror Story

When I decided to become a volunteer hospital chaplain, I got a lot of negative reactions from family and friends. “Oh, no! You aren’t going to turn into one of those people who marches into a hospital room and starts thumping a Bible, are you?” “You aren’t going to turn into one of those people who shows up with a simpering smile, leaves a prayer card on the bedside, and vanishes again, are you?” “You aren’t going to turn into one of those people who says I have to accept Jesus for my illness to be cured, are you?”

No, no, and no. My training emphasized that the first principle of pastoral care is meeting people where they are, instead of telling them where they “should” be. Proselytizing is forbidden (and isn’t something I’d be inclined to do anyway). Our goal is to learn enough about the patient’s belief system to try to help that person marshal emotional and spiritual resources. This means that a lot of the time, I don’t even talk about God. I’ve had pastoral conversations about people’s grandchildren, about their pets, about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I try to learn what people love -- whether that’s cooking or genealogy or Little League -- because the things we love are the things we live for, and that means they’re the things that heal us.

But listening to all those horror stories about hospital chaplains, I remembered one of my own.

Caveat Lector

I’ve dithered for a few days about whether to post this, because you can’t get the full effect of the gormless-chaplain story unless I first tell a gormless-gynecologist story and a gormless-ER-doc story. (Lest you think it’s all bad news, there’s a saintly ER nurse in there, too.) To tell those stories, I need to go into some fairly graphic and personal details that might embarrass people. They don’t embarrass me, but I don’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable.

I’m offering this as a cautionary tale to medical and pastoral caregivers about what not to do, although I hope most folks would know better anyway. But if you’re embarrassed by graphic medical stories, especially about the female reproductive system, please don’t read this. Also, this is quite long. I considered breaking it up, but my husband thinks it should all be one post.

The Gormless Gynecologist

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away (popularly known as New Jersey), I had an abnormal Pap smear. This meant that during a routine pelvic exam, my gynecologist found pre-cancerous cells on my cervix. To determine the next step in medical treatment, I needed a colposcopy, a specialized examination and biopsy of the cervix.

Colposcopies are office procedures. Gary and I were living together, but not yet married. His best friend had just died of cancer, and so -- even though my gynecologist’s nurse assured me rather impatiently that the abnormal Pap was really nothing to worry about -- we were both anxious. Gary volunteered to come with me to the colposcopy, to hold my hand during the procedure. (This meant the world to me. Any guys reading this: if you really want to score brownie points with your significant other, offer to go along during medical procedures!) The day before the procedure, he’d popped a tendon playing tennis, but -- in typical male fashion? -- he stayed quiet about how much pain he was in.

So we’re in my gynecologist’s office. I’m up on the table, in stirrups. Gary's standing beside me, holding my hand. My gynecologist, who’s young and female and subscribes to the “tell the patient exactly what you’re doing at each moment” school of medicine -- which I normally appreciate -- is giving me a perky, chatty tour of the procedure. “Okay, Susan, now I’m inserting the speculum! Okay, now I’m staining your cervix with vinegar! The vinegar makes the abnormal cells turn white under this special light we’re using! Oh, look! There are so many abnormal cells that your cervix looks like a glazed donut!”

Those were her exact words. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach, but at least I was lying down. Gary was standing up. His calf was massively swollen from his athletic injury. His best friend had just died of cancer. The room was also rather warm. The upshot of all this was that he turned gray and began sweating copiously. “You don’t look too good,” the doctor told him.

She and her nurse promptly abandoned me to make sure Gary wasn’t having a heart attack. (He wasn’t.) They left me dangling in those stirrups, worrying about him, for a good twenty minutes. Because of all the confusion, when they did come back, they forgot to give me discharge instructions.

Discharge instructions include symptoms of post-biopsy infection: “If you develop nausea or a fever, call your doctor.” I hadn’t gotten the instructions. So two weeks later, when I developed fever, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, I assumed I just had the flu. But after several days, the nausea turned into periodic waves of wrenching abdominal pain: pain that, when it hit every few minutes, left me gasping for breath and curled into a little knot of agony. You know that 1-10 pain scale, with 10 being “the worst pain you’ve ever felt”? This was a 10.

Enter Saint Nurse

Gary and I went to the nearest ER, which happened to be a Catholic hospital. I was wearing jammies, slippers and a bathrobe, walking doubled over because of the pain, puking into a plastic bowl I was clutching to my chest. When we walked into the ER entrance, the person behind the registration desk took one look at me and said, “You go right back there and lie down, honey.”

By some fluke, the place was almost empty. I got prompt attention from a kind, funny, personable ER nurse. Between waves of pain -- now somewhat reduced by pain meds -- she asked me about my graduate work, chatted about my doctoral dissertation, and generally treated me like an intelligent, competent human. And when my bloodwork came back with a white-cell count of 29,000 (normal is between 5,000 and 9,000), she became very grave and quiet, and told me quickly and gently -- as someone else quickly and gently started an IV for antibiotics -- that I had a very serious infection and would have to stay in the hospital.

Enter Gormless ER Doc

I’d told Saint Nurse about the colposcopy, and the ER doc wanted to do a pelvic exam. This doctor had already lost points for telling Gary to go sit in the waiting room. My impression at the time was that he kicked Gary out because we weren’t married; he asked Gary to leave when he heard the word “boyfriend.” Maybe he would have asked a husband to leave, too. I don’t know. I wasn’t yet a churchgoer -- that wouldn’t happen for another few years -- and I was very conscious of being in a Catholic hospital. That definitely colored my perceptions of what followed. (I volunteer in a Catholic hospital now, and I love the place, but I’m also very sympathetic to patients who are nervous about being in a faith-based institution.)

Maybe the ER doc was having a lousy day, even though the ER was temporarily quiet. Maybe he was just very bedside-manner-challenged. Maybe what happened next had nothing to do with the fact that a) he knew I wasn’t married and b) I was about to be admitted to the hospital with a diagnosis of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. PID is most often caused by untreated STDs; it sometimes results in infertility, which will become important later in this story. My interpretation of events may have been swayed by the fact that the doctor was clearly from India and that his English wasn’t terrific; this made me wonder if he had more conservative beliefs about sexual mores than an American doctor might. (Someday I’ll post about the role of gender, race and social class in the emergency department. They definitely affect patient-staff interactions, but they aren’t often discussed.)

Whatever his reasons, this doctor gave me the roughest, most painful, most callous pelvic exam I’ve ever had. I clung to Saint Nurse’s hand, trying to be a good patient, trying not to whimper. When the exam was over, he took out the speculum, held it up so I could see the bloody pus on it, and glared at me as if I was something he wanted to scrape off the bottom of his shoe. “This is bad discharge,” he said, his voice dripping scorn. Saint Nurse squeezed my hand.

“I’m due for my period,” I said. “Could that be some of the blood?” (As it turned out, I had indeed just gotten my period.)

“Yeah,” Saint Nurse chimed in eagerly. “Could it?”

He curled his lip. “This is really bad discharge.”

I felt like the Whore of Babylon. Why was he talking to me that way? I was already sick as a dog and about to be hospitalized; was he trying to make me feel even worse? Later, when Saint Nurse was taking me up to my hospital room, I told her, “You have a much better bedside manner than he does.” She giggled. She didn’t seem to think he was a horrible doctor, so maybe he really was just having a bad day. He shouldn’t have taken it out on me, though.

Enter Gormless Chaplain

Upstairs in my hospital room, where I went through severe separation anxiety because Saint Nurse had gone back downstairs to the ER, I lay in bed, wondering when I’d see another doctor. My eyes were tearing from the pain of the IV: they had me on doxycycline, which is great stuff (it brought my white count back down to 9,000 in two days) but also burns the veins going in. I didn’t expect to see another doctor that night, but I was sure I’d see one in the morning.

The next day, my sister and mother visited, and Gary came and played Scrabble with me to distract me from the pain of the IV -- I got a new dose of doxycycline every twelve hours, and quickly learned to dread it -- but no doctor came.

The next morning, my aunt and uncle and several friends visited. Still no doctor. In the afternoon, my sister came by again, and she was still there when a short, excessively cheerful man appeared in the doorway and said, “Hi, Susie! I’ve come to see how you’re feeling!”

I stared at him. “My name’s Susan.” Blood relatives and extremely close friends who’ve known me for longer than twenty years get to call me Sooz. Nobody calls me Susie. “Are you my doctor?”

He chortled maniacally and bounded a few feet into the room. “Well, hi there, Susie! So how are you today?”

My sister looked alarmed. I shrank back against my pillows and tried to stay calm. “I prefer ‘Susan,’ thank you. I’ve been waiting to see a doctor. Are you my doctor?”

He beamed at me and hopped closer to the bed. “So, Susie, you seem to be in a good mood!”

At that point, I lost it. ”My name’s Susan. Who are you?”

“I’m the chaplain!” he said, chuckling. (My sister told me later, “You should have seen the look of relief on your face when you found out he wasn’t the doctor.”) He asked me if I’d like him to pray with me. I thanked him but explained that no, I wasn’t religious. It turned out that he was a Catholic priest. Somehow we started making small talk -- I didn't know that I could tell the chaplain to go away, and I wasn’t going to kick a priest out of my room in a Catholic hospital -- and discovered that we were both writing doctoral dissertations. He asked what mine was about, and I told him that I was writing about runaway mothers as figures of social reform in nineteenth-century British and American women’s writing.

He beamed at me. “Oh, how wonderful! Motherhood is women’s highest calling!”

I think my jaw dropped. The dunderheaded sexism of the comment would have been bad enough, but I was in the hospital with a diagnosis of a condition that could have left me infertile.

Now, I was positive that I didn’t have classic STD-related PID (and indeed, the STD tests came back negative). I was positive that the infection was somehow related to the colposcopy, although there was no way to prove it. And I’ve never wanted kids, so the fertility issue was far less important to me than it would have been to most women.

But he had no way of knowing any of that. If fertility had been an issue for me, his comment would have been devastating (even aside from its dunderheaded sexism), especially after I’d felt so judged by the ER doctor. “Whore of Babylon, your licentiousness has barred you from Woman’s Highest Calling!” For many reasons, I wasn’t about to buy into that message, but many other women might have.

I don’t know if the chaplain had access to my chart or not, and I don’t know if he’d have had any clue of what “PID” meant if he’d read it. When I became a chaplain myself and worked on medical floors, before I discovered that I preferred the ER, we were required to chart on patients (“Prayed w/pt” was the standard note). When I could find the chart -- which wasn’t often -- I usually tried to make some sense of the History & Physical section so I could suss out any potential landmines before I met the patient.

Nobody’s perfect. I believe that this chaplain was a genuinely sweet, if gormless, man who was truly trying to cheer me up. Even at the time, I wasn’t as upset with him as I was with either my gynecologist or the ER doc, and now I have quite a bit of sympathy for him. I know I’ve put my foot in it with patients sometimes too, and we worship a God of forgiveness.

But the lessons remain. Medical caregivers: please try to think about how your words would sound to you if you were the patient. Pastoral caregivers: please remember to introduce yourselves and your function right away, and try to avoid bringing up potentially sensitive subjects unless the patient does so first. And if you have any access to information about the medical condition being treated, educate yourselves!

Epilog

After I’d gotten out of the hospital and had recovered completely from the infection, I had laser surgery to remove the abnormal cells from my cervix. (I had a bunch of other tests, too, to make sure nothing else was wrong, but that’s another set of posts.) I’m delighted to report that since then, I’ve been fine, and all of my Pap smears have been normal.

Award News!

I've been selected as one of the 2006 recipients of a Silver Pen Award by the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. The Silver Pen Award recognizes emerging or mid-career writers who've shown a significant attachment to Nevada. Here's the press release.

Ann Ronald, who's being inducted into the Hall of Fame itself, is a colleague of mine in the UNR English Department. I don't know Ellen Hopkins, the other Silver Pen recipient, but her work sounds very powerful.

I've actually known about this for a week -- I got the phone call last Saturday morning, and spent the rest of the day doing the Snoopy dance around the house -- but I wasn't allowed to tell anyone except Gary and my parents until the press release came out. I love Nevada, so this makes me exceedingly happy.

The awards reception is a benefit for the Friends of the UNR Library, so if you're reading this and you live in the Reno area, I'm supposed to try to sell you a ticket. I couldn't even sell Girl Scout cookies when I was a kid, but at least I'm trying, right? Here's the page with the info about how to buy tickets. You have to scroll down a little to get to the blue box about the reception.

I'll get to do a short reading at the reception, so now I have to find a 10-12 minute chunk from The Necessary Beggar that will work as a standalone. That's going to be a bit of a challenge, but I'll figure out something.

Bright Lights, Small City

Following that link to the RGJ story about the fire, I encountered an extremely annoying casino ad, which reminded me that I should probably say something about casinos, since everyone from Somewhere Else who knows that I live here always gets around to asking.

Q: Do you spend a lot of time at the casinos?

A: No.

For me and Gary, and most of our friends, casinos are the equivalent of the Empire State Building in New York: the tourist attraction you only visit when you have out-of-town guests. When we first moved here, we were startled by the slot machines everywhere (the airport, gas stations, supermarkets), but at this point, we don't even notice them. We've attended concerts at some of the casinos, but that's it.

I don't consider gambling inherently evil. Britt Olson, the former rector of the St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Sparks, once commented that churches claim to welcome everyone, but that casinos are the only places she can think of that actually do. (I'd add public libraries to that list.) International Gaming Technology, the huge slot-machine company headquartered here, is an extremely good corporate citizen. IGT employs a number of my friends -- including one of my parish priests -- and they sponsor everything: arts events, charity events, community-service programs, you name it. They pull in a lot of money, and they're very generous with it. And while I wouldn't choose to work in a casino myself, many of my students over the years have supported themselves by working as dealers or cocktail servers.

I don't happen to enjoy gambling. It just doesn't appeal to me, partly because casino decor is always so deliberately tacky. The carpets and ceiling are invariably hideous: they want you to focus your eyes on machine- and table-level, so they make everything else ugly. There are very few windows and no clocks, because people tend to gamble longer if they aren't aware of the passage of time. And casinos are designed to be mazes leading you inexorably back to the gaming floor: just trying to find your way out of those places can be an epic adventure. Also, they're filled with smoke and flashing lights and noisy slot machines, which means that I inevitably get a migraine within ten minutes of walking in. Casinos make me sick, literally, but it's nothing personal.

I do have to admit that whenever I see people shoving quarters into a slot machine, I want to say, "If you really don't want your money, why don't you give it to me?" But most people are able to gamble responsibly, just as most people are able to drink responsibly. The key to responsible gambling is knowing when to walk away. Accept that the house always wins in the long run, decide how much you're willing to lose, and when you've lost that much, leave. For people who find blackjack or the slots entertaining, spending $20 or $40 bucks in the casinos is no more harmful than spending the same amount on a movie and dinner; they've had a good time and stayed within their budget, so it's not a problem. When my sister visits, she likes to go to the casinos and play two dollars at the slots, and since it's very easy to lose two dollars within my ten-minute migraine window, I don't mind going with her.

Casinos do pose some health risks, however. Here are a few things I've learned from volunteering in an emergency department:

* Eat at the coffee shops or other regular-service restaurants, not at the buffets. The restaurants are fine, although service tends to be slow. The buffets are risky. Yes, all casinos advertise their wonderful buffets. If you define wonderful as "all-you-can-eat mountains of really mediocre food that's been sitting in a warming dish for God knows how long," have at it. But in that case, please be prepared to spend entirely too much of your vacation in the bathroom, and another chunk of time in the ER, where the staff will hook you up to IVs to rehydrate you after you've lost a large percentage of your body fluid to unpleasant intestinal upsets. Between the desert climate and the altitude, dehydration's a constant danger here anyway; Nevada's the driest state in the country. You didn't come here to gamble on your health, did you? Stay in the coffee shop.

* Make sure that you do get to the coffee shop, or at least that you keep a supply of power bars on your person. If you become so entranced by the slot machines that you forget to eat -- and this is especially true if you're elderly -- you will collapse, and the casino will have to call an ambulance, and your distraught spouse will accompany you to the ER, where everybody will be really worried about whether you're having a heart attack, until the emergency physician ascertains that you haven't had a meal in twenty-four hours. At that point your nurse will order a hospital meal tray for you, and you'll gobble it down and feel much, much better, except that you'll be really embarrassed. Hospital meal trays are extremely expensive and far from gourmet fare (although they're better than casino buffets). If you want to spend a lot of money on food outside the casino, I'd be glad to recommend a few excellent Reno restaurants. Finding a good restaurant that's neither in a strip mall nor in a casino is a bit of a challenge, but anybody who lives here will be happy to share the Secret Knowledge.

* If you have asthma, hanging out in a smoke-filled casino isn't a good idea. Really. Trust me on this one.

So there you have it: Susan's Pocket Casino Guide. I like casinos best from the outside, at night; I think all that neon's pretty, especially from a distance. Many people disagree with this. But we all agree that there are a lot of other things to do here. Reno offers easy access to excellent mountains (where you can hike, bike, or ski), stunning lakes (Tahoe and Pyramid), and a lovely river, the Truckee, that runs right through downtown. You can sit and drink coffee and watch kayakers and kids and dogs frolicking in the river, or you can frolick in the river yourself. For my money, that beats slot machines any day.

Biggest Little Ashtray

There's a huge fire here. It started at 3:00 this afternoon in Verdi, just west of Reno, and at 8:30 the paper was reporting that it had already spread to 5,000 acres. I imagine it's bigger than that now. The air reeks of smoke -- even inside the house, with all the windows closed and the AC on -- and from our bedroom window, Gary and I can see the dull glow of fire on Peavine Mountain, just a few miles away. That's where he always hikes.

It's very windy, so they'll probably have trouble getting this one under control, although they already have a lot of people and equipment on it. We called some friends who live closer to Verdi than we do and asked if they wanted to come here: they were watching the fire from their front porch but said that no, they were okay.

We've never had to evacuate because of fire, but anyone who lives around here is aware of the possibility. There are places in town where you can't get home insurance without a fire-retardant roof. Most of the houses in our neighborhood, including ours, still have wood-shingle roofs. When we first moved here, we were two blocks from the start of wild land: now there are a hundred more houses up there, at least (and several new developments being built; they may be ashes in the morning). Gary always says that those houses would go before ours does. But even so, every summer he clears the cheatgrass from the backyard so our property will be less flammable.

In this wind, I worry about sparks on the roof.

If we did have to evacuate, we'd take the cats and my computer. And my meds and CPAP, I guess.

We'll probably be fine. But it's scary to watch the mountain burning.

Saturday morning:

The sky looks almost clear now, and the smoke has abated considerably, although we can still see smoke on Peavine. It's nothing like last night, though! As per Lee's request, here's a link to the Reno Gazette-Journal article about the story, complete with photo and video links. The story says that last night, the fire was 20% contained; I can't find a figure for this morning, but I suspect it's higher than that.

Strange New Worlds

Of all my homilies, this one's the most about science fiction. But it's also a true story about a rickety contrivance of doing good. (Yep, those old Star Trek sets were as rickety as it gets!) Whenever I tell this story, people love it, and I think we could all use some cheering up right now.

I gave this on January 15, 2006. The readings are 1 Samuel 3:1-10 and John 1:43-51.

* * *

Epiphany is the season of revelation. The word “Epiphany” is derived from the Greek word for manifestation, and the season of Epiphany is about how God becomes manifest to humans. Epiphany invites us to think about how people become aware of God’s presence. When have we seen or heard God, and what made us realize that God was with us?

This morning’s lessons suggest some answers to those questions. In these stories, people first become aware of God indirectly, through other people. Only in hindsight do they realize that God has been with them all along. These stories also suggest that God becomes manifest to us when God has a job for us to do. God doesn’t drop by just for the heck of it. In fact, this sense of calling may be one of the surest indications of God’s presence.

In the story from 1 Samuel, the boy Samuel – who by tradition was about twelve years old when this happened — is serving in the Temple under Eli. “The word of the LORD was rare in those days,” the passage tells us; “visions were not widespread.” Even though he is in the Temple, Samuel no more expects to hear God speaking to him than he expects the lamp to get up and dance a jig. And so, each time the Lord calls Samuel, the boy goes to Eli, thinking that his master has called him. Eli, who has not spoken a word, finally realizes that God has been calling Samuel, and he tells Samuel what to do. “Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'” And Samuel obeys.

Samuel grows up to become a great and beloved prophet. But I suspect that in this first encounter with God, Samuel listens and obeys as much because he loves and trusts Eli as because he loves and trusts God. Before the boy can hear God, he has to listen to his human master.

In the Gospel reading, we see a similar pattern. Jesus calls Philip, telling him, “Follow me.” Philip, in turn, finds Nathanael, and when Nathaneal dismisses Philip’s claims about Jesus, Philip answers, “Come and see.” Philip follows Jesus; Nathaneal follows Philip. Although Nathaneal quickly decides to follow Jesus himself, he got there by following another person.

In these two stories from Scripture, the gap between listening to another person and listening to God, or realizing that God was the one speaking in the first place, is very short. It takes practically no time at all for Samuel and Nathaneal to recognize their true master, to recognize whose they are. But sometimes it takes much longer. Sometimes it takes years for us to realize who we were really hearing when someone said something that changed our lives. These stories can be very long and winding indeed. I’m about to tell you a story like that. Please bear with me, because the pieces do all fall into place.

Tomorrow we will celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s a safe bet that a lot of preachers are talking about Dr. King today. He lived in a time when the word of the LORD was rare, when visions were not widespread. But King had a vision. He had a dream, and he passed it on to others. His assassination, when I was seven years old, is the first national event I remember. I watched people on television holding hands and singing “We shall overcome.” I didn’t know who Dr. King was, but I knew that a lot of people were very sad.

Two or three years later, I started watching Star Trek — already in reruns, since the series had ended in 1969 — and by the time I was twelve, the same age Samuel is in today’s Old Testament lesson, I was a fervent fan. Star Trek portrayed a future where people worked together, even if they didn’t all look alike. That was a vision I needed to see. There had been race riots in our New Jersey town in the late sixties, and my middle school was very uneasily integrated. In my school, you were either white and Jewish and going to college, or black and not going to college. Most of the black students had internalized the message that they weren’t college material, no matter how many caring adults tried to convince them otherwise. Black kids who got good grades were ostracized by other black kids.

I was white and not Jewish. My best friend, Nadia, was black and brilliant. I met Nadia when she started defending me against the bullies who beat me up in the halls between classes every day. We became friends because we were both misfits and because we both loved Star Trek. We talked about the show for hours on the phone every night. In February of 1973, when I was twelve, we went to our first Star Trek convention, in New York City, where my father and stepmother lived. At that convention, we heard a speech by Nichelle Nichols.

If you aren’t Trekkies yourselves, you may not remember that Nichelle Nichols was the black actress who played Lieutenant Uhura, the Enterprise’s communications officer. She was the first African-American to have a major role on a TV series, and Star Trek featured the first interracial kiss on television, between Uhura and Captain Kirk. Only as an adult did I learn that during Star Trek’s first season, Nichols had been ready to walk off the show. She was sick of endlessly repeating her only line: “All hailing frequencies open, Captain.” The person who convinced her to stay was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who told her that her people, and young black women in particular, needed role models.

I didn’t know any of this at that convention in 1973. All I knew was that I was in a hot, crowded ballroom with several hundred other Star Trek fans. Most of us were adolescent, pimple-ridden, and somewhat socially challenged. If you’ve seen the movie GalaxyQuest, you can imagine the scene. And the lovely Nichelle Nichols looked out over this sea of acne, and here is what she said. “All of you are here because you love Star Trek. People make fun of you for that. All they see when they look at Star Trek is the bad makeup and cheesy special effects. But you know more than they do. You’re the people who know that Star Trek is about more than cheesy special effects. You’re the people who know that Star Trek is about love, and truth, and peace, and justice. And that’s why it’s your job to go out and change the world.”

Everyone in that room was electrified. Nichelle Nichols had just told us we were worth something. Nichelle Nichols had told us that we had a calling. I decided to become a writer that year, although it took me a while to connect my career choice with what I’d heard in that crowded ballroom. Nadia told me later that Nichols’ speech inspired her to become a NASA scientist; she didn’t quite achieve that goal, but she did get a master’s degree in biomechanics and a doctorate in physical anthropology. When I last heard from her, she was the director of research and development for a company that manufactured artificial joints.

Three years ago, I told this story as part of a conference paper at a meeting of the Popular Culture Association in Philadelphia. When I’d finished, the woman who runs the science-fiction and fantasy area of that very large academic organization stood up and said, “I’m a little older than Susan is, but I was at that same Star Trek convention in 1973, and I heard that same speech by Nichelle Nichols. And here we both are.” Nichols’ speech that day changed the lives of at least three people. When I was researching this homily, I learned that Dr. Mae Jamison, the first black female astronaut, was inspired by Nichols’ career. So was Whoopi Goldberg.

And now I wonder whose words I was really hearing, in that crowded ballroom. Nichols was speaking, yes, but her message of love and truth and peace and justice is surely one that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have applauded. King was a Baptist minister. In a sermon on Loving Your Enemies, he wrote: “We must discover the power of love . . . the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. . . . Love is the only way. Jesus knew that.” The message King proclaimed was God’s.

It has taken me thirty-three years, but I think I finally understand that what I heard, in that crowded ballroom in 1973, was the Word of God. It came to me very indirectly, through many human intermediaries. Only now am I close enough to Jesus to recognize his voice in Nichelle Nichols’ words. But I believed those words the minute I heard them. I believed that Star Trek’s promise to discover “strange new worlds” was really about remaking the world where I lived.

And now, thirty-three years later, I believe the same thing about the Good News Jesus proclaimed, the Good News Christians celebrate during Epiphany, and all year long. We are the people who know that the Gospel is about love, and truth, and peace, and justice. And that’s why it’s our job to go out and change the world.

Amen.

The Thin Red Line

I lied; we have some SF today after all. Meme Therapy has posted another Brain Parade, this one about whether the "thin red line" between SF and fantasy is worth maintaining, and I'm one of the people quoted.

Miscellany, Medical

Tomorrow we'll get back to SF and faith, I promise, but in the meantime, if you're as fascinated as I am by medicine, here are some tidbits for you.

The latest Change of Shift is up over at It's A Nursing Thing. This is an exceptionally good issue, and I'm not just saying that because I'm in it. Be sure to check out the pieces by Donorcycle, Warrior Mom, and Nurse Ratched, who provides a wry historical essay on what it was like to try to track down doctors in the era before pagers and cellphones. And if you have a strong stomach and handy tissues, I also highly recommend the posts by Surgeonsblog and KT Living.

Keep those tissues out for this NPR report on end-of-life care for children. This isn't a topic most of us even want to think about, but for the sake of the kids and their families, I'm glad some doctors are doing so. Note that there are three parts here, and don't miss Dr. Chris Feudtner's letter to his own sons about his work. Thanks to eagle-eyed Gary for spotting this for me!

And, finally, the New York Times most e-mailed list has two interesting health articles, one on changing theories about migraines and one on -- ewwww! -- tapeworms, memorably described as both cunning and compassionate. This week's health tip: if you make your own gefilte fish, do not, in the name of everything that's holy, sample the raw ingredients.

Tomorrow: Nichelle Nichols, MLK Jr., and GalaxyQuest. Stay tuned!

Is She Real, Or Is She Memorex?

For most of my life, I’ve been a very status-conscious academic overachiever. So when I decided to learn about hospital chaplaincy, I chose the most rigorous training I could find: an extended unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, which would require sixteen hours a week in the hospital -- eight hours of patient visits and eight of classroom instruction -- for seven months, for a total of 400 hours. Because I was on a year-long sabbatical from teaching, I thought I could handle this without any trouble.

I was wrong. I’ve always thrived on demanding academic programs, but not this time. I’d gone into CPE tired; I quickly became more tired; and, to shorten a long and somewhat embarrassing story, I wound up withdrawing after barely more than a month. CPE’s a great program, and my classmates and instructors were wonderful, but I just wasn’t in the right place to be able to do it.

In retrospect, dropping CPE was one of the smartest decisions I ever made, but it also left me with a pretty big chip on my shoulder. I’d never been unable to complete a course: not even CUNY’s Summer Latin Institute, which I took my first year of graduate school and which nearly did me in. (Someday I’ll post about that. I have lots of Latin Camp stories.) The good news in all of this was that I’d discovered how much I loved the ER, where CPE interns are required to spend half their clinical time. And the volunteer coordinator at my hospital let me switch over to volunteering four hours a week without making me go through the three-weekend volunteer training course; she said I’d already done enough classroom time in CPE. (Thanks, Val!)

So I could keep the gig that had been my favorite part of CPE. But I also had to trade in my “Chaplain Intern” badge for a “Volunteer Chaplain” badge, which meant that five thousand imps of status-consciousness started dancing the tarantella on my shoulder-blades.

The word “volunteer” has a number of connotations. It can mean “warm-hearted, generous citizen.” But it can also imply “amateur,” “dilettante,” and “somebody without the qualifications to get paid:” in short, “unprofessional.” Hospitals treasure their volunteers, and my hospital is no exception, but healthcare chaplaincy has also become more and more highly professionalized. As a volunteer, I was still rubbing shoulders with paid staff chaplains and with CPE interns working towards that 400-hour certificate, and the mix made me more than a little self-conscious. When my non-hospital, non-church friend Rob listened to me wrestling with all this, he raised his eyebrows and said dryly, “Yep, when somebody visits me in the hospital, that’s the first thing I say. ‘Show me your certificate saying you’ve had 400 hours of training to do this, or you’re out of here.’” I laughed, and I certainly saw his point, but I still struggled not to feel like a failure whenever I was around one of the “real” chaplains.

We’d spent some time in CPE talking about the best way to introduce ourselves to patients. The word “chaplain” is even more loaded than the word “volunteer.” Entirely too many people have been traumatized by organized religion, and many other people think that chaplains only show up to give last rites. (“I visit everybody in the ER, so please don’t worry,” is one of the lines I often use when I introduce myself to patients; it usually makes them laugh, but you can see the relief on their faces, too.) Some chaplains prefer to say, “I’m a visitor from the Spiritual Care Department,” but whenever I’ve tried that, the patient has squinted and said, “The what?” Somebody who’s sick and stressed out just doesn’t need to deal with all those syllables.

So fairly early on, I decided that I’d introduce myself as a volunteer chaplain. It was short, it was simple, and it matched my badge. And early on, it was also my way of saying, “I’m not, like, a real chaplain or anything, so please don’t expect too much.”

But what I discovered, to my immense surprise, was that the word “volunteer,” more often than not, made patients beam at me, or reach for my hand, or break into goofy grins. A patient who’d been staring at me suspiciously would relax into a radiant smile as soon as I said I was a volunteer. “Oh, it’s so nice of you to do that!” The word “volunteer” turned out to be the best ice-breaker I could use. This was true even of non-religious patients, and even of patients who had no need or desire to talk to me. “I’m a volunteer,” rather than signaling my lack of qualifications, seemed to create instant trust.

Mind you, patients have dismissed me on other grounds: because I didn’t belong to their denomination, because they considered all religion useless, or because I wasn’t the right gender. (Some people still believe that chaplains have to be male, and women hold this view as often as men do.) In CPE we’d been told, “Chaplains are the only people in the hospital the patients can tell to go away, so if a patient doesn’t want you there, you should feel good about the fact that you’ve just empowered the patient.” I’ve empowered my fair share of patients, but never for the reasons I initially expected. Rob was right: no one’s ever said, “Show me your 400-hour certificate, or you’re out of here!” Some patients hostile to religion have sent me away because they assumed I was clergy -- some volunteer chaplains are clergy, but I’m not -- but no one’s ever sent me away for being a layperson. (Catholic patients will often request a visit from a priest for sacramental purposes, but they’re usually still happy to talk to me in the meantime.)

After thinking about all this for a while, I formed a theory about what the word “volunteer” means to patients. I don’t think they hear, “not good enough to be paid for this.” I think they hear, “doing this even though she isn’t being paid.” And I’ve come to believe that my lack of professional, accredited, and salaried status is one of the most helpful and healing ways I can act as a servant and ambassador of the God I try to follow.

Christians talk a lot about grace, which means “unearned, unmerited gift.” We believe in a gracious God who loves and heals us even if we’ve done nothing to earn that love and healing, and certainly without expectation of recompense. As a friend of mine’s fond of saying, “Nothing we do can make God love us any more, and nothing we do can make God love us any less.” Clergy and chaplains, like everybody else, need to eat, so as a practical matter, they need salaries. But I’m increasingly convinced that the professionalization of ministry -- despite its real benefits in terms of skills and standards -- contradicts that message of grace. “I’m here because I’m a highly trained professional being paid a salary to pray with you” is a very different message from “I’m here on my own time, just because I want to be, and just because I want to try to make you feel better.” I suspect the second message sounds more gracious to many patients than the first does. I’m real to patients, not because of how many hours I’ve spent in training, but simply because I’ve taken the time to show up.

And so the five thousand imps of status-consciousness have, for the most part, curled up and gone to sleep. Seeking to help heal patients, I’ve found that they’ve healed me.

But that’s no surprise. As anyone who’s completed CPE will tell you, that’s always how it works.

Aliens on Vacation

Yours truly is included in the latest Brain Parade over at Meme Therapy. I'm the third person down.

This is your chance to see what I look like without feathers.

Meanwhile, the latest edition of Grand Rounds is up over at Mexican Medical Student. I submitted my post God in the ER, and it made the cut! This makes me very happy. Thanks, Enrico!

Have I mentioned that I love blogging?

Okay, enough ego-boo. Time to go do my actual life now!

Mountains Beyond Mountains

A footnote to yesterday's homily: Planes can, obviously, be very very good things, tools for ending isolation instead of promoting it. (Duh. Thank you, Dr. Obvious. For this I need a PhD? Okay, I haven't had much coffee yet, so let me cut myself a break!) Several days ago, I read this very moving news story about Dr. David Nichols, who for twenty-seven years has been flying to Tangier Island in Virginia to provide medical care to the people who live there.

And that reminded me of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder's stirring account of the work of Dr. Paul Farmer, an infectious-disease specialist who's done simply amazing things eliminating TB and treating AIDS in impoverished Haiti (and in many other areas of the world). The title of the book comes from a Haitian proverb, "Beyond mountains there are mountains," meaning that when you've solved one problem, you need to solve the next. Farmer has flown, literally, millions of miles. Working with very little money and seemingly scant resources, he's achieved results many people would consider impossible. He's living proof that one individual really can make a huge difference in people's lives. He's also a very colorful character. It's a great book; go read it.

And while I'm on the subject, let me recommend a few other works of medical nonfiction written for general audiences:

Perri Klass' A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student, about her experience at Harvard Medical School.

Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, about his experience treating AIDS in Tennessee while adjusting to America (he was born in India).

Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a fascinating and heartbreaking story about a Hmong girl with epilepsy, whose medical treatment in the United States was complicated and undercut by cultural miscommunication.

I've taught the Klass and Verghese books; I read the Fadiman this past summer, at the urging of my friend Wendy.

Anyway, back to Farmer. Among his favorite authors is J.R.R. Tolkien, and Tolkien loved mountains (and also drew and painted them; the picture at the beginning of this post is his). One of my favorite passages in The Lord of the Rings -- you surely don't need a hypertext link for that, do you? -- is the moment at the beginning of "The Muster of Rohan" where Merry grasps the difference between hearing stories about a landscape and actually traveling through it:

Merry looked out in wonder upon this strange country, of which he had heard many tales upon their long road. It was a skyless world, in which his eye, through dim gulfs of shadowy air, saw only ever-mounting slopes, great walls of stone behind great walls, and frowning precipices wreathed with mist. He sat for a moment half-dreaming, listening to the noise of water, the whisper of dark trees, the crack of stone, and the vast waiting silence that brooded behind all sound. He loved mountains, or he had loved the thought of them marching on the edge of stories brought from far away; but now he was borne down by the insupportable weight of Middle-earth. He longed to shut out the immensity in a quiet room by a fire.

I always find that passage especially moving in counterpoint to the moment in "Leaf by Niggle" (which you'll find in The Tolkien Reader) when Niggle sets off into the landscape that lies beyond death:

He was going to learn about sheep, and the high pasturages, and look at a wider sky, and walk ever further and further towards the Mountains, always uphill. Beyond that I cannot guess what became of him. Even little Niggle in his old home could glimpse the Mountains far away, and they got into the borders of his picture; but what they are really like, and what lies beyond them, only those can say who have climbed them.

When I lived back East, mountains didn't mean much to me. Then I moved to Nevada, the most mountainous state in the country. After living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, with other mountains in almost every direction, I'm not sure I could live in a flat place again. There are places in Nevada -- especially if you're driving across Highway 50 -- that look quite a bit like Tolkien's picture. The geography of my home is a concrete reminder that beyond mountains, there are mountains, but that we can journey into and through them if we set out with the supplies, companions, and hope we need.

I have no intention of learning to pilot a plane, though. Learning to drive at the age of 36 was scary enough.

Coming Down the Mountain

Here's my homily for Sunday, August 6. The readings are Exodus 34:29-35 and Luke 9:28-36.

* * *

“Master, it is good for us to be here: let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

Peter has just had a mountaintop experience. Along with John and James, he’s seen Jesus transfigured, his face changing and his clothes becoming dazzling white. He’s seen Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus. Having been granted the privilege of climbing up the mountain with Jesus, he’s been further privileged with amazing visions. He wants to maintain his exalted position. He wants to freeze this moment in time, to preserve it.

But as soon as he proposes his mountaintop subdivision, he and his companions are overshadowed by a terrifying cloud and buffeted by a booming voice. “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” The voice is God’s, and the message is clear: Maybe Jesus chose you, but I chose him. You don’t give the orders. He does. Listen to him.

We’re never told what Jesus says, but we can guess. “Guys, I know you want to stay here. But we can’t. We have to go back down the mountain. Remember when Moses received the covenant on Mount Sinai? His face was shining, just like mine. But he couldn’t stay on the mountaintop; he couldn’t help anyone that way. His job was to climb back down the mountain to give the law to the people who were waiting for him. And now we have to do our jobs. There’s a man waiting for me down there. His son’s been having seizures. I have to go heal his child, and you have to follow me and learn as much as you can, because I won’t be here much longer. I didn’t choose you so you could isolate yourselves from the world. I chose you to heal it.”

August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, offers a grim reminder of what happens when people choose isolation instead of relationship, disconnection instead of healing. Sixty-one years ago today, three small structures with men inside them appeared in high-altitude isolation above Hiroshima, Japan. One of these shelters, a B29 bomber named the Enola Gay, dropped an atom bomb on the city. Had the bomber pilots been on the ground, they would have witnessed a scene eerily similar to the transfiguration. Here is an eyewitness account from Tsuruyo Monzen, a peasant woman whose story is collected in the book Widows of Hiroshima. She lived in a farming community about six miles from the center of the city. Her husband, like many others, had gone into the city that morning to help dismantle some buildings, because the Japanese government wanted to create open spaces to slow the spread of fires from air raids.

“It happened when I was really putting my back into thinning out the millet. There was a blinding flash and I thought the sun had fallen out of the sky. I thought to myself that something terrible was happening, so I ran across the next field and threw myself into the bamboo wood. . . . When I looked over towards Hiroshima from the bamboo wood, a great mass of smoke rose up, tottering from side to side. Something white almost seemed to come floating over in this direction. I was completely dazed, and then [my son] shouted from the embankment in a big voice: ‘Mummy, come quickly! The house is falling down!’” (20)

Like the Gospel we just heard, this story includes blinding light, a terrifying cloud, and a loud voice calling out a command. But when Tsuruyo’s husband at last returned from the devastated city, his transfiguration from radiation burns was horrific, not beautiful. He quickly died. Many of the other eighteen women whose stories are collected in this volume never saw their husbands again at all, although most ventured into Hiroshima to search for them.

The translator of the volume comments, “One never hears [these widows] saying, ‘America was wrong. I hate America.’ What one hears instead is: ‘War was wrong. I hate war.’” (xiii). That refrain echoes throughout the book. “There mustn’t be another war. There mustn’t,” says one woman (52). Several others talk about trying to teach this lesson to younger people. “Unless you’ve experienced it,” says Sada Tatsumoto, “you can’t really understand the horror of the atom bomb. I’ve told my grandchildren about it again and again, but they don’t take it seriously. I’m an old woman now and I haven’t got much longer to live, but I could die with an easy mind if only people could understand how terrible the atom bomb is” (104).

“Unless you’ve experienced it, you can’t really understand the horror.” You had to be there. You had to be on the ground. People in the Middle East are learning that lesson all over again in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Last Tuesday, the Anglican Bishop of the Diocese of Jerusalem sent out an anguished plea for humanitarian and diplomatic aid from the West. He describes two Israeli bombs dropped “on a house, crushing at least fifty-six people, including thirty-four children and twelve women.” U.N. convoys carrying urgently needed food and medicine have been turned back by the Israeli government. “The war rages on into the third week,” he says. “If fighting does not cease, the homeless count in Lebanon will soon reach one million people. Families and communities continue to be ripped apart.” Writing from Ground Zero, Bishop Riah reports that many people in Lebanon see the reaction of the West as “callous indifference,” and he urges us to come down from that real or perceived mountain. “We must not become complacent or . . . desensitized to the images of this human tragedy. Continue to appeal to your government representatives to demand an immediate cease-fire.”

Personally, I don’t respond well to letters like this. I find myself becoming paralyzed in the face of so much suffering. I’m tempted to close my eyes, stop up my ears, and remain on my mountain of distance and relative safety. What can I really do? How much difference can I make? The grandchildren of today’s survivors won’t take these stories seriously, anyway, because they weren’t there. They and their children will just wage war all over again, won’t they? How can we teach children who haven’t seen war how terrible it is?

But maybe there’s another option. Maybe we can provide and support a place where children who have seen war can meet their supposed enemies on common ground, on a level field, in safety and peace. Last Thursday, Public Radio International broadcast a story about the Creativity for Peace camp in New Mexico. Every summer for the past five years, Arab, Israeli and Palestinian girls, teenagers, have come here for three weeks to share their stories and to work together on art and leadership projects. They get to know each other. They become friends. If a girl from Palestine talks about a bad experience at a checkpoint, a girl from Israel will get up and hug her. When they go back home, the girls maintain these friendships, working for peace and reconciliation in their own families and in their communities. At this year’s camp, there was great grief and worry when the war broke out, but the girls are still determined to remain friends.

Among other art projects, the girls make masks of each other’s faces. On the PRI broadcast, a camp assistant talked about how much trust it takes for an Israeli Jewish girl to lie back in a chair while a Palestinian Muslim girl applies plaster strips to her face, covering her eyes and mouth, leaving a hole only for the nose, so she can breathe. When the masks have dried, the girls decorate them: their faces are transfigured by paint and glitter, by love and friendship. The masks shine. They are beautiful. When the camp has ended, the masks will be concrete reminders of how the face of an enemy can be transformed when it appears in a different light.

And if the war raging now keeps these friendships from developing further, if the girls never see one another again, if even the masks are destroyed, the girls will still have their memories: just as Peter and John and James had their memories of Jesus, just as the Hiroshima widows had the memories of their husbands. One of those women, Fujie Ryoso, says,

“I’m turned 70 now, but even so, if I hear a noise outside in the middle of the night, my heart starts pounding, thinking he’s come back. People say, ‘You should forget your husband now,’ but I can’t forget him. It’s unfeeling of them to ask me to forget a husband who disappeared without trace on the day the atom bomb was dropped. Even now I remember him as though it were yesterday. The older I get, the clearer become my memories” (42).

Fujie Ryoso’s husband left her a written testament, almost as if he foresaw his death. And we too, with Peter and John and James, have the gift of memory, and of a testament. “Do this in memory of me,” Jesus told us before he died. “Love one another as I have loved you.”

God loves us by coming down the mountain to heal us. God loves us by forgiving us, and by teaching us to forgive instead of retaliate. And God loves us by assuring us that we, too, can love as he does, looking through eyes that find all faces beautiful.

Plumb Tuckered Out

Yesterday morning I wrote my "God in the ER" post. Yesterday evening, I hammered out a draft of my homily for Sunday, writing four and a half double-spaced pages in about three and a half hours. I'll post that tomorrow, after final edits.

I'm tired.

I was going to write a post today about the theology of volunteering, but instead I'm going to take a break, because coherent sentences are in short supply right now.

In the meantime, here are some other blogs for you to check out. My friend Lee has written a lovely post about Comics and Ritual. My friend Inez has posted some scary pictures showing the effects of straight-line winds in Iowa (she's also posted some much more cheering pictures of craft projects). Kim of Emergiblog (with whom I've now exchanged e-mail) has posted a beautiful tribute to her grandmother, who inspired her to become a nurse. And hospital chaplain Jeanene has posted a touching poem about one of the more sobering tasks chaplains are asked to perform. I don't know Jeanene personally; her husband is Real Live Preacher, whose work I've admired for a long time now. If you haven't read his book RealLivePreacher.com, which collects a number of gorgeous essays from his blog, I highly recommend it.

Happy reading. See you tomorrow!

God in the ER

For almost two years now, since October 2004, I've spent four hours a week -- unless I'm ill or out of town -- as a volunteer chaplain in the emergency department of one of our local hospitals. This hospital isn't a trauma center, so the work isn't as dramatic as it sounds: we don't get gunshots, stabbings, or really bad car accidents. But the place is still plenty busy, with a huge range of patients and problems.

I started out being more than a little scared of the ER. Now I absolutely love it. I'm an ER junkie, although my infatuation would probably fade pretty quickly if I had to pull the twelve-hour shifts that are standard for medical staff. When I can't work my modest four hours, though, I get positively cranky. This is exactly the same way I feel when I miss my almost-daily exercise or can't get to weekly communion: irritability combined with physical restlessness. Withdrawal symptoms. (I had a great time in Berkeley last week, but I was still jonesing for the ER.)

A few months back, I realized that the ER has become sacred space for me, because it's where I most reliably encounter God. Sometimes it feels more like church than church does, even or especially when it's really busy. This seemed a little odd even to me, so I sat down to figure out why.

First of all, the ER (at its best, although no human institution functions at its best all the time) epitomizes a culture of compassion. As I've said here before, genuine vulnerability is one of our deepest taboos. But ER patients are all, to varying degrees, profoundly vulnerable, and instead of being mocked, they receive supremely skilled and conscientious care. The staff do whatever they can to relieve pain, both physical and otherwise. Nurses have sought me out to say, "Will you please go talk to this very anxious patient?" or "We have a patient who's dying and is here all alone: do you have the time to sit with her?" Anyone who's spent time in an ER knows that some patients -- especially the elderly and bereaved -- come to the hospital because they're lonely and need human care and attention, even if they aren't fully conscious of those motivations themselves. But loneliness and grief can take a heavy physical toll, and these patients receive the same care as anyone else. This kind of focused attention and respect renders frail, broken human flesh holy, and functions as powerful medicine in its own right.

And so all that suffering isn't, as you might think, depressing. Too many of us respond to suffering either with overwhelmed denial ("If I pretend it's not happening, I won't have to figure out what to do about it") or with despair ("There's nothing I can do about this, and everything's hopeless"). ER staff see suffering firsthand, but they neither deny it nor allow themselves to despair about it. They get to work doing whatever they can, however small or partial that effort may be -- and sometimes, of course, it's life-savingly large -- to solve the problems in front of them. They do what they can, where they are, with what they have. What might the world look like if all of us did that everywhere, every day?

I'm also continually astonished by how the ER brings out the best in patients. Some, of course, are in too much physical pain or too chemically impaired or under too much emotional stress even to be polite. (Hey, I'm not always nice when I'm sick, either.) But most patients manage to be deeply gracious even when they're in agony. They thank me for visiting them. They thank me for being a volunteer. They tell me how grateful they are to the doctors and nurses. When I pray with them, they weep, squeeze my hand, promise that they'll pray for me. They tell me amazing stories: stories that move me to tears and laughter, that show up in my dreams, that fill me with awe. After an hour or two in the hospital, any pains or worries of my own have vanished. I've heard life stories that made me wonder how the patient managed to get up in the morning, let alone remain cheerful in the face of a medical crisis. The word "humbling" doesn't begin to cover this.

And patients help each other. They form community. I've seen patients and their friends and relatives offer each other hugs, Tylenol, pillows, tissues, shoulders to cry on, cabfare home. Children to whom I've brought crayons and paper (we have coloring packets put together by other volunteers, and they're a great distraction for kids) often draw pictures for the doctors and nurses. More than once, when I've introduced myself as the volunteer chaplain, a patient has said, "I'm okay, thanks, but the person in the next bed really needs you."

Everyone in the ER, patients and staff, dwells in liminal space: in the space between life and death, health and illness, the known past and the unknown, frightening future. This is what Celtic spiritual traditions call "thin space." It's where the human and the divine come most closely into contact. And the range of humanity in the ER is amazing: we see the very old, the very young, the poor and the rich, every possible ethnic group, the homeless, the addicted, prisoners (always accompanied by corrections officers), people who are grieving and people who are joyous, the helpers and the helped. The Body of Christ has many members, and the ER is as concrete an example of the Body of Christ as I can imagine.

And so after a while, everyone in the ER looks like Christ to me: patients in pain, staff working to relieve pain, worried relatives and friends. The ER shines with Christ, overflows with Christ, incarnates Christ. And at the end of every shift, Christ sends me back out into the world, to feed others as I have been fed.

Thanks be to God. Alleluia, alleluia!

Masks for Peace

PRI's "The World" had a story today about a "Creativity for Peace" camp in New Mexico. Arab, Israeli and Palestinian teenagers, all girls, spend three weeks at the camp sharing their stories with each other and working together on art and leadership projects. Here's a short online story with photos of the art projects, which include mask-masking. I started crying when I looked at the pictures, because they reminded me so much of making my own mask in Berkeley class last week. (If you're new to this blog, you can read about that class here).

The audio version of the story mentions how much trust it takes for these teens to lean back and let someone from "the other side" cover their faces with plaster strips. You can hear the audio clip if you go here, scroll down to the Peace Camp story, and click on the audio icon. This page also includes a link to the Peace Camp site.

Gary heard this story on PRI and did online research while I was at the hospital tonight, so he could send me all the links. Thanks, Gar! His comment about the mask-making for peace project was, "If that's not a Rickety Contrivance of Doing Good, I don't know what is."

I do find myself wondering why the camp's only for girls. Does anyone know anything about this, or have theories?

In hospital news, my volunteer coordinator has given me permission to write about my experiences, as long as I talk only about myself and not about specific visits, and as long as I don't give any information that could be used to identify anyone else. So I'll start blogging about that tomorrow.

Today's Burning Question

Where are the chaplains in TV medical shows?

Gary and I are big "ER" and "Scrubs" fans (although we're always a little behind, because while we have a big TV, we actually only use it as a giant DVD player for Netflix rentals). A few nights ago, we watched an ER episode where Carter goes into the hospital chapel to try to convince the grieving mother of a braindead son to donate his organs, since a sixteen-year old girl with his exact rare blood type, who needs a liver transplant, has just shown up in the ER. Oh, and it's Christmas Eve. (Talk about rickety contrivances of doing good!) And Carter and Lucy spend a lot of the episode talking about whether they believe in God or not. And I think the hospital in the show is supposed to be a level one trauma center, which would be mandated to have a chaplain on call 24/7.

And there's not a chaplain in sight. That episode was the first we'd even seen of the hospital chapel, which is filled with fresh flowers and must therefore be populated and maintained by somebody other than this one mother. Later we see a priest giving the son last rites, but my impression was that he'd come in from outside, and might in fact have been the same priest who'd been brought in by another distraught mother to try to convince her thirteen-year-old daughter not to have an abortion. Maybe he also stocks the chapel with flowers in his spare time. This is season five of the show, and the chapel has just popped up out of nowhere.

The absence of chaplains is even more glaring on "Scrubs," which is set in Sacred Heart Hospital, for crying out loud. They'd have a pastoral care department. They'd have staff chaplains. They might even have volunteers. No way would Turk and Carla, after Turk stands her up at the altar because he has to perform emergency surgery, then wind up being married by the surgery patient, who just happens to turn out to be a priest, as Turk and Carla conveniently discover after they've gone to the hospital in their wedding finery to check on how the guy's doing.

Right.

M*A*S*H* had a chaplain, and in my foggy memory of the show, he even got his own story arcs and plot crises sometimes. "Firefly" had the very memorable Shepherd Book. (Simon's also one of the more believable doctors on TV; but then, Joss Whedon is the God of All Storytellers, so we shouldn't be surprised.) Where are the chaplains in the current shows?

Okay, there are plenty of other unbelievable things about TV medical shows. Gary and I gave up on "Grey's Anatomy" after the second or third episode, when a Concerned Surgeon sits by the bedside of a comatose patient for something like ten hours so he'll be there when she wakes up. Oh, sure. Surgeons do that all the time, because they have such relaxed schedules. And then there are the "outside the hospital" episodes on "ER": you know, like when Carol leaves the hospital during her shift to try to track down the estranged wife of a dying patient so she can come say goodbye to him, or the ridiculous episode where John and Lucy run all over Chicago, scaling fences and racing through traffic, to try to track down the missing father of a dying child with another rare blood type -- rare blood types are a staple of these shows -- because Only His Blood Can Save Her. (The realism of that episode was redeemed somewhat when the kid wound up in really grim shape anyway.)

"Outside the hospital" episodes remind me why I stopped reading the Cherry Ames books when I was a kid. I'd devoured all the Nancy Drew books, and I was looking forward to reading about a nurse instead of a detective, but Cherry kept turning into a detective about twenty pages into each book. It really drove me nuts. If you want to be a detective, go to the police academy! I thought I was going to be reading about a nurse! This is major dishonesty in advertising!

The best candidates for tracking down missing family members would be social workers. They rarely show up on medical shows either, although they're vitally important in hospitals.

Oh, and then there's the issue of codes. I've seen hospital workers elsewhere in the blogosphere grumbling about the TV fallacy of the code patient who arrives on an ambulance gurney with somebody perched on top of it, doing CPR. My own pet peeve is the Fallacy of the Uncrowded Code: our favorite doctor or medical student is alone in a room with a patient, with maybe just a nurse there too, and the patient codes, and the lone doctor and nurse attempt to resuscitate.

Nope. Codes get called out on the overhead, whereupon at least one doctor, a horde of nurses, a couple of respiratory therapists, and -- apparently -- just about anybody in the hospital with nothing else to do crams into the room (and yeah, there will probably be pastoral-care types hanging around too, especially if the patient's family or friends are there, although all of those folks are usually outside, because the room itself is too crowded). And that's just the people: never mind all the extra equipment.

And, mind you, I really know very little about all this. So if I'm picking up on these mistakes, how many more must there be?

Somebody needs to do a hospital show about the people who never get airtime on other hospital shows. Chaplains. Social workers. Security guards. Dieticians. Admitting clerks. Physical therapists. There are plenty of stories there, and you wouldn't even need to make them unbelievable to make them interesting.

Art for Lent

Many churches, including ours, have Lenten study groups: weekly potluck dinners during Lent that incorporate prayer or discussion. A mask-making project like the one I described in my previous post might be a really interesting Lenten activity: a chance for people to become Lazarus, to have friends wrap and untie them, and to explore what either the old or new versions of themselves look like.

Now that I think of it, I'm quite taken with the idea of an entire "Art for Lent" series. Last year I had the idea of doing a small drawing every day as a Lenten discipline, but it didn't happen because I was so busy with other things (I always joke that I need to give up Lent for Lent). Having people get together once a week to do artwork around Lenten themes could be a very refreshing pause in the middle of what's always -- for me, anyway -- an entirely too hectic season.

I love the idea of visual prayer, although I don't do as much as I'd like. It's a very effective way of cutting through the rote aspect of so much verbal prayer.

Hmmmm. Must think about this more! Does anybody know of churches that have done something like this?

Fledgling

Here's a photograph of the mask I made as my final project for the course I took in Berkeley last week. We'd been working with Thomas Merton's ideas about the true self and the false self; each of us could choose which one our mask would represent, or whether it would depict a mixture of the two.

Making the mask was a two-day process. On the first day, Thursday, each of us lay on a table while two of our classmates covered our face with a protective layer -- I chose Saran Wrap, although cold cream and vaseline were also available -- and then applied moistened plaster strips. The nostrils were left uncovered, of course, so we could breathe. After several layers of strips had been applied and then hardened, our two helpers removed the mask and put it aside to dry fully.

The class met in the evening. During the day on Friday, as I went into San Francisco for lunch with my friend Beth and then did some shopping in Berkeley, I thought about how I'd decorate my mask. I wanted something that would look strong and powerful.

Well, as you can see, that's not what happened. On Friday, after a shared potluck meal, the teacher gave us a set of readings to use as meditations before we began decorating our masks. The reading that immediately drew me was Jesus' raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. This passage is one of the lectionary readings for Lent, and it was the Gospel I heard the first Sunday I attended St. Stephen's in 1999, on a day when I was feeling pretty buried myself.

Every commentary I've ever heard on this story emphasizes two things. The first is that Jesus calls Lazarus out of the tomb, but Lazarus must choose to respond. And the second is that Lazarus can't fully return to life without the help of his community, the family and friends who've been mourning him. "The dead man came out, tied hand and feet with burial bands, and his face was wrapped in a cloth. So Jesus said to them, 'Untie him and set him free.'"

Writing this now, I realize that the first day of mask-making was a ritual reenactment of the raising of Lazarus. Each of us had our face wrapped in cloth, the same way the dead Lazarus was wrapped in funeral cloths by his grieving relatives. And then the cloths were removed when the mask was lifted: our classmates untied us and set us free. For all our cultural emphasis on the myth of rugged individualism and self-reliance, we really do need other people, especially during important life passages. We're interdependent, not independent.

None of that consciously occurred to me when I looked at my hardened mask after reading the meditations. But I had a very unexpected emotional reaction: a rush of tenderness towards the naked, fragile form of my own face. I lost all interest in a warrior mask. My other projects for the class had all been hard-edged and busy, in bright primary colors: now I wanted to create something soft, simple and muted, an image towards which I'd continue to feel wondering and protective.

The decorating materials available to us were a range of paints, several different bags of feathers -- some brightly dyed, some natural -- and glittering plastic jewels. Most of my classmates created very colorful, shiny masks in the Mardi Gras mode, which was what I'd expected to do myself. But instead, I painted the mask with a range of fleshtones (including a soft glowing gold that doesn't show up in the photograph) and then used earthtone feathers for the features. The plaster cast, with its ragged edges, looks like a broken eggshell; that fit the image of hatching baby birds I'd chosen (without really knowing why) for a collage I'd done a few days earlier.

I've dabbled with art for most of my life; this mask is unlike anything else I've ever done. I'm particularly pleased with how the brown feathers in the eyesockets look like closed, sleeping eyes. And the edges of the feathers move in the air, even in a seemingly still room, so it looks as if the sleeping face is breathing. One of our class readings had suggested approaching works of art as separate, sentient entities: looking at the mask after I'd finished it, I had the eerie sensation of seeing a creature with its own life, an existence apart from me. And I wanted to keep it safe. I cradled the mask in my arms for most of the rest of the class, and settled it among cushioning towels on the front seat of my car for the long drive home the next day.

I've believed for a long time that true vulnerability is taboo in this culture. The homily I posted yesterday reflects that idea. This taboo is precisely why we're fascinated with -- and simultaneously contemptuous of -- inner children and scandalous talk-show confessions: the forbidden is always both fetishized and mocked. We're taught that strong, competent adults keep their wounds and weaknesses hidden, which is probably why so many churches have replaced the broken Christ on the cross with a triumphalist, martial Christ: Jesus as X-man superhero, kicking ass. But one definition of "tabu" is "forbidden for profane use because of sacred status." Maybe we fear vulnerability precisely because it brings us closer to God: to a force infinitely bigger than we are, a power we cannot control.

Triumphalist, martial superheros terrify some people and rescue others, but they don't heal anybody. The best healers -- and Jesus was the quintessential healer -- confess to their own woundedness. They empathize with those who are vulnerable, instead of making them feel powerless, less-than, incompetent. (See Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer for the classic exposition of this idea.)

Even though I did a long stint of inner-child work in the 1980s, when it was all the rage, I've struggled with as much discomfort and shame over my vulnerabilities as anyone else. That's one reason I was surprised when I felt such tenderness towards the unadorned mask. My current therapist has been urging me to do more inner-child work, and my initial reaction was exasperated dismissal. Been there, done that. My inner child's grown up and gotten her driver's license, okay? Can we move on, please?

Yesterday I showed up in my therapist's office with a shopping bag. "You brought me goodies?" she asked, trying to peer inside.

"I brought you my inner child," I said with a sigh, and lifted the mask out of the bag.

She was delighted. She heaped the mask with praise. (Although, as Gary and I joked later, she is a therapist. What's she going to say? "Ewwww, that's hideous, why in the world did you spend time making that"?)

Gary wants to hang the mask in our front hallway, where it will blend pleasingly with some other artwork we have. I'm nervous about people knocking into her and crushing her, about the cats leaping up to attack the feathers -- she's currently in my study, on top of a bookcase they haven't been able to scale yet -- about visitors saying, "Ewwww, that's hideous, why in the world did you spend time making that"? (Putting her picture on the blog feels safer somehow, perhaps because any derision of the image can't harm the actual physical object.) But I suppose she'll have to emerge from the nest eventually.

Stigmata

Many of you have probably seen this story about the recent epidemic of fatal overdoses from heroin laced with fentanyl. Over 400 people have died nationwide. Some needle-exchange programs are giving addicts prescriptions for Narcan, an antidote to opiate poisoning, to try to prevent more deaths, because fentanyl kills people so quickly that paramedics often don't even have time to get them to the hospital.

Now, mind you, anybody using a needle-exchange program is already a confirmed addict. But the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy opposes distribution of Narcan, according to spokeswoman Jennifer DeVallance, because “We don’t want to send the message out that there is a safe way to use heroin."

I first read about this story on AOL News. There was an attached poll about whether people favored giving out Narcan scripts or not, and 53% of the respondents said, no, addicts shouldn't be given the overdose antidote. (I thought this week's edition of Grand Rounds might mention the controversy, but it doesn't.)

It's very difficult for me to read the AOL Poll response as anything but, "They're addicts, so who cares if they die?"

Well, some of us care, because some of us have loved addicts, or been them. Even if we don't have first-hand experience with the issue, some of us can at least imagine loving addicts and not wanting them to die. We can imagine wanting them to get better instead.

I'm not, thank God, a heroin addict, nor is anyone in my immediate family. I worked with a heroin addict once, and while she made me nervous because she was so generally twitchy and erratic, I certainly wouldn't want her to die of an overdose. I still think about and pray for her, hoping she somehow stayed alive. I know she used clean needles, because I once found a shrink-wrapped syringe in an umbrella she lent me (long story!), so I hope she's okay.

But I've been around other kinds of addiction -- a therapist friend of mine says that everybody's addicted to something -- and I take this issue very personally. Here's a homily I wrote that explains why. I've given this twice now, once in my parish and once as a guest preacher; Doubting Thomas comes around every year, right after Easter. The Gospel is John 20:19-31.

I have my mother's permission to post this homily.

* * *

The phrase “Doubting Thomas” is often used to dismiss skeptics, to imply that people who need concrete evidence of seemingly impossible events are somehow less faithful than those who trust blindly, without having seen. That’s the most common popular interpretation of the Thomas story, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. For one thing, the Gospel lesson tells us that the other disciples rejoiced only after Jesus showed them his hands and his side. They required the same proof Thomas did, and Jesus knew it. He showed them the evidence even before they’d asked for it.

We can’t blame any of Jesus’ friends for demanding evidence: resurrection is both the most essential component of the Christian faith and the hardest to believe. Jesus’ tag line, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,” feels to me like something tacked on by Gospel writers who knew that Christ was no longer present in the body to show skeptics his wounds. Two thousand years after the disciples gathered in that locked room, millenia after the Ascension, where can we look for concrete evidence of resurrection?

There are some clues in the Gospel story. The first is that the disciples had locked the doors because they were afraid of the people outside. They certainly didn’t expect Jesus to come walking in. They’d given him up for dead. This story happens in a place of fear, a place without much hope.

And the second clue is that Jesus doesn’t return to his friends as the triumphant risen Christ, wearing a crown. Instead, he shows them his wounds, the marks left by the most humiliating death the Romans could devise. The formal name for Jesus’ wounds is “stigmata.” This is where we get the word “stigma,” which means shame. Jesus doesn’t flaunt his power and glory to prove his identity. He reveals his vulnerability. He shows his friends his scars.

If we’re looking for resurrection, then, we might start with a series of questions. When have I been afraid, or without hope? When have I locked my doors to new people or new ideas? When has someone considered shameful, someone stigmatized by society, come through those doors and said, “Look, here are my wounds. The world gave me up for dead, but here I am.”

My own family’s resurrection story began on a winter day in 1964, when I was three years old. My sister, who was twelve, remembers watching my mother -- who has given me permission to tell this story -- being wheeled out of the house on a gurney. My mother had been a chronic drinker for twenty years. My father had put her in fancy hospitals, and she’d tried AA a few times, but it hadn’t worked. Nothing had worked. And so my father decided to send her to the state hospital, which wasn’t fancy at all. He didn’t think she’d ever get better, and neither did anyone else in the family. Everyone thought she was dying. My sister, watching the gurney roll out of the house to the waiting ambulance, told herself that our mother was already dead.

At the state hospital, the doctors told my father that my mother’s case was hopeless. One of the doctors recommended a lobotomy. My father couldn’t bring himself to consider that idea, but he was prepared to have my mother locked inside that building for the rest of her life.

Inside the hospital, my mother got hungry one night. There was an AA meeting inside the hospital, brought there by recovering alcoholics who lived in the community. My mother knew there would be cookies at the meeting, so she decided to go.

This time, it took. No one believed it; I don’t know if she believed it herself. But she kept going to meetings, and one evening a few weeks later, a visiting AA member -- one of the people who had walked through the locked doors of the hospital -- sat down and talked to her. He learned that she was afraid of being committed for life, and that she was afraid of never seeing her children again, and that no one in her family believed that she would ever get better.

This visitor walked back out through the locked doors of the hospital. He went home, sat down at a typewriter, and wrote a letter to my father. He sent my mother a copy of the letter, and I own a copy of it now. The visitor identified himself both as a prominent businessman and as a recovering alcoholic. He told my father that he had once spent time in a hospital like the one where my mother was. He told my father that sometimes it takes many attempts to get sober. He told my father, in effect, “Here are my wounds. The world gave me up for dead, but here I am.” And he asked my father to give my mother yet another chance.

My father agreed. This time, it worked. Five months later, the hospital visitor wrote a second letter. This one, addressed to my mother, compliments her on her continued sobriety, on her new job and her new car, and on her joy at spending time with her children. Last winter, my sister and I helped her celebrate forty-one years of sobriety.

This is the resurrection story closest to me, but it isn’t the only one I know. I’m an English professor at UNR. Several years ago, one of my students, a very talented writer, told our workshop class that she had once been a homeless drug addict, living in a van with her boyfriend. They had no hope. They wanted to die. They had made a suicide pact: they planned to OD together. But as they were driving to buy enough drugs to do this, they were pulled over by the police, who made them open the locked doors of the van, and then arrested them and sent them to prison. My student used her one phone call to contact someone she knew who ran a rehab program. She has now been drug-free, working to support herself and her son, for eight years.

We stigmatize addicts, and the homeless, and people in jail. It took real courage for my student to tell her classmates that story, because she couldn’t tell the story of her resurrection without showing them her stigmata, the marks of her shame. We stigmatize alcoholics. It took real courage -- especially in 1964, when alcoholism was considered even more shameful than it is now -- for the hospital visitor to show my father his wounds. He had to tell his story to show that my mother’s story could still turn out differently, that resurrection was possible.

Resurrection is both the most essential component of the Christian faith and the hardest to believe. But I wonder if so many of us find it so hard to believe because so much of it happens in places we don’t want to look, to people we’d rather avoid: to alcoholics and addicts and convicts, the homeless and the mentally ill, the despised and rejected. To the locked out and the locked up. And I wonder how many resurrection stories we never hear, simply because the people who have come back to life aren’t willing to reveal their wounds -- to show us their shame -- for fear that our doors, and our hearts, will remain locked against them.

Gerard Hughes, in his book God of Surprises, reminds us that the resurrection was not a one-time event. “The risen Christ is continuously coming through the closed doors of our minds and imagination . . . He enters our consciousness, closed through fear of ourselves and our fear of other people, and says, ‘Peace be to you.’ The power of his resurrection gives us . . . the ability and strength to be open and vulnerable when before we could think of nothing but our own protection and security” (141). Let us pray, then, to find the strength and ability to be open and vulnerable: to tell our own resurrection stories, and to listen to the stories of others.

Peace be to all who are in this place, in the name of the risen Christ. Amen.