Balthazar's in the Hospital

He did not like being in the carrying case with the frozen peas, and I was afraid that his agitation would drive his fever up further, so I called Animal Emergency again and they said, "Bring him in."

We just got back from admitting him to the hospital, where they'll put him on IV fluids and monitor his temperature. The vet said, "We see these little guys all the time, and most of them do just fine." She said his fever actually wasn't high enough to cause brain damage (although that would be a concern if it went up any more). She also said that she'll be there all night, and I can call her for updates any time I get worried. Nice lady.

Gary came with me this time. We both liked the vet. We're both glad that Bali's being taken care of by professionals, so we can stop worrying about trying to monitor his condition ourselves. He'll probably be in the hospital for 24 to 36 hours.

I feel awful about the fact that he's going through all this, though. I hope it won't make him hate humans for life!

Update, Sunday 1/7, 5:30 a.m.:

I just called the hospital. He still has a fever: 104.5. So that proves that he really does need to be there, and that the high readings weren't just some fluke of our thermometer, as I'd been hoping/fearing. When I called, they were just about to try to get him to eat some breakfast.

Update, Sunday 1/7, noon:

He ate breakfast, which is a good sign, but his temp's now 105.3. It looks like he'll be spending at least one more night in the hospital. Poor kitty!

Balthazar Goes to the ED

Balthazar slept virtually all day today, and only ate a little bit in the morning. About 6:00 PM, he seemed very listless: I couldn't get him to play, and he'd walk a few steps and then lie down again.

Of course it was after hours. Of course our regular vet wasn't available. Of course the only option was Animal Emergency, the place we hate because it's a) at the other end of town, b) really expensive, and c) where our last two cats had to be euthanized. Very bad memories.

I called them anyway, to see what they advised. The tech I spoke to said, "You could try to wait until Monday, but if I were you, I'd bring him in." I consulted Gary, who thought the cat was probably just tired and that we should leave him alone. I called my mother, who said, "Have you taken his temperature?"

I'd never taken a cat's temperature before, but I figured out how to do it -- and it was almost 105. (Normal for cats is 100-102.) So I got in the car to drive Bali to the clinic, while Gary stayed home to cook dinner.

The trip down was a nightmare, because the cat was alarmingly quiet -- not yowling, the way most cats do in cars and the way he did coming home from the shelter -- and because I was so freaked out that I got lost. But I finally got there, and the people were really nice, and we got some good news:

1. Bali doesn't have FIV or FeLV; they tested him there, although he still needs to be kept separated from the other cats, because

2. He has an upper respiratory infection, the cat equivalent of a bad cold: this isn't good news, but it's better than some of the alternatives.

So he's back home now on antibiotics. They got him to eat some of their food, a few cans of which came home with us, and I have instructions to steam him in the bathroom every day for ten minutes to decongest his little nose, because stuffed-up kitties who can't smell their food don't want to eat. I also have to take his temp again in ten minutes; they said he'll still have a fever -- it was down to 103.75 in the clinic -- but that if it spikes back up to 104 or 105, I should call them. And I'm supposed to listen to his breathing to make sure he doesn't start wheezing.

Poor little kitty! He's absolutely exhausted. So am I. And I'm preaching tomorrow, which means getting up at 6:00 to do two services . . . but at least I'm not going to the hospital tomorrow night.

Being in an animal ED was a little eerie, I must say; I found myself doing chaplain-ish things (offering tissues to a woman crying about her dog, listening to other people's pet stories), but of course this time, I was the freaked-out family member, listening to one of the techs tell everyone in the waiting room, "We just had two traumas come in, so everyone's going to have to wait a little longer: I'm sorry." Luckily, Bali was already being discharged at that point.

Triage is triage, no matter what kind of organism is being assessed.

And I found myself worrying about whether I'd been right to bring Bali in: was this just a minor complaint? I must have asked at least three times, "Did I do the right thing coming here?" The vet and the tech told me that because of the fever, I did. The tech said, "He would have been a glazed donut by tomorrow morning," and before I left she told me, "We're here all weekend, for moral support."

I'm just so glad that we both got to come home. (They originally told me they'd keep him in the hospital if they couldn't get him to eat.) Now I finally have a halfway decent memory associated with that place, although I hope I'll never have to see it again! Everyone admired Balthazar's gorgeousness, of course. The vet said that her official diagnosis was that he's "too cute."

Oh: and on their form, they say he's female! Is he Caprica after all? (I think they just copied the info from the Humane Society folder, which I'd brought with me.)

Driving home, I saw a Code 3 ambulance -- lights and sirens and horns -- blasting its way through an intersection. Someone is having a very bad ED night. On my way down to the clinic, driving badly because I was so stressed, straining my ears to hear if Bali was making any noise, I found myself wishing fervently for a kitty ambulance.

But I'm okay, and in all likelihood, he will be too. Thanks be to God!

Later:

Oh, frack, his temp's 105 again. I called Animal Emergency and they said, "A fever that high could cause brain damage. Wet down his paws and stomach, and put him in a carrier with a bag of frozen peas. Retake the temp in half an hour. If it hasn't gone down, you have to bring him back in."

Pray for us, please.

Do normal people narrate pet crises on blogs? It makes me feel like I'm talking to all of you, even though I'm really not.

Bookcase Balthazar!

Little kitty gave me a scare today because, after running around like a maniac all yesterday, he seemed quite lethargic today, and also wasn't interested in the food we gave him. So this evening, after gnawing my fingernails and reading about various horrible ailments that can afflict kittens -- including a feline version of SIDS -- I raced to the store and bought a bunch of different kinds of food.

IAMS kitten chow seems to have done the trick. He chowed down just fine on that, thank goodness.

The next time I came into the room, I couldn't find him. He wasn't on the white fluffy pillow on my rocking chair where he usually sleeps. He wasn't on the couch. He wasn't under the couch. I was starting to panic when I saw him perched among the rocks, statues and tchotchkes on top of my bookcase. Little kitty's a climber!

So here's a photo of Balthazar with Fledgling and Gabriel. (Mind you, I keep Fledgling on top of the bookcase to try to protect her feathers from cats. Silly me!)

In other news, I wrote a draft of my homily for Sunday. It's definitely not one of my better efforts, but it will do. This is one of those times when I'm really grateful that the center of Episcopal Sunday worship is the Eucharist -- and, in this case, baptism -- and not the homily!

I'll stop posting cute cat pictures soon. Really I will. Honest.


Any minute now. I promise.

What -- you don't believe me?

Baby Balthazar!

Here is Sir Balthazar proudly celebrating a heroic conquest!



And here he is resting on his laurels! You'll notice that his fur's a little dirty; we can't give him a bath yet because his sutures are held together with glue, which will dissolve in water. So we have to wait 5-7 days. But isn't he adorable? Doesn't he look like a little bear?

Hey, Cute Overload has nothing on us!

Wiped

Last night's hospital shift was exhausting (although, as often happens, I'm only feeling the full effects this morning). There was a much higher percentage than usual of people who desperately needed to talk, so it's good I was there, but the stories were sad and complicated and full of unresolved grief: a parent who, many years ago, lost a child on Christmas; a grown child who, several years ago, lost a parent who's still deeply mourned; an older man who's lost five siblings in the last two years. These were cases where all I could do was say, "I'm so sorry" and be willing to listen, but although I was certainly happy to listen, it was harder than usual to walk with these patients without being dragged into their emotional states myself.

At the end of each shift, I do a circuit of the waiting room. I wait until then because otherwise, I'll just see those patients back in the ER. Usually, hardly anyone in the waiting room wants to talk to me. Last night, two people wanted to tell me complicated life stories, another patient needed to share a long medical saga, and a family asked me to pray with them.

It was a draining shift. At the end of it, I was really tired.

And in the middle of it, another insane ice storm had descended on Reno. Nothing was moving on the freeways, and major local roads were closed. Nurses had to extend their own shifts because their replacements couldn't get in to work. Ambulance medics were saying, "It's a nightmare out there." I thought about leaving after two hours instead of four -- urged on by an EMT who said, "You're a volunteer, and we don't need to see you as a patient in here because you've gotten into an accident!" -- but decided to stay the entire time after a security guard pointed out that the snow had stopped: things wouldn't be any worse in another two hours, and might be better if sand trucks were able to get out.

But when I left at my usual time, that same security guard drove me back to my parking garage over level streets slick with ice, and told me, "Don't even try to drive uphill in this with a front-wheel-drive car. Call a friend who has AWD."

My trusty SUV friend wasn't home; I called a cab instead -- I had chains with me, but was more comfortable just leaving the car there and paying for a ride home -- and made it back fine, but much later than usual. It was nice to have bouncy little Balthazar to come home to!

Today I'm wiped, watching in bemusement as Balthazar energetically slaughters a toy mouse at my feet. Can someone give me a transfusion of kitten energy, please?

Name that Kitty!

Baby Kitty is home, but when we went to the shelter, the clerk coughed and looked embarrassed and said, "Um . . . this kitty isn't a girl."

She seemed to think we might not want a baby boy kitty, which is ridiculous. We obviously aren't planning on breeding him, and who in the world could fall in love with an adorable kitten and then refuse to take it home over something as arbitrary as gender?

But now we need a new name. We like three-syllable names with literary connotations. Current possibilities:

Adama (a good BSG name, but may sound female to people who don't know the show . . . and yes, I know, that's arbitrary too)

Agathon (a neat BSG name)

Apollo (another BSG name, but a bit too ordinary)

Ichabod (a great literary name, and we can call him Icky for short)

Godzilla (he just did that rearing-up-at-himself thing in the mirror, and they look like monsters preparing to decimate Tokyo when they do that)

Balthazar (we're strongly leaning towards this, especially since it's almost Epiphany and Balthazar is the traditional name for one of the three wise men . . . and we now have three cats)

Votes or ideas?

In the meantime, he's running like a maniac around my study, already pouncing on things, and he gobbled down the tiny bit of post-surgery food he's allowed to have in about two seconds. And he's already very affectionate with people. He's going to be a splendid cat!

Later:

Never mind. We've settled on Balthazar, although now we need a good nickname. My mother thinks that "Balthie" sounds vulgar.

Little kitty has further proven his brilliance by chasing his tail, leaping onto Gary's sweater to attack the buttons . . . and escaping from the study twice, although he's only been home an hour. His vet appointment isn't until Tuesday morning. Oh dear. But if he does get out, at least our other two cats are immunized against FIV and FLV. We still don't want them to get upper respiratory gunk, though, and he has sneezed a few times.

Betwixt and Between

I've talked a little here about the "Women and Literature" course I'll be teaching this spring, described in this post. I was working on the syllabus the other day and came across an excellent Wikipedia article on liminality, which will be the theme of the course. Very briefly, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, liminality is a state of transition, "characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation."

As the Wikipedia article explains, there are many forms and examples of liminality, which can take the physical form of a threshold -- a door, a window, a border -- or of a time of day (dawn, dusk). The term's very fashionable in all kinds of academic fields these days, from literary criticism to religious studies.

Reading the Wikipedia article reminded me how attracted I've always been to liminal states and places. One of the things that appeals to me most about the diaconate is how deacons live in liminal space, moving back and forth between the church and the world, standing on the borders between the two; and, of course, my on hold status is a liminal state in itself. At the moment, I'm neither withdrawn from ordination nor moving towards it: I'm living in a grey area. It's ironic that a Myer-Briggs J would be so drawn to the liminal, but maybe the two are connected: maybe liminal states serve as an antidote to my J-ness, or something. In any case, there's great power and possibility in liminal states. I've always found them magical, and a lot of fantasy deals with liminality very directly.

That's all old news. The new thing I realized the other day is that I love the ER because it, too, is liminal space. The Wikipedia article outlines the three stages of liminality, as defined in the work of anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner:

With examples from a college graduation ceremony.

First or preliminary stage
This change is accomplished by separating the participants from their usual social setting. The students are first separated from the rest of their community, both by gathering together and by wearing distinctive clothing.

The liminal stage
A period during which one is "betwixt and between", "neither here nor there". When the ceremony is in progress, the participants are no longer students but neither are they yet graduates. This is the distinctive character of liminality.

The final or postliminal stage
A period during which one's new social status is confirmed, and reincorporation. Upon receiving his or her diploma, the student officially becomes a college graduate. The dean and professors shake the student's hand in congratulation, giving public recognition to the student's new status as a person with a college degree.

It's pretty easy to see how these stages apply to the ER. Patients are in a distinct, separate space, usually wearing hospital gowns rather than street clothing. While they're in the ER, most of them are very much in liminal space: the gray area between sickness and health, between life and death, between being discharged (and resuming civilian status) and being admitted (and assuming full patient status). In this sense, the ER is a psychological no-man's-land, and one of the jobs of the staff -- and certainly one of the primary roles of chaplains -- is to help patients navigate that territory, to serve as guides and companions.

The liminal nature of the ER may also be why it's always felt so holy to me. Like other liminal places, it's "thin space," where the barrier between the human and the divine is most permeable. People who haven't spent a lot of time in ERs may find it very strange to think of them as spiritual places. Emergency departments are bustling, chaotic, and noisy, and the patients there are often in pain and usually unhappy. But I suspect that at least some people who do spend a lot of time in ERs will understand what I mean. In the middle of the whirlwind, after all, is where we often hear the still small voice.

Unavoidable Delays

My pharmacy called this morning to say that the wrong dosage of Effexor arrived today, so they have to re-order, and I'll have it tomorrow.

I called the Nevada Humane Society's spay/neuter clinic to see if Caprica was scheduled for today: they said they have a backlog, so her surgery will probably happen tomorrow, too.

Meanwhile, our local paper carried this AP story about the hidden cost of cancer: the sheer amount of time patients spend in waiting rooms or in the hospital.

The hours spent sitting in doctors' waiting rooms, in line for the CT scan, watching chemotherapy drip into veins: Battling cancer steals a lot of time -- at least $2.3 billion worth for patients in the first year of treatment alone. [. . . ] Although most of these patients were retired, the researchers assigned a monetary value to their time -- $15.23 an hour, the median U.S. wage rate in 2002. Then they estimated the national toll by including the number of patients diagnosed with cancer in 2005.

I have three comments on this.

First, does it strike anybody else as one of those "duh!" pieces of research? Hey, guys, you had to do a study to figure out that cancer patients spend a lot of time in treatment or waiting for treatment? Most of the rest of us could already have told you that.

Second, I strongly suspect that most people with chronic health conditions also spend their fair share of time in waiting rooms: cancer's not the only condition that takes this kind of toll. I'm talking here just about regular waiting in doctors' offices, not emergency visits. I spend a lot of time explaining the triage system to impatient ED patients -- "If you have to wait to be seen, that means you aren't the sickest person here, and that's a good thing, because you never want to be the center of attention in an emergency room" -- and I don't think it's fair to compare those waiting times to the time people spend waiting for scheduled appointments. Office physicians are rarely forced to put everything else on hold because someone's heart has stopped.

And third: Is it just me, or does measuring the burden of illness by lost work time -- assigned an arbitrary monetary value -- seem a little, well, perverse? To me, this is a symptom of American workaholism, where everything's measured in terms of productivity, real or potential. Somehow I doubt that many cancer patients waiting to see their oncologists after a diagnosis are thinking, "If I'd spent the last hour at work, I'd be $15.23 richer now!" That's especially true of retired patients, who formed the majority of this study group. I know that research is all about numbers and data, but please: can we acknowledge that it's impossible to attach a pricetag to someone's life?

Baby Kitty!

We adopted a kitten today! This is Caprica. She's about seven weeks old and has lovely long fur. We couldn't bring her home today, because the Nevada Humane Society won't let animals out of the building until they're neutered. So tomorrow she'll be spayed and microchipped, poor baby, and the clinic will call us when she's ready to come home. Even then, though, they won't have done a complete health check on her (evidently it's not cost-effective for them), so the first thing we'll do is take her to our vet to be tested for FIV and FLV.

I'd seen her on their website yesterday; someone brought her to the shelter on New Year's Eve after finding her, abandoned. Poor little kitty! Gary and I saw her the minute we walked into the building -- she was in a big display cage with two other young cats -- and we spent some time with her in an adoption room, although of course it only took us about twenty seconds to fall irrevocably in love with her. She's very alert and very calm. She snuggled against my chest for a while, watching Gary; then she climbed on Gary; then she wanted to get down and explore the smells in the rest of the room. Gary said, "She's obviously a very intelligent cat," which is on a par with doting parents predicting that their newborns are headed for Harvard, but that's okay. She's our newborn.

She looks a little grotty at the moment -- she's definitely going to need a bath -- but she's going to be gorgeous when she's older, with that long black fur. We're hoping to start grooming her early so she'll get used to it. Now we just have to hope that the surgery goes smoothly and that all the tests for nasty illnesses are negative. (We'll of course keep her away from the other cats until we know she's healthy.) Her shelter name is Trinity, which I take as a good omen even though we're planning to call her Caprica.

After we left the Humane Society, we went to the fancy-fur place to pick up Gary's relined jacket (finally!). Going from an animal shelter to a store with racks and racks of exotic fur coats was a bit too much cognitive dissonance for me, I have to say.

In other medical news, Primary Doc has put me on the smallest possible dose of Effexor, in addition to the nortriptylene. She hopes I'll only have to be on it for a few months, and she did say I should go ahead and consult an actual psychiatrist too. I'll start that tomorrow: the pharmacy said I could have the name brand today, for $60, or a generic tomorrow, for much less. One more day won't kill me! And this stuff's supposed to start working pretty quickly.

I told PD that we were hoping to adopt a kitten today, and she beamed and said, "Oh, that's every bit as effective as medication!" She has two dogs and a cat, so she completely understands the animal thing. My therapist, with two new kittens of her own, does too.

I'll of course post better pictures of Caprica when we've gotten her home and had a chance to document her full cuteness.

Grand Rounds, and an Unpleasant Resolution

This week's Grand Rounds is up, with a theme of exploding things, complete with musical accompaniment. I'm honored to be included, although I do hope my post doesn't make anyone's head explode.

My New Year's resolution, unfortunately, is to bite the bullet and make an appointment to see an actual psychiatrist for meds evaluation, as per my therapist's nagging. The arrival of 2007 didn't have the happy effect on my mood that the new year usually does, and I'm getting tired of feeling like I've been hit by a truck (although at the moment, that may have something to do with the fact that the seven-concerts-in-four-days chamber-music festival badly messed with my exercise schedule; I finally got a walk in yesterday, and feel somewhat better today). Therapist informs me that it takes a month to get in to see Shrink-of-Choice, so I have an out: if I make the appointment and then start feeling much better, I can cancel.

Have I mentioned that chronic medical conditions are really annoying? Yes, I know: this isn't exactly news.

The current bad mood is strongly tied to the fact that I've been very inefficient about getting necessary work done (blogging doesn't count!). As Gary points out, that's partly because of the Shelter copyedits, which I didn't expect to show up when they did, but which are finally done. So it's not like I haven't done anything. It's just that, after going through 574 pages of small type with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, I'm still looking at a mountain of other work.

In the meantime, I have an 8:00 a.m. appointment this morning with Primary Doc. Oh, and we may finally get a new kitty today (yet another distraction I want, but don't need). If so, I'll definitely be posting pictures.

Gotta go shower. Have a good day, everyone.

The ED Sonnets: Room 4

Happy New Year! I wrote most of the first of these sonnets during the intermission of the chamber-music concert we went to last night; then I finished it, and wrote the other two, between ten and twelve after we got home. These seem to come quickly or not at all.

Gary didn't have any edits on this set, although as I was about to post them I discovered (to our mutual horror) that there was an eight-syllable line neither of us had caught. It's fixed now.

*

Bed 4.1

I hear the rhythmic hissing of the vent
before I see the bed. “She shouldn’t have
been intubated. Nothing curative
will come of this,” the nurse says. “If she’d meant
to be on life support, there wouldn’t be
a DNR! The nursing home misplaced
the file, and then they panicked when they faced
the code, called 911. Her family
has tough decisions now. I hate this stuff!”
I look down at the patient, pale and still,
so like a corpse already. Were that hiss
of air God’s voice, would I still hear, “Enough?"
The son arrives -- Lord, help us do your will --
and chokes, “She wouldn’t want to be like this.”

*

Bed 4.2

“My husband left me when I had the stroke
last year. He couldn’t stand to see me sick.
He’s not a bad man, really, but it broke
my heart to see him go. We’d been through thick
and thin for fourteen years. Oh, God, I miss
him more each morning! Will you help me pray?
Our baby’s only two, and I’m on dis-
ability. I don’t know how I’ll pay
the bills. My daughter’s such an angel: she’s
what keeps me going. Please, let’s pray.” We do.
We pray for strength and comfort, health and peace,
and afterwards the patient smiles, says, “You
were sent by God, a sign. I prayed for one,
and then you came, to prove I’m not alone.”

*

Bed 4.3

And here we have a Brady Bunch, or three:
the patient, wife and son, son’s wife, their tot,
an older child. They all sit quietly,
which must be why the loyal tribe has not
been asked to leave. They don’t want prayer, but ask
if dad can have a blanket, if the son
can have some water. Glad for simple tasks,
I cheerfully take all requests, and run
all errands: crayons for the little boy,
a plush toy for the baby (“you can take
that home”). Such simple service! I enjoy
the specificity, how crayons make
grace visible. I steel myself for codes,
but always welcome flight-attendant mode.

Marshwiggle of the Year

Yesterday I talked to my mother on the phone, and she said -- I think as a result of reading the chapel sonnet -- "Your blog's getting awfully religious."

Mind you, I think most readers would concede that it's been fairly religious all along. (Hi, Mom! Check out the blog's subtitle! Check out the "about me" description!) But this brought us back to a recurring theme, namely the "How in the world did you ever start believing that stuff?" subject.

I didn't go to church as a child. My father loathes religion; my mother simply finds it incomprehensible. I hadn't started going to church yet when I met Gary, and one of the measures of his love for me, or else simply of his general tolerance, is that he puts up with my church activities (and edits my homilies), even though he wouldn't be caught dead at any worship service himself. My sister's Quaker, and thus somewhat more sympathetic, although Episcopal liturgy makes her want to run screaming out of the room. (That's okay, since silent Quaker worship does the same to me.) Of my pre-church friends, a few -- generally either Jewish or Buddhist -- have well-developed faiths of their own (hi, Claire!), but most of the others are dyed-in-the-wool secular humanists. When I started going to church, one of my closest friends from college called in alarm from Europe to make sure I wasn't having a midlife crisis. And although several people in the English Department at UNR are religious themselves, work does tend to be a very secular environment. I've told the story here before of a grad student who summed up her own perception of the academy's take on religion with the memorable phrase, "Smart people don't go to church."

That's nonsense, of course. Plenty of profoundly smart people go to church. But that general attitude means that many of my nearest and dearest find my faith both bewildering and embarrassing: if smart people do go to church, they shouldn't talk about it, any more than they'd tell people about their preferred brand of underwear. (Hanes men's cotton briefs, because they're more comfortable and better made than women's. Gary, bless him, gave me a bunch of these for Christmas so I'd stop stealing his. Yes, I'm now at the pathetic age where I like getting underwear for Christmas, and you now have official proof that I have no shame.)

My nearest and dearest do approve of my various ministries. Since they're all compassionate people, they find my hospital and nursing-home work perfectly acceptable, even admirable. Visiting sick or lonely people is a Good Thing, although talking about the ways in which those public activities are informed by private faith lands us squarely back in "How can you believe that nonsense?" territory.

My mother and I got into this conversation yesterday because I was telling her about one of my recent hospital shifts, where I wound up seeing two people I know from other contexts: one from UNR, one from the health club. Both of these individuals were there with sick parents, and were understandably worried and distracted, but both also seemed really uncomfortable with my being there, even though one had already known I did the work. These were very awkward "when worlds collide" moments. My impression -- which may very well have been completely wrong -- is that they were embarrassed by the idea of any sensible person praying out loud with patients in an emergency room, that they didn't quite get how a smart person could believe that nonsense.

"I'm with them," my mother said when I told her this story. "I mean, come on! The immaculate conception? The trinity? The resurrection? How can you believe all that stuff?"

"I don't believe all of it," I told her patiently. We've had this conversation before. "And what I do believe, I don't believe 100% all the time. But I've figured out that I don't have to believe every article of the Nicene Creed to be a Christian. What I do believe works for me."

"But how did you start believing it? It doesn't make any sense. You never went to church when you were a kid!"

I've had this conversation with both of my parents more times than I can count. I don't have a simple, coherent answer. (As one of our deacons is fond of saying about the Trinity, "It is a mystery, and should remain so.") My faith journey has been extremely long and meandering. But one of the factors, surely, is that I adored and devoured fantasy when I was a kid, and was especially moved by work by fantasists I now know to be Christian: Tolkien, Lewis, L'Engle. As a child, I was blissfully unaware of the sometimes heavy-handed Christian allegory in the Narnia books, which I now enjoy less than I do The Lord of the Rings. All I knew was that I loved Narnia and wanted to live there.

And for all his heavy-handedness, Lewis has given me what's still the best answer to the "How can you believe that nonsense?" question. This is the passage I turn to on the days when even I find my faith ridiculous, when I find myself agreeing with the friends and relatives who think I've bought into a bunch of hogwash. I have this passage typed out on a piece of paper that's taped to the filing cabinet in my study; I read it to my mother over the phone yesterday. She liked it.

It's from The Silver Chair. Puddleglum, the gloomy Marshwiggle, and the children have been captured by an evil witch who's holding them captive underground. She's hypnotized them into believing that their own belief in the world they came from is nonsense. She tells them that there is no sun, that they've simply extrapolated the idea of a sun from seeing lamps. She tells them that there is no Aslan, whom they've simply invented from seeing housecats. She tells them there is no Narnia.

Puddleglum, in a heroic act of resistance, shoves his foot into the fire so the pain will clear his head of her enchantments. Then he makes this speech:

"One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always likes to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things -- trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

Amen.

The ED Sonnets: Hall Beds 1 and 3

Here are the next two sonnets. For those of you who don't hang out in hospitals, or who don't regularly find yourself glued to hospital TV shows, "ETOH on board" is paramedic-speak for "this patient's drunk." (ETOH is ethyl alcohol.)

The contrast between these may be a little too obvious and preachy; I had fun writing both of them, but they may need to be split up at some point.

Oh! But first! Today's mail brought Rachel Barenblat's chapbook of poems about chaplaincy, fittingly entitled chaplainbook. This is beautiful, piercing poetry, and you must all go buy Rachel's book without delay, and right after you do that, you must must must read Marcia's amazing Open Letter to a Family I've Never Met.

And then you can read my sonnets. And oh, yeah, I shouldn't have written these: I should have spent the time doing other work. Oh well. I'll pay for it later.

Now I have to go to sleep. G'night!

*

Hall Bed 1

They’ve brought her in on CareFlight: broken hip.
She’s eighty-eight, four hours from her home
by car, and no one’s with her. “I’m alone,”
she says. “Oh, I have neighbors, but this trip’s
too long for them. Please, sweetheart, will you pray
with me? The Lord’s Prayer, maybe? That would make
me happy. Jesus bless you, dear!” I take
her chilly hand in mine. We start to say
the prayer. Our Father . . . . When we reach forgive,
she says trespasses. I say sins. Her eyes
fly open. “You just changed God’s Holy Word!
That’s unforgivable!” I bite my cheek
to keep from laughing. “Ma’am, you realize
they’re both translations?” Icy, undeterred,
she glares. I might as well be speaking Greek.

*

Hall Bed 3

A homeless guy arrives by ambulance.
“ETOH on board,” the medic says,
and rolls his eyes. The nurse is even less
amused. “Stop cursing!” -- giving me a glance --
“This woman is our chaplain! Be polite!”
The patient, halfway through a graceful stream
of expletives, sits up and grins. “You seem
to be a lady, chaplain. Well, all right.
You pray?” “Of course.” He beams at me. “Me too!
Most every morning: ‘Hey there, Big Dude!’ Then
God answers: ‘Hey there, little dude!’ And when
I’ve fed the birds, well, me and God, we chew
the fat a while. He feeds me like a bird.”
I laugh, delighted. This one has the Word.

The ED Sonnets: Chapel I

Here's another sonnet. I wrote it in half an hour, just because I was getting itchy from not writing any. As a result, it's extremely simple, but that fits the mood I want.

The hyphenated word at the end of the third line is a bit of a cheat, but Marilyn Hacker does it, and if something's good enough for her, it's good enough for me.

This is Chapel I because I often take several chapel breaks during a shift. It's a bit out of order, since I'd normally wait until I'd seen more patients. But this is all a draft anyway, and I'm sure I'll be making all kinds of changes to the sequence if I ever get a complete cycle of poems.

*

It’s almost always empty when I come;
I’m almost always empty, which is why
I come. I sit. I breathe. I notice some-
one else, off in a corner, and I try
to let myself be filled. I cannot bring
God’s love to others if I do not feel
that love myself. I don’t feel anything
right now except exhaustion. Should I kneel?
No: I’m too tired. Sit and pray. Dear God,
make me your hands, your feet, a hollow reed
through which you speak. Make me your lightning rod,
your vessel. Help me give them what they need.
Has that done anything? I’ll only know
by visiting more patients. Time to go.

Change of Shift, and "Minor Complaints"

This week's Change of Shift, the nursing blog carnival, is up over at NeoNurseChic. Thanks for including me, Carrie!

And, while we're on the subject of medicine, here's a subject that's been nagging at me for a while: the issue of people showing up in the ED with "minor complaints." DisappearingJohn wrote this post a while back kvetching about the problem, and during a recent volunteer shift, I heard a doctor venting about the same thing. "These people come in with nothing, nothing! They don't need to be here!"

A few notes: Everybody who talks about this acknowledges that people who don't have insurance have to use the ED for primary care; in addition, DisappearingJohn informs me, laws designed to protect the uninsured mandate that EDs have to evaluate anyone who walks in, even if the triage nurse considers the problem minor. There's also a trend where primary-care providers tell patients, "Just go to the ER," even for problems that might be better handled with an office visit. And some nurse hotlines, cautious about liability, seem to use "go to the ER" as a default (although the one I use has always been good about saying, "No, that's not that serious; you can see your primary tomorrow," or, "This doesn't sound serious now, but if XYZ happens, go to Urgent Care").

However, all these factors aside, I hear in many such complaints an exasperated expectation that patients should be able to figure out for themselves which problems are minor and which aren't.

Dear doctors and nurses:

Newsflash: We can't do that. In most cases, we don't know how to evaluate our own medical conditions. We aren't the doctors and nurses: you are. You're the ones who are trained to figure out if something's minor or if it isn't. That's why you get the big bucks. (Ed. note: Since this line has deeply offended certain readers, I feel obliged to point out that it's ironic; I've never heard it used any other way, but I guess some people have. See comments.) That's why you wear the scrubs and white coats and we wear the oh-so-fashionable gowns gaping in the back, okay?

Also, there are entirely too many people who go to the opposite extreme, who consider their own problems minor and won't seek medical treatment unless other people tell them to. Consider:

* My classmate in graduate school who had a huge red boil on her arm but wanted to wait until after our three-hour seminar to go to the university health service. My cousin had once had a boil like that, and it developed scary red streaks and he had to be in the hospital for a week, so I told her to skip class and go to the doctor. She said no. I said yes. I convinced her. She went to the health service and received very prompt treatment from ashen healthcare providers; about a week later, she told me, "My doctor's only now telling me how serious that was."

* Another friend who had an annoyingly painful paper cut, one she couldn't even see but that hurt like blazes, and who finally went to the doctor for it, feeling really foolish, and who then discovered that she had an antibiotic-resistant staph infection, and who spent quite a while in the hospital and had to take several months off work.

* The time I thought I had a stomach virus and was really embarrassed about going to the ED, even though my aunt the nurse told me to very firmly; the ED staff thought it was gastroenteritis, until the bloodwork came back with a white count of 29,000 (I know I've told that story here before, but it was pretty traumatic, believe me). A friend of mine told this story to a friend of hers who's a nurse, who evidently turned pale and said, "She could have died."

And then there's the sort-of-funny story an urgent care nurse told me once when I went in, feeling very embarrassed, to have a very small and painful splinter removed. (She took it out, and told me that I'd been right to come in.) She'd been working in an ED once when a call came in from a guy who said, "I have a splinter in my hand. Are you busy? Would it be okay if I came in now?" She told him to come in, but she and her colleagues were rolling their eyes about the wuss with the splinter -- until he came in with a 2x4 driven through his palm.

You see, doctors and nurses, if you ask us to decide what's minor and what isn't, sometimes we're going to err on the wrong side. We aren't the best judges of this. You are.

And yes, we all know that you have to deal with too many hypochondriacs, too many people who come to the ED for the wrong reasons (drug-seeking, social contact), too many people whose sore throats and coughs would respond very nicely to over-the-counter medication, and whose germs aren't doing the ED staff and the other patients in the waiting room any good, either.

But think about the other side: the times you have to tell a patient that he's having a heart attack, that she's had a stroke; the times when you have to tell patients and their families that a suspicious mass has showed up on the scan, that it looks a whole lot like cancer, that emergency surgery has been scheduled.

You hate those moments. I know you do. I've seen you steel yourself to deliver bad news. I've heard you say, "Oh, man, we just had a guy come in with an inoperable brain tumor."

I know that the patients with the coughs and sore throats take up valuable time, time you'd rather spend with the patient who's just been diagnosed with cancer. I know that your frustration with "minor complaints" is really a larger frustration at having too many patients and not enough staff. I know you wish you had the resources to give everyone your fullest attention.

But think about it: wouldn't you give anything to be able to tell your cancer patient, "It's nothing, really. You just need a bandaid and some aspirin. You can get dressed now and go home."

Why I Like TV Better than Movies

One of the downsides of working in a profession where you have to read a lot, all the time, is that recreational reading tends to fall by the wayside. After a day of grading papers -- even really good papers -- the last thing I want to do is look at more text. And so, several years back, Gary and I hit on a new form of relaxation: watching TV series on DVD.

I should add here that when we started doing this, we didn't own an actual television. We watched the DVDs on Gary's computer. Back then, the only TV we'd ever owned was one of those tiny beach TVs; I'd won it in some raffle at a temp agency where I was working in the 1980s, but the only time we took it out of its box was when Gary wanted to watch the NBA finals in 1994. This meant that even though we've never been TV people, we too -- along with most of the rest of the country -- got to watch OJ's slow-speed car chase. How weird is that?

Last year we splurged on a 42" plasma screen, but we still don't watch TV in the conventional sense. We don't have cable; we just use the plasma as a giant DVD player. When we explained this to the salesman who sold us the set, he looked at us as if we'd just landed from Mars.

The plasma's mostly for Gary, who's completely obsessed with movies and manages his Netflix queue the way other people monitor the stock market. Gary watches movies every day -- either in a theater or at home -- and adores both fine films and really schlocky ones ("good bad movies," as he calls them). I, on the other hand, have found my appetite for feature films steadily decreasing over the years, especially since so many movies I've gone into with high hopes have so thoroughly disappointed me. I come out of most movies thinking, or saying to Gary, "They spent umpty-ump million dollars on that piece of garbage? Did anyone connected with this project have a brain? Did anyone notice that the story makes absolutely no sense? Did anybody think about how much food and medicine those umpty-ump million dollars could have bought for people who need them?"

So I'm now very picky about what I'll watch. In particular, I won't see anything scary or too violent, because there's more than enough fear and violence in the real world. Gary, on the other hand, revels in cheesy action flicks and chainsaw-style horrorfests.

But, I've discovered, I adore good TV shows, even gory or scary ones. We started with Buffy and moved on to Oz, ER, Scrubs, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, Firefly, and, of course, Battlestar Galactica. These are just the shows we really enjoy; I won't list all the ones we've started watching and have given up on after a few episodes because the stories were just too ridiculous. (Grey's Anatomy is probably the most egregious of that group.) There are other shows we're ambivalent about but have watched through an entire season or two anyway: Veronica Mars, Joan of Arcadia, Smallville.

At some point, I sat down to figure out why I loved TV shows so much, even though I'm increasingly lukewarm towards movies. The answer has to do with the episodic nature of TV. Movies are the visual equivalent of short stories; TV series are multi-chapter novels, giving the viewer more of a chance to get immersed in the world and familiar with the characters. There's just more going on, so they're more interesting in narrative terms. Also, TV is more forgiving of weak patches than film is (just as novels are more forgiving than short fiction). Even the best TV shows we watch have an occasional weak episode, but that's okay, because we have faith that the story will get back on track. A few weak episodes damage a TV show less than a few weak scenes damage a movie.

In other words, I enjoy TV shows for the same reasons many people enjoy daytime soaps or those multi-volume Tolclone fantasy sagas ("Volume 27 of the Dragonbarf Chronicles!"): I've become invested in characters and situations and want to stay with them for as long as I can. My reading tastes run to standalone novels, but my viewing tastes are the polar opposite.

We've now been watching TV series since March 2002, when we got our first disc of Buffy. We've learned to recognize actors from one series when they pop up in another. We've become quite adept at predicting plot outcomes, especially in weaker episodes. Remember the ER episode where Mark Greene's doing ambulance ridealongs with the annoyingly chatty female paramedic who keeps telling stories about her son, whose photo is taped to the dashboard of the rig? "That kid is so dead," I told Gary about five minutes into the episode. "That's why she keeps going on about him."

And indeed he was. "You called that one," Gary said approvingly.

One of my quirks as a writer, though, is a kind of chameleon effect where if I absorb many examples of a certain kind of story, my own narratives start to come to me in that form. And so an unexpected (and not entirely welcome) side-effect of watching so much TV is that I now have my very own TV series running through my brain.

This is ridiculous. I know nothing about the very technical aspects of writing for TV. I don't want to write for TV; my one brush with Hollywood (when Flying in Place was optioned by Columbia Pictures) left me thoroughly cynical about anything to do with the TV or movie industries, and I'm far too much of a control freak to hand my ideas over to strangers. Even if I did want to write for TV, it's not like I'd have the time.

When I first told Gary about this, he said, "Well, you could write the story as a novel." But it's not coming to me as a novel. It's coming to me as a TV show, complete with specific actors, character arcs, music, quirky visual details, yada yada. Yesterday Gary and I were listening to a song and he said, "This would be perfect for your soundtrack." Oh, dear.

I started making notes on this puppy a year ago. I now have about twenty pages of notes, which isn't very many, but on the other hand, the story and characters have stubbornly refused to fade into the background. I keep thinking about them. For the time being, I've decided that this is a harmless form of fanfic, a way to invent juicy roles for my favorite underutilized actors (Paul Ben-Victor, Clea DuVall) and pass time in doctors' waiting rooms.

If the idea's still stubbornly nagging at me after I've finished the ED sonnet cycle and the fourth novel (currently sitting in very fragmentary first draft on my file cabinet), then maybe I'll try to do something with it.

And on that note, back to proofreading Shelter galleys!

Grand Rounds: Home for the Holidays!

Dr. Nick Genes, the founder of Grand Rounds, is hosting this week's edition over at Blogborygmi. I'm honored to be included, and the statistics Dr. Nick has compiled about the history of Grand Rounds are impressive indeed.

Enjoy!

Voices

Yesterday morning at church, our priest read, as part of her homily, an essay about God, supposedly written by eight-year-old Danny Dutton of Chula Vista, California. (Snopes.com argues that this essay is probably a hoax, composed by a much older person, but it was fun to listen to anyway.) One sentence in particular struck me: "Because He hears everything there must be a terrible lot of noise in His ears, unless He has thought of a way to turn it off."

Hearing that, I flashed back to a particularly haunting hospital visit some months ago. I was going to try to work it into the sonnet cycle (and I may still do that), but right now, prose is easier. This one feels right in second person, for reasons I can't quite articulate.

*

You're on a bed in the hall, huddled into a blanket. When I introduce myself, you sit up and look at me anxiously, nodding when I ask if you need to talk. But it takes you a moment to collect yourself, or to gather the courage to speak. "The doctors don't understand. Nobody understands."

"What don't they understand?"

"The voices. No one knows what it's like. I just want them to stop!"

I kneel next to the gurney so you won't have to strain your neck to look up at me. "It's hard for people to understand something they haven't gone through themselves. I want to understand. Will you explain it to me?"

You say you will, but you're fretful. You don't like being in the hall: it feels like everyone's staring at you. There's a newly empty room nearby, so I get permission from your nurse for your security guard to move you there. (All psych patients are watched by security guards. This sounds unkind, but it's better than restraints, and the guards are profoundly sympathetic people; this part of their job has given them excellent listening skills.) The room gives you a little more privacy, although we still can't close the door or draw the curtain around your bed, because the guard has to be able to watch you from the hall. There's a radio playing in the room, and it bothers you: the guard turns it off.

You ask if I'll sit with you. I sit, trying to be quiet, trying not to press too much, and gradually your story emerges.

You've been here at the hospital for going on twelve hours, waiting for psych evaluation and transfer to another hospital. You've been hearing the voices for twelve years. The voices never stop completely: not even on meds, not even when you're asleep. When I ask what they say, you tell me flatly, "They want me dead." They're never friendly. There are two or three different ones, distinct from each other but always the same, a chorus of enemies. They sound as if they're in the air around you.

"It must be like being in a really noisy bus station," I say, and you nod. They're talking to you now, of course. They're really bad right now, which is why you're here. I can tell how much effort it takes for you to listen to my questions, to talk to me over the din: you wear the strained, distracted expression of someone who's trying to hold a conversation over jackhammers, or screaming infants, or car alarms. Or voices that want you dead.

Your parents hate you, you tell me. You have siblings, but you don't have a relationship with them, either. Your spouse and child have just left you, which is why the voices have gotten worse again. "I miss them," you say, and your voice cracks. "I want them to come back." You have one friend in another part of the state: someone who understands about the voices, someone who loves you. On the phone this morning, your friend told you that you needed to come to the hospital, and you listened.

I tell you that I'm glad you have a friend like that. I ask if there's anything else you enjoy. You think a moment and say, "I like my job." You hope you'll still have your job after you get out of the hospital.

You're tired of waiting, hungry, exhausted from the voices. I find some crackers for you to eat. I ask if you'd like a magazine, but you shake your head. "I can't read when the voices are this loud." I ask if you'd like some paper and crayons to draw with, and you nod, giving me a shy, surprised smile.

I bring you paper and two packs of crayons, one in mostly bright colors and the other in darker ones. I'm curious to see which you'll choose. You choose the bright ones, and start to draw a flower. When I compliment you, you say, "It's not very good," but you smile again when I tell you that it must be good, since I knew right away what it was.

We talk about the psych hospital. I ask if people there understand. "Some of them do," you say. "Some of the doctors. It's okay there. They're pretty nice." But you don't have anyone to talk to once you're out of the hospital, except your friend across the state. You mention NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and I suggest that maybe the local chapter has a support group for people who hear voices. If they don't, maybe they can help you start one. That would give you people to talk to outside the hospital, people who understand.

You appear to consider this, but your expression's more strained again. I tell you that I'm going to try to find out how much longer you'll have to wait for the psych evaluation, and I go to find your nurse. The nurse doesn't know. When I go back to your room, you show me the picture, finished now: the flower, a tree, a house, a sun. A heart. The colors are bright, the lines delicate. I tell you that the picture's beautiful, and you look pleased.

I tell you how brave you are to keep going despite the voices: how brave to have constructed a life where you have a job, a place to live, a family (even if they're gone now). I tell you again how beautiful your picture is, how happy it looks. If I heard nonstop voices that wanted me dead, I don't think I could draw a happy picture. "I just want to be be normal," you tell me. "I just want to be like everybody else." It occurs to me then that your picture's a prayer, a drawing of the life you want: sunny, peaceful, calm. Quiet.

I wish you luck in the hospital. I thank you for talking to me. I say, "I know I can't understand what this is like for you, because I haven't gone through it, but thank you for telling me about it. Thank you for helping me understand a little better than I did before."

I can't tell if you hear me. The strained expression is back; I think I'm being drowned out by the voices.

Later that evening, I think about a story I didn't tell you, because it's too sad. In college, I studied poetry with Maxine Kumin, who had been one of Anne Sexton's best friends. One day in class, Maxine talked about Sexton's suicide, which had been no surprise to anyone who knew her. The remarkable thing, Kumin told us, was that Sexton stayed alive as long as she did. "She heard voices. She told me once that the trees spoke to her every June." It had taken unimaginable courage, Kumin told us, for Sexton to function as well as she did for as long as she did.

I pray for you every day. I don't want you dead. I wish my voice could make the others go away, but I don't have that power. Only God and the doctors do.

I pray for your doctors, and I pray that the ones who don't understand will listen to you, and try to understand.

Bringing Up Baby

This homily is really old -- I preached it in 2002! -- but I still like it, and if it covers some of the same thematic territory as the one I posted yesterday, it has a decidedly lighter tone.

The Gospel is, once again, Luke 2:1-20, not that I talk much about it here.

* * *

Merry Christmas!

We’re gathered this morning on one of the most joyous days of the Christian calendar, the day when God put on a body and was born as a human child. But if any of us are feeling more dazed and exhausted than joyous, it’s not too surprising. By any measure, religious or secular, Christmas is one of the most stressful times of the year. These past few weeks, we’ve all had too much to do -- cooking, cleaning, shopping, wrapping -- and not enough time to do it. We may fervently wish that we were able to give more -- more time, more money, more presents -- or we may resent being asked to give so much. We may be mourning the absence of people who used to put the joy into Christmas for us, and who aren’t here anymore. Whatever we’re actually feeling, though, we’re under enormous pressure to show only the socially approved emotions of cheer, fellowship, and good will. Christmas is an object lesson in the difference between expectations and reality.

I strongly suspect that it’s been that way since the very first Christmas; I have a hunch that Mary and Joseph were feeling dazed and exhausted that first Christmas morning, too. Jesus was a first child, and his parents, temporarily homeless, were bedded down in a barn. The Gospels don’t tell us how long Mary was in labor, in that era before anesthetics, but first children are usually more difficult to deliver than later ones. It’s a safe bet that if epidurals and comfy birthing rooms had been available, Mary would have jumped at them. Like the shepherds in the fields, we don’t hear about that part: we only get the engraved birth announcement, delivered by angels and accompanied by a heavenly choir.

We and the shepherds are told that the child’s humble housing is actually a sign of his aristocracy, proof that he’s really front and center on God’s Society Pages. This would have been good news indeed to the shepherds, who were considered unclean laborers; the fact that they were chosen as the first to hear the news is one of the many radical things about the Nativity, underpinning the New Testament’s insistence that “the last shall be first.” The most radical part of this story, of course, is the sheer fact of the incarnation, the appearance of God the Son -- Our Lord Jesus Christ, the author of creation -- as a squalling infant in an unprepossessing building in an obscure corner of an occupied territory.

When we hear the phrase “God the Son,” we usually think of Jesus as God’s son, as the son of Yahweh, who is also our Father. This makes Jesus our brother. But Christmas reminds us of another meaning of “God the Son:” for Jesus was also Mary and Joseph’s son, and when all the angels and well-wishers and wise men bearing gifts had left, when these dazed, brand-new parents had digested the announcements and prophecies about who their child was and would become, they were still left with the day-to-day realities of taking care of a newborn.

If God appeared among us as a human infant, then God needed two a.m. feedings. God needed his diapers changed. God had to be burped and rocked and soothed through nightmares and teething pains and colic. God went through the terrible twos. God got scraped knees and chicken pox. God had to be toilet trained. And if Mary and Joseph, like all new parents, thought that Baby Jesus was the most beautiful child in the world, he probably also frequently drove them nuts. Where were the angels when Jesus got the flu and was up projectile vomiting all night? Where were the Wise Men when Jesus went through that stage where he asked “Why?”every two seconds? That’s when Wise Men would have been useful!

We don’t hear about any of this in the Gospels. The Apocrypha -- early Christian writings that were ultimately left out of the New Testament, partly because their authenticity was contested -- are far more forthcoming about the challenges of raising such a singular child. In the First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ, written during the second century, we learn that Jesus and his playmates liked to make clay animals, which Jesus obligingly brought to life. This alarmed his friends’ parents, who accused Jesus of being a sorcerer. Granted, Jesus could be helpful at home, especially since his father wasn’t a very good carpenter. When Joseph spent two years making a throne for the King of Jerusalem, only to find that it was two spans too short, his son said, “Do thou lay hold on one side of the throne, and I will the other, and we will bring it to its just dimensions.” Jesus and Joseph tugged the throne to the proper size, “which miracle when they who stood by saw, they were astonished, and praised God.”

But these folk stories of Jesus’ childhood contain as many disasters as wonders. It seems that he hadn’t yet figured out the part about loving his neighbors, because he did not play well with others. Yes, he healed the sick and raised the dead, but he also killed children who bumped into him or broke his toys. When Jesus misbehaved in school and his teacher threatened to whip him, the teacher’s hand withered, and the man died. One can only imagine what Mary and Joseph went through during all of this, not to mention their neighbors. The summary of the second chapter of Thomas’ infancy narrative presents a succinct portrait of parental strain: “Jesus causes a boy to wither who broke down his fish pools, partly restores him, kills another boy, and causes blindness to fall on his accusers, for which Joseph pulls him by the ear.” If Joseph and Mary expected that their miraculous baby would be easier to raise than other children, they quickly discovered that the reality was very different.

And here we are two thousand years later, still learning the same lesson, year after year. We’ve experienced the joy and wonder of the miraculous birth, and everyone we know has given us gifts, and we’ve sung joyous hymns and cooked a lot of food for our visitors. And now we have to go home, clean up after our guests, and begin the hard, daily work of tending our faith. Right now it’s sweetly wrapped in swaddling clothes in the living room, cooing at the stars and angels on the Christmas tree. It’s adorable at this age, isn’t it?

But we all know that parenting is the hardest job there is. Over the next twelve months, the church year will lead us through a series of challenges and heartbreaks, as well as triumphs and miracles. Jesus’ life was nothing if not eventful, and -- like conscientious parents who attend every dance recital and soccer game -- we’re called to witness to all of it. Our own lives have a way of getting complicated, too, but we’re charged with the task of never neglecting our faith, the presence of Jesus in our lives. We’re called to listen to Jesus, talk to him, play with him, grieve over his pains and setbacks, and cheer his victories. We’re called to be patient when he appears to be a wayward child who’d rather hide than come when we call. Above all, we’re called to love him as much as we can, even when we’re distracted, short-sighted or short-tempered.

And we’re called to trust that Jesus will forgive us when we goof. No parents are perfect, and he’s a good kid. He’ll love us no matter what; he’ll never forget to call, to write, to bring presents. And when we can’t take care of him anymore, he’ll take care of us. He’ll stay with us to the very end; he’ll be our strength when we lose our own, until at last he brings us home, to live with him forever.

Amen.

The Angel of Incarnation

I preached this homily on Christmas Day, 2004. Our Christmas morning service is very small and quiet, and often attended by people struggling with loss, people for whom the holiday is difficult. It's the closest we come to a Blue Christmas service, which is why this isn't a conventionally joyous Christmas homily. (Tomorrow, I'll post a much lighter one I preached in 2003.) Several of our long-time parishioners died in 2004; you'll see their names near the end.

I'm still very fond of this piece, and I still keep, in my study, both of the angels I talk about here. One of our cats likes to jump on top of my bookcase and sniff around the base of the ceramic angel, but so far, both angel and cat have stayed safe. Since my 2004 visit to Biloxi, the George Ohr Museum has been renamed the Ohr O'Keefe Museum of Art. They're rebuilding after Katrina, and have found their own angels of incarnation.

The Gospel -- for those of you who don't have it memorized from having watched A Charlie Brown Christmas when you were a kid -- is Luke 2:1-20.

* * *

“In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.”

This is one of the most famous passages in the Bible. I never went to church as a child, but I knew this story by heart, because every year I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas on television. And every year, when Linus read these lines during the school Christmas play -– and later, when he and Charlie Brown and Lucy and the rest of the gang sang “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” –- chills went up my spine. “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” is still one of my favorite Christmas carols, simply because it moved me so much when I was a child.

As a little girl, I uncritically believed the Christmas imagery I saw all around me. I pictured the shepherds as slightly bigger kids than I was, hanging out on a grassy lawn somewhere -– possibly playing frisbee -– while surrounded by cute, fluffy animals. As a sheltered suburban child, I imagined sheep to be rather like large, friendly dogs, like the lambs at the petting zoo who ate food out of my hand. And of course, the angels were beautiful and smiling.

Here’s an angel I drew one Christmas when I was eight or nine. My mother carved the picture on this woodblock, which we then used to make Christmas cards. This angel has long eyelashes, a goofy happy-face smile, and wings that look like elephant ears. This angel doesn’t have a care in the world, and neither did I, at that age. I loved Christmas.

But as I’ve gotten older, Christmas has become more complicated for me. I’m now much more aware of the suffering in this story. First-century shepherds were social outcasts, dirty and poor and marginalized, and Joseph and Mary were turned away everywhere they went. The fact that God sends good news first to the poor is one of the things I love about this story as an adult, but it can’t help but remind me that the poor and rejected are still with us. And because this is a story about birth, it’s also a story about death, about mortality. Mary risked death in labor, as all women did then, as many women still do. Some commentaries on this story claim that shepherds would only have kept night-time watch during lambing season, which -- in addition to shifting Christ’s birth from winter to spring -- means that they and Mary were engaged in the same exhausting, biological business of bringing new life into the world. This is a story about labor, about hard work and pain, blood and afterbirth.

And then there’s the angel. He terrifies the shepherds and tells them to “fear not,” which are the first words of nearly every angel in the Bible. Angels are evidently not serene, beatific presences. They scare everyone who encounters them. Shepherds were tough customers, used to protecting their flocks from wolves. It would take some doing, to terrify a shepherd. Because I know this, I’ve become allergic to commercialized Christmas angels, to cuddly cherubs and sentimental seraphim.

But last month I found this angel in the gift shop of the George Ohr Museum, a pottery museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, while I was visiting my father for Thanksgiving. This angel, wearing a quizzical expression and covered with wounds and bruises, fascinated me: I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He made me think immediately of the angel who wrestled with Jacob, and whom I’ve always imagined must have sustained his own scars in the process. I carried him around the store with me for at least half an hour, while a woman who was buying everything else in the shop told me that if I didn’t buy him, she would. I finally caved in and handed over my credit card, fretting about how I’d get the angel -- and his fragile, brittle wings -- home safely on the plane. When I got back to my father’s house and unwrapped my new purchase, Dad’s lady-friend peered at the sculpture and said, “That angel looks kind of scary.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

The museum shopkeeper had told me that the artist, a woman named Dina O’Sullivan, was Director of Education at the museum. I found her e-mail address on the museum’s webpage and sent her a note, asking her if there was a story behind the angel’s creation. She wrote back almost immediately; she told me that she’s Jewish, and that for her, the angel symbolizes all the stories of struggle in the Hebrew Bible. So my instinct about the Jacob story was confirmed.

I cradled the angel, swaddled in bubble-wrap, on my lap during the long, bumpy plane ride home, and then I started doing research. According to one tradition, the angel who wrestled with Jacob was Gabriel, the same angel who appeared to tell Mary that both she and her cousin Elizabeth were -- impossibly -- pregnant. It makes perfect sense to me that Gabriel would also be the angel who appeared to the exhausted, anxious shepherds as they mid-wived their lambs. And Gabriel, in many of the sources I read, is called “the angel of incarnation and consolation.”

Incarnation and consolation, mortality and comfort: they’re two sides of the same coin. Incarnation is the miracle of God become naked, vulnerable human flesh, of God growing a body. But bodies are fragile, and need to be comforted. Hearing this story two thousand years after it happened, we know how it ends. We know that the God who was born a mortal baby to an outcast mother will die the humiliating death of a criminal. We know that he will be bruised and wounded. We know that this is a story about labor, about hard work and pain. The ultimate comfort, Christ’s resurrection, will come only after the incarnational agony of Good Friday.

As I grow older, there are days when I think that resurrection is the only thing that makes incarnation bearable. Our embodiment inevitably subjects us to loss. I miss Vern and Del and Eleanor this year, and I know all of you do, too; we trust in their resurrection, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t grieve, that we don’t need comfort. We rejoice whenever a baby is born, but we also know that all babies, as they grow, will meet trouble, will be bruised and wounded. We long to spare those we love from suffering: we yearn to swaddle them in bubble-wrap and hold them in our laps to protect them from turbulence, and sometimes we are able to do this, for a little while. We do everything we can to keep what we love from breaking. But Lent and Good Friday await all of us, as surely as Easter does.

And so we need Gabriel, the angel of incarnation and consolation. He appears to us in the darkness of our most difficult labors, as we bring forth new life and as we face death. He tells us, “Look, I’m scarred too; I’m wounded, too. I’ve struggled all night with fierce enemies who refused to release me. I’ve sat with women as they labored in childbirth. I am the angel of everything that is bruised and broken but stubbornly survives, and I am here to tell you that for every pain there is also joy, joy at the end of everything, joy and the peace that passes all understanding. God is with us; Emmanuel has come. From now on, you will not suffer anything that your Lord has not also suffered. You are no longer alone, no longer poor and outcast: you are the Lord’s beloved. Today everlasting life has been born, and today death has died.

“Do not be afraid; for see --I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”