by Mark Salzman
Father, you cut down the unfruitful branch for
burning and
prune the fertile to
make it
bear
more fruit.
Dr. Sheppard assured her that this was normal. Heeding his advice, she began walking up and down the corridors for exercise, rolling her IV frame alongside her. One hallway window offered a view of the plaza linking the main hospital to other buildings associated with the medical center. The tiny human figures below, most of them in white jackets and green scrubs, streamed across the plaza in well-worn paths. It looked like the courtyard of a large monastery, she thought, only with the action speeded up. Instead of breviaries and rosary beads, the doctors carried patient charts and hot beverage cups.
She watched a team of residents, led by an attending physician, go into a nearby room and interview a stroke victim. Listening in to their discussion, Sister John inferred another parallel between religious life and the culture of medicine: the spirit of obedience ruled in the hospital, as it did in the cloister. Younger doctors yielded without hesitation to the will of their superiors, as if hoping to become perfect vessels for the greater will of medicine. Cooperation and teamwork were more important than individual achievement.
She wondered if a doctor, visiting a monastery, would draw the same parallels. Or would he translate the experience into the language of pathology? The ideal of continual prayer: hyperreligiosity. The choice to live as a celibate: hyposexuality. Control of the will through control of the body, achieved through regular fasting: anorexia. Keeping a detailed spiritual journal: hypergraphia. None of these terms troubled her as deeply, however, as the one she brought from her own tradition: spiritual pride. She was convinced now that her epilepsy had been merely an opportunistic virus; egotism had weakened her resistance to it.
Like her doctor, she had dedicated her life to the service of others, but had she really been of service to anyone? She had vowed to lead a life of charity, but in fact she had been dependent on others’ charity all along, and was even more dependent now that she was in the hospital. And what about the future? Her treatment for epilepsy would define her for the rest of her life. No matter what she did in the cloister from now on, it would always be followed by an asterisk and questions about the nature of her relationship to God.
Am I really a person who lives by faith? God can surely tell the difference between someone who walks in darkness and someone who walks with her eyes shut. Which am I?
OCTOBER 1
Thérèse of the Child Jesus,
Virgin and Doctor
Before dawn, she lit a votive candle on the tray next to her hospital bed and prayed the responsory in Thérèse’s honor:
From the very beginning, O God, You came to me with
Your
love,
which had grown since my childhood.
Its depths I cannot fully grasp.
Saint Thérèse, whose only ambition had been to love, was now a Doctor of the Church. This was history, and Sister John had almost become part of it by participating in the ceremony at the Vatican; instead, she was reading the Office alone in a hospital bed. This was like childhood, but not the spiritual childhood Saint Thérèse advocated. This was Sister John’s own childhood all over again: feeling desperate and in need of rescue, but suspecting that the rescue party was no longer interested.
Afire with shafts of holy love she turned
From earthly joys to yearn for those of heav’n;
Eternal triumph now her soul’s reward!
Every Carmelite monastery in the world was linked, through prayer, to the ceremony at the Vatican. Understandably, Mother Emmanuel was too busy to visit the hospital that day. Sister John was relieved when Sister Mary Michael came alone; she did not want to talk about the day or its significance, and there would have been no avoiding it had the prioress been there. Instead, she asked Sister Mary Michael what had led her to become a Carmelite extern after being married and raising children. Had she felt a calling for a long time, or had it appeared suddenly?
“A little of both,” the extern answered, unwrapping a loaf of Sister Christine’s walnut bread. “I loved being a mother, but once our kids were grown, I needed something else. I didn’t want to become one of those women who only live in the past; I wanted to be of use. I did volunteer work through the Church for a while, but when my husband passed away, I felt the need to make a deeper commitment. I looked into becoming an extern, and this community seemed to need me the most.
“I’m not like you cloistered Sisters, whose vocations burn so bright. I couldn’t spend all those hours in choir, my mind wanders too much. It’s enough for me just to feel the strength of your prayers and to see the effect you have on the parishioners, who have become like family to me. How many people get to have as varied a life as I’ve had? I wouldn’t change a thing about it.”
“It may be that your vocation burns the brightest of all,” Sister John said. “You’ve always felt you were where you belonged. I wish I could say the same.”
Sister Mary Michael waved the compliment away. “I feel that way now, but that’s hindsight. Nobody raising three kids knows any certainty, believe me. And anyway, you’re too young to be thinking about peace of mind, you’re still in the middle of your journey. Christ hardly knew any peace—he struggled right up to the end. There’s your model.”
OCTOBER 2
Guardian Angels
“Time to have a look.” Dr. Sheppard supported her neck with his left hand while he unwound the cotton strip with his right. When the bandage had been completely removed, his left hand stayed on her neck for just a moment as he inspected the wound. When he pulled it away, the cool air sent a shiver down her back.
“Looks good.” He opened up a nearby drawer and took out a pair of miniature pliers. “I’m going to take out the staples now. This might hurt, but only for a second.”
He removed them so quickly that she hardly felt anything. He swabbed the wound with an alcohol-based disinfectant—sending another chill down her spine—then wrapped a fresh bandage around her head. He pressed the cotton strip down with one hand and trimmed it with a pair of surgical scissors. As he fastened the bandage with tape, he held the scissors in his mouth, his lower lip yielding to the weight of the tiny instrument.
“It would be a good idea if you didn’t shave your head for a while,” he said, dropping the scissors into a wastebasket. “We don’t want to risk an infection near that wound.”
She asked why he had discarded the new-looking scissors.
“It’s the law. We’re not allowed to use them more than once without sterilizing them, and sterilizing is expensive. It’s cheaper to buy new ones.”
“Even if you only used them to snip a bandage?”
“That’s right.”
The thought of all that waste dismayed her. “Could I take that pair, then? We could get a lot of use out of them.”
He bent down and recovered them for her. They were the sharpest scissors she had ever seen. He sat down facing her, and smiled. “Your EEG came out clean. I think we’ve got this thing licked.”
She tried her best to smile back.
He did not appear surprised by her subdued reaction. “Don’t worry about it if you feel a little washed out. Almost all patients experience some postsurgical depression, especially after this kind of surgery. Life without seizures may seem a bit dull at first, but that’s a normal adjustment.”
A normal adjustment? For three astonishing years she had lived and prayed from the inside of a kaleidoscope. Everything fit into a design of feeling, a pattern linking all souls and minds together. She felt God’s presence in the design, and nothing seemed out of place. Every person was like a piece of glass in a giant rose window. Now the pattern was gone.
“In religious life,” she said, turning the scissors over in her pa
lm, “if you lose confidence in your personal experience, it’s hard to keep from doubting everything.”
He closed the manila file containing her charts. “That’s true for everybody, isn’t it? I nearly quit medicine during my first year of residency because I realized I’d gotten into it for the wrong reasons. But here I still am, and I’m glad I stuck with it.”
She appreciated hearing something personal from him. “What kept you going?”
He laughed. “Finding out that everybody gets into medicine for the wrong reasons. It seems to come with the territory.”
OCTOBER 4
Francis of Assisi
On Sister John’s last day at the hospital, an unconscious patient, a teenage girl, was wheeled into her room on a gurney, her head completely wrapped in bandages. A machine breathed for her, and from the demeanor of the orderlies bringing her in, Sister John guessed she was gravely injured. Dr. Sheppard arrived shortly afterwards and pulled the curtains around the patient’s bed to examine her. He left the room looking tired, then came back with a grief-stricken woman with two young daughters and a teenage son. The mother spoke Spanish, but the children answered her in English. The daughters clung to their mother while the brother sat apart from them all and glared at the floor. He looked about fifteen.
Sister John approached the family and asked if there was anything she could do to help. The mother didn’t understand her, the son ignored her, and the daughters were either too young or too upset to know how to respond. When Sister John stepped into the hallway to give the family some privacy, she nearly bumped into a police officer standing outside the door to their room.
It was nearly dark out. She sat on the ledge of the window across from the nurses’ station and watched as an ambulance, lights flashing and siren wailing, exited the freeway and sped toward the hospital. She dreaded going back to the room. She tried to pray for the injured girl, but something was missing. She couldn’t feel her way to a connection with God the way she had in the past.
A patient’s bell went off somewhere down the hall. Another ambulance exited the freeway and disappeared into the receiving bay, five floors down.
“Look at that,” someone said. She turned and saw Dr. Sheppard standing a few feet away, gazing out the same window. The moon had just risen above the horizon to the east, appearing twice its normal size. “It looks fake, like a billboard. Or some new Disney stunt.”
She tugged at the sleeves of her hospital gown until they covered her forearms.
“I wish we could move you to another room,” he said, still looking out the window, “but it gets busy here on weekends. We had no other place to put her.”
“I don’t mind. It’s a hospital.”
He took out a pack of gum and offered her a piece. She declined. “What happened to her?” she asked.
He put a stick of gum in his mouth, then rubbed his neck as if trying to massage a cramp. “She got shot in the head. Not a good thing.”
“Is she going to live?”
“The survival rate for the injury isn’t high.”
His retreat into jargon chilled her. “What’s the policeman for?”
“Apparently the patient was involved in a crime at the time of the shooting. The guard is there to be sure she doesn’t walk out of the hospital and disappear.” He sighed. “You don’t have to be Oliver Sacks to know that’s not going to happen.”
From down the hallway, the patient’s bell went off again, this time more insistently. A night nurse sauntered by, but not in the direction of the patient’s room. Dr. Sheppard groaned and pushed away from the window.
Sister John thought about what Sister Mary Michael had said the previous day about Christ knowing no peace, and having to struggle to the end. At times, reality had taken even him by surprise.
OCTOBER 5
Seventeenth Sunday
in Ordinary Time
Sister John took her folded habit out of the closet and changed in the bathroom. Tunic, scapular, sandals. Her veil didn’t fit properly over the bandage; she would have to fix it when she got back to the monastery. She read through Lauds while the grieving mother slumped in a chair next to her daughter’s bed. Before breakfast, Dr. Sheppard came into the room with a Spanish-speaking intern. They pulled the curtains shut around the bed to speak to the mother.
Sister John could not hear what was said, but from the sound of the woman’s reaction, it must have been terrible news to deliver. The agonized consultation seemed to go on forever, then the curtain slid open and the two doctors left. Sister John saw the intern lean against the wall in the hallway. Dr. Sheppard touched her shoulder and spoke to her quietly.
A pair of orderlies entered the room with a gurney. Dr. Sheppard followed them in and helped as they moved the unconscious girl and her breathing apparatus onto it. When one of her arms slid out from under the sheet, looking momentarily animated, the mother became frantic. Dr. Sheppard had to hold her back as one of the orderlies tucked the girl’s arm under the sheet, treating it as gently as if it were attached to someone conscious. Sister John looked down at her own hands and saw they were shaking.
The gurney left the room with the mother walking beside it. Dr. Sheppard stayed behind to gather her charts.
“Where is she going?” Sister John asked.
He didn’t answer directly. “We’re giving the family some time with her first.” He rearranged the papers in her file several times. “It’s going to be a tough morning.” He started massaging his neck again, then seemed to notice for the first time that Sister John was in habit again, ready to go home. “But I get to see you walk out of here with no symptoms. That makes it a good day.” He tucked the papers under his arm, then said, “Hold on a second. I have something for you.” He left the room and came back with a box labeled GAUZE ROLLS.
“Will I need these?” she asked.
“Look inside.”
She opened the box and saw that it was filled with pairs of scissors, all different shapes and sizes.
“Now you and your Sisters won’t have to fight over that other one.”
Facing the lab coat while in her habit, she felt like a frontier guard saying good-bye to her counterpart across the border. She thanked him and wished him God’s peace, then stepped into the elevator. When the doors slid closed, she saw her own image in the polished metal surface. The garment she had cherished for so long looked strange, like a costume.
1997
Faith
OCTOBER 15
Teresa of Avila,
Virgin and Doctor
Orion leaned toward the ocean, fleeing the smudge of light over the mountains. Muffled wingbeats: a band of crows in formation, on their way to a landfill for the morning’s harvest. Instead of cries, they made rattling sounds in their throats.
Sister John turned on the lights in the infirmary and offered the day to God:
Anyone who is lukewarm in his work is close to falling.
She dressed quietly. The wound over her ear had closed, but her heart gaped. Her doctor was right—life after epilepsy seemed dull. She felt as if she had tumbled out of a sacred mountain into a ruined village. The cloister buildings looked institutional, her Sisters’ piety showed signs of wear, and the psalms read like the libretto of an opera delivered as a speech. God’s presence was replaced by an atmosphere of human compromise. Her convalescence in the infirmary became a prolonged examination of conscience.
Throughout the cloister, spiritual quotations had been painted over doorways to keep the Sisters’ minds on God during the ordinary, in-between moments of daily life. These messages tended to become invisible over time, but now the one over the infirmary door would not disappear even when Sister John turned her back to it:
If I serve Thee in hopes of Paradise,
deny me Paradise.
If I serve Thee in fear of hell,
condemn me to
hell.
But if I love Thee for love of Thyself,
then grant me Thyself.
She had come to the cloister in hopes of paradise; proof of it was how disillusioned she had become in the years after Solemn Profession, when the novelty wore off and paradise still eluded her. She reacted out of fear, shutting down her emotions and losing herself in busywork disguised as service to God. Her readiness to interpret her seizures as spiritual favors rather than signs of illness: renewed hopes of paradise. Deciding on surgery out of a sense of obligation: fear of hell.
In the next bed, Sister Teresa was all white hair, parched skin, and staring eyes. She hardly spoke anymore, but when she did, it was usually to people no one else could see. In this least favorite room of the monastery, endurance passed for reverence, prayer veered toward bargaining, and cleanliness substituted for purity. Even the furniture acknowledged defeat: beds with railings, doughnut-shaped cushions, wheelchairs, a chrome-plated walker. While the cross in each nun’s cell issued a challenge to love, the one in the infirmary offered the consolation of surrender.
I’m too young to feel finished, too old to start over, and too worn out to see coherence in all this. How many times can a person fail before losing heart? Forgive me, Lord.
Fog rolled up through the canyon and over the cloister wall, so thick that even Saint Joseph disappeared into the void. Sister Miriam entered with a breakfast tray, bowing at the foot of Sister John’s bed before serving her.
A nun in the infirmary shall be looked upon as Christ.
This lesson, like so many in the education of a Carmelite, addressed the problem of how to turn an unpleasant task—in this case, caring for a sick nun—into an opportunity for grace. Nothing in the training, however, prepared the sick nun for the role of the Beloved. Sister John did not enjoy being looked upon as Christ because she knew she did not resemble Christ at all. The bandage on her head was more dunce cap than halo.
