by Albert Holtz
Over the years since then I’ve come to realize that through this mysterious catastrophe, God has done some tremendous life-giving things in many people, including me. The next four meditations suggest a few of the many lessons I’ve drawn from the most tragic period in my life.
9. Reading with the Eyes of Faith
WHEN I STEPPED QUIETLY INTO THE HOSPITAL ROOM I found my brother propped up on some pillows in the bed near the door, looking pale and exhausted. For the past two weeks I had been visiting him in the ICU amid blinking monitors and a ventilator machine pumping air into his lungs through a tube inserted at the base of his throat. As his wife and children and the rest of us watched and worried about his slow progress, the wearying days wore on. To make things even harder, the “trache” tube in his throat hadn’t allowed him to speak, so he’d had to laboriously write everything onto a little pad—an arrangement that didn’t encourage a lot of small talk.
That morning I’d gotten a call from his wife, Judy, that he had finally been moved from the ICU into a regular room and that the breathing tube had been removed. Knowing that he would now be able to speak, I had driven to the hospital looking forward to our first conversation since the start of this whole ordeal. When I walked into his room he gave me a weary but warm smile, and in a voice made gravelly by the recently removed breathing tube he whispered, “Hi!”
I took his hand and looked into his tired eyes. “How are you?” I asked.
“Okay. Better,” he whispered hoarsely.
Then quite spontaneously I asked, “Well, what’s the story? Have you figured out what God’s been up to?”
His answer came back right away, as if he’d been thinking about nothing else for the past two weeks; he whispered with complete conviction, “Al, he’s rebuilding me!”
For a moment I stood speechless, marveling at the deep wisdom of his answer. But I wasn’t completely surprised either; he had always been a thoughtful and spiritual person. As we continued talking I started to realize that he was looking at his suffering so completely with the eyes of faith that he was able to peer deeply into the mysterious meaning of his illness. And I, the monk and priest, unable to see it that way, was helplessly shattered by it all. He was able to see that as his body was wasting away, a deeper and opposite process was taking place: He had realized that God was rebuilding him by means of the suffering.
I had certainly learned a few things about God’s strange ways when St. Benedict’s closed fourteen years earlier, and when I’d spent eleven weeks on crutches after my knee operation in 1980. But Bob’s view of his illness showed me that my view of life was still pretty shallow compared to his. Just how shallow I would find out a month later, when he died.
My grief over Bob’s death was far deeper than I could ever have imagined. The enormous, inexplicable, wordless pain made me understand for the first time the real meaning of the word “grief!’ Probably what made the pain worse than anything I’d ever felt before was that I wasn’t able to see with Bob’s eyes of faith. All I saw was that my brother and best friend had died of a wasting disease, leaving a widow and four young children.
It took months of crying and anger and deep, deep sadness before I started to catch little glimpses of how Bob had seen things. One of the first of these insights came half a year later around Christmas 1987 as I was reading Luke’s narrative of Jesus’ birth. The Christmas story was so familiar that I could read it easily in the Greek, which is what I was doing one morning when suddenly Bob gave me a Christmas present, a little piece of his vision.
It started when I came across one of my favorite words, the noun rhma, “word.”1 What had always fascinated me about rhma was that it had come to mean not just “word,” but also what the word referred to; and so it could also mean “thing, object, matter, event.”2
As I read further in Luke’s Christmas story, I enjoyed watching him play with the two different meanings of rhma, “word” and “event.” After the mysterious events surrounding the birth of John the Baptist, “fear came upon all the neighbors, and all these things [rhmata] were discussed throughout the hill country of Judea.” On Christmas, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go, then, to Bethlehem to see this thing [rhma] that has taken place.” Arriving at the stable “they made known the message [rhma] that had been told them about this child. … And Mary kept all these things [rhmata], reflecting on them in her heart” (Luke 1:64–2:19 passim).3
The shepherds went to see the rhma that had taken place, and Mary kept all these rhmata in her heart; these were not “words” but “events.” Suddenly I began to catch a glimpse of a crucial truth that Bob had seen so clearly. Luke, by playing on the double meaning of “word” and “event,” was inviting us to see the birth of Jesus on two levels. First, there was the visible, historical event in time and space: a baby boy had been born in a small town (or a man had died of lymphoma in a large hospital). Second, for a person of faith that event was also a word that by its nature stood for something else, pointing beyond itself to some meaning. The essential question to ask about any word was after all, “What does it mean?”
As I kept reflecting on this double meaning of “word” and “event,” I began to understand a little better what I had seen in that hospital room months before. While Bob was lying for long hours in the ICU, he had been doing exactly what Mary used to do, quietly consulting his heart and trying to “read” an event as if it were a word that conveyed a meaning. She had pondered the mysterious words of the angel Gabriel (see Luke 1:29), reflected on the meaning of the visit of the three wise men (Matthew 2:9–12), and meditated on the somber prophecy of Simeon (Luke 2:25–35), searching each time for what the Almighty might be asking of her. Bob had reflected on the “event” of his terrible ordeal with lymphoma, and had seen in it a “word” from God, while I could see only a tragic event.
The first Christmas without Bob was painful, as anyone would know who has ever celebrated that first holiday after the death of a loved one. But the pain was eased a little bit by the glimmer of light shed by my friend rhma in the Christmas readings, assuring me that sooner or later I, too, would be able to read the terrible “event” of Bob’s death as a “word” that made at least a little sense.
And indeed, in the following months and years I would come to share more and more of Bob’s vision, and would start to see some meaning in the events surrounding his death. I discovered, for example, that by hollowing me out they had made a little more room in my heart for other people and for God. I discovered, too, that my grieving had given me a special bond with others who were being overwhelmed by grief the way I had been.
As time goes on I still miss Bob, but I also occasionally see some new gift that has come from that horrible event; I can look at the rhma of his death and read it a little more clearly as a word from the Lord.
But that afternoon as I left his hospital room depressed and miserable, I wasn’t able to read anything. Not one single word.
Reflection
1. Think of an event that eventually became a “word” for you. What was its meaning for you? How did you arrive at the meaning? Did it take a long time for you to understand it?
2. Are there certain kinds of events that you find easier to “read” than others? If so, what is it that makes some more difficult to understand?
Sacred Scripture
Rhma is translated as “word” in Matt 12:36; Acts 6:11; and Heb 11:3. The same noun is translated as “subject, thing, event” in Acts 5:32 and 13:42.
Rule of Benedict
Never swerving from his instructions, then, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom. Amen (Prologue, v. 50).
10. The Healing Visit
“HI, PHYLLIS!” I greeted the nurse, “How’s Bob today?”
I had stopped at the nurses’ station on my way to my brother’s room to find out how he was doing that aftern
oon.
“He was a little better this morning,” she answered, looking up from a patient’s chart. “The doctor’s in visiting him right now, so you’ll have to wait a few minutes.”
I thanked her and headed for the now-familiar visitor’s lounge. “He was a little better” probably meant that he had managed to eat a whole cup of JELL-O at lunch. Big deal. But at least, I thought, that would be an improvement over yesterday’s half cup, right? I could remember him running with his long, graceful stride, winning the quarter-mile at the New Jersey AAU state track meet his senior year of high school, so by comparison a cup of JELL-O was a pretty depressing victory.
I was in a foul mood as I walked into the lounge, but, conscious that I was dressed as a priest, I managed to give a sincere priest-smile to the two people who were chatting quietly on the sofa at the far end, near the big window that looked out on an expanse of gravel-covered roof. I didn’t recognize them; they must have been visiting someone else. I slumped into a chair near the door to brood.
Despite my depressed mood and my anger, I found that being in a hospital still made me feel like praying, as it usually did. So, while I was waiting, I started to ask the Lord to help Bob to get stronger, to let him start measuring victories in bigger steps than cups of JELL-O. I asked Jesus to heal whatever was wrong with my brother. Then I started to think how the Lord also works through doctors and nurses and family and friends to do the actual work of curing people.
That’s probably why Jesus put such emphasis on visiting the sick—he even said that our final reward or punishment would be based on it: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, for I was sick and you visited me” (Matthew 25:36).
I glanced up at the big clock; I’d been sitting there for three long minutes waiting to visit my brother.
As far back as the Old Testament, the verb episkeptomai, “to visit”4 had a deep religious meaning—mostly, I suppose, because the Israelites saw God as always “visiting” them. They knew God not as some theological abstraction, but as someone who was constantly intervening in the course of history to act on their behalf: to deliver them from Egypt, to knock down the walls of Jericho, or to restore the temple after the Babylonian Exile.
So when the Jewish scholars who were translating Old Testament Hebrew into Greek looked for a Greek word to express this idea of God’s acting in their lives, they found that episkeptomai fit the bill perfectly: It meant both “to visit” and “to be concerned about.” They used it, for instance, for the Lord’s “looking on” Sarah so that she bore a son, Isaac (Genesis 21:1), and for the patriarch Joseph’s deathbed prophecy that God would one day “look upon” his brothers and lead them out of Egypt (Genesis 50:24). The widowed Ruth decided to return to her native land because she heard that the long drought had ended because “the Lord had had consideration for [episkeptomai] his people” (Ruth 1:6).
The idea that God is constantly and deeply involved in the world carried over into the Christian era, so that in almost half the uses of “to visit” in the New Testament it is God who is doing the visiting. You can hear it in the cry of the amazed onlookers when Jesus raises the son of the widow of Naim: “Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, exclaiming, ‘A great prophet has arisen in our midst,’ and ‘God has visited [episkeptomai] his people’” (Luke 7:16 NAB).
I glanced up at the big electric clock. I’d been waiting for five minutes. I wondered if I should go and see if the doctor had left yet, but I decided to wait a little longer.
I kept reflecting about God’s visiting. At Morning Prayer each day we sing the “Canticle of Zachary,”5 which begins by praising our God who has “visited [episkeptomai] and brought redemption to his people” (Luke 1:68), and ends with “the tender mercy of our God by which the dawn from on high will visit [episkeptomai] us” (v. 78). In that first sentence, the two verbs “visited” and “redeemed” are a pair: They go together, and both mean the exact same thing. This “visiting God” is decidedly not dropping by for a quick hello, but has a clear purpose in mind: to redeem, to bring healing and salvation.
I smiled as I remembered what the nurse, Phyllis, had said back at the desk: “The doctor is in visiting him right now.” I knew that Bob got billed every time a doctor made a “visit” to his bedside. Funny, one of the earliest uses of episkeptomai was for a doctor “visiting” a patient. Obviously the oncologist who was “visiting” Bob was not paying a social call, but had come as a healer with only one goal in mind: to cure Bob’s lymphoma. Maybe that’s why early believers started to use the word to refer to God’s visiting us, because when the Almighty “visits” it’s always to work some healing wonder in our lives.
I found myself praying again: “Lord, please visit Bob this afternoon, and stretch out your hand to touch him to comfort him and heal him. Help the doctor who is trying so hard to cure him, and visit the rest of us, too, with your strength.” I had forgotten for the moment that God had been visiting Bob and the rest of us all along, and was certainly doing so right now, even as the doctor was visiting.
I glanced again at the clock. I’d now been sitting there ten minutes. That was long enough. I stood up and smiled good-by to the two people who were still sitting by the window. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Bob all weak and wasting away, but I did want to go in and hold his hand and talk with him for awhile and just—well—visit.
Reflection
1. God’s visits are life-giving and healing. Do your own interactions with others have the same results? Is there someone God may be expecting you to “visit” in a life-giving and healing way?
2. The verb episkope is used for a shepherd carefully watching his sheep (1 Peter 5:1–2) and gives us words for “overseer” in Greek (episkopos) and Latin (episcopus)—the early Church’s words for “bishop.” If there are people in your life over whom you have been given some charge (children, employees, students, an aging parent), ask yourself how your “overseeing” might also be a kind of blessed “visiting” for those in your care.
Sacred Scripture
Other texts that contain the verb episkeptomai offer plenty of food for meditation:
1. Ex 4:31, “the Lord had given heed to [episkeptomai] the Israelites.”
2. Ps 106:4 (NAB), “Remember [episkeptomai] me, Lord, as you favor your people; come to me with your saving help.”
3. Heb 2:6, “What are … mortals that you should care for [episkeptomai] them”?
4. James 1:27, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for [episkeptomai] orphans and widows in their affliction. …”
Rule of Benedict
Care of the sick must rank above and before all else, so that they may truly be served as Christ, for he said: “I was sick and you visited me,” and “What you did for one of these least brothers you did for me” (Chapter 36, “The Sick Brothers,” vv. 1–3).
11. The God of Compassion
“WELL, AS FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, God killed my brother!”
Even as I was saying it I knew that what I was saying was untrue and sounded stupid. But what else are friends for if you can’t tell them what you’re feeling.
“No he didn’t,” my brother Benedictine replied calmly, gazing out at the view of New York City twenty miles away.
“Yes he did!” I retorted loudly.
“No he didn’t,” he answered in his same even tone. We repeated this a few more times until, seeing that he wasn’t about to give in I gave up on the game.
We just stood there in silence, leaning on the stone wall that runs along the top of the cliff at Washington Rock, and watching tiny toy-sized jets landing at Newark Airport. Off to our left we could see in the far distance the pincushion of lower Manhattan crowded with the needles of dozens of shiny skyscrapers.
It had been only two weeks since my brother’s death, the most painful experience of my life, and emotions were still raging and tumbling around inside me in confused tangles. I could see why people in ancient times thought t
hat all strong emotions were located in the gut. That’s certainly where I’d been feeling them.
In fact, the New Testament Greek word for affection or compassion is actually the plural noun splanchna,6 meaning “the internal organs of the abdomen.” We hear it in Mary’s song of praise, the “Magnificat,” in the phrase “because of the tender of mercy [the splanchna] of our God” (Luke 1:78).
For us Christians, this idea of a God who experiences “tender mercy,” who suffers and who feels, is so familiar and so taken for granted that we lose sight of its powerful implications. This is exactly what had happened to me after my brother’s death. I had lost sight of those crucial Christian beliefs: that the risen Savior suffers when we suffer, that he weeps when we weep, and that he shares in all of our pains. I was furious at God for allowing my brother to die, leaving his wife, Judy, and four little children—which was why I’d just told my brother monk and hiking partner that God had killed my brother. It felt like a way of striking back. Although I’d been celebrating mass and praying with my community four times a day, for the past couple of weeks I had been so angry that I refused to speak to God.
Without another word we turned and starting walking the two miles back to the car along the road through the woods.
Jesus taught us that God is full of compassion. In the parable of the Unforgiving Servant, the servant who owed his master ten thousand talents of silver “fell down, did him homage, and said, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.’ Moved with compassion [splanchnizomai] the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan” (Matthew 18:26–27). In the story of the Prodigal Son, “While [the repentant son] was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion [splanchnizomai]. He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20).
