I recently attended an exhibition of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) at the Met Breuer. I had never really thought a whole lot of Munch before, but after a few months of working as a hospital chaplain, I found myself facing the works of this individual who gave artistic expression to his own encounters with death, loss, and mental illness with a new sense of familiarity. These paintings were about me. They were about my patients. Munch gave color and texture to the wordless despair of a mother helpless at the deathbed of her daughter in his series of paintings on “The Sick Child.” And I was stuck by the intimate face-to-face encounters with individuals caught in a moment of inner torment, in “Despair” and “Jealousy.”

Language offers ample tools for the work of theological reflection that is essential to my functioning and learning as a chaplain. But these visual meditations offered something else: another way to do theology. The felt like—in the wise words of a patient who recently participated in the weekly spirituality group I lead on the Adult Psych floor—”an alternative form of prayer.”

Here is an alternative prayer I offer this evening, a vessel for the pain and the hope that poured out in my patient visits today.