In a previous post, I shared the final section from the Theological Dynamics paper I wrote during the second unit of my current CPE residency. Here, I share another section from that paper. It expands on some of my reflections from an earlier post on this blog: “A Prayer for Healing: Art and Illness.”
Two years ago my parents, partner and I traveled halfway down Baja California, Mexico, to a remote place called Scammon’s Lagoon, where hundreds of gray whales journey each year to mate and give birth. We joined a tour boat that went out on the lagoon, where we sat for about an hour watching as hundreds of whales leapt, mated, and played around us.
A week later, when I recounted the experience to my spiritual director, I shared my particular amazement and elation at a moment when a whale and her calf suddenly emerged right next to the boat. Sitting there within a foot of this massive, beautiful creature, it felt as though my entire perception of myself and my place in the universe suddenly shifted. Everything felt momentarily simpler and more marvelous. My spiritual director rejoiced with me in the retelling of the story, and encouraged me to hold onto that image of the whale in my memory, to recall it as needed like a prayer.
The idea using an image as a prayer felt novel to me at the time: prayer, as I had come to understand it through example and practice, was an essentially verbal thing, although occasionally augmented by physical postures like kneeling or folding one’s hands. But the idea of using an image, presence, or memory as a prayer felt right to me. It spoke to the fact that, sometimes, when it comes to matters of transcendence, words fail. This feels as true for life’s greatest joys as it does for life’s greatest pain.
In January, I went to an exhibition of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch at the Met Breuer Museum and I found myself in a room full of images of illness and dying—personal, familial images—the art feeling unexpectedly familiar in light of my recent months of training as a hospital chaplain. There were two paintings in particular that stood out to me, a pair of meditations on the same subject, both titled “The Sick Child.” There Munch had reflected on the illness and death of his own sister. The works gave silent homage to the wordless despair of a mother at the deathbed of her child.
It recalled a woman I had sat with one early Saturday morning in the Emergency Department, who had the previous day noticed a change in her adult son with cerebral palsy, and brought him into the Emergency Department only to watch him die, inexplicably, before her eyes. I sat with her—mostly in silence, though the few words that she did speak have remained seared in my memory—for about an hour that morning, waiting for her family to arrive. But she made it known that my physical presence was a comfort to her. Even when her support system did arrive, she did not want me to leave her side, accompanying her and her family members to go see her son’s body.
The helplessness I’d felt sitting with this woman had been consuming. There was nothing I could say in reply to her shock and devastation, the pain that she acknowledged she had not even begun to fully feel. But my presence there with her that morning felt like a prayer. A prayer for her isolation. A prayer for her healing. A prayer for I don’t know what. But I was there.
