Water From a Rock

I live in New England, and this time of year it's frustrating because the temperature is gradually climbing but not nearly fast enough to make a tangible difference. There's no green grass, no daffodils, no robins, no sound of lawn mowers waking up from their slumber. In fact, it's worse than that. There are still patches of snow on the ground--dirty blotches on brown grass that serve as a cruel reminder of the winter just endured, and they sit there as if to say, "It's not really over, you know. We're still here. And you know what else? It could snow again. Even in April. Don't for a second think it might not."

There's more. This morning on my drive in to work I passed by a craggy rock formation on the side of the road and there were frozen chunks of ice stuck to the rock wall like gobs of glue or waterfalls frozen in time. The ice seems to flow out of the middle of the rock, and I like to pretend that there are little goblins inside the rocks pushing water out of any tiny opening they can find, and the water then transforms to ice when it hits the chilly air of night.

Yes, such scenes remind me that winter is still very much alive in New England, that any hope of the coming of spring must stay just that--a hope. I drive by my son's Little League field and see snow in the outfield and can't even envision a grounder slipping through the second baseman's legs and causing panic all around.

But the other thing I thought of when I saw the ice on the rock was Moses. Moses the unsure leader of that wandering band in the desert; Moses the one who went to God and said, "What am I to do with these people?" Moses who couldn't speak without stuttering. Moses who time after time dealt with quarrelling people and must have wondered what all this wandering was really for. And he does something remarkable: the people are thirsty and at God's command he takes his walking stick and hits a rock with it, and water comes gushing out.

So I see this water gush frozen in time on my way to work this morning in this desert called New England in March, and I realize that I need to have faith like Moses did. At various times I, too, wander in the desert. I, too, grumble and complain and test God. I, too, want to go back to Egypt where there's no economic downturn and housing is affordable and all the children play nicely with each other.

I need to have faith like Moses that spring is in fact just around the bend, that longer, warmer days are coming, that the lilacs will soon burst forth.

Not long after I saw those ice globs clinging to the rock today, I saw something else by the side of the road: crocuses. Small pinpricks barely visible to the naked eye--white, yellow, purple--peeking out to see if anyone's watching, ready to fight back against those bully patches of dirty snow.

Water from a rock indeed.

It's About Time

Time is a funny thing. You can't really make time, even though we say you can. You can't really save time, even though we all try hard and pretend we do with this technology or that convenience. You can't even really spend time, like it's some kind of bizarre currency from outer space, even though we obsess constantly about how we do so. No, time is finite and set and ever-moving, like a motorized exercise wheel in a mouse's cage where the wheel keeps moving no matter how fast or slow the little creature inside wants to go.

I keep trying to sit down to write for this blog, but time keeps slipping by. And I keep thinking: where did the time go since I left the hospital so many weeks ago? What happened? What have I been doing? Well, work, for one. Being a husband and father, for another. In short, as my cousin likes to spell out in slow, deliberate letters, L-I-F-E. Life has happened since I last wrote, and I look at it and marvel at how quickly time seems to pass. Of course, it hasn't passed any faster than those long interminable days of recovery in the hospital. It's just that when we get busy, we forget about the exercise wheel and then we're surprised, shocked even, when we notice that the wheel keeps moving.

When you live with a disability, even one you've had all your life and you've had lots of practice tackling everyday tasks, you realize that time for you is not like time for other people. I have to build in extra time in the morning because it takes me longer to get ready. I have to plan ahead at least a little bit when I do mundane tasks like packing up my bag at the end of the day or going to another part of the building for a meeting. Sometimes I get jealous of other people, "normal people," who don't need to think about time like I do. When I allow myself, I fantasize sometimes about not thinking about time at all and going about my day as oblivious about time as I am about the air I breathe. Oh, how I wish I didn't need to think so much about it, how I wish I could just be rather than think about being late.

And yet. And yet. If I really think about it, the steadiness of time passing is a gift. There is a rhythm and a pattern and a predictability to time that I don't appreciate as much as I should. Time gives space and shape to our lives that allows us to live in freedom, like a fence around a playground that abuts a busy highway. I need to start thanking God for time, maybe even especially when I don't seem to have enough of it. I need to start being grateful for the extra time it takes me in the morning; I need to appreciate more the freedom that the limits of time afford.

It may seem kind of funny to thank God for being behind on a project or late for a party. But that's the paradox of gifts that seem like burdens. If we can become more grateful for the burdens, then maybe--just maybe--they will wrap themselves in colorful paper and disguise themselves as gifts.

Going Home

First, a caveat: the title here is not, so far as I know, a clever metaphor of any kind suggesting anything about my premature demise. Period. I do like metaphors and write with them a great deal--maybe too much. But this one is as literal as it gets. I'm going home. Tomorrow. After almost five interminable weeks. Five weeks of physical therapy and occupational therapy and 5:30 AM vital-signs checks and enduring the food and my family trekking yet once more for a visit and roommates who can't sleep without the TV on and nurses who make me laugh and doctors who show up when they want and 80-year-old patients who stare off in the distance as they tell you about a time when they were young. And that's not even a fraction of what these five weeks have been.

Five weeks, and tomorrow I'm going home.

Home. What a lovely-sounding word. Cliches abound around that word, like a ball made out of rubber bands or a maypole wrapped up in ribbons in the spring. But sometimes cliches are apt because the word is too slippery and somehow cliches give it traction. Home. It's a whispy word that floats around; it's a warm word that glows a little when you say it just right; it's a word that brings to mind waiting and invitation and welcoming all at once. We wait to go home, or home waits for us. We invite someone home, or we are invited to someone else's. We welcome someone home, or home welcomes us.

But as so many others have already said, home is not so much a physical space. Four walls can't wait or invite or welcome. No, it's the people in it that count. It's the sense of place and belonging and rest. The chance to be just you--no pretending, no airs, no sense, really, of yourself at all. At least that's the way it should be.

No wonder going home is a metaphor for heaven.

Metaphors aside, tomorrow I get to see this hospitally place in the rear view mirror, and it will be nice to see it shrink like that. But it's what lies ahead facing forward that excites me, that marvelous and lovely thing coming into view called home.

New Life

Yesterday, here in the hospital, there were no less than ten babies born down on the birth wing. How do I know this? Because this particular hospital does a stunning thing: every time a baby is born here, someone pushes a button somewhere and then "Lullaby And Goodnight" chimes in all over the hospital. You can hear it from your room; you can hear it when you're lying there in a hallway waiting for an x-ray; you can hear it on your way to the cafeteria. Usually, the song comes on once, perhaps twice in a given day. Never more than three times. That is, until yesterday. Ten times, from about 7:30 AM until 8 at night. I counted.

One of the therapists here deflated my wonder with a splash of cynicism. "I know why there are so many births," she says. "Tax deductions. The economy's pretty rough, you know."

How mean of her to bring me down to earth like that. But even if she's right, that parents ask for labor to be induced so that the child tax credit can be claimed for 2008, I'm choosing to focus on the wonder of so many births in so brief a time.

I'm also choosing to marvel at the idea of playing the Lullaby song throughout the hospital every time a new life takes its first gasp of air. Whose idea was that? How brilliant. I think about the nurse cleaning soiled bedsheets for the 6th time today, or the elderly patient who wonders if his broken hip will ever heal, or the ER doc who just lost a battle to save a life. They all hear the magical music at the same time. Do they notice? Does it lift their spirits, even just a little? How can it not?

I got some New Life news of my own yesterday: my doctor said I can start walking again, after four agonizing weeks-that-feels-like-years of calling this hospitally place my home and getting around in a chair on wheels. This is step one to going home, though that might still be a week or more away. But it is a step nonetheless. And I took that literal first step today and it felt difficult and painful and good and gravity-defying all at once. And if I didn't know better, I thought I heard Lullaby And Goodnight playing yet again. But this time it was only in my head.

The Manger and the Cross

I don't usually pay much attention to art. Don't get me wrong--I like art and visiting art galleries, but when I see something about art in the paper or on the web, I usually gloss over it. Today was different. Today I read about a discovery at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts that struck me sideways like a gust of air.

Apparently there's a painting kept there at the MFA called "The Nativity" by a Renaissance painter named Jacopo Tintoretto. I've never heard of him and never seen the painting, but the article describes the work as very large, somewhat pedestrian and, truth be told, not very good. At least that's what the critics say. But recently, during a routine restoration of the painting, the staff there made a startling discovery. An x-ray revealed that Tintoretto had used this canvas before, and they found that lying beneath the images of Mary and the Baby Jesus and the shepherds and all the rest was a portion of an even larger painting that the artist never completed. I guess artists did this all the time (recycling canvas, perhaps?), but here's the rub: the painting underneath was of Jesus hanging on the cross. All you can see are his legs, but it's impossible to mistake it--that's the death of Jesus, hiding beneath his birth. (Click here if you want to glimpse a remarkable graphic of the two scenes.)

The article goes on to explain the nature of these things, that Tintoretto probably didn't like how he had done the crucifixion and just decided to paint over it like a schoolboy might write over a mistake on a math problem instead of using an eraser.

Perhaps.

But I think there's something deeper going on here. And I wonder if Tintoretto didn't do this on purpose, a clever transfiguration of canvas silently whispering to us from the 16th century. "Take a closer look," he seems to be saying. "Look beneath the peaceful manger and the light of the stable and see the very purpose of this birth. The crucifixion is why he came."

The wise men knew this of course; why else would one of the gifts be what amounts to ancient embalming fluid? But was Tintoretto picking up on this idea when he decided to reuse his canvas? We do not and cannot know. But I suspect he did.

It is tempting to forget, even now just two days before Christmas, that Jesus came to die. Too morbid, we say to ourselves, too sad and scary to think of this beautiful baby hanging on a cross. No, we'd rather stay focused on the baby even though we know his fate. Come to think of it, Santa is a safer option altogether.

So it turns out that the painting of the cross completes the painting of the manger, that the crucifixion lies in the shadow beneath the birth. Maybe Jacopo Tintoretto knew this all along.

Hospitality

It was many years ago now that I first noticed it, first saw that embedded within the word 'hospitality' was the word 'hospital.' At first I didn't get it. To me, these words were at polar opposites of the emotional spectrum. 'Hospitality' connotes something inviting, warm, with good friends all around and good food just over in the next room. 'Hospital,' largely because I had spent so much time in one growing up, conveys a sense of dread, pain, loneliness, stale-white brokenness, and of course bad food.

But then it hit me. The two words are intimately linked. They're not 2 sides of the same coin; they are both sides all at once. Hospitality in its purest form is what we extend to the broken, to the lonely, to those whose pain is bearable only in the company of others--in other words, to those we'd find in a hospital. And when we're sick or broken or in unbearable pain, where do we go? To a hospital, because that's the place we can be healed. So it turns out that the two words are connected because hospitality is in fact an act of healing. It took my breath away when I first saw this; it still does.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, seeing how today is Day 15 of my latest hospital stay. The other day a nurse, unprovoked, started telling me about her father who had been homeless and had recently died a broken and lonely man. And here she was, supposed to be binding up my wounds when hers seemed much deeper to me. But that's the funny thing about hospitality--the guest just as easily becomes the host when we are transparent with one another.

Jesus knew this well. Just before his birth, the world was waiting for the Messiah, holding its breath, even. And when he came so gently, so quietly, the world had little choice but to extend its hospitality to him (excepting, of course, for Herod). But in one of the great cosmic ironies, the guest was in fact the one through whom the world was made. And as the guest grew up, he slowly and without fanfare assumed the role of host. We were the ones who were desperate for hospitality, aching for healing, yearning to be made whole.

And Jesus invites us to the banquet still.

Waiting

I don't much like waiting. It feels useless, wasteful, unproductive. Waiting means being out of control, and I don't like that either. I suspect most people don't, and that's why we don't like waiting. I hear there are people you can rent to stand in lines for you so you don't have to wait. That's funny, but if I had the means I'd be tempted to do that too.

The other day here in the rehab ward my physical therapist and I had a conversation about the time it takes for broken bones to heal. She knows me well enough to know that I am impatient with my progress and I have a bent towards overdoing things, pushing myself, overtaxing my already levied body. "You've got to give it time," she said. "Can't you invent a pill to speed this up?" I said. She laughed. "Oh, if only I could," said she. And then this: "I'm pretty sure I could retire early."

That got me to thinking. What if we could speed the healing process? It would mean a lot less waiting, to be sure. But I suspect it would mean a lot less human contact as well, and we already suffer from too much isolation in the name of technology and progress and speed. Just yesterday I was out in the hall and saw a beautiful thing. One of the elderly patients here shimmied ever so slowly in her walker out of her room and over to the room across the hall. "Sandra?" she called from the door. "Oh, Julie!" came the reply. "How wonderful of you to come visit!"

What would happen if we invented a pill or a machine to speed the healing process? Certainly not a friendship like that, born on the wings of brokenness and nurtured in the nest of the time it takes to heal.

No, I don't much like waiting. But if I had a choice between waiting and loneliness, I'd choose waiting every time.