The town where I live is tourist-driven. Therefore, nearly everyone of us who lives here has a job they're overqualified for. Comparatively speaking, I have a desirable job, because I work at the hospital. However, it's in the kitchen, so I'm still doing the same sorta foodservice job that motivated me to finally finish my degree so that, "I'll never have to do this kind of work ever again." I've had my degree for twenty years now; nearly eleven of those years have been in foodservice.
People can be at their most anal, most a-holeness when it comes to their food. Throw in being hospitalized and it can understandably make them even moreso. Further, the lines of communication between the second floor, where patients and nurses are, and our kitchen on the first floor can typically be poor. This patient doesn't want what they said they did, earlier, or their diet has changed, or they want this something or other, now; or the patient has left to go home, been transferred to another hospital or other facility, or can't eat because they're having a procedure, which means they'll need a second tray when the procedure is completed, and they'll be even hungrier, grouchier, then.
There aren't any closets in the kitchen, so I've made the hospital's staff elevator my prayer closet. At least four times for every meal, when I'm transferring food carts, I have to take the elevator. Ours is a small hospital (our town has less than six thousand), so I all but always ride the elevator by myself. Going up to, or down from, the second floor, I have a good half-minute or so to bow my head, or drop it in exasperation/exhaustion, and pray for strength, clarity, perseverance, patience(!), faith, trust, and/or divine intervention.
It's fairly common to hear folks talk about hospitals being Holy Ground; but I bet most of them don't think to include the elevators.
A La Mayor Gloria de Dios
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Monday, October 22, 2012
Scones of Christ
One recent evening, I stayed after
my closing shift in the hospital kitchen, to do some baking. This is something
I’ve become know for: baking cookies, at least once a week. This time, though,
rather than cookies for that night’s staff, or for sale the following day, I
was making scones for the operating room nurses and surgeons, who had eight
extra surgeries scheduled the next day. They’ve been huge fans of my scones,
preferring them over my cookies.
I was somewhere amid the mixing of
ingredients and forming of the dough when I realized that what I was doing was
something that wouldn’t be allowed, anywhere else I’ve worked. (Too many
problems with someone staying on after their shift, not to mention the
food-costs of making something not on the menu.)
In this small river-valley where I
live, there’s a sense of close-knit community that sets it apart from even
other small towns. It’s one of the things that drew me to repeatedly visit, led
me to eventually move here. I’ve come to accept it, expect it—having forgotten
what a distinguishing characteristic it is.
Just because something has been so
for nearly a decade doesn’t make it any less a thing of grace. And it is likely
its own act of grace, recognizing grace. When I realized how I’d been blest to
work in a place that allows me to do a simple act like baking, I prayed thanks
for that blessing, and also the blessing of being able to see it as so.
This story, to close. I learned to
bake—cookies, scones, muffins, and such—at a local café that’s since gone out
of business. Five or so years ago, during my early days there, one of the
co-owners was a retired Catholic priest and monk. Invariably, every time I’d
have him taste-test something I was working on, before taking that taste, he’d
intone, “Body of Christ.”
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Community
In a recent conversation with a
nurse at the hospital where we both work, I was telling how my having to work
every Sunday interferes with my being able to attend worship. She mentioned
that she just needs to step outside in order to spend time with God. Now, the
part of Colorado where we live is awesome, and quite easily does evoke an, “Oh
my God;” and further, I grew up the son of a wildlife biologist, so I know
about coming to be with God in the quiet of the forests, alongside the living
waters. But church worship isn’t about our alone time with God. It’s about our
coming together as a community to join together in being with God.
To remain outside of such community
makes it easier to sink totally into one’s self, to settle and stagnate, to
become a singular, not really alive thing. You’re not rubbing up against the
notions of others’, particularly the troublesome ones which poke holes in your
notions and carry their implications further, or in differing directions, than
you intended. Nor are you having oddball ideas thrust at you, which sink in and
begin growing—whether weedy growth or possibly beautiful and beneficial things
you’ve never seen before. Of course, with a community you have needs, dreams,
hopes, desires, hang-ups, and irritating habits other than your own. You cease
being the center of the universe, instead, becoming just one more body
continually going in circles.
As these things happen, what
started this conversation with the nurse was my mentioning it was World
Communion Sunday. So, I see a certain properness that our conversation led me
to consider the communion aspect of worship which distinguishes it from
solitary time alone with God.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Which Way?
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the
life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 14:6 NRSV
Oy vey, the ways these words of
Jesus have been used to insist that Christianity is the sole, one true religion,
with all others falling short, at best. It’s yet one more place where a line
from God’s love letter to God’s people is used to bludgeon them.
This passage comes from the book of
John, which begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.” So seems to me we need to come to this particular Gospel
with a pair of eyes that don’t read only what’s on the surface of the pages,
but also discern what’s beneath and behind the writing. We need to read in
brief bits, stopping to ponder what we’ve read, asking what it means. To apply
John’s words literally is to miss their point and their intention by a wide
mark.
Look again at what Jesus said: “No
one comes to the Father…” This isn’t about getting God closer to us; it’s about
our getting closer to God. After all, this is the same God who’ll leave the
ninety-nine gathered sheep in order to search for the lost one sheep. The same
God whom St Paul says loves us so fiercely and persistently that there is
nothing whatsoever at all that can separate us from that love. And surely one
of the reasons God’s ways are not our ways is because God is so phenomenally
beyond human perception.
It doesn’t seem to me that such a
God would have but one singular port of entry. Too, there’s an earlier verse in
John, where Jesus says, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I
must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one
flock, one shepherd. [10:14]” We’re dealing, again, with metaphor; but one
interpretation made by Christian scholars is that Jesus is including
non-Christians as members of The Sheepfold of God. So, what was Jesus talking
about in the opening passage? I think it’s worth discussing.
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Saturday, September 1, 2012
Harmonic Frustration
In one blog I follow, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer posts a poem of hers, every day. A recent post refers to the song of a river; and what keeps it from falling into the clogged waters of cliché is Trommer’s telling us this riversong is due to the river being frustrated in its course, being impeded by changes and obstacles in its path.
Here’s the poem I’m referring to:
Tanka
The river song
fills the evening—an homage
not to flow
but to what
stands in its way.
Like most folks, I don’t like being frustrated. This poem, though, has me thinking. Just maybe there is something substantial to the cliché regarding the silver linings of dark clouds, or of the lotus flower blooming in a pile of yak flop. It also got me remembering that sounds, and especially musical ones, don’t happen without vibrations; and vibrations can’t occur unless there’s a disturbance to an object’s stasis, its sense of stillness and poise. Until, say a guitar string, is strung in taut tension and then plucked, there is no note, no music.
And I’m not all that comfortable with how this applies to life—to my life, especially. It makes me squirm, seeing that it’s only by being stretched and struck, or by being thwarted, that allows music to be manifested. But it does offer another meaning to the notion that we’re to be instruments of God’s will.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Carried Away
I work in a hospital kitchen where
there’s often too much to do, and too few people to get it done, sanely and
civilly. So, it’s not just the cooking appliances that can get hot. Feeling
we’re understaffed is a common sensation. Lunches can be especially
exasperating, with patient meals, and two distinct staff/visitor meals—the
regular lunch and the lunch special—all needing to be prepared and ready to go
at roughly the exact same time.
During one recent lunch, things
were even more frenzied and crazy making than typical. But once the patient
trays had been delivered, the staff/visitor lunches had been put out and were being devoured,
and things had begun settling down, I noticed one of the lunch special
sandwiches had been set aside for me, wrapped in foil, with my name on it.
Despite the chaos, I was still, nonetheless, being thought of, being loved.
It can happen to any of us that
life carries us away. Our world diminishes and scrunches in around us, limiting
our view. We become isolated and self-absorbed, forgetting it’s not solely
about us. All around us, things seem, at best, half-empty. It easily becomes a
vicious cycle, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fortunately, as Paul tells us,
there is not anything, nor any combination of things, that can separate us from,
stand in the way of us, being loved. And it’s not usually with grandiose
gestures that love is expressed. Paraphrasing Paul, love doesn’t call attention
to itself; it just is. It’s typically seen in the quiet commonplace
actions, ones we would otherwise skip over, missing their subtle transcendence.
Which brings us this crucial
lesson: Love is all around; we just need to open ourselves to the seeing it.
The kingdom of God is, afterall, right here, right now. Heaven: It’s under our
feet.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Safe Landing?
There’s a Christian aphorism that
goes something like: God doesn’t promise us a smooth flight, just a safe
landing. I have issues with this notion; and it’s such a broadly open metaphor. Just when is this safe landing? At the end of the journey through our current dark
forest? At the end of our life? At the beginning of our eternal afterlife? Part
of what vexes me, I think, is that this phrase sounds so wise and wonderfully
comforting, yet winds up not meaning much of anything. Like meringue and cotton
candy, it seems so richly decadent and sweet at first, yet leaves nothing to
sustain a body. It also bothers me because it’s so obviously untrue. Think
Dietrich Bonhoeffer; the early Christian martyr, Stephen; the persecutions
leading to death of Christians (and non-Christians, too) throughout today’s
world—and this is scarcely even the tip of a ginormous iceberg. They're
crashes, not landings; and they’re definitely far from “safe.”
Yet, still, our God knows each and
every hair of each and every one of us. The “more excellent way” of God, is
love. And, to be quite certain, if God didn’t absolutely desire to deal with
us, we would have been dropped ages and ages ago.
Greater minds than mine have been
unable to solve this seeming discrepancy: Our omnipotent, omnipresent, and
omniloving God allows us to live such impotent, distant, and hate-riddled
lives. “God’s ways our not our ways,” sure. But couldn’t they be, at least once
in awhile, more “godly?” Then again, as Paul says, we won’t see things clearly
until later on. At the moment, things remain muddled. And it surely often
escapes us the myriad ways God does indeed sublimely intervene into our lives,
softening its blows. Perhaps, what God promises us is actually a safe-er
landing.
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