You never know about someone else's interior life. You see their heads in the hallway. Their eyes as they look at computer screens or at their patient's chart. Someone stands over an elderly man in a loose fitting hospital gown. His neck and shoulder are covered with age spots. When I see his face, his eyes are vacant. Open but seeing nothing. The nurse is adjusting one thing... then another. She is wearing pink scrubs. Her eyes are flickering around, gathering information. Seeing much, presumably, but one can never tell. Does she know that this blank faced man before her was once a toddling boy? Does she know that he's not just an elderly fall-risk, but an aging sacrament? Do I know these things?
I lug my body around like a boy in a nightmare. I used to be so fast. So weightless. Oh, I am still young. Youngish. I look in the mirror and I see myself. I see that my skin has its scars and blemishes, like a car that's not old yet, but not new anymore. I've picked up a few dings. I look into my eyes, which are too small for my taste, and wonder: "Who the hell are you?"
I look around and see people and wonder what they think and feel. The doctor is deep into the Epocrates app on his iPhone, but just before he was making a grocery list. A physical therapist carries something that looks like a giant seat belt, but a moment before she was thinking about the new Trader Joe's going up on Nicholasville Rd. Everyone else is working, carefully tending to their tasks, but probably thinking about sex. And even though most of us probably think about that quite a bit, I won't write more about it, lest you become embarrassed.
There is another temptation. To see each person as a random bag of meat. Or as a consumer. Or as a pathology. Even ministers fall prey to this. If a church loses bodies in the pews, then something must be wrong. "The church is dying." Every person is reduced to some quantifiable bit of commerce. We look for what we can get and we arrive at simple, obvious conclusions.
Look over there... THAT person is a patient. He has a patient ID number. An admitting diagnosis. Doctors have a list of numbers that tell us why that person is here. They have another list of numbers that tell us when they get to leave. At some point, the numbers get so bad that there's nothing much more to do than to just bury them.
But he could have been a hero. Or a devil. Yes, I've picked on the doctors. But professors and business execs muddle along in similar exercises. Chaplains do too.
Let's go back to the "aging sacrament" in the first paragraph. Here is the truth: We can't know what he's thinking. But he is a means of experiencing God.
He may have dementia, or he may be drugged, or he may have a low IQ, or he may be a genius. Doesn't matter. For all we know this patient is somewhere in his childhood. Visiting with friends from long ago. Sitting on his grandpa's knee. Stealing his first kiss from a girl at the high school dance. Toddling towards his mother's loving arms. We don't know. Maybe he is communing with God. He has nothing to say to us, because he's heading into an undiscovered country, and the views are extraordinary. We see a "fall risk," but who knows what he sees? Who knows what we could see if we looked hard enough.
We make lists... label things and people... to establish order out of chaos. We HAVE to. But the universe is strange. People are strange. And when we see another person, we are gazing at a mystery. We are looking at God.
When you see me next, you won't know what I'm thinking. And you will be a mystery to me. If we are honest, we might find that we are mysteries to ourselves much of the time. That is, perhaps, disturbing. True seeing doesn't give us fixed definitions. We see that everything, including our understanding, must always be in a state of flux. We look in the sky and see that even the stars are moving... changing. Does that frighten us? Or does it stir something adventurous inside of us? Every moment the world is created anew. Every moment that elderly man, draped in his hospital gown, points us towards the ineffable, riddles of the universe we will never fully grasp.
Our job is to keep searching anyway. The bread crumbs, I believe, will lead us somewhere. Then again, do they need to?
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