Sabbath Moments
Ministerial Meandering
Sabbath moments
The nurse’s name was Amber, and she used to tell me that ‘Soup was only for sick people’. She stood quietly in the Trauma bay, looking down at the little child now still amid the detritus of the failed resuscitation all around her. Abandoned by all - except for Amber. It was a moment etched into my memory at the time, and I can see every detail of it still.
Another day, a young lady whose name I never knew, but whose brain had ceased to function - thanks to her boyfriend’s drunken driving - was lying in the OR with different teams of surgeons poised to take their turn at the pickings.
In carefully respected order, lest her heart be taken before her liver or kidneys, every useful organ was removed from this tragic girl, starting with her eyes and ending when, finally, her heart and lungs were removed - and there was no more need for the ventilator. Silence filled her empty spaces. I felt I had witnessed a sort of rape; I called her ‘Briar-Rose’.
Two young parents sat either side of a crib, the mother holding tightly to another hand - one of the Staff Nurses on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Dad, on the other side, was immobile, looking down at his boy - the tiny scrap I had fought for three days to keep alive after his congenital heart defect had been repaired. Sometimes you don’t win, even if the operation was technically perfect. Maybe the lungs were just too immature…maybe this…maybe that.
I stood at the end of the crib quietly, until Dad got up and leant over his son and said, ‘You didn’t have much of a life, did you son? I was so looking forward to taking you fishing, playing soccer with you…’. then he broke down, sobbing. I had to leave before I joined him.
All these are unforgettable ‘sabbath moments’ in my life. You might wonder why I have only mentioned sad and difficult ones - to which I would say that beauty isn’t always or only found in things that bring us joy. I have seen Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’ in Florence - presumably a copy, as the original is apparently in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Nevertheless, it remains a sublime work of art. It does not bring us joy - but perhaps invokes a sense of awe, along with intense sorrow.
However, a couple of days ago, Sheila and I were walking Gracie and chanced to look at the sky. Radiating paths of pink/orange cloud came from a point in the west, separating above our heads, and then converging again to an apparent point in the east. I suppose we were under parallel lines of peach clouds.
And years ago, when we were still courting, coming out from an intense Anatomy course in central London, we were stopped by an orange moon hanging over Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament at the end of Westminster Bridge. These both brought us a quiet and unspoken joy.
Some people’s sabbath moments might be more in line with Mary Poppins’ ‘Favourite Things’, but for me, I need something that makes me stop in my tracks and ponder.
And I actually saw a shooting star streak the sky west of the moon three nights ago.
Philip+