"Being a fellow pilgrim" and/or "Walking her to CAT Scan"

One day this summer, while serving as a chaplain at a local hospital, I was paged to respond to a possible “stroke code.”  I arrived on the unit and asked one of the nurses about the patient. 

            “Oh, she’ll be on her way down to CT scan soon.  Poor thing, she had back surgery a few days ago,” I was told by a nurse.  A CT scan would help determine if she indeed had a stroke.  At that moment the patient, a woman in her sixties, was being wheeled out of her room by a technician.  I walked up to the bed and introduced myself.

            “Ms. Jones*, my name is Robert; I’m the chaplain on this unit.  I hear you are going to CT scan now, would you like me to come back later or to join you?” She nodded at the latter suggestion and seemed to mouth something but she could speak in only a whisper, and barely that.

I walked beside her bed as we made our way through the labyrinthine halls of the hospital, down two floors to the imaging labs.  It is difficult for me to imagine the view from Ms. Jones’s perspective; I’ve not been in a hospital bed in a long time.  The halls which seem confusing when walking upright must be more difficult to understand when all you can see are the ceiling panels and lights, the occasional wall, the elevator, and passing people’s heads.  In a hospital it is easy to feel lost, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  

The waiting/staging area for imaging is a large blank room, but the lights were half-off throughout, which made it seem smaller and a bit more oppressive to the senses.  It was a gloomy place.  The technician parked Ms. Jones’s bed and went to prepare the scanner.  Aside from myself and Ms. Jones, there was one other person in the room, a staff person.  I pulled a chair bedside and took Ms. Jones’s hand when she offered it to me. 

We spent the next ten minutes in near silence.  As I said, she could not speak above a whisper, and she seemed distant and anxious.  There were a few questions and answers exchanged.  What was more important was to sit there with her; to keep her from being alone. I offered a prayer for her. 

When the technician returned to let us know the lab was ready, Ms. Jones looked at me and squeezed my hand.

“Is it possible for me to join you?” I asked the technician.

“Oh sure, that’s fine,” the technician replied.

I held Ms. Jones’s hand as we continued our trip through another set of hallways and then into the CT scanning room.  The machine looks imposing, but not as large as an MRI. 

I held her hand until it was time to lift her from her bed to the machine.  I stayed for the scan and spoke to her during it, although from the same small room that the technicians were in.  After the scan I held her hand as she was taken back through the hallways to the waiting/staging area to await transport back to the unit.  I stayed with her until I was paged to an incident in the ER and made a mental note to visit her again.  When I told her that I needed to go, but that she would see me again, she mouthed “thank you.”** 

“Walking with someone on their journey” and “pilgrimage” are popular ways of thinking and talking about spirituality.  Many congregations and pastors talk about the need to “meet people where they are” and “join them in their journeys.”***  Experiences such as the one with Ms. Jones helped me realize that good spiritual practice—and good pastoral practice—is both metaphorical and literal; spiritual and physical.  It means walking with people through the hospital, or the funeral home, or the protest march.  It means being present to them in a real and tangible way in the scariest and hardest moments of their life; like when they may be asking themselves if they just had a stroke as they recover from a painful back surgery...and then being transferred from one bed to a machine and then back to a bed to get a CT scan after this back surgery, with the resulting back pain.    

            Perhaps, the greatest witness to Christ is not how loud or how reasoned a Christian’s arguments are about the faith, but about the Christian’s willingness to let go of the illusion of pristine, drama-free lives we supposedly “earn” through our relationship with God, and join people as they/we walk through uncertainty, pain, doubt, fear, and death.  It is a bit harder to follow a person into these spaces when we’d naturally rather just hear and see and experience their joy and happiness alongside them.  Yet in all of these moments, one can finds glimpses of the Divine.

Being there matters. 

Staying there matters. 

           

 _________

*Ms. Jones is not her real name.

** I did go back to visit during that shift but she was asleep whenever I would come by.  As a general rule of thumb, and knowing how hard it is to sleep in a hospital, I didn’t wake her.

***The sentiments seem to come close to cliché, and maybe I think it seems clichéd just because I hear it nearly daily at seminary.  But I know I benefitted from such an attitude when I was willing to give Christianity another try.