Compline & Confusion in a Manhattan Hospital
Compline & Confusion in a Manhattan Hospital
Rachel Rim
On Christian Wiman & Faith as Contingency
At the hospital where I work as a chaplain, there’s a skywalk 11 stories high that connects two of the buildings, composing part of our sprawling network of inpatient and outpatient units. On clear days, one can stand halfway down the glass corridor and look out at the stunning Manhattan skyline framed by the Hudson River. Sometimes on my overnight shifts, walking back from rounding our ICUs, I’ll stop in the empty corridor and face that majestic view of lights against the inky darkness. I imagine all the nameless people who call this city home, including the ones whose ailing bodies have brought them to our halls, and I’ll whisper Compline into the stillness:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
Sometimes I pray that prayer. Still, other nights I gaze out at the rows of skyscrapers and feel not God’s presence but his absence. If I pray anything at all on those nights, it is not an Episcopal liturgy but just a few anguished words: “What are You doing?” “Please help.” “Do something.” The faces of my patients and their families flood my mind, their inconsolable grief like a blanket of snow covering any trace of my faith, and I walk the rest of the corridor in exhausted, sometimes defiant, silence.
*
Lately, I’ve been re-reading Christian Wiman’s spiritual memoir My Bright Abyss, which I first read a year out from college after an acquaintance was so convinced I’d love it that he sent me a copy in the mail. (He was quite right.) Once again, Wiman’s words are deeply nourishing to me—perhaps even more so now than they were five years ago. In fact, re-reading Wiman has revealed to me just how much my faith has changed in this season of my life; I’m at a different place than I was then, a landscape filled with less certainty and more questions, fewer labels and more ambiguity, and far more resonant with Wiman’s own mystical musings. I understand a little better what he means, for instance, when he writes that Christ is contingency; that faith is change; that human love opens up the possibility of divine love. I’m thankful for the book’s reminder that I am not alone in the aesthetic, ambivalent, at times anguished ways that I experience God.
At one point in his memoir, Wiman writes about how his love for, and marriage with, his wife awakened “the faith that was latent within him.” As he puts it: “it was human love that awakened divine love.” I think some version of this rings true for me. I feel it most deeply when I think about the patients and families I’ve cared for over this past year—the COVID patients in isolation rooms, their families pressed against the glass ICU doors; the infants on our cardiac NICU, with tiny teddy bears or rosaries draped across their cribs; the cancer patients awaiting test results and the transplant candidates ready to rush to the operating room the moment they get that call. I think about all the conversations I’ve had about God’s will, or God’s love, or God’s absence. I think about the parents of terminally ill children, asking themselves what they did wrong for their children to deserve such a fate. I think about all the prayers I’ve been asked to pray—prayers for healing, for comfort, for rest, for permission to stay, for permission to let go, for peace that goes against every grain of logic. These encounters are not just memories; they are the material that makes up my faith, both the reverence and the rage, the beauty and the horror. Remembering God’s love for them, doing my best to pull the thread of divine affection and presence through the crippling knot of crisis, helped me to remember my love for God. I have found that it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to intercede for someone in prayer day after day, week after week, to plead for God to direct his love and goodness upon their anguished lives, and to listen and validate their own spiritual meaning-making in those moments, and not feel one’s own appetite for divine love whetted.
*
To recognize within myself a greater appetite for divine love is not necessarily to recognize a greater capacity for receiving it—or even a greater ability to recognize it. In fact, I’ve been sitting with the realization that my faith, in its present iteration, is difficult to describe, and that it doesn’t seem to belong with the spiritual articulations of most people I know. I’ve been realizing, also, that I rarely feel like God is speaking to me, or feel like I “experience” God—a rather terrifying revelation for someone who gets paid to help others connect with their own source of the Divine. I even had the deeply disconcerting thought this week that I’m not sure I understand what people mean when they talk about finding the Jesus of the Gospels beautiful. Truthfully, as I’ve started to read through the Gospels again after a long hiatus (I just finished the Gospel of John), I’ve been struck by how irritating Jesus can be. I feel more on the side of the Pharisees than on the side of this enigmatic and temperamental rabbi from the hill country. And it isn’t as if the Gospels are full of the kinds of intimate details and personality quirks that help me feel connected to other people. Yes, the Jesus we see in the Gospels heals some sick people, but he doesn’t heal many more. Yes, he says some kind words to people, but he says harsh words to many others. Jesus in the Gospels doesn’t really feel like a full, knowable person, a round character, someone I would want as a friend—and perhaps this is why I struggle to feel like I have a personal “friendship” with Jesus, in the way that I grew up thinking it should mean.
But if I don’t feel particularly connected to the Christ of the Gospels, if I struggle to see my life through the lens of an intimate relationship with that Christ, then what is my faith? Am I actually a Christian? When I sort through the debris of what it is I feel I should feel, is there anything left?
What I think I would say is this: the way I do relate to Jesus, the way I do find him powerfully, indescribably beautiful, is in the narrative of Scripture as a whole. When I read from Genesis to Revelation, from the exodus to the exile to first century Israel, and when I see how Jesus takes up the motifs and themes and stories of the Hebrew Bible and embodies them in new and consonant ways—that I find profoundly beautiful. It’s more of a literary beauty, perhaps, than it is obviously relational. One of my great fears is that this kind of beauty is not the “right” kind, not the kind that I should have or that God wants me to have. But I’m trying to make more space for naming what my faith is rather than what it is not, and to realize that I like my faith and the shape that it takes. I want to hold room for the possibility that these two beauties—one more literary and theological for the narrative, and the other more relational for the person—are not as distinct as I sometimes fear. Perhaps there are as many different ways to love God and to have a relationship with Jesus, as many different ways to be incorporated into faith and to incorporate the Gospel into one’s life, as there are ways to love one another, and to love this earth, and to discover nature as divine creation. There is great beauty in belief in all its kaleidoscopic diversity.
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Mulling over these thoughts over the past few weeks has made me wonder how many other people feel this way and do not know how to put their fears into words, or wonder if they are alone in the expression that their faith takes. Are there dozens—maybe dozens and dozens or hundreds or thousands of us—going about our lives feeling like we are deficient in how we do and do not relate to God? As if there were one set and acceptable way to inhabit our faiths that we must try to twist ourselves into feeling, rather than recognizing that our faith arises out of our lived experiences, which we in turn embody in our unique personalities, and thus it makes perfect sense that my way of knowing God is not your way, and your way of knowing God is not my way. I am only now beginning to recognize how deeply I have felt this fear of deficiency, and how much I have longed for someone to tell me, “Your faith is okay. Your faith is beautiful. Just because it is harder to label or manifests more ‘intellectually’ than obviously ‘relationally’ does not mean you do not love God with the same quality or quantity of love as the next person. It does not mean that God is moved by it any less.” I feel a deep sadness in realizing how long I’ve carried this fear and this longing—yet I also feel grateful that I can name it now and feel that fear a little less acutely. As Wiman writes:
Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life . . . Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change. I don’t mean simply that faith changes (though there is that). I mean that just as any sense of divinity that we have comes from the natural order of things—is in some ultimate sense within the natural order of things—so too faith is folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product.
This understanding of faith as “folded into change,” as inseparable from the ambiguity and ambivalence of our becoming, feels so comforting to me. I have changed significantly in the past five years. Seminary, loss, chaplaincy, the cultural waves of our time—all of these have molded me, broken me, and remade me into someone as unknowable to myself as any stranger. It is difficult sometimes to say what it is I believe, what I believe about belief, what communities I identify with and want to belong to, what I hope for and what grounds my hope. I have felt not just my faith but myself as profoundly, confoundingly inarticulable lately—an immense frustration for someone who finds herself in language. Yet Wiman seems to be saying that this inarticulateness, this process of change, is itself the essence of faith—the essence of it, and perhaps the beauty of it. Isn’t, after all, a faith that is never exactly the same two days in a row, that grows as we grow, that deepens as we deepen and holds our subjectivity with a profound patience and generosity, a deeply beautiful faith? Shouldn’t it be something we want as a companion to our lives, that extends to us a remarkable freedom? It is, at least, for me. Maybe it can be for you. Maybe there are far fewer reasons for fear and guilt and far more reasons for joy and grace than we would ever think to trust.
Rachel Rim
Chaplain & Writer
Rachel has been published in Kodon & Prairie Margins
Photography by Esteban Chinchilla