Contemplation exploded in my heart
Mitcham, Marylee
CONTEMPLATION EXPLODED IN NY HEART FROM THE MOUNTAIN TO THE PLAIN MARYLEE MITCHAM have been numbered among the Catholic laity, that large group defined by what it is not, since 1968. That was...
...I am getting paid for practicing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, which as a Christian I have to practice whether I get paid or not...
...I'm a mere cog in the machine, too insignificant so far to rate my own locker at work...
...Believing in my strength and desire to help her, she got a good night's sleep...
...Thanks a lot," I said, shivering at the sight...
...It's no exaggeration to say it took me a whole winter to stop collecting kindling off the street — "just too good to pass up" — then looking for people who could burn it, because with my own wood stove left back in Kentucky, I sure couldn't...
...There is no time to do anything right...
...In 1985, I became a registered nurse and now offer hospitality to the potentially suicidal and homicidal in a large and very disturbing hospital environment...
...And when I am not able to choose charity, to watch the way it frequently chooses me through its action in others, sometimes sent as an apology from my loudest critic...
...And when my husband was offered a teaching job at a New York university, we felt a change of scene might help us heal...
...It's a lot of things that are understandable, but it's not therapeutic...
...We were there for ten good, hard years and went through a rich, though unofficial, formation in Cistercian ways...
...If Adam and Eve had been kicked out of Paradise they could always move to the big city and join a regular parish like regular laity with regular jobs...
...In a mental ward, they are twice not what they seem, which sometimes adds up to prophecy...
...I'm too proud to ask anyone to share their locker with me, and so far no one has volunteered...
...My answer apparently satisfied him, because he said "All right" and went back to an uncomfortable rigidity...
...I took a chance though, and am glad I did...
...So almost everything has changed, and I think about it a lot, about whether I meet God differently from before or whether these transformations are superficial, like clothing...
...In 1982 we moved to Brooklyn...
...I decided it was about time my children learned the truth about indoor plumbing...
...This Mary Lou has taken her knocks...
...Now this is exciting — to see in oneself evidence of a preference for love...
...I've discovered it's considerate to warn people...
...Then I went back only part-time...
...To do good and also earn money...
...A hospital — my hospital at least — is the antithesis of a monastery...
...How many milligrams...
...But what do we really know about them...
...And a year to the day later, these believing people were bringing him home...
...I don't know how to help these people — because I have not fully learned to avoid judging them...
...Before you can get to the sick themselves, you have this enormous stumbling block of burned-out caretakers who eat too much, smoke too much, and generally operate as though everything, including the patients, is the last straw...
...Helping people is not seen as the issue, although patients themselves know when you're on their side...
...This man needed an injection and I went to him before my lunch break to confide I would give it when I returned...
...Why am I a nurse...
...On the contrary, it's self-destructive as Hell...
...Determined hospitality, for instance, was replaced by determined effort in school...
...A few days later I actually saw him tying another patient's shoes...
...After a year of full-time work, I was crispy at the edges myself, so I quit for a few months...
...We had begun to relate...
...I think of one woman who said she couldn't sleep in her bed anymore because someone had practiced Voodoo in her room causing waves of heat to emanate from the floor...
...As founders of a small intentional community — Families of St...
...he asked, and I almost jumped at the sound of his voice...
...Certainly their idea of treating themselves well seems to revolve around getting more of the stuff...
...I have been openly sneered at as "Florence Nightingale" on one occasion and a "racist cracker" on another...
...It was a miracle...
...In my unit the staff is as spiritually needy as the patients...
...Why do they do this to themselves...
...If someone comes to me and shyly gives me a button "for good luck," that person may well be Christ handing me the only thing that matters...
...James Cathedral women's shelter...
...I had another patient whom I overlooked for a long time because he didn't speak and was mostly observed in mildly catatonic positions...
...That was the year a languid reading of The Seven Storey Mountain detonated a God-device hidden so deeply within me that I had thought it was a mere question mark, and not — as it turned out — a direct call to seek the Lord at some personal expense...
...At the end of that time, the community was in shambles and so were more than half our relationships, including the one my husband and I had with each other...
...As basically conservative, I am theoretically supportive of the church hierarchy, yet no bishops' press release issued from a synod in Rome is likely to explode in my heart the way contemplation did...
...There, there...
...What is it...
...I carry tons of keys, a sure sign of power, but am given nowhere to put my coat and backpack...
...I lead a life far more self-indulgent than before, though in certain respects more humble because I don't hobnob with my friends "the monks and nuns" in rarefied surroundings...
...Let all the world know...
...We stood rather dramatically on the hot spot, and, with joined hands, consecrated the room and its inhabitants to the "Power of Good...
...The minute I write those words, I feel deep embarrassment at how minimal is the persecution I have ever experienced and how untested my capacity for charity really is...
...Needless to say, there is much spiritual poverty in New York, and for evety beautiful sight, like my church, an hour's subway ride away, there are numerous crummy sights within walking distance...
...We were not attracted to the city, but neither were we oblivious to this possible turn of fortune...
...It allows me to fulfill Christ's injunction: pray for those who persecute you...
...Benedict — we immersed ourselves in genuine experiences of prayer, poverty, hospitality, manual labor, primitive living, (and I stress the word primitive), liturgy, spiritual direction, and communion with others...
...True, there may be few miracle cures, because in this life we pass through death, often in drawn-out stages...
...Modest as those victories may be, they bring joy in their wake...
...The memory still gives me strength at work...
...As one of our daughters succinctly put it in her college admission essay, "After a lot of talk and hard feelings, the community ended...
...I was very moved to be present at this living creche scene, so anomalous in that abortive environment...
...That's a good thing to do...
...Then there are other patients — some of them deeply delusional and helpless — who shine with meaning, who are like Gospel parables brought to life, who are so transparent in their response to kindness or its opposite, that it is easy to see Christ in them...
...Then one day a little extra care paid off...
...Not only that, but now it was over...
...Actually, mercy is my hidden agenda...
...In a sense, it is they who help me, by affording the opportunity of this insight...
...That switch seems more than even...
...It brings bathroom odors right inside the house instead of leaving them in the backyard where they belong...
...And they are trained to it right away, with a good portion of verbal abuse, though every now and then one of them will say that the emperor has no clothes, proving once again that they are only crazy but not stupid...
...There is great resistance to new people who smell of reform...
...Then, with four small children and in nomadic fashion, we violently bore it away to Kentucky, finally settling as neighbors to the Abbey of Gethse-mani where Merton had made his stability...
...To earn money and also do good...
...I doubt it...
...Partly this is style, partly self-defense...
...It stands in absolute contrast...
...they're often brave enough to risk what little self they have in an attempt to connect with you...
...As nursing practice, this ranks as questionable...
...For money...
...The initial blast and fallout from that nuclear family explosion have left my husband and me irreparably changed, even damaged, in the world but not of it, scarred survivors of the Christian message which is Paschal: through death to life...
...It turned out they learned a lot more quickly than I did...
...Giving no thought at all to our "role" in the church, we simply made a commitment to God as we found him in the monastic tradition...
...It smells...
...Finally and most importantly in all this are the patients themselves...
...As 11 September 1987: 475 angry as it makes me feel, I believe it's a good opportunity...
...Recently called Mary Lou for the fiftieth time, I corrected the mistake — only to hear a sharp "I like Mary Lou better...
...And truly, its evidence lies all around us in our own debris, a constant reminder that all will be well...
...Some people are adrenaline junkies...
...We also failed miserably...
...Good possibilities for leisure lie fallow, though laziness on the job is also a pervasive problem...
...And there is corruption here beyond what I Have known before...
...Elizabeth Ann Seton in thanksgiving for a miracle...
...it helps them respond better...
...others say things like, "Well, it was stay at home and watch T. V. all evening or come to work and earn some money...
...She became known to me when I happened into a Mass during my lunch break one day while I was staff nurse on a rehabilitation unit...
...Yet there are some Christians serving in this shamelessly dishonest, exploitive place...
...Nursing is such a noble profession, but too often a sad one...
...Not by a patient, I might add...
...For those of us who have had the Good News preached to us and will never be the same again, the search for that life is the road to Heaven and health...
...yet, to take "extra care" at work is to be called "obsessive-compulsive...
...476: Commonweal...
...In trying to be saints, we had overreached ourselves, deeply disappointing others who deeply disappointed us...
...Should it take three months to learn a person's name...
...But what about the restaurants and travel, the culture and entertainment of my new upscale life...
...Making an act of trust that we weren't being lured to New York, we packed a U-Haul and began re-entry into middle-class life with a passel of kids who couldn't remember a thing about it...
...She stood before me clutching her pillow and looking hopeful that I would switch her room...
...I was heartened, spiritually nourished if you will...
...It is not easy to romanticize a flighty, manipulative teenager four months pregnant who has stabbed herself in the belly with a kitchen knife to test her boyfriend's love...
...But our faith tells us the end of all death is life, and that's the real miracle cure...
...I told him the drug...
...Not everyone can afford to do that, I agree, but more can do so than are willing to admit it...
...And he didn't whip his head in the other direction to avoid me...
...To sense the action of the Holy Spirit — "not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me...
...Forgive me if this is too harsh, but that's the way it looks...
...Things are not what they seem...
...By occasionally volunteering a night at the St...
...If time is viewed as money, not treasure, it better be taken at work...
...She, her husband, and young adopted daughter were presenting the hospital chapel with its own statue of St...
...Capable of taking deep offense according to my nature, I am also capable of letting it go according to God's grace...
...If Carl Jung is right, that hurry is "not of the Devil but is the Devil," then we so-called healers are in big trouble...
...Happily for me, the director of psychiatric nursing is one of them...
...If precious minutes are found, they are mostly stolen from the patients themselves, who are such examples of suffering humanity that they expect the loss as their due...
...But we start with what we're given to start with...
...I am hired to be swift of hand, to help the hospital process its clientele as rapidly and non-litigiously as possible...
...These are my borderline patients (often heavily into drugs), the ones whose syntax is still easily understood but whose lives appear shattered...
...The real truth was how much we were hurting...
...Our throats felt like open graves...
...It is sometimes possible to help these people in small ways...
...This successful administrator, herself a middle-aged R.N., had prayed to Mother Seton on her feast day for a second child to adopt...
...Instead I chose to banish the forces of Voodoo...
...Or an elderly and likable con man who has continued, after years of therapy, to "talk the talk" rather than "walk the walk...
...474: Commonweal Are they adequately offset by the fact we still don't own a television or a car, by my attempt to buy everything short of underpants second-hand...
Vol. 114 • September 1987 • No. 15
