Two Hospice Essays: A Special APR Supplement

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 2008 by Reece, Spencer

It is strange how people seem to belong to places, especially to places where they were not bom.

-Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

1. ACaIl

"You don't see this often," the chaplain said to me. On my first rounds at Hospice I entered a room: a baby, born without her brain's frontal lobes, gurgled on her mother's chest. The baby lived with the mother for months, much longer than the doctor expected. The baby's face grew gravely unencumbered. We prayed over that baby every day. When the baby died, words never explained it. The mother walked out of the room, her arms slackening at her sides like old latches to a door of an abandoned house.

I have decided to become a priest. No light decision. Each piece of my sentence is weighted. The wild, oval-flourish of the "I," the firm, charged, unequivocal "decided," the blossoming, fleshy "to become," and finally that stern, indelible object, "a priest"-all yoked together, coming out of my hand, onto a keyboard, displayed on a screent projected outwards, by lasers, into space. Who invests in such architecture? I hammer my antique sentence on air.

Unfortunately, sentences are no longer immortal. E-mail has wrecked the intimate tenacity of handwritten sentences. A letter, breathed on, spilled on with coffee, ink-smudged, the paper torn, words crossed out, nails time. Today e-mails disappear fast as Japanese bullet trains. When Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians, "Let the same mind be in-you that was in Christ Jesus," his ink was concrete. I am glad that sentence was saved. Nowadays, cavalier deletions crowd us. Instant messages quicken me.

I often wonder these days if this departure from the slowly personal is affecting that fragile thing we call the spiritual world. As our glaciers melt and the takes dry up, and Beijing's sky is a complete ceiling of pollution so that the citizens no longer can see the moon or the stars, so too has some of the patient, ponderous care we took in communicating with each other begun to completely evaporate. Archeologists will have a harder time finding e-mails than they did the ancient Roman letter from Vindolanda.

No doubt, this rushed, charged atmosphere I breathe and walk through every day, is also pushing me towards the priesthood. I want to be quiet I want to be still with others. I want to let others know Jesus loved them. If Jesus sets off alarms, I want to let people know, simply, they were loved.

1 have been called. That sounds arrogant, unstable even, I know. But that is not how I mean it I mean to express obedience and transformation. No cell-phone, answering machine or labyrinthine voice-mail system reached me. I got quiet. Through silent retreats, spiritual direction from nuns, Hospice courses, volunteering, and simply aging, I began to listen. Exiting the Tower of Babel, my message came, clear and direct There was a tentative quality in what I heard. I think sometimes Jesus is tentative: his spirit always managing to live in both the divine and the human world, without taking sides. He commanded me in a gentle, invisible, determined way. Yes, that is better. There are those that have been put on locked units for hearing voices; conversely, the voice I heard gave me the keys. The voice I heard was coming through the patients I have been meeting. Perhaps you know of what I speak? For this is a long legacy of one whisper that came down from a horrible day on a hill.

Two years ago, I began volunteering at the Gerstenburg Center in Palm Beach County as a pastoral care volunteer. Although I had attended the Harvard Divinity School and graduated with a masters of theology in 1990,1 had not used that education for twenty years. Often, as the years went by, I thought my choice a mistake. Perhaps, as Marjorie Thompson suggests in her book. Soul Feast, I was "anxious over what God might demand of [me] if [I] got too close. Maybe God would ask [me] to give up certain relationships, life dreams, or things [I] enjoy." I was 27 when I graduated. Dependent on my parents, who had generously paid for my education, at the time, I felt beholden to produce something more than prayers. A religious career seemed impractical4oiKs repellent to speaking of blessings.

These days, the word "spiritual" is palatable and welcomed, spreading like wild fire through twelve-step groups that fill church basements like gatherings of early Christians, but who uses the word "pious"? The image of a "pious Christian" is nearly always bad, someone prim, prudish. As Thompson writes: "Our caricature of a pious Christian has eyes rolled heavenward and hands permanently joined at the fingertips. Indeed, many would rather be taken for secular humanists than pious Christians." I see this, on an etymological level, as a deepening schism in our modern world, the spirit being blocked by ring tones. I don't feel Christ is a dirty word. I wish my little Episcopal church in Tequesta, Florida, to be as irresistible as a treatment center. But, perhaps zealous piety is too idealistic.