Chaplain David Fries on wonder that is not glorious

Wondering as Prayer

The patient, as many do, said, “No, thank you, I am fine,” to my invitation to talk. I lingered and made complimentary niceties. She soon opened up. “I did everything right. So how come these three babies died?” The young ones were developed enough to have been dressed by the staff and placed, for a while, into her arms. They were named. One of the things that we considered was what the children had done for her. Then I asked what she had been wondering herself, “What have you done for them?” This was an important question. We wondered together.

Later that day I was in The Addiction Institute. One of the patients in our weekly conversation group was skeptical about G_d being good or loving. He had been clean of heroine for seven years. Before some surgery he informed his doctor that he was an addict. The doctor said that he was going to give him a low dose of morphine and it would not set off his addiction. The doctor was wrong. He wondered, “Why did G_d allow this to happen? After all,” he said, “I had been doing my part.”

Both had done their parts in creating and making a good new life. Had G_d done G_d’s part? If so how? How do you know? These questions disturbed my day. Where is the evidence of a loving G_d doing G_d’s part when all evidence seems mean, I wondered.

Tragedy makes people wonder. Wonder is a state of being that I associate with being in the presence of G_d. Proximity to the Holy induces wonder. That wonder is glorious. But in tragedy wonder is not glorious. When I begin a visit I almost never begin with the subject of G_d. G_d is too divisive to be an opening. G_d will enter when (and if) the spirit moves. If G_d is to be a friend in time of need and a resource for future strength then the worth and the good of G_d has to be made recognizable. Recognizing personal beauty is a way that I am learning to find an appreciable safe ground for discussion. In both of those situations I opened up the subject of personal beauty. Both responded readily.

Through intrinsic beauty that each individual has, their worth and resource for understanding securely increases. The powerless feel inner resource. Inner beauty may be the place to begin seeking access to possible worlds not yet comprehended. G_d is behind all beauty, an assumption that for the sake of discussion is usually granted. The creating process (G_d’s as well as the individual’s) is an ongoing process. Ever, unstoppable, opening beauty is the evidence. A person can still, maybe eventually will, cast the fateful event into a new light. “G_d doesn’t give me anything that I can’t handle,” said the man, a fellow addict, next to the heroin addict. Like so many, he sought to find a meaning that he could have a fashioning free hand in. He wanted to have reconstructive part.

There is aesthetic potential mixed with G_d’s will and my loss. “How will they take it?” is a health care question that artists also ask. There is a beauty that passes understanding. The new mother understood. She sadly said she recognized it when she held those three beautiful, named and dressed children in her arms, between them was a beauty, which passed the understanding of others. She gave them her beauty.

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