Daily Episcopalian

By Donald Schell

Peter is twenty-eight now. This memory must be almost twenty years old. It was Christmas. I’m guessing we were home between the early Pageant Liturgy and the Midnight Choral Eucharist on Christmas Eve. Peter, just beginning to grow into his manhood, took an elegant nonchalant stance leaning against the mantle over the fireplace when a tea-light on the mantle ignited his t-shirt. He felt heat on his back glanced over his shoulder and did what any of us might do seeing fire - he ran. His mother, the nurse, did what she knew to do – though I don’t remember her telling us that she’d been trained as a tackle in nursing school. She ran after him to the dining room, threw her arms around him, and slammed him against the dining wall, smothering the flames. And when the nurse had dealt with the first stage of the emergency, his mom reappeared to comfort him and calm him enough to get the t-shirt off and survey the damage.

Between Peter’s shoulder blades, he had a blistered area about four inches across, second-degree burns. Some small areas were charred, third degree burns. My dad, the physician was there and Ellen and Dad cleansed the wound and Dad set out the twice-daily protocol for debriding the wound. For the next several days I was her assistant.

A serious burn destroys our body’s most powerful defense against infection, our skin, and to make matters worse, dead skin in a moist wound is particularly hospitable to airborne bacteria. Debriding is tough love. Twice daily with a sterilized pair of tweezers Ellen methodically pulled dead skin from the wound. Dead skin is attached to living skin. It hurt Peter. My job was to help him lie very still on his stomach while she worked. I say ‘help him’ because Peter proved a brave and cooperative patient. Step by step Ellen told him what she was doing, and when she was about to pull. He did his best to steel himself and not to jump or pull away from her. My pinning his shoulders down was his back-up. Because sometimes he had to flinch, and then, without my hands on his shoulders holding him still, he would inadvertently poke himself on the tweezers or break his mother’s grip on the scrap of skin she was pulling away. Sometimes too, Ellen asked me to help by pulling the healthy skin on either side of the wound taut to make a dead skin fragment yield an end she could grab.

My role was mostly silent. For the first couple of days I thought of what an unlikely nurse's assistant I was. Growing up with both father and grandfather physicians, I lost track of how many people had asked me if I wanted to be a doctor. Usually I just said, ‘no.’ Sometimes I might venture a boyish imagining of vocation as ‘a preacher.’ But either way, my unspoken response was a forceful ‘NO,’ imbued with the painful knowledge that not only didn’t I feel called to medicine, but that I couldn't do it. Visible wounds made me queasy. Injuries to my own body frightened me. I was convinced I was too squeamish to be a doctor.

When my firstborn was coming and dad heard that her mother and I were taking birthing classes and that I planned to be in the delivery room, he wondered whether my presence there was a good idea. ‘Birth can be a little startling,’ he said. ‘It’s messy. There’s blood.’ But I was determined, and was glad to be present, and am still very glad for that experience. It was also my first hint that I’d outgrown some of the old un-ease at how raw bodies can be.

Then in my Clinical Pastoral Education at St. Luke’s Hospital, New York, I saw some badly battered bodies, some living, some dead, and I did my job all right, helped families talk to staff, stood by the body, said prayers, touched when it was helpful and appropriate. For my C.P.E. summer I’d been assigned to be the student chaplain on the Intensive Care Unit, which included burn patients.

Eighteen years later, as Ellen and I began our twice-daily routine with Peter, I remembered St. Luke’s burn unit. The memory of a child on the burn unit, most of his body burned, no one knowing whether he’d live or die, helped me with context and focus as we worked on Peter. Where, I wondered, was God in such suffering? I wasn’t satisfied with any answer I could offer to that question, but ‘where is God,’ resonated in this work, the painful and more hopeful treatment of my son. My job was to watch closely to anticipate when Peter's taut muscles would jump or lurch. As the delegated minister of stillness, my task was to watch, to hold a steady gaze as Ellen’s tweezers patiently took us to lower layers of Peter’s burn.

In the second day of this gazing as I watched Ellen’s meticulous work, I saw in Peter’s wound what Symeon the New Theologian called, ‘the impossible beauty of the life in Christ,’ or, to put it in plainer language, the awesome beauty of Life.

So soon after the burn “the wound” that I’d begun to know well from steady scrutiny through twenty minutes of teamwork unexpectedly showed a wholly different face. Just hours before I’d seen only ugly disfigurement, an opening to infection, damage, and grave risk to his health. Now healing was visible. In that same place where old skin was dying, brand new skin was beginning to appear. It felt so much like seeing healing in the moment that I wondered whether we’d actually see new cells or fresh patches of healthy skin move into place as Ellen worked. Peter’s body’s own work healing itself from session to session presented greater changes day by day. I was astonished. Watching the wound was moving me to a kind of joy. I loved gazing at it.

Had I not loved my work as a priest, that gazing spoke deeply enough to prompt a vocational crisis. Why had I imaged I couldn’t bear doing what my dad loved so much? Being a physician, seeing healing happen – ever – was an amazing privilege. Did Dad have to get over his own queasiness? Gazing at the wound, I understood something of my father’s heart and of his joy in his work. My Dad was an often skeptical Christian, but he did insist Life and God did the real work of healing, which he said made his work simpler and humbler: doctors could remove obstacles, sometimes clean things up or put them back together, keep them clean and in their right place, and watch healing overcome disease while trying to prevent complications.

Those days of watching my son’s very ugly wound heal I experienced, saw, and felt beauty where I’d imagined nothing was possible but ugliness. I’m not saying I found the idea of healing beautiful, not even my own thoughts observing the process of healing, but rather seeing Life present as Peter’s body healed, I felt the radiance of the Life that is the Light of humankind.

Culturally, but also religiously, we have a hard time with beauty. Sometimes we explain that difficulty in economic terms. When we’re working for justice or any pragmatic alleviation of human suffering, we mistrust beauty, suspecting it’s a luxury or a distraction. By common cultural consent we reduce beauty to a purely subjective, personal, and even idiosyncratic matter of taste.

But theologians as diverse as Jonathan Edwards (who calls the Spirit “the beautifier, the one in whom the happiness of God overflows … the one who bestows radiance, shape clarity and enticing splendor.” (Paraphrased by David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite, the Aesthetics of Christian Truth). Or Gregory of Nyssa (“Human nature’s perfection is nothing but this endless desire for beauty and more beauty, this hunger for God.” From Gregory’s Life of Moses, quoted in Hart) Or Hans Urs von Balthazar,
Or – liberation theologian Alejandro Garcia Rivera whose work, The Community of The Beautiful, Jesuit James Empereur draws on so heavily in La Vida Sacra, Contemporary Hispanic Sacramental Theology.

Ancient theologians, a famous Puritan in New England, a Roman Catholic teacher beloved by Vatican conservatives, a Jesuit, and new work in the tradition of liberation theology all tell us beauty drives it all.

Gregory of Nyssa describes the engine something like this:

God creates life, Life beholds Beauty, Beauty begets Love, Love of the Life of God.
(Paraphrase from Gregory’s On the Soul and the Resurrection by Scott King who set this text as a four-part canon in Music for Liturgy)

Just as ‘love is stronger than death,’ beauty, the real thing has power enough to include and transform the raw suffering of a healing wound.

Beauty makes our world radiant with the life of God.

Some recent discussions here at the Café focused on verifiable truth claims got me thinking about Peter’s burn and healing and prompted this piece. Watching my son’s wound heal doesn’t prove the existence of God. In fact those who play the game of proofs, sooner or later will admit that none of the proofs give us a loving, forgiving God; it’s simply not possible

Love proves nothing, and watching that wound heal wasn’t an experience of proof or testing but one of simpler knowing: in a community of love facing a hard task, I was seeing the love that sustains our every moment in Life doing its work. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was simply beautiful.

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is President of All Saints Company.

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Donald Schell

Comments (8)

Donald -- the story of Peter's burn STILL makes my gut leap, as many times as I've heard it, and this telling has left me with a wonderful, tender picture of your father and Ellen working together, weaving their professional skill and their deep love, their calm presence. Perhaps even a glint of humor. Your father's memory is a blessing.

I was struck by your assertion about a cultural/religious distrust of beauty. I have missed that entirely, and wonder if you are talking about 'beauty' in the same way I am. Maybe you could say more about that. You do point at something about the 'inter-infusion' (there is surely a real word that says that, but I can't bring it forward right now) of beauty, love, and life. Perhaps it's the sterile beauty of the whitewashed tombs that draws our distrust?

Leesy

Posted by leesytag | July 20, 2009 11:42 AM

Leesy,

I'm glad to think with you and anyone else who shows up in this conversation about trusting and not trusting beauty (or not trusting ourselves in the presence of beauty or our deep longing for beauty and our working to avoid our deep disappointment when beauty is belittled or beauty betrayed, whether it's for high-minded concern for people and causes or for eagerness for the quick profit). For a bit though, I'm going to hold off responding, and wait to see what other voices show up.

Are there other readers who recognize a cultural and religious stuck place in mistrusting beauty?

Posted by Donald Schell | July 20, 2009 1:37 PM

Hi Donald,

could you explain this paragraph further: "Culturally, but also religiously, we have a hard time with beauty. Sometimes we explain that difficulty in economic terms. When we’re working for justice or any pragmatic alleviation of human suffering, we mistrust beauty, suspecting it’s a luxury or a distraction. By common cultural consent we reduce beauty to a purely subjective, personal, and even idiosyncratic matter of taste."

I am not sure I completely understand what you mean by this. It also may be helpful if you can provide an example of the common cultural consent to reduce beauty.

Posted by Rev. Jarrett | July 20, 2009 5:14 PM

A great piece, Donald!

Along with you and Leesy, I have observed, with great frustration, the mistrust of beauty within not only religious but activist circles. This mistrust has a twin: the countervailing mistrust of religion and social activism felt by aesthetes.

I’ll add my own particular mistrust to the list: the mistrust of those who call for balance between the appreciation of beauty and social action. The story of Peter’s healing is a vivid illustration of how the beholding of beauty and the enacting of (a particularly loving form of) social action emerge, not from programmatic balance, but from chaos—in this case a frightening, fiery accident.

Posted by Jacob Slichter | July 20, 2009 5:38 PM

I'm going to give it a try.

When our culture puts a premium on cynicism and the appearance of toughness, we're acting like we fear beauty for its power which is great than us and threatens to un-make and re-make us.

Culturally we fear feeling, we fear whole-heartedness, we fear promise (and what Jesuit theologian Brian McDermott calls 'Graced longing for the more'). We we're afraid of hope and risky openness and trying to find our way to controlling expectations, living with disappointment, and conflating cynicism with wisdom or experience.

God's wild, indiscriminate embrace of us, God's life surging in and through us, God's forgiveness making us whole are all signs of 'the more' that won't let us make life drab, decaying, and disappointing.

The cultural mistrust comes with good reasons. Beauty, glory, wonder, hope, joy, and the rest of the cluster can be simply seductions to complacency and illusion. The wonder of the simplest things in Hopkins' familiar poem is a kind of test -

Is the Bach's B minor mass or the Taj Mahal or even the Golden Gate Bridge actually beautiful? The grander the work, the more danger of ego, manipulation or self-deception. But Hopkins is on to something -

Archives

* January 2005
* August 2005

Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

When a cultural treasure or a grand spiritual/religious offering touches us to our depths like that heartfelt stirring of the most ordinary or odd thing, it's likely the treasure too is touching us with grace and a power to unmake us (and so make us new).

Posted by Donald Schell | July 20, 2009 8:26 PM

editing glitch above -

I copied the Hopkins poem from a website and didn't realize I'd also captured the odd lines, 'Recent Posts' down through 'Gabriel's submission'

those nine lines don't belong. sorry.

Posted by Donald Schell | July 20, 2009 8:29 PM

[What follows, except for the last two lines i've added in brackets is a note from Ana Hernandez which she tried to post to this conversation and ended up sending to me. I'm adding it in here with her permission.]

Thanks for the post, Donald.

It seems there are two huge issues here: the healing of Peter, and the embracing of beauty. Either would have made a fine piece, but to choose to connect them brings us to the place that is not often spoken of: the way that consciousness creates reality.

There is a sad feeling that we don’t have time or money for beauty, which tends to reinforce a sense of impoverishment and fear that we lack either the resources we need to serve us, or access to those resources; that there’s so much work to be done that someone is bound to starve or die if I stop to feed my heart by smelling a flower, because there's still so much work to do! That’s always smelled like false marketing, but I have never paid attention to the marketers as the arbiters of truth, nutrition or beauty! Beauty is all around, nutritious, and full of grace.

On a personal level, until we stop looking for beauty while still thinking it’s okay to tell ourselves that we’re not beautiful, we’ll keep leaving people on the marketing cultural highway. Consciousness creates reality.

Do you remember Merton on the street in Louisville? “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” We need to figure out how to tell people them precisely that: “Hey you! You are beautiful and shining like the sun!”, and to help them believe it, because they’ve already got everything they need to do works both great and small. It’s a matter of no small faith on all our parts, but nonetheless imperative. Consciousness creates reality, so let’s help each other wake up.

In the healing of Peter (who probably didn’t feel very beautiful even though people were treating him as though he were the most beautiful thing on earth), awareness, attention, and intention came together, through his family, to enable Peter to feel rested and cared for, so that his body could do what bodies do. The body can heal best when it is in balance, and although I’m sure Peter would have healed just fine with only one of his attendants, there are many who can use an *extra* attendant. I italicize *extra*, because people in need of healing are not always in as good a place as Peter was, and therefore have further to go to get their bodies to the restful place of balance, so they can muster their healing energy.

Attention, awareness, and intention also create beauty which might account for its unwieldy nature! Consciousness creates reality.

Thanks also for the Hopkins. Here’s one I was reminded of by John O’Donahue, from his last book, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings. It's the end of his Blessing for a Nurse:

In this fragile frontier-place, your kindness
Becomes the light that consoles the broken-hearted, Awakens within desperate storms
The oasis of serenity that calls
The spirit to rise from beneath the weight of pain, To create new space in the person’s mind
Where they gain distance from their suffering And begin to see the invitation To integrate and transform it.
May you embrace the beauty in what you do
And how you stand like a secret angel
Between the bleak despair of illness
And the unquenchable light of spirit
That can turn the darkest destiny towards dawn.
May you never doubt the gifts you bring;
Rather, learn from these frontiers
Wisdom for your own heart. May you come to inherit
The blessings of your kindness
And never be without care and love
When winter enters your own life.

May this add to the conversation. Blessings and Peace, Ana Hernandez

O'Donohue's book *Beauty* is also a nutritious read.

[And I won't pass up the chance to add that hearing and singing Ana's music is also very nutritious -
http://www.myspace.com/anahermusic
and
http://www.anahermusic.com/

Posted by Donald Schell | July 21, 2009 6:54 PM

Interesting dialogue on the fear of beauty. It reminds me of watching my sons grow into young men in a culture that presses joyful feelings into "coolness." When they were toddlers, they both were drawn to bright, beautiful colors. But it became less acceptable as they grew closer to peers, to enjoy those things. They both have artistic skills, and love to master drawings of monsters and dragons. (Beautiful in their own way.) But Karl continues to bring in artwork that is more delicate in beauty.
Sometimes it seems to me that the only acceptable strong feelings in our culture are anger and vengeance.

Posted by Laurie Miller Vischer | July 28, 2009 7:39 PM

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