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Hospitals and Hermitages: Strange Bedfellows? 2005

Wilderness gave something back to me. It was an image of God in the way it simultaneously engaged relinquishment and retrieval—a loss and a gain. Grace in the Desert, 124.

As I rest at home recovering from emergency appendectomy surgery after a pesky appendix recently ruptured during the night, I recalled lying in my hospital room at 2 a.m. listening to the nurses chatting in the hall and the maintenance crew polishing the floors. I reflected on how monastic my experience was beginning to resemble this hospital stay. An existence full of medication was beginning to shift into a still life of meditation.

I have spent many months in monasteries over the past 35 years, even publishing a book recently describing my pilgrimage. But to connect my bodily aching now, stapled together with clamps that made my abdominal wound a thin smile with funny teeth, to the spiritual life of a hermitage retreat, was a revelation.

Their basic terms are really not so different.

For example, when one enters a monastery, one gives up or abdicates the normal round of one’s life and surrenders to something that defines the existence of the place. So it is with the life of a hospital patient: one’s will is dwarfed under the will of surgeons, nurses, orderlies, food service, and to body functions that may or may not be operative. The more one abdicates control, the richer, even more complex, the experience assumes. I can still hear the man in the next room barking at nurses, howling for aids to serve him as he shouts orders from his bed. Clearly the patient and the penitent are at odds in his raucous recovery.

In monastic life, one enters not just a different space, but a different time. Hospital time and monastic time share a certain slowness and a ripening, where diversions are stripped away and one is thrown back on to the mercy of surgeons, many of whom, like monks, are called to this vocation, or on to the mercy of God and His will. “In his will is my peace” proclaims a repentant soul in Dante’s Paradiso, who is saved by her willingness to abdicate her will to God even while succumbing to the temptations of mortality. A rhythm different from what one engages daily in the comforts of home or in the stresses of a job begins to wrap around the patient and the penitent, to transform what one thinks about, dreams of, meditates on. Here the word “patient” takes on added resonance.

In such an altered time shared by both hospital and hermitage, one may begin to assess what is authentically valuable in one’s life, as mortality in the form of a keener consciousness of time’s finitude rushes in to be remembered, revisioned, and perhaps renovated. I found myself reflecting on habits I was not happy with that had crept into my life; I sought ways, through prayer and patience, to amend them, in much the same way that similar recognitions have occurred to me during monastic stays.

I love to think of the various rituals that engage one in a hospital: the monitoring of temperature and pulse every two hours 24/7; the morning rounds where the surgeon, like a high priest, moves quickly, surrounded by his young novitiates, all striving to keep pace and to please. The surgeon embodies the knowledge and skill others wish to possess, a kind of secular form of grace gained from deep practice; the body’s mysteries have been revealed to him or her which will now be passed down to the willing novices eager for the medical mantle. In monastic life, one enters the rituals of the divine office, of the Mass and singing of the Psalms, or of silent meditation that serve as corridors into invisible realms. In the hospital post-operative meals, initially often austere bowls of clear liquid or green Jell-O, are taken alone, in silence, by or in one’s bed. Contemplation can mesh with the meal, making the simple food more nourishing through mindful eating that encourages a fuller awareness of one’s body functions and well-being.

In the hospital setting, so much of one’s life grows lean, unadorned, even to include the silly initiate’s gown with no back except for a few strings to keep it anchored to make the body’s surface quickly accessible; they are humbling garments to wear, especially down a hospital hall, as anyone who has been given these “fatigues” knows. The patient is easily recognized as a member of this monastic unit. Similarly in a monastery, dress becomes minimal, less important; fashion statements become fragmented sentences because the fabric of one’s interior life is granted higher attention, more care under the fabric softening presence of prayer and meditation. This sharing of the interior life of the body and of the soul weds hospitals and hermitages to one another. Some form of healing enters both realms. Wounds are identified, worked on, prayed over; one may corner advice or guidance from a spiritual director who can assist in diagnosing the spiritual malady. Both hospital and hermitage have as their respective goals a renewed health and vitality for and in life.

For most of us, a stay in a hospital and in a hermitage is short-lived: perhaps a weekend or a five day retreat. These are temporary way-stations, places of healing, abruptions into the ordinary life of busy-ness, but they are often accompanied first by some wounding, some insight, some revelation one did not know that suddenly has the time, place and condition to manifest, like a hierophany, less prescriptive than necessary to face and meditate on. I have met dozens of people in monasteries who admitted being there in order to recover from a traumatic wound in their lives.

Hospitals and hermitages allow one to reflect down, into a deepening awareness of meaning and method, accompanied often by a firm amendment to change thought patterns and habits that require modest surgery, some shift in diet, even an antibiotic, to coax one out of toxic habits of being.

Life’s large questions refuse to remain hidden in either postoperative pain or monastic meditation. Both places—secular and sacred,—though I don’t really subscribe to such an arbitrary split—invite others to care for those who are wounded, suffering, or surfacing with life’s pains now visibly stitched on the outside to provide containment and safety.

I like the idea of a hospital stay, with all its uncertainties, its huge cloud of unknowing hovering over one like the marine layer off the Pacific ocean in southern California, as an analogue to monastic life. Both allow one to transgress, to deviate from the normative path and to find, within the folds of a blanket or in a book of spiritual readings, a new experience of grace that only woundedness seems to break open with a force sufficient to encourage change.

Home now, I feel myself discharged from a space that nurtured me as well as dozens of people worked diligently with my good health and recovery as their primary goal. Such generous souls everywhere—much like I find when I enter the unique world of monastic life. We are all wounded. Hospitals and hermitages are resting places of respite where our wounds may be stitched by surgeons, salved by grace, nourished by blessedness. Hermitages are another form of hospitals, hospices for the soul where grace itself can heal the afflictions unavoidable in life’s pilgrimage.

Notes

Slattery, Dennis Patrick. Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life. Foreword by Thomas Moore. San Francisco: Jos-sey-Bass, 2004.