Hoping Past Numbness

When you work in a hospital, you get used to the 'buzz'. In the past month I have become quite accustomed to tuning out all manner of irritating noises. Don't get me wrong, I hear them. But, my job is about prioritizing instantaneously. So, when I'm preparing a dose of morphine for a post-surgery patient who is three minutes from sceaming in such a way to wake up all the former patients in the morgue three floors below, IV alarms can wait. There's a wide variety of sirens and audible reminders that I am innundated with nightly from the first second I set foot on the floor.

Basically all these noises are annoying. They're designed that way, since experience has shown that pleasant noises don't get nurses in a room quickly. So, as a nurse you learn to notice but not hear as many noises as possible. The human mind is a wonderous thing, and selective hearing has turned out to be one of God's finest gifts.

Hospitals are designed to be numbing. There are no "loud" colors at our hospital. The walls are an opaque white, as are the sheets on beds, to give the impression of cleanliness. All upholstery and paints are typically subdued colors to hopefully prevent irritation to patients. The brightest colors I see all night are the bright red haz-mat bags, and the hunter orange stickers to draw my attention to when IV tubings need be replaced.

Then there's the bland food. The sleepy tiredness that has infected 90% of the staff. The odd sensation of touching one's own hands and having them feel foreign to the body due to how dry they are.

I deal nightly with patients who move in slow motion. Communication requires extensive effort, not only for the drugs the patients are on, but also for the cultural barriers and generation gaps present in our dialogue.

Each night I am surrounded by sensory experience that leaves me feeling numb. It's part of the job, I know. It's part of life too; numbing pain and so many other unpleasantries. But, there are occasional moments of sobriety.

It doesn't happen often on night shift, but occasionally there's this eerie feeling that subtly shakes me from my numbness. When a baby is born, and they care to, the L&D nurses can call the front desk and they play a lullaby over the loudspeakers. It's quiet. The kind of quiet that is reminiscent of God and the way he so often wakes us from our drunkenness. It's one of those rare moments that is so easy to ignore, but when I allow it, it reminds me of the good of the world. At least for a moment I am reminded that there are people downstairs who will leave the building that I reside in for 13 hours at a time, and there lives will be changed. There newness in the world, and in an infant that can barely open its eyes, there is a future that is wide open, full of possibility. Rare though it may be, it is a big picture moment for myself and anyone else who is haunted by the simple tune that plays for less than a minute before the madness of hospital life begins.

I had thought of this weeks ago, when I was first starting. I had a similar experience the other night. This time it was Mrs. Milton. She has end-stage COPD. That basically means she smoked long enough for her lungs to get rock hard, and now she struggles to breath. I was assessing her at the beginning of the shift. She was different than most patients: she wanted to know the numbers and tried to understand what was going on. The ironic thing was that she fully understood she wasn't going to recover, and that her days were numbered. She just liked having a good ballpark figure on how she was doing and roughly how many more days she could count on. She spoke a lot about her family. She was proud of her grandchildren.

I guess the enlightenment was in seeing the difference in spirit between her and most of the patients I take care of. Most patients see their illnesses as something tragic that has befallen them, and in interacting with them they seem to feel they have been unjustly sentenced to poor health and a stay in this hospital. They start coming up with escape plans . . . no I'm not kidding. In truth there's no where for these patients to go. If there were, the injuries they would sustain getting them there would put them right back where they already were. Yet, occasionally I get one like Mrs. Milton who knows why they're there, and knows there's no hope for their body, and so suddenly they live every day instead of counting down the days until they can live.

It wasn't exactly a Carpe Diem moment. Work was still numb when I left her room. I just realized briefly that what we often claim as life, may not really be life. Life isn't just the glorious day in the future when I walk out of work, fall in love with the woman of my dreams, and reach some final epiphany about God before he roles the credits. I think life is possibly just waking from the numbness we too often rely on enough to realize that in spite of all we've done, God has still given us "grandchildren". I wonder if Abraham and Mrs. Milton will connect on that point.

Abraham Heschel wrote, "The insights of wonder must constantly be kept alive. . . The sense for the 'miracles which are daily with us', the sense for the 'continual marvels', is the source of prayer. There is no worship, no music, no love, if we take for granted the blessings or defeats of living." He later quotes Rabbi Mechilta, "Day by day man is sold [into slavery], and every day he is redeemed".

I think the greatest redemption is one which allows people to face the defeats of living unshaken. People face death daily, and no matter how many rounds we drag the fight out, we lose. Perhaps the difference for any who have learned trust, is that they know a God/Reality that is living and victorious. I think it is a testimony to the greatness of the human spirit when one can live and not be deluded to live as though the freedom which the victorious God imparts to us has been overcome by the fear of failure.

Our Trojan Jesus

Image is important to the majority of us. We want to convey the right image. We choose our clothes and hairstyle to give off the right image about who we are. If I could afford it, I would wear Banana Republic crap all the time so people would see that I'm intellectual, cultured, slightly laid back, and independent. I shop at Old Navy and do my best to replicate such attire to show people who I am. . . . or maybe just who I wish I was.

Movie stars pay millions to convey the right image. They get bored, so they spend millions more to change their image. They buy houses and cars to contribute. No expense spared to show who they are . . . or who they want people to believe they are.

Maybe that's why God says not to make an image of him. For one, it's fake and everyone knows it. Second, it's confining; as though the God of the universe could fit nicely into some pithy saying, or could be summed up by an earthly creation.

I think one of the most universal images is Jesus. We parade around pictures of a fair skinned Caucasian wearing a toga, sporting shoulder length hair and a 3 month old beard (trimmed, ironically). He's always clean, evidently Jesus invented bleach as he's the only one in pictures who manages to keep his robe white. This is also a good sign that he never worked hard as anyone who's attempted to get mud/dirt stains off a white shirt even with bleach could tell us. Basically he skipped the whole carpenter thing and went into management.

And, all the world learns from this is our values, but definitely not those of the man of Nazareth. The world can learn our American/Western values quite well from this image. Appearance is everything, which is why Jesus obviously spent so much time combing his hair, as the pictures of his gracefully flowing locks display. Jesus was very hygienically minded; again he was never dirty. This reveals his consumer work ethic: do as little as possible and get paid for it. Oh, did I mention he's white. That's an obvious value as well.

So . . . here's where I'm going with this, if this is what the world sees when we witness about Jesus; not a practicing Jew from Nazareth, but the plastic epitome of Western values, what are we of the evangelical persuesion convicted we should convert them to?????

I'm pretty convinced that the plastic Jesus is a Trojan horse. We send missionaries around the world to get people to bow down to the plastic Jesus that we've created in our image. When they ask valid questions about our faith we speak louder, trying to drown them out. We attempt to use coercive arguments so that they are trapped in our pseudo-Christian, Western paradigm. We ask them about sin and salvation, which we have pre-defined for them. Remember earlier posts: he who defines the terms, wins the argument. We do all this quite often with honest intentions. But the end result is another heathen bowing down to our plastic Jesus, who is devoid of anything divine.

I've read a lot of books on pluralism recently, and for all it's ills, I will say, at least pluralism is an environment in which the graven image of our plastic Jesus' don't fair well.

I'm reading another book encouraging us toward ecumenical (inter-religious) dialogue. The book is discussing the objections to such dialogue: it requires a "lack of convictions" and an openness that compromises the nature of faith. I think these are objections of lazy people who have found their security hiding behind a plastic Jesus. I think that faith that fears it might be dissuaded to such an extent that it aggressively rejects all discussion that could provide a challenge to it, is no faith at all, but only a form of idolatry. We craft an image of what it means to follow Christ by employing cheap marketing strategies and cheesy images that only reveal how we've lost our connection to Divinity. Anyone who experiences the Divine will automatically understand the concept of true art so lacking in all commerical appeals.

Convert. Con = opposite. Vert = line. A convert is one who makes a 180. Who turns from the direction they are walking and walks a different direction. At this basic level it appears that one could convert from eating fast food or smoking. I find it funny then that we say that one needs convert to Christianity to be saved. They must walk the opposite way on the line toward this faith system . . . one which it appears Jesus himself did not exactly endorse. That's right, we need to go out and turn people around so they walk towards the plastic Jesus.

Or they could walk toward the man himself . . . and what would they do when they got to him? Probably converse with and follow him . . . oh, right, we also call that dialogue.

Jesus did a lot of that. He dialogued with Jews, Samaritans, and Gentiles of a wide variety. He didn't tell them to adopt his belief system. He simply talked with them and challenged them. I would point out one story where he speaks to a Gentile woman and compares her to a dog not worthy of his miracles . . . it appears our Savior was human enough to have prejudices, yet in talking with the woman his notions of Jewish superiority were challenged in that she had more faith than any of his religion. . . . hmmm, what could that say to Christians??

If Jesus were to talk to a Buddhist, I wonder what ways he would have been challenged in? and if it's possible for him, what does that mean for me? In talking with a Muslim, I obviously would desire that he know Jesus: if he doesn't know Jesus, then how can he challenge and be challenged by him?

I also find it funny that I have found an awesome way to remain unchallenged by Jesus, it's called Christianity. I hide from Jesus behind the plastic image I've made of him. The truth is that pluralistic dialogue stands a good chance of proving to me that the religion I've held up as the model for all, is actually quite far from the man to whom it refers and originates from.

This is what I've come to see in so much of our evangelism: a way to make people good, secular, Americanized, pseudo-Christians, but not to allow them or myself to be engaged by Jesus. Then I might realize how lifeless this plastic figurine of faith truly is, and be forced to stand in the frightening presence of a man who's got a few questions for me, who might point out to me the horrid direction of a few of the lines i'm walking it. I've also realized how cowardly it is to use our plastic faith to hide from the pertinent questions that other religions would ask us: questions which might also oppose some of the directions I've chosen.

If I truly follow Christ, I will ultimately walk in the midst of people of faiths different than mine. I will see that he does not demand they become like me, but only offers them food for thought on how life could be different. There is no imperialism in Jesus' wake. If the Roman centurion was still a pagan when he walked away, then should I assume it should be different today when I encounter people of other religions? Why not instead try something more modest: conversation. No hiding inside the Trojan horse of what we call Christian faith. Instead the frighteningly vulnerable position of standing in the open with no image to enshroud us, but an openness that hides neither our insecurities nor our strengths.

A is for Assessment

At 0400 I make rounds with my Dynamap machine. It's typically the fourth time I've woken my patients up. Dynamaps cost somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000. They take blood pressure and pulses so I don't have to. I guess it's an efficiency thing. Time is money, and if the hospital can save me time manually taking blood pressures I can spend more time charting on the patients I've barely seen, all in the name of the chief nursing virtue: covering one's ass.

My hands are raw after a weekend of washing them everytime the thought of washing them comes to mind. This is how I save lives.

It's funny that saving lives involves preventing people from touching. Life comes from blessed isolation. Yet, I see it in my patients; they want me to stay. Room 402 had a hip replaced and has no idea what's going on. She wakes up with a look of desperation in her eyes since she can barely tell the difference between the dreams she's waking from and the drugged stupor she awakes into.

404 is a friendly guy. He speaks good English until the conversation gets going and then I realize that I stopped understanding him seconds before unknowingly. Now he looks at me as though he's just said something funny, only I have no idea what we're even talking about any more. I laugh anyway. Weakly.

I finish vitals and return to the nurses station. I feel like I'm at a sixth grade girls sleep over, only I can't leave. Two of the nurses have been doing this long enough to be jaded, but not long enough to have gained any maturity. They act sweet half the time, and then proceed to vomit dirty looks and gossip the rest of the evening.

The nurses here are just as sick as the patients.
At least ethically. Maybe spiritually?
They spend most of the evening being mean to the secretary.

I try to ignore most of their asinine topics of conversation and learn to do this job. I put my initials on random squares to make it appear that I know exactly what's going on with the patients I'm in charge of. I do this again for the sake of covering my ass. That's the name of the game here. I am a pawn in the big corporate machine. Patients are cash cows. We milk them. It's not that my corporation is bad, they only do what they must to maintain the American consumer economy.

I try to start an IV. I don't get it. I pass it off to another nurse who misses twice. Finally on the fourth try our man has an IV . . in a horrible spot, but at least we can continue to pump him full of antibiotics while we chart that we "cared" for him. He looked bored. Really bored. As though what he really needed was conversation and fresh air.

The 4 needles probly cost over $300. Insurance is sure to fight it. We hold onto yellow stickers to make sure the hospital doesn't have to eat the cost.
Why so expensive?
Well cause our government decided it was better to blow up chunks of Iraq than subsidize the production of medical supplies. I earned around $150 dollars tonight. I imagine at least 15 of those dollars are paying for high tech bullets to put Iraqis in hospitals much worse than mine where they will most likely die. I'm working to fund the slow bacterial death of Arabic speaking people everywhere. If my vote counted for much I would give the money to medical companies to make IV's cheaper for Mr. Gomez.

A guy at Starbucks tonight suggested I go be an LVN in Iraq. I could possibly get a six-figure contract, seeing wounds on American soldiers that cost American tax payers multiple tens of thousands to get on them. That's where all the real money's at . . . Hell.

I still want to keep going in nursing. I want to get good at it, cause I feel there's such huge potential for awesome stuff to happen. Yet there's so much wrong with it. The way the system works, we basically prove we care more for the patient's rights than the patient's well-being. It's almost as though the patient is purely a liability to the medical achievement we call "health". . . . And there would be a lot more "health" out there if these stupid patients would quit screwing it up. I wish there was some sort of role that was an inbetween for nurse/minister/counselor. But alas I am confined to forcing health on patients who want so many other things as well. Sure they want health, after they get some help with finances and receive a general impression that there are people who give a damn about them. And I don't think that's too much to ask, only the American medical system isn't well suited to providing those things. And, sure, it's not like it's only the system's fault. The system is only the way it is because our government would rather corporatize Hell, and open up franchises in all the Arabic-speaking countries.

And I guess since we are the government we have no one to blame but ourselves.

I am reenacting Plato's cave. I've been outside, and the shadows aren't real. But the majority likes the shadows, they're entertaining, even during commercial breaks. So, leave the TV on. Vote pro-Hell. I'll go forcefeed people some of this stuff we call "health".

The Update

I live in Brownwood now.
I've got an awesome house.
I've met a cool group of people here, and have enjoyed hanging out with them.
Work is good.
I successfully started my first two IV's the other day. That was cool.
I like most of the people I work with.
I'll be switching to night shift in another week. We'll see how that goes.
I've gotten a few new song ideas of late.
'Heros Carry Swords' by Jacob Metcalf is awesome.
Brownwood has good BBQ.
I need a washer and dryer, if you've seen a pair for cheap, let me know.
Explosions in the Sky is the best study music of all time.
All the people I've met in Brownwood are conservative, and most are charismatic: God has a sense of humor.
I bought a road bike, and went riding yesterday.
I am out of shape.
There are 2 cute girls working in physical therapy at the hospital. That's typically the highlight of my day when they come up to the floor.
I think both the girls are engaged.
It's still the highlight of my day when they come up to the floor.
My Aunt and Uncle are awesome. They got me a kitchen table for a housewarming gift.
I love my cousins . . . and that's weird.
My cousin Olivia bit me the other day.
It left a bruise.
I love her anyway. . . and that's weird.
Gas space heaters leave the floor cold and so my toes are prepetually freezing.
I really needed to do laundry today. Instead I blogged. You people better be happy.
I talked with a girl on the phone for 2 hours last night. Strange.
I now have internet at my house.
I get TV this next week. I think i'm excited. At least I can watch the Mavs.
Brownwood is getting a new independent coffee shop soon. That's good.
k, i think yall are about caught up

David Tracy and the Repressed

So, Hans Kung has been for some time the main author who was really rocking my world. He's been the only guy who's ideas seemed to be big enough and progressive enough to be fitting of the God of the universe. But, I did have one problem with him. When it comes to philosophy, Kung knows his stuff up to about WWI, but beyond that I've never heard him mention much at all. Kung can take Nietzsche, Kierkengaard, Hegel, and Marx, quote them back and forth and use them to explain God in ways that are new and pretty interesting, but i've barely heard him mention existentialism, let alone postmodern philosophers like Derrida and Foucault who are all of the same period as he is. I love Kung's ecumenical views, but I've felt that without acknowledgement of the most recent currents in philosophy they are a bit incomplete.

Enter David Tracy. Tracy is a professor at the University of Chicago. He works in their divinity school and with the philosophy department. This guy knows his stuff, and it's been amazingly refreshing to read it. For the first time in months i've felt like i'm reading something over my head, but not so far over it that I can't make any sense out of it. So for the three of you who might care . . . here's a taste.

In the book i'm reading, Plurality and Ambiguity, Tracy is discussing some of the changes in postmodern culture on our perception of history.

We read a history book and no matter how difficult to discern, most histories are laid out as narratives. Often we let the "objective" language fool us into thinking that historians care only to report the facts. Yet, it has been demonstrated quite well in most current studies that the facts which an historian cares to report are typically those which support his system of beliefs and interpretation . . . just as the fact that he leaves out are those which would pose a challenge to his views.

Consider most accounts of the Wild West. Cowboys vs. Indians. In the end we all know, that the indians were not exactly the victors historically. So, as history reports it, the indians were at best 'noble savages' whose time had come. They had enjoyed their heyday and it was the 'white man's' turn now. Keep in mind that these accounts which manage well enough to justify the genocide of our European forefathers were written by our European forefathers. Notice the stark lack of historical reports from the period written by the indians, generally because we killed or repressed any indians who were capable of writing such reports. Thus, history belongs to the victors, as is commonly said.

Yet in postmodern thought, the lowly voices that we've done so well at repressing are suddenly finding avenues in which they can be heard. Tracy puts it this way:
"Their voices can seem strident and uncivil - in a word, other. And they are. We have all just begun to sense the terror of the otherness. But only by beginning to listen to those other voices may we also begin to hear the otherness within our own discourses and within ourselves. What we might then begin to hear, above our own chatter, are possibilites we never dared to dream."

Earlier on in the book Tracy discusses that a great temptation for us in the uncertainty of our times is to return to the sameness that gives us a sense of stability. But, the only way to do so is to continue on in acts of repressing those voices that represent the other. Cowboys only continue to conquer the great frontier so long as they kill the indians who long before had lived on the same land in harmony. We have long sense run out of things to conquer and realized that we don't know a damn thing about harmony. And how would we? We killed everyone who could have taught us about it, and we go on with our triumphant stories of how the West was "won".

Still we sense the imperfection of our own stories that we use to find our identity. We see our children dying of cancer most likely caused by the toxic pollution left behind so our factories could make better antifreeze to help 'fight' the elements that would prevent us from driving to work. We begin to sense the 'otherness' within ourselves. The otherness that says that the land we've stolen is better lived with, than on top of.

It becomes easy to realize in this conflict within ourselves how much we suffer because we've silenced the voices that might have imparted wisdom that could have saved us from our fate. Yet now, in this postmodern world where pluralism seems to be invading everything that once felt so settled, we are faced with the terrifying voices of those others that we have kept silenced for so long. We are faced with the fact that they too have a story. One that conflicts with ours, or even more frighteningly, sounds more appealing that ours. We are confronted by the inadequacies of our worldview, by the shallowness of our culture, or any number of other things. We are forced to realize the validity of the other person's voice, no matter how we wish we could have the only voice that counts.

This is where we find ourselves. We no longer live in a world where we can keep competing voices quieted by bigger guns and better technology. We are forced to listen to the losers of history whose stories and interpretations also count. This applies in all avenues: politics, religion, economics . . . We find ourselves in the frightening situation where we who for so long have enjoyed a quiet bought by domination, are increasingly forced to listen to those persistent, haunting voices of those no longer intimidated into silence which justifies our truth.