Hospitality

Here I sit in my "island room" at BA somewhere in Utah, struggling to become a true castaway. This assisted care facility is not a hospital, but it is a place where many of us suffer from one kind of malady or other. The root of the word "hospital" is guest, host, stranger. Our feelings about hospitals range from deep gratitude to fear. We feel "estranged." a wary "guest," and always ambiguous about the work rhythm of our "host." Why do they awaken us to see if we are ok? And what of the night sounds: the soft shoes racing across the floor; the chatter at the nurse's station. The moonlit brilliance of stainless steel and porcelain, the smell of alcohol and sometimes the subtle sound and smell of Death approaching your hallway.

When one is marooned, getting your bearings is critical. As I have pointed out in other blogs, routine/ritual is one way of ordering your life. Mornings for a devotional/scriptures, a short walk up and down the halls, a cup of mint tea to settle the jumpy stomach. Breakfast, another walk, an appropriate foreign film, some notes on a possible e-mail or blog. The help here is hospitable and they treat me as a guest. My Level One status allows me freedom to take short errands with family and friends. I am surrounded by books, a computer and a television.

But I often find myself lonely, starved for conversation. When Samuel Johnson's Rasselas finds a would- be city dweller trying to be a country shepherd, he finds the man near madness. He quickly packs his bags and follows Rasselas and company into Cairo, a kind of 17th century Portland, Oregon. He needs to talk and to listen. Conversation is for me a form of prayer. For our distraught "shepherd" the pastoral [rural] life has isolated him from other people. For some, like my son-in-law solitude works. I would rather talk and listen than scale the mountains, mountain goat style. Is your solitude self chosen or are you imprisoned by circumstances? Are you a mere face in the crowd or the congregation? The worst kind of solitude, I think.

Is it possible that solitude is a mere frame of mind---as is loneliness? However, I noticed my last time through Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude that solitude turns out to be a negative term, something closer to loneliness or isolation. Gold coins, epic love affairs and numerous military conquest and businesses, yet nothing remains. Emptiness. A journey into demise--and a wonderful warning to the reader. Nothing material in this life but love will remain. With a list of more than a dozen versions of solitude, I am forced to limit myself to a couple. Solitude is aloneness; solitude is sometimes loneliness; solitude can be decay, the inability to withstand time itself. The village Macando "will," says the last Aureliano, "soon be wiped out by the wind." Even the precious hieroglyphics of the family parchment will be only partially translated. Words die, words which capture our past. How do we survive? Along with scripture and "walking prayers" [I seem to be better on my feet than on my knees], my last, most critical resource is the people around me.

In his stirring account of life in a Nazi concentration camp, Victor Frankel discovered that [1] love and [2] work [exercise?] provided the logos [meaning] he so desperately sought. As the camp's only doctor, he lost himself in saving others. When most of the camp was "transferred" out, Frankel volunteered to stay with the sick. Those who left were never heard from again. Out of that "work" came love, and that love for others saved him. If I'm reading the Gospel of John correctly, love of others lies at the heart of meaning in life.

Let me send along an excellent DVD recommendation on Netflix [streaming or disc]. "Happiness" strikes at the heart of our search for meaning. The most unhappy country in the world? Japan. The happiest? Denmark. And it seems the more wealthy people become, the less happy they become.

You ask me what loving others means? I try to meet the simple needs with warmth and affection. A quick shoulder rub, a hand on the arm, a kind word to the confused, walking with the Parkinson's patients who wobble their way heroically down the hall, listening to endless redundancy from the demented, the 10 minute retention of those struck down by Alzheimer's.

There's hope, then, for all of us castaways. At least I'm not talking to a volleyball with a painted smiley face.