Thurnderstorms and chaplaincy

The afternoons and early evenings bring thunderstorms to the Denver skies. The days are hot—in the low nineties, and clear blue skies. From the chaplain’s office or the deck of my brother’s home, I can see the storm off in the distance. The dark clouds form with streaks of rain connecting them to the earth. Flashes of lightning illuminate the dark underside of the roiling storm clouds.

      I watch the storm travel, often from the west towards the east. Before the actual storm arrives, the winds pick up. The nearer the storm, the stronger the wind is. The temperature has dropped quickly. The first drops come down, and then the storm is upon me. The rain is hard, fast, and heavy, filling the gutters to overflowing in minutes. The lightning is more frequent. I can hear the thunder now and I count the distance, wondering if counting really measures the distance. It has been a long time since I’ve been in warm rain, summer rain. I feel energized by the wind. This rain soaks me in a minute. Not like an Oregon soft rain that you can run through and not get soaked.

      In only a few minutes, the storm moves on. I can watch it move off into the distance. A few days ago, the storm came later, and as it was night, the lightning now illuminated the clouds in the northeast. I could see the lightning strike from cloud to cloud, back lighting the big black cloud between the storm and me. As I watched over time, I could discern the shape of the cloud as the storm continued. It was now too far to hear any thunder. The sky above me was clear, stars shining.

       I thought how being in the hospital might be like experiencing a storm like this. Maybe we can sense the storm or illness coming at a distance, as our bodies don’t respond the ways we are used to it responding. And the turmoil of the storm, maybe it could be a metaphor for the crisis of being out of normal time, of being in the hospital. The storm is so powerful. And it is not in our control in anyway. Illness can hit us, come over us in a similar way. As the crisis peaks and passes, the illness or lightning flashes and illuminates the shape of the cloud, of the new pattern in the sky, of a new pattern in our lives.

     I’m not sure that there is a purpose or meaning in the illnesses of our lives. But I know from the work in the hospital that illness storms into our lives and changes them whether we are the ones who are ill or if we are the ones whose loved one is ill. Hospitalization changes us. It puts us into a space where we are not in control of much if anything. Pain, like lightning, backlights the new patterns in our lives. And illness passes, sometimes bringing us back to our changed lives and sometimes taking us to the life to come.