Hospital Visitation

Hospital Visitation

Kathleen and I went up to visit Freddie this past weekend. He has been at the Med for several weeks now. He remains in intensive care. We’ve been asking and continue to ask for prayers for him as he struggles to recover from a very serious spinal injury sustained in a fall.

When Manna House started, I never imagined that I would be doing hospital visits like the pastor of a small church. But over the nearly ten years we have been open, hospital visits have become an all too regular feature of our work of hospitality. Some guests fall ill, seriously ill, as poverty grinds them down. Some get hit by cars as they negotiate the city streets. Some are done in by violence, swift and brutal. Some, like Freddie, have a horrible accident. Whatever the reason, word comes to Manna House via the news of the streets that a guest is in the hospital and off we go to visit.

I’m grateful that in Kathleen I have a good partner in making these visits. They would be too difficult for me to do alone. The difficulty includes the physical exertions of finding parking and getting up to a room, but more there is the spiritual challenge of being with those who are suffering.

Jesus taught that when we visit the sick we visit him, just as when we offer hospitality to the stranger we are welcoming him (Matthew 25:31-46). But how do we see Jesus in a guest who is terribly broken and barely alive in a hospital bed? How is Christ present in those we visit in the hospital?

When I read Monday morning from Edith Stein (whose feast day it was) I saw another identification between Jesus and the guests we visit in the hospital. “Do you want to be totally united to the Crucified? If you are serious about this, you will be present, by the power of his Cross, at every front, at every place of sorrow, bringing to those who suffer, healing and salvation.”

When I stand next to the hospital bed of a person I love, and I know that person is there because of a life of poverty and suffering, I readily recognize I am at the foot of the Cross of Christ. At this place of sorrow, I pray for healing and salvation for the person who I have come to visit. I certainly cannot bring either healing or salvation. But I deeply hope for both.

To have that hope does not take away my sense of emptiness and helplessness, rather it affirms that it is that very emptiness and helplessness which makes room for God. There is nothing that I can offer except my prayers and my presence. I simply stand at the bedside asking for God’s blessing upon the person who is broken and ill.

Visiting accepts that there are no easy answers in the face of the Cross; just as there are no easy answers in the face of human suffering and death, especially when those are caused by human injustice. There is only the hard response of reaching out with compassion, of standing with those who suffer. To visit is thus a moment of great grace, but not the cheap grace of easy answers. Rather it is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, the costly grace shared with us by Christ in the cross.