On Friday, for the first time since entering the hospital on Monday and going through surgery on Tuesday, I got out of bed. Or rather, I was gotten out of bed, transferred to a wheelchair, then wheeled to see the courtyard garden and feel the sunshine.
It took awhile. It was clumsy. I am bigger and taller than most Guatemalans, and this is a challenge even to male orderlies. The wheelchair is uncomfortable. My knees, massively torn up in two falls in two days last week, are not to bend or bear weight for six weeks, and so must stay braced and extended. There is discomfort and, though decreasing, pain. It sucks.
Except it doesn’t. Because it is proving to be — what to call it? A profound opportunity for reflection? A lesson in letting go? A “severe mercy”? Sure. All of those things that can feel like cliches when other people say them, and still feel a little shallow when you say them to yourself as a way to wrangle meaning out of setback. All may apply, but lamely.
So I’m going to go all in. This whole ordeal is turning out to be a mystical experience of sorts. Like that first encounter with sunshine.
I don’t just mean that it felt like I was seeing and feeling sunshine again for the first time, to use T.S. Elliot’s much borrowed turn of phrase. No, it felt like seeing and feeling sunshine for the very first time. Because maybe I had always taken it a little too for granted. And now, behold! And now, soak in!
And so too with so many other parts of this experience, except perhaps the freakish injuries that brought it on:
So many Guatemalan friends have offered whatever support they could.
So many many friends from around the world have sent prayers and messages and love.
The Sanatorio Hermano Pedro Center — named for Guatemala’s first recognized saint (a lay Franciscan who exemplifies all the works of mercy) and run by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul — is an oasis of beauty and kindness amid the congestion of Guatemala City.
Loving “in sickness and in health” indeed, Joetta has been wonderful beyond words.
And even when we think about the injuries in retrospect, we speculate about all the graces by which what probably was going to happen sometime soon happened now, in places allowing for safety and rescue and support.
Graces upon graces.
Such grace is a reality I have known and believed in and trust in but for which I have not always practiced adequate gratitude: Perhaps I could not begin to practice adequate gratitude until now, in the early evening of life. I do not beat up on myself for that, and yet long ingratitude does seem like a sin of omission that I must name at my next confession.
Oh well. The best that mystics have been able to do to describe their experiences has been to name visions of webs of interconnection in which the whole is greater than the sum of parts and in which that whole can be nothing less than the unity of all things. I only glimpse.
Yet the sunshine and beauty of the courtyard of Sanatorio Hermano Pedro has cast its light to reveal so many other graces embedded and interwoven. Again for the first time? Or the first time? Who cares?
And will mystical glimpses into those graces pass? No doubt.
But who cares? It is all grace upon grace.
Sunday, 15 September 2026