Emergency! Prayer, Paradox, and Matthew McConaughey

“Who is your doctor?”

The replies to my “I don’t have one” ranged from an incredulous, frustrated “Well, you’re sure going to have one now!” to “You remind me of my seventy-four-year-old Dad, he’s healthy as a horse and has never seen a doctor.”

The absence of a doctor wasn’t planned. During my career (in the last century!), the medical system was far less rigid. Working side by side with doctors, I could stop them in the hall…”Hey, can you check out this….whatever?” Later on, a personal physician was unnecessary…. until now.

It was a week ago, Thursday night into early Friday morning. I was in the Emergency Room at Methodist Stone Oak Hospital because I’d collapsed at home. That previous Monday, I’d contracted what I’d called the “GI flu, “more accurately, norovirus.

The incredulous, frustrated emergency room doctor asked who my doctor was because he was admitting me to the ICU. Several hours of treatment in the emergency room failed to convert the rapid atrial fibrillation or stabilize my blood pressure.

Looking back, I’m stunned at how long it took to get that I was in trouble.

How could I have gone three days with only sips of water?

Why didn’t it occur to me to check my pulse?

The reason is the usual one: Denial. I kept thinking, “It’s just the flu, it will go away.”

Until suddenly, I collapsed to the floor as I followed John out of my bedroom to drive to the emergency room.

Emergency!

Paradox and prayer

I think, and therefore write, about paradox with frequency. In an article titled Three Essential Qualities for Writers, I wrote the essentials as these:

• The ability to hold two paradoxical thoughts about just how well we write.
• Ceding control of the story to the characters.
• Extreme tolerance for risk.

I doubt that I’m the only writer who believes that, on the one hand, I have a gift: I write well, better than most, and have a duty to use it up for whatever time I’m on this planet. On the other hand, I feel insecure and vulnerable, and am wondering just how and why I have the audacity to write another book on King David.

Just so, the events of last week have shaken up my world….in a good way.

I don’t know that I have ever been that helpless before: completely reliant on others, including for prayer. During those eighty hours, I could not pray. Even later, when in the ICU and John brought me my Liturgy of the Hours and other prayers I pray daily, I could not pray them.

Was it the sleep deprivation, the intravenous lines, immobility, meds, or the fear?

A million years ago, when I was learning the vocabulary of the Catholic faith, the mystical Body of Christ slammed into my psyche and never left. That fundamental axiom of Christianity felt like something I’d always known but didn’t remember until studying it over that long-ago summer of conversion.

Of course!

Of course, we are one!

How could it be otherwise?

And so the prayers of the faithful during Mass and those of my husband and friends did for me what I could not do for myself.

…the importance of “negative capability.” It’s a concept she found in a letter from the poet John Keats (1795-1821). Keats praises this capacity that he perceives in great men like Shakespeare – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason….

As Brené Brown puts it, “Negative capability is a difficult muscle to build.  We’re wired to resolve tension and seek certainty.  This capability requires the ability to reach inward toward stillness rather than out toward counterfeit facts and reason.

I’ve been appreciating Brené Brown’s newest book (Strong Ground). She names some of the paradoxes that wise and courageous leaders learn to embrace.

I immediately resonated with the chapter on the importance of “negative capability.” It’s a concept she found in a letter from the poet John Keats (1795-1821). Keats praises this capacity that he perceives in great men like Shakespeare – “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

There are moments when abiding in love and truth is particularly painful. These are the moments of the in-between, when we have only partial insights or unsatisfactory options. We feel the pressure to make something happen and get away from the tension as soon as possible. It becomes almost unbearable to abide and wait for fuller truth and goodness and beauty to emerge.

To be human in a fallen world is to live in this tension. We are stretched by two seemingly incompatible truths. On one side is the harsh reality of impermanence. As much as we attempt to deny it, our earthly existence is fleeting. Nothing gold can stay. On the other side is the nonstop human tendency for meaning-making. We insatiably interpret what is happening and why – a task that our brains engage both consciously and unconsciously, even while we sleep! We don’t like waiting to receive the fuller truth. We both desire and need to belong securely and trustingly to something solid.

Embracing Paradox

Matthew McConaughey

Along with the prayer books that John brought to me was my friend Margaret’s gift of Poems & Prayers.

Following the third interminably sleepless night, I picked up the book with desperation. Once I began to read it, with inexpressible relief, I was transported out of myself by McConaughhey’s first words: In caps, I’ve always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.…

A prescriptionist at heart, I’ve always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream.

I’ve been finding that tougher to do lately. It’s more than hard to know what to believe in; it’s hard to believe.

But I don’t want to quit believing, and I don’t want to stop believing in . . . humanity, you, myself, our potential.

I think it’s time for us to flip the script on what’s historically been our means of making sense, and instead open our aperture to enchantment and look to faith, belief, and dreams for our reality.

Let’s sing more than we might make sense, believe in more than the world can conclude, get more impressed with the wow instead of the how, let inspiration interrupt our appointments, dream our way to reality, serve some soul food to our hungry heads, put proof on the shelf for a season, and rhyme our way to reason.

Forget logic, certainty, owning, or making a start-up company of it; let’s go beyond what we can merely imagine, and believe, in the poetry of life.

The ultimate paradox:

Work as if everything depends on you
Pray as if everything depends on God.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola