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Settling In ˜ 33
was prayed for by so many friends and family, including the Catholic Worker
communities, and I know that was a great source of my healing.
Though I had spent a lot of time around Grady for twenty-five years, I had
always been on my feet. For the first time I was a patient. I began to realize what
was meant when I heard an Emory doctor who practiced at Grady Hospital describe
the patients as “clinical material.” There were a few times that I felt like
“clinical material.” But I must say that, for the most part, my care was wonderful,
and I was absolutely amazed by the compassion and the excellent care of so
many medical staff in that place.
Now we pray for the power and the capacity to renounce privilege. Dorothy
Day often pointed out that sometimes we don’t know what we’re praying for,
but we can count on the fact that our prayers are answered. And there was one
time in particular that was a real comeuppance for me. I was sitting in the hall
with Ed one day, waiting for my chemotherapy treatment, when a woman bustled
up to me with a clipboard and said, “How do you do I am your social
worker.” And I thought, “My social worker” The first thing I could think was
it was one thing to be told that I had cancer. But it was something else to be told
that I had a social worker! I had worked with social workers for years, so I had
this immediate surge of “wait-a-minute-I’ve-got-to-tell-her-who-I-am.” We talk
with Grady social workers when they are trying to place somebody, or trying to
find somebody’s family, or to meet some need. Now I was struggling to hear this
word: “I have a social worker.” Finally I realized that my prayer for solidarity was
being granted: I was really a poor person in that moment. I had a social worker
just like everybody else I knew at Grady Hospital. All the patients at Grady have
social workers, and now I had my own. In fact, she has become a good friend,
and has sent us other patients from the oncology clinic to live at the Open Door.
At one point, there were three of us in the community from the oncology clinic,
and with the same social worker.
God does answer our prayers, and we can move toward solidarity with our
sisters and brothers who are poor. If there is anything that the scriptures and the
Eucharist teach us, it is that the poor are not a problem to be solved, as we hear
so often in the parlance of our day. The poor are not a problem to be solved, but
a mystery to be loved. They are a sacramental presence among us.
In the eucharistic vision we are given the eyes to recognize and to love God’s
presence among us—Jesus Christ in the stranger’s guise. It all, of course, becomes
a joke without the Eucharist. It is incomprehensible to the rest of the
world, to those who lack a vision of the holy in the ordinary. The table companionship
and the eucharistic vision are the bases for our hospitality. If, as
Dorothy always said, solidarity brings us to the table with the poor, then the
grace is that at the table we can learn to love the poor. Love is the only solution.
Here we come face to face with the depth of the vision of hospitality. Solidarity