Revelations from the Sanctuary Floor

by Casey Thompson

Carolyn was the first person I visited as a pastor. She was a patient at Grady Hospital in Atlanta, an African American woman in her mid-thirties, nearly bald and maybe seventy pounds after a turkey dinner. She was a crack addict — in recovery not by choice but because the streets had been brutal to her — but now she was laid up in the hospital with a terrible infection in her leg. According to her doctors, she was going to lose it. In the six weeks I knew her, I never saw her relaxed. Her hands were balled into tight fists even while she slept. She had also partially lost her ability to talk; sounding always like her mouth was full of mashed potatoes. When I came to see her, she rarely met my eye. She always let me pray.

One day late in the summer, I walked off the elevator and heard screaming in the hallways, a phenomenon not unusual for that place. This scream stood out though. Even the nurses were frazzled. The charge nurse waves me over and tells me Carolyn’s surgery is today and that she’s been shrieking all morning long and pretty soon they’re going to restrain her. Carolyn sees me from her room and starts screaming again, “Chaplain, chaplain!” I look around non-chalantly as if I can’t hear her. “Chaplain, chaplain! Come here chaplain!” The charge nurse smiles mischievously. She knows how Carolyn scares me. “Come here, Chaplain. Come here.”

“Now get in there,” the charge nurse says, “we’ll be in there shortly.”

The Spirit of God picks me up by the scruff of my neck and puts me in the room.

“They’re gonna take my leg, Chaplain,” Carolyn screams.

“I know.” I’m not sure there’s anything else to say.

“Pray for me, Chaplain. Pray for me.”

I take her rolled up hand and start to pray, a flimsy prayer from Augustine I learned for a moment like this when my spirit stalls. She groans throughout. Then her Spirit finds words to buttress mine, “Help me, Lord, help me. Help me.” Over and over, a mantra: “Help me, Lord, help me. Help me.” Her breathing becomes measured; her hand loosens. I start another prayer, a long, desperate prayer, asking for God to attend to her, and she keeps praying below me, “Help me, Lord, help me,” but her words become sluggish. We finish and she looks me in the eye and says thank you and falls asleep. I linger over her a few more minutes, unwilling to leave this holy moment.

In the hall, I see the charge nurse accompanied by two large men and bed restraints.

“She’s asleep.” I say.

The charge nurse looks at me like I’m a witch doctor, and this time I smile mischievously, “She just needed to pray.”
A few hours later, they take Carolyn’s right leg below the knee. I visit her later that week. For the first time, she greets me with a beautiful smile. She whips off her sheet and shows me her leg, “They took it clean off, chaplain.”

Then, she looks me in the eye and tells me all the things about her life that she’d never say before and keeps thanking me as if I were the Spirit of God who came to her. She is changed, a new creation; changed by the desperation of her prayers and the faithfulness of God in being present to them.

We live in a desperate world, but with a loving God. When we fail to pray, we see only wolves and leopards and amputations and not the world God imagines: a world where the wolf lives with the lamb, the leopard lies down with the kid, where legs are amputated and discarded but the spirit of God perseveres, where food stamps run out but manna drops from heaven, where grief threatens to obscure us but the Lord of life stands resurrected outside the tomb and wags a finger.

Carolyn saw God’s new world. It’s what changed her. I wish I knew what has happened to her. It’s quite possible her demons reeled her back in — that’s a common enough story — but I imagine that Carolyn still prays with groans that open up God’s new world to her.   I can see her crutching her way up to worship, her inward breath intoning a prayer of entreaty, “Help me, Lord, help me” and her outward breath an affirmation of faith, “Your grace is sufficient for me, O Lord.” Her affirmation’s right. God’s grace is sufficient for us, because the things that make up our desperate prayers cannot withstand God’s grace.