Daily Reading for March 10
This truth of the power of our interconnectedness was brought home to me in an unexpected way not long ago. One recent spring I was referred by my family physician to an endocrinologist because of a growth on the right lobe of my thyroid. The specialist informed me that he needed to perform a biopsy on the growth to gain the necessary information he needed to make an accurate diagnosis. This procedure involved placing several small needles into the lump in my neck and drawing out tissue which would then be analyzed in the laboratory.
To get clear access to the growth, I was asked to lie on the examination table and prop a pillow under my shoulder blades and upper back so that me head fell backwards off the pillow and left my throat prominently exposed. I felt like Isaac, docilely submitting to the one in whom I had placed trust.
Just before the physician inserted the first needle, one of the two nurse assistants who were standing by his side toward the end of the exam table took my hands in hers. I could not see which nurse it was but I knew immediately what she expected me to do—hold on to her. That is in fact what I did. As each of the needles was inserted deep into my throat, I found myself communicating my response to the pain to her hands. As the pain rose I held tighter, as it subsided I let go. I remember thinking that she had remarkable hands, healer’s hands, that they “said” much more than simply, “Hang on here if you have to.” . . .
About four o’clock, driving to pick up my children after school, suddenly the experience came rushing back to me. In the recalling, I became aware of the inner shift that had occurred when I took the unknown nurse’s hands. I had been making the kind of inner preparation that I might usually make, a sort of burrowing down into myself to find the resource, strength, or attitude that could get me through, when suddenly I found myself connected to a source of strength outside myself, a self-transcending energy that was greater than my bounded efforts and capacities. It was a graced moment, a grateful recognition of the holy, if you will, and, flooded with gratitude for it, I broke into tears.
From The Rising: Living the Mysteries of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost by Wendy M. Wright (Upper Room Books, 1994).