SMALL THINGS

When I worked as a respiratory therapist in a Fort Worth hospital, once a small Latin-American child was brought into our ER. She was about three years old, dark hair with curls, dressed in playful multicolored floral dress and on her feet, little red sneakers with the white tied laces. Her eyes were closed. She was not breathing. The only external sign of her injury was a slight gash in her upper lip. No blood was flowing from the wound. For the blood had not been flowing for some time.
According to the story, she had run out between some parked cars and was suddenly hit by a driver who did not realize her presence until after the terrible impact. We worked in a hushed, almost reverent silence while attempting to resuscitate her with every technique and medication available. It was one of the longer resuscitation efforts I was ever involved in. But the spirit had left. The final impact had already occurred on the street.
So when the hope was gone, we stopped. She was taken away and the room was cleared and prepped for the next available emergency.  I returned to the office to make report but was immediately called back to the ER for another resuscitation. This time a very large and obese elderly man in his late eighties who had suffered a heart attack was on the gurney. No response from our efforts was forthcoming. We stopped.
But this time the timber of the ER crew was more jovial, more conversational. The man had made it around the Sun for eighty-nine trips. A fair journey for any one I thought. As I stepped away from the the gurney I surmised the difference in the team's demeanor while working on the small girl from the overweight elderly man. I thought of the difference as a form of coping with the inevitable exiting of life and its unpredictability for us. One somber silence the other the necessity of releasing those feelings through jovial expression.
As I was exiting the ER room, I looked down, and there in the corner were those little red sneakers with the laces still properly tied.
"Its the small things," as Madeline L'Engle says regarding the remaining presence of her late husband's shaving brush, in this week's chapter entitled "Smells Like Hope" from our Life of Meaning text. The large things are too large to truly interpret or grasp she says. Possibly this relates to her lack of how she would respond in the light of such an horrendous tragedy as the Holocaust. It's just too large to fathom and to act on. What are the small things that are meaningful in your life?
One thing that does not appear small to L'Engle is hope. She equates it with faith in difficult times and in the face of grief. In fact, it appears to be in the depths of hard times when we are most attuned to presence of God according to her. Other times we are busy with the daily errands of life. How have you felt the presence of Hope in hard times? Have you felt the presence of God in hard times? How does that result in your feeling toward your life?
There is a difference between fact and truth for L'Engle. Is this a matter of interpretation? How do you interpret this difference in your life?
L'Engle speaks of journaling as her way of objectifying her experiences and their resultant moods, attitudes and resolution. Do you have an objectifying practice to maintain the long perspective for you? Have you changed or adapted it over time?


Walter Morton for Terra Incognita