Seeing God by Practicing Reverence
My pager screamed an alert across the room. I jumped up from the rickety bed and ran to shut it off. I quickly called the number on the pager. “Patient in Room 753 wants to speak to a chaplain,” said the voice on the other end of the line. After asking a few assessing questions, I responded, “Be there as soon as I can.” I shook my head, trying to wake up and tamp down the adrenaline rush that comes with being startled out of sleep. I grabbed my credentials and dashed out of the sleep room, heading to Room 753.
As I walked through the quiet corridors of the normally crowded Texas Medical Center hospital, I reflected on how the deserted halls seemed to hold a sacredness at night that I did not feel in the daytime. There was no bustling of visitors and staff heading purposefully to their destinations, no chatting about what was going on with patients, no visitors looking lost or needing directions. Only an occasional staff member in scrubs waited on an elevator or ambled down the hall.
This great house of pain and suffering appeared to be pausing to rest—rest from testing, consulting, billing, planning, questioning, consorting, moving from one place to another. The hospital had an almost cathedral-like atmosphere; I addressed the few people I saw in hushed tones and noticed how my solitary footsteps reverberated off the walls. As I made my way to Room 753, I felt the presence of God. Be still and know…
In one of my first units of Clinical Pastoral Education, our educators encouraged us to approach our work with reverence. I had not really thought much about the concept of reverence before this, so it was like trying on stronger glasses. “Reverence,” the American Heritage College Dictionary says, is “a feeling of profound awe and respect.” To revere something or someone “suggests awe coupled with profound honor.”
As I incorporated reverence into my practice, I began to recognize the presence of God. Yes, there was overwhelming need and sadness in this critical care hospital. Yes, I witnessed suffering every day and cared for those who tearfully shared their stories. But in the midst of it all, if I stopped to be still and practice reverence, I witnessed how God was at work in this place. I saw the faith of a paraplegic woman without housing who praised God for loving her. I observed a nurse’s compassion as she cared for a patient struggling with pain. I saw the love of the parents at the bedside of their dying son as they held his hand and stroked his head. I marveled at the God-given wisdom of those who developed medical treatments that improved the health of so many. In other words, I was in awe of how God showed up in sacred silence everywhere I looked.
As I listened to the patient in Room 753 share what was keeping her up that night, I thanked God for calling me to walk with her in that moment. In doing so, God had silenced in me any meaningless noise of the world that might have drowned out the Eternal Presence.
Be still and know that I am God.
