On August 13, 2023, I turned 38 in a hospital bed while awaiting emergency surgery for spinal stenosis. My right arm and leg were partially paralyzed. The last several days had passed in a haze of beeps, buzzes, and rings—“code blue, first floor, code blue, first floor,” the clacking of MRI machines, notifications from a cell phone I could no longer grasp with my right hand. In that same week, I had jogged three miles and gone surfing.
Also on August 13, 2023, in Rome, Pope Francis ended his homily with these piercing—and for me, prescient—words:
How do I react when I am afraid, in difficulties? Do I go ahead alone, with my own strength, or do I call on the Lord with trust? … But above all: Am I sailing with him? Do I welcome him? Do I make room for him in the boat of my life—never alone, always with Jesus? Do I hand the helm over to Jesus?
The Pope’s nautical imagery refers to Jesus’s walking on water (Mt 14:22). One might assume that Jesus’ miracle is a joyous event, forgetting the darker subtext in which it occurred: in the dead of night, upon rough waters, with our Savior’s disciple—for Catholics, the first Pope—sinking into the sea as he cries “Lord, save me!”
The Bible verse reminds us of the moments when our strength alone cannot carry us: when the storm comes—and inevitably it will—we can look into the waves and the darkness, or we can look to Christ.
The day after my surgery, I walked. I did not walk on water or even without a walker, but I walked all the same. I regained enough grip in my right hand to use a fork. I was taken off the list for a two-week stay at an acute care facility to be discharged directly to home. As I improved—despite my despair, my doubt, and my frustration—I began to notice a world of quiet grace moving all around me.
Nurses and nurses’ assistants work 12-hour shifts. Proximity breeds familiarity. They are there when all your visitors are gone, when you are in pain, and especially when you start sinking. What kind of people, you begin to ask yourself, can do this work everyday? How can they countenance seeing people at their lowest with unflinching courage and compassion? Something more than Adam Smith’s theory of labor value drives them.
In Spanish, the verb compadecer (compassion) could be translated literally as to “suffer with.” This is what the nurses who changed my IVs, who bathed me, and took me to the bathroom were doing. They looked me in the eye and suffered with me. They spent hours going over discharge papers with me and advocating on my behalf with doctors. They reached across the water into the boat.
As I exited the hospital, a nurse who had spent three 12-hour shifts in a row with me while her kids and husband slept at home, reached out and gave me a hug. It was then I realized that even when we don’t have Christ in our boats, he reaches—his arm, through others—across the waters to calm the storm.
