Blessed are they who believe they sufferyour justice. In the ICU a woman said,“I’m being punished.” A silence nested thereuntil a nurse set down a paper cup of medsand asked, “From one to ten, where is your pain?”then turned to raise the question of my belonging,a familiar sting. “Oh, I’m just the chaplain,”I shrugged. The nurse said, “Thanks for visiting,”although at three a.m. I feel I’m more raccoon—with questions curious as paws—than brother to these patients, for whom the moonseems closer company than either me or God.To know them more I read the doctors’ notes,the language like an alien’s, unclarified,with words I squint to follow as through a telescope:“Pt tachycardic but afebrile thru the night … “And yet, I click NEW NOTE and start my own:“Pt says she’s struggling with God.”I chart it, pained to see it written down,and fear I’ve represented the façadeand not the living space of her complaint,which I hear as: “I’m alone in my own grief.”My face is brushed in blue computer light,burning in the same cool flame that wreathedthe bush where Moses heard you speak, alone—though I am met with only the dim stillnessof these rooms in which no one feels at homebut you, Lord, whose silence lingers like an illness.