Hospital Theodicy: Overnight Call

Christian Detisch

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.

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Headshot of Christian Detisch

Christian Detisch is a writer whose poems, essays, and criticism have appeared in Image, The Rumpus, 32 Poems and elsewhere. He works as a chaplain in Asheville, North Carolina.

115

Seattle, Washington

Center for Religious Humanism
Seattle Pacific University

Editor in Chief
James K.A. Smith

Poetry Editor
Shane McCrae

Founding Editor
Gregory Wolfe

Image was founded in 1989 to demonstrate the continued vitality and diversity of contemporary art and literature that engage with the religious traditions of Western culture. Now one of the leading literary journals published in English, it is read all over the world—and forms the nexus of a warm and active community.

We believe that the great art that has emerged from these faith traditions is dramatic, not didactic—incarnational, not abstract. And so our focus has been on works of imagination that embody a spiritual struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. In our pages the larger questions of existence intersect with what the poet Albert Goldbarth calls the “greasy doorknobs and salty tearducts” of our everyday lives. Learn more at imagejournal.org

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