NOTE: REVISED POST 1/14/2010
"Now Moses was tending the flock of his father in law Jethro....an angel of the lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush...he gazed and there was the bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. The Lord said to him...
"Remove your sandals for the place on which you stand is holy ground."
The Cycle of The Torah Portions rolls round and round. There are times I am drawn to favorite stories or powerful images and this week is one of them...
The moment is when Moses confronts the Burning Bush speaks to me this week.
Every time I have rushed off to Abbott Hospital with someone, my dear husband and now my father I go with great intrepidation and anxiety. I grab my sketchbook, my pen and I run. So afraid of what the coming hours will bring. And so I stand there in the rooms that have held so much pain attending to the one I love.
It is holy ground, those hours of vigil and worrying and waiting. Those moments of prayer. The prayer evoked by a hopeful drawing as we wait for answers. Yes, that is the holy ground I stand on. The plain gray floor in the busy emergency room. The place I have stood again and again.
And the burning bush...the flames, the fire. G-ds voice. What and how is that? It is the metaphor for the intense pain one must sometimes witness on the holy ground of the emergency room. There in the intimate sterile setting one comes face to face with mortality. There are times you pass through narrow portals. Wondering. Will he make it? Will we make it? When the fire of suffering flames up, you feel it. Every empathetic feeling fuses to the one you love and compassion is the cooling fountain that cools the fire of pain...yes there one hears G-ds voice. speaking to you directly in those moments when you hold onto the one you love for dear life.
Through drawing that moment I somehow make my peace with huge fears and am able to pass through to faith and hope....faith...such a tiny seed... as small as an amaranth seed...yet something to hold onto in the knowing that a tiny bit of faith can grow up into something large, beautiful and sustaining.
That ground I stand on is holy ground. And I am not alone. The wonderful nurses, the kind doctors, the orderlies who joke and make things comfortable. They are all part of that holy ground. There is the relief of humor and their deep well of compassion that we draw from again and again. We are blessed.
Nothing is so scary you can't draw it. This ground I stand on in the emergency room is holy ground.
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