Editor’s (admin’s) note: First of three journals based on spiritual and theological reading while I was in HSHS St. John’s Hospital in January. I did a lot of reading, in my usual slapdash manner, and I pulled together some disparate ideas — connected some dots. — on topics ranging from Einstein’s concept of God to Franciscan theology to a novel bringing together the bombing of Hiroshima and the 13th-century Jewish mystical text known as the Sefer HaZohar or Book of Lights. In the end, I decided they’re all stories that attempt to explain the inexplicable, and they all have something to teach me.
One thing you can do when you’re strapped to a hospital bed with a yellow “FALL RISK’ bracelet on your wrist, is read. In fact, it’s just about the only thing you can do. But all that reading turned out to be valuable because I was able to put together old ideas and interests, things I had always known, but in new ways. I wish I could say I planned it that way. But I can’t.
Any benefit I got from the reading was purely good luck and serendipity. When my oncologist told me I’d better check into the emergency room to find out why my kidney function numbers were going haywire, I just grabbed a book off my bedside table on the way out the door; another came in the next day’s mail.
The books couldn’t have been more different. One was Christ in Evolution, a deep dive into 21st-century theology by Ilia Delio, a scientist (quite a good one, too — she was accepted for a postdoc at Johns Hopkins before she took vows as a Franciscan sister); the other was The Book of Lights, a 1981 novel by Chaim Potok that explores the ethical ramifications of atomic warfare and the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah. Potok writes compellingly about the tension between and religious and academic (i.e. empirical, or evidence-based) ways of knowing, and I find him deeply relatable, because I come down on both sides of that equation.
What did the books have in common? Well, they’re both about God. (Hardly surprising if you believe, as I do, God is imminent in all of God’s creation!) And they both tell stories.
One story, Delio’s, is theological; the other was a more traditional form of storytelling, a novel. But I think at the end of the day, I relate to both as stories. We’ll get back to that in a minute or two. But, first, back to the ER. They were kind of puzzled by my blood tests. So was I.
As a matter of fact I felt great, except for those damn creatinine numbers. The docs ordered other tests, and I kept coming up clean on everything except for the creatinine, a chemical they use to assess kidney function. It was still too high, and there was no obvious reason why, so they admitted me for further testing and observation.
That was on a Thursday night going into Friday morning; after running a couple more tests, including a CT scan, they scheduled a biopsy for Monday and kept me over the weekend. (It came back a week or two later suggesting the immunotherapy I’ve been getting for stage 4 cancer has started to attack my kidneys. Not exactly good news, but the prognosis is apparently manageable.)
Which means not only did I have plenty of time to read over the weekend, I had time to sit back and actually think about what I was reading. Which also means for just about the first time ever, I was able to reconcile the God of science with a God I can pray to.
Since I didn’t remember the password (story of my life!) to get ito my WordPress account in the hospital, I’d scribble preliminary outlines on a legal pad and copy them to Debi’s laptop at night in Gmail; when I got home, I completed the drafts on my desktop Mac. Three journals came out of the exerciese:
- This introductory post. Full disclosure: I’m writing it last. (I’m trying really hard to resist a lame scriptural pun here about how the first shall be last and the last shall be first.) I’ve done the same thing with my dissertation and most of my academic writing — how can I write an introduction before I know what I’m going to introduce?
- My thoughts on Ilia Delio; her Franciscan theology of creation, incarnation and evolution; the God of science (Einstein’s God, “the God of Spinoza,” as he famously once said); the God who walked with Adam and Eve in the garden; the incarnate Word in the gospel of John: and a personal God I can pray to. I ended with a prayer from the Lutheran retreat center at Holden Village in Washington state and titled it: “Hospital journal 1: A merry romp through abstract theology, Christology, rabbit holes and a lovely prayer for good courage.” Link HERE.
- My thoughts on the novel that came in the mail, The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok, the story of a Jewish US Army chaplain in Korea who turns to the Kabbalah in the stark moral and ethical ambiguity of the atomic age (and who, in spite of himself, fulfills the liturgical necessity of responding when the mourner’s Kaddish is recited at Hiroshima). Titled: “Hospital journal 2: Reading a novel about a Jewish mystic seeking ‘acceptable heresies’ in the shadow of the atomic bomb.” Link HERE.
What helped me put it all together was reflecting on the prolog to John — “In the beginning was the Word […]” — and a statement of Delio’s that “every aspect of creation is a ‘little incarnation’ of the divine Word.” This tells me it’s OK — what Potok’s chaplain might call an “acceptable heresy” — to look inside myself, and to the Word, when I’m seeking God.
And that, in turn, tells me Adam, Eve, the Franciscan theologians, Einstein, John the evangelist and Chaim Potok’s young rabbi in wartime Korea are all OK, too.
By that I mean they all have perfectly valid ways of trying to describe God in the wholly inadequate language available to us as human beings. To this old English lit teacher, that means the language of metaphor and story. I’m reminded of Laotzi and yet another faith tradition: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”
Maybe all we have is the stories, and that’s OK.
Here’s an example: In ” the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month,” which by some reckoning comes out to 593 BCE, the “the word of the Lord” (There’s that Word again) comes to the prophet Ezekiel in exile “in the land of the Chaldeans by the River Chebar.” Ezekiel has a vision of “something like four living creatures” around “a wheel within a wheel,” and, above the wheel, a throne:
[…] and seated above the likeness of the throne was something that seemed like a human form. Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all around, and downward from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.
I’ll have to admit Ezekiel’s imagery doesn’t do much for me. (I like the Raphael painting much better!) But I admire the prophet’s effort to stretch the limits of language — with descriptions like something like gleaming amber and something that looked like fire enclosed all around — to accommodate his vision. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. It’s way outside my frame of reference, which doesn’t include the River Chebar in Mesopotamia, the land of the ancient Chaldeans or the Babylonian exile. But Ezekiel’s vision makes for a marvelous story.
And I think, at bottom, it’s a story. Ezekiel looks up, and he sees the splendor of the Lord all around, like a rainbow on a rainy day, and he goes on to prophesy.
So it is with the old African American spiritual, “Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air.” It’s a wonderful story, too, replete with Christian imagery to give hope to enslaved people in America: And the big wheel run by Faith, good Lord; / And the little wheel run by the Grace of God; […] / Way in the middle of the air. Like the wheel within Ezekiel’s wheel, there’s a story within the story of the spiritual.
One of the songs collected by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s, it crossed over to white vaudeville audiences and ultimately to the concert stage. I haven’t given up hope yet the story of Black spirituals like “Ezekiel” might one day contribute to the redemption of America.
A few years after the original prophet Ezekiel, during the mid-800s BCE, Elijah had a very different vision of God. As his story is recorded in the book of 1 Kings, he is directed by an angel to Mount Horeb, another name for Sinai:
[The angel] said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
The King James Version has “[…] and after the fire a still small voice.” The Lord tells him to return to the northern kingdom of Israel, where King Ahab (who ruled from the 870s to the 850s) and his queen Jezebel, had introduced the worship of the Canaanite god Baal. Whatever the historical circumstances, it’s a grand story. And one I find relatable because when God speaks to me, God speaks in hints and whispers. Sometimes in sheer silence.
And God speaks to me in stories.
One I keep coming back to is the 1977 movie Oh, God! starring George Burns in the title role and John Denver, a grocery store clerk who has been chosen as a modern-day Ezekiel or Elijah. For obvious reasons, I find their story more relatable than a long-ago prophet’s vision of the God of Israel on a riverbank in what it now Iraq.
In his review of the movie Jan 1, 1977, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said Burns, a secular Jew when he was off camera, was “an improvement on [God’s] earlier cinematic incarnations,” and added Oh, God! was a “sly, civilized, quietly funny speculation on what might happen if God endeavored to present himself in the flesh yet once again to forgetful Man.” At one point in the movie, speaking in character, Burns is prepping Denver for a debate with religious leaders:
I want to say to everyone that everything around them, that they can see and smell and feel and hear, they should delight in all this. That what is here is some of My very best ideas. And I want everyone to try very hard to make sure it doesn’t all go down the drain. (IMDb)
This sounds almost Franciscan, but I suspect it’s not a direct literary allusion to St. Francis’ canticle praising God through “Sister Mother Earth, who sustains us and governs us and who produces varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs.” It’s more like an intuitive understanding, I think, of God’s presence in all of God’s creation. It’s one I find in Franciscan theology, in authors like Richard Rohr OFM — and in Ilia Delio.
I suggested earlier that I approach Delio as essentially a storyteller. It helps me relate to her theology, which can get pretty abstract, but I’m not going to pretend that sums up her approach. She’s much more than that. A thought-provoking profile in National Catholic Reporter by book editor Jamie Manson puts it like this:
Her engaging personality has made her a popular speaker not only among women religious, but in spiritual and academic circles. The breadth of her knowledge can make these events downright epic. When Delio addressed the LCWR [Leadership Conference of Women Religious] assembly in 2013, she spoke for more than two and a half hours over the course of two sessions, then took questions for another hour.
Delio’s intellect works like a hummingbird in flight. As she speaks, she moves swiftly and precisely from physics to medieval theology to the 20th-century mystics. She feverishly taps each of these sources, cross-pollinating ideas and generating new, complex images of God and the universe.
“I want everyone to see that we are loved into being at this moment just as we are by a God of unconditional love,” Delio says.
“We emerge out of this long, cosmic process we call evolution. But evolution is about deep relationality,” she continues. “We are created for love, and that’s what keeps pulling us onward.”
In her NCR profile, headlined “The Evolution of Ilia Delio,” Manson acknowledges this corss-pollination “has been known to bedevil even some sophisticated theological minds.” But Delio says her message is simplicity itself:
And that, to me, is a story I’m just beginning to wrap my head around — thanks to some scary creatinine numbers.
An update and a footnote. A week or two later, I was back in the ER for another blood test. I hadn’t been wearing socks at home, so on my way out the door I grabbed a pair. When I got to the hospital and put them on, I realized they were a Christmas present from a sister-in-law who has a quirky sense of humor similar to my own. They said “Don’t Poke the Bear” and here I was in St. John’s for a blood test!
So we went ahead and poked the bear. And the creatinine level was down. One and done, treated and released with follow-up appointments already scheduled with my primary care doc and my new kidney doc. Life is good, and I was a happy bear.
[Revised and uplinked Feb. 7, 2025]
Ordinary Time 