#chaplain

I was asked what I learned working the covid floor.

1) Anger at those mocking covid. You are mocking the sick. Desecrating the dead. I’m still bitter about it.

2) It is heartwrenching to say goodbye through a video call.

3) No. One. Should. Ever. Die. Alone.

4) Nurses. Thank you.

I’ve worked in the hospital long enough to find:

Not every storm will pass.

Some oceans do not part.

Some things will never be okay.

Belief is powerful—

but it doesn’t magically make the life you want.

Sometimes the cancer wins. The evil gets away with it. The law and medicine and prayers don’t always work.

Life, as you’ve been told, is remarkably unfair. But it’s even worse than you think. If you knew the cold cases never solved, the surgeries that fail, the hate crimes unrecorded, the abuses unreported, the thousands of gofundmes that get nothing, the patients who die alone—it’s too much to think about. I’ve seen nameless people end up cremated by the county without a trace.

These types of catchphrases—

“Just put your mind to it, you attract what you believe, hustle and grind and get up at 4am like me, you don’t have it because you don’t”—

They only work in a vacuum. It assumes the luxury of a perfectly windless environment with unlimited windfall. It does not account for failed systems which actively hurt people who already live in deficit. It does not account for purely bad luck. To blame is only to place a second burden which pushes further down, never up.

Here’s the other thing. Life is made bearable by those who bear it with you. Who crawl with you to the finish line. Who remind you what happened to you is not your doing.

So often it’s assumed we need correction when really we need connection: to know we are not untouchable simply because life itself withdrew from us. To know that grace is not contingent on how we may have fallen. Grace, in fact, is exactly for when we fall.

I don’t need to know how to succeed in three steps. I need the people who will crawl with me when I can’t take another step. I need the grace which whispers to me through grief, depression, and sorrow, in the hopes that glimpses of bare joy will occasionally peek through the wreckage.

My hope is even when the storm stays, you will too.

Even if for a moment, in the worst of it, in the dirt and hurt of it, I hope you will visit a little while.

That in loss and abandonment, grace remains.

That when every prayer goes unanswered: you are the miracle I have been looking for.

— J.S.

Visions of The Great Crusade. Young Lorgar Aurelian and Kor Phaeron on Colchis.

This is a painting by an unknown remembrancer, from the time of The Great Crusade. The picture depicts not an illustration of real events, but a idea of remembrancer, about events that him have never seen, but heard and read, like realism artists of the 19th century, who tried to depict Ancient Greek and Biblical myths. 

P.S. The artist was brutally murdered by Kor Phaeron, due to “blasphemy”, in the time of the Horus Heresy. ‘A mortal doesn’t have the right to depict of the Divine.’

Dark Apostle Erebus