“This is a sacrament. This is a sacrament. This is a sacrament.” I breath in and out slowly through my mask, goggles fogging and palms sweating under my gloves as I gently squeeze a shaking hand. “This is a sacrament” I tell myself over and over again. The frail woman in the bed trembles so hard she shakes the bed frame, the sound harsh in this dark and quiet room. “This is a sacrament. This is a sacrament.”
It’s been over a year now since COVID-19 took over my life. Over a year since we first heard about a new virus overseas, back when its spread to the U.S. seemed unthinkable. Over a year since we looked to Italy and thought “that couldn’t happen here.” Over a year since the first news of U.S. cases emerged, and the conflagration began to lick at the edges of American life, before blazing into an inferno that has engulfed the world, and every facet of our lives. Over a year since I felt at ease.
I am a nurse at a teaching hospital in Boston. I work on a surgical floor, taking care of patients who need or are recovering from surgery. I’m comfortable caring for people with tubes coming from just about every place you can imagine, and a few you can’t. And I love my work. It challenges me, wearies me, refreshes me, hurts me, humbles me and makes me laugh. I’ve seen a lot over the years. But nothing in nearly a decade of practice as a nurse prepared me for the first wave of COVID in Boston.
Every bed was filled, and we expanded capacity by turning other areas of the hospital into patient rooms. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) became a valuable commodity. N95 masks which once would have been single-use only were now worn for an entire shift. Dressed in blue hospital scrubs and caps, and yellow precautions gowns, wearing double gloves, and N95s covered by another surgical mask and topped with a clear plastic face shield, we took to writing our names in Sharpie on strips of tape we attached to the shields above our eyes, so that patients would know who we were. Even when not in patient rooms with our N95s on, we wear paper surgical masks. I haven’t seen my coworkers’ unobstructed faces in over a year. I’ve started to forget what some of them look like.
No more post-operative patients. Only COVID. No milestones of recovery. Only COVID. No first steps after waking up without the appendix you had all your life until today. Only COVID. No happy news of cancer cut out, no eager visitors, no therapy pups, no patients walking the halls, pushing their bodies to heal. No excitement. No joy. Only COVID. For months during the first wave, we drove to work on empty streets with a handful of other “essential workers” while the rest of the world stayed home. I will admit my commute was nicer, but that’s about the only thing that was. Those times were dark.
While I somehow managed to stay free of COVID, huge numbers of my coworkers were infected. We were falling like dominos. Treatments for COVID remain limited, and at that time were basically non-existent. Placing patients on their bellies, called “proning,” and giving more and more oxygen--more than I’d ever administered before--were about all we could do. People either slowly got better, or they slowly got worse until they went to the Intensive Care Unit, where they too often died anyway, but at least I didn’t have to watch. Many patients and their families decided on “comfort care,” basically hospice, and those folks stayed with us until they passed away. We held up iPads so that the sick and dying could say goodbye to their loved ones over FaceTime. And in all of this chaos and sorrow I lost track of God.
While our meeting houses were closed Friends quickly adapted to digital worship, but I didn’t attend. Much of the time I was too tired. I was picking up extra shifts because of the severe staffing shortages, and the work itself was more exhausting than usual. But even when I wasn’t working or sleeping off three 12-hour overnight shifts in a row, I didn’t want to worship. I didn’t want to open myself in expectant waiting to meet with the Divine. I didn’t want to find God. Instead, I wanted to curl up tight and coat my soft and broken heart in hard layers until I was safe, like a turtle in its shell.
To worship in the manner of Friends is to make yourself exquisitely vulnerable. To be part of a worshipping community is to share that vulnerability with others who are equally open. And I could not take the risk of being vulnerable; I didn’t want to share my bruised and broken self with others. In worship the Spirit has often appeared to me as a well of cool water, and I felt like toxic waste that would befoul the water supply for everyone else. So I packed the pain deep down and stayed away.
This all came to a head during a virtual Planning Committee meeting for Quaker Spring, an annual gathering I’ve attended for many years. During the meeting we each shared how we were doing. I had no intention of saying much beyond “I’m hanging in there.” But God had other plans for me, and without warning my turtle shell—that hard, safe haven I’d constructed to protect myself—cracked open and spilled my messy, bleeding, sobbing, smushy, broken heart all over that Zoom meeting. The part of me that could think straight was mortified. This was exactly what I had feared. This was why I had stayed away from worship. I was tainted. I was ashamed.
But there was no need for shame. In the face of my sorrow, those present opened their hearts even wider to receive my pain. The grace of God expanded to accommodate my frailty, as it always will. And that well of cool water I’d imagined myself spoiling? That water is unspoilable. It washed away the grime of this world and left me feeling cleaner and freer and lighter than I’d felt in months.
Since that day I’ve tried harder to find God in COVID. I make a deliberate effort to be open to grace. Over and over again I remind myself of something Sally Fritz said at a Quaker Spring gathering several years ago, when describing a moment of holiness found in a quotidian task: “this is a sacrament.”
Sally’s words have stayed with me ever since. Augustine of Hippo said that a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace.” While Friends do not practice outward rituals, I find Augustine’s definition congruent with Friends’ efforts to bring the sacred into every day, and live out that holy truth that comes to us in worship in our daily lives. In this way small tasks are consecrated through our attention.
We erase the line between the sacred and the profane by believing that the profane is sacred. And we transform the exhausting, the depressing, the tedious, the heartbreaking, into avenues for greater communion with that beating heart, that rushing wind, that wild, living fire at the heart of our Quaker faith. And in this way the simple act of holding a frightened woman’s hand while she lies in a hospital bed, scared and missing her family who cannot visit, becomes a sacrament. Christ’s love for us is made manifest in the love we show for others. An inward and invisible grace made visible in the world.
This is a sacrament.