Bad news

A terrible thing happened on Saturday morning, which I just learned about yesterday. Mkhululi, one of the guys from Siyaya was hit by a combie (mini-bus taxi) and is in the ICU. He is one of the three guys I went to Mzoli's with last weekend.


I went in to visit him in the hospital today with Bonganyi, the music director, and Johanna. The kid is in very bad shape. I was glad for my experience working in the ICU at the hospital last summer, which prepared me for this a little bit. But I was not working in a trauma ICU, and nearly all of the patients were older people in more advanced stages of disease. Some were hooked up to machines and respirators, just like Mkhululi was. But it is much different to see a healthy young person, especially one you have hung out with in that situation. He had thick bandages on his head, which was very swollen, and the machines were doing all the work for him, violently pounding breaths in and out of his heaving chest, as he is probably in an induced coma. He is only twenty-two, and he is a father. I was glad other members of Siyaya were not there with us.


There is not much you can say in such a situation. There were no family or friends to comfort, and Mkhuli was unconscious, but just seeing someone you know like that is not easy. You ask yourself, why does God allow this? That was always one of the hardest things to address as a hospital chaplain. I didn't have anything profound to say. The only God I could speak about in the hospital was one who is present in human suffering, and does not sit far off and aloof, too pure to get the divine hands dirty. If God doesn't get down in the mess with us, then there is not much use in talking about God. That at least was my feeling. So what is it like when God gets down in the muck with us? That was my question, and I had no answers. Often it was the patients and family members themselves who would be doing the ministry to me in that situation. They had much more business telling me about faith, I thought, than me trying to tell them.


What do I know? I can make the proclamation, "God is here in this tragic moment", but I couldn't point God out. When you sit beside a woman moaning in agony from bone cancer (which has to be about the worst ailment imaginable) theoretical theology is meaningless. She doesn't care, for instance, that Alvin Plantinga has proved that there is no logical inconsistency between belief in a perfectly good God and the reality of human suffering. These abstractions don't matter when you are living in the pain. There is nothing to say, as a pastor, in that situation. Ministry of presence is important -- sometimes it's all you have -- but much of the time it just isn't enough. Hospital visits militate against pat answers and easy solutions. Somehow, that is why I am drawn to situations like that. I don't like easy church answers. I would rather be real about the complexity, the incomprehensibility of suffering. It won't just go away by ignoring it.


A glum posting, I know. But this is life everywhere.