“Songs of Innocence”
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
-William Blake
I did not know what to expect. I did not know what effect seeing Carter would have upon my psyche. I was afraid.
There he lay, his head bandaged from the surgery, his left side motionless, not paralyzed, just perfectly still and quiet, receiving no instructions from the brain. That morning, prior to surgery, he had been sitting up on the bed, alert, moving, playing. Now a perfectly healthy body was half immobilized from a wound inflicted by surgeons in the attempt to stop the seizures that were slowly depriving Carter of his childhood. How strange that the perfectly formed side of the child now so unresponsive, so passive, struck me as extraordinarily beautiful! Being with Carter, touching him, was a privilege unlike any I had experienced. Most interesting and most irresistible was his face. Handsome is not the right word. “Angelic” is fanciful. It was the perfect face of a little boy, captivating in its expressionlessness. What was stirring in the depths that seemed to call out from his half-open blue eyes? I could only hope that he was not hurting, not afraid, that he in some way sensed that his parents were near, knew their touch, felt their love.
The expression on the faces and in the voices of the parents was, by contrast, transparent enough, disclosing desperate hope that the terrible decision that had been thrust upon them would result in the healing of their son, and that he would some day understand why what had been done to him had to be done, that it was for him, that it was only love, completely love! At one point, the day after surgery, Leslie, the amazingly calm and steady young mother of this child, sitting in a chair with Adam standing beside her, held to his leg and cried out: “Oh Adam, did we do the right thing?” There was nothing I or anyone could say to her. Only Carter himself could answer her question.
Who was I in that room? pastor? friend? grandfather? and what was there for me to do for this child? I felt nauseatingly helpless. Should I pray? console? theologize? or just be quiet? The worst thing would have been pious palliatives, explanations of any kind. I dared not utter the word G - O - D, not because Carter’s Christian parents would have objected (and not because “God” himself had been put in the dock by Carter’s suffering, a la Job), but because nothing I could have said on that Subject would have come out right, nothing could have possibly lessened their distress. Nothing seemed more irrelevant, more impotent, to me at the moment than theology. Before the week was over I would have my internal debates with what I had been taught of G - O - D. For the moment the best pastoral wisdom I could muster was silence. If the years had taught me anything it was: know when you don’t know what to say! Know when it is better to say nothing! So what was I to do? I was there. That’s all. I had felt the need to be there, received the inner instruction to go there. So there I was, on the periphery of a pain that I could not alleviate.
Of course I had brought along my book satchel, knowing from experience that all I need is a chair in the corner in order to work. I had a half-written sermon with me and much reading. I would, I thought, sit with Carter and get some work done! Having over the years trained myself to mentally override extraneous noise and concentrate in places unconducive to concentration, I was prepared for my usual modus operandi. Carter’s room, I should remind you, was in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit of one of the largest and best hospitals in the world, and as such abuzz with doctors, nurses, procedures, beeping monitors, incessant movement. Carter was the center of a powerful collective attention! But it was not that that distracted me from thought. It was Carter himself who sometimes slept, sometimes gazed at who knew what across the room, and was very often intensely agitated and restless, flailing his good arm about aimlessly or grasping his neck. I would look down, read a paragraph, look up again, stare at Carter, look down and read the same paragraph over again, and again.
To comfort myself I would occasionally get up, walk to the bed, and touch the child’s arm, say something to him. How could I calm him? What role did I have, the preacher, other than try not to be in the way of the professionals who knew very well why they were there, what to do and how to do it.
Doctors did not enter Carter’s room singly but in teams: epileptologists, neurosurgeons. Their educated faces, language, demeanor bespoke knowledge, the limits of that knowledge, and the frustration of those limits. They had done all they had known to do. They had given Carter the benefit of all their experience. There was no one else to consult. They were the best. And Carter’s future was still uncertain, the degree to which he would recover unknown and unknowable. They were, no less than I, humbled before the child.
The question was, and is: what was Carter’s power? That he was the most powerful presence in the room is simply beyond question. I saw it and felt it. Everyone, not excepting those who had been trained to keep a clinical distance, was taken in by him. How could the least, the weakest, the wounded, the stricken, hold sway over the room? enthrall everyone? Yes, his head, with its long, curving, incision was beautiful, not the less so for its wound. Was it his beauty, that of the perfectly formed male child? Was it because he was so utterly unaware of where he was, what had happened to him, and what lay before him? Was it his perfect helplessness? defenselessness? was it what the world had done to him, the injustice that had been perpetrated upon him? was it the divine innocence of the suffering child? was it therefore the grace with which he received his mother’s love or grasped his father’s finger? was it the unsurpassable gift of that perfect trust---as if to say, in answer to his mother’s cry, “it’s okay”? Donald Morris
