God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet

Author:Victoria Sweet [Sweet, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101561812
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2012-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

I never forgot that moment. The wedding of the Teals crystallized something for me that had been hard for me to conceptualize, but it had something to do with miracles and transformations and community. I thought of it as the “Wedding at Cana.”

The Wedding at Cana was where Jesus performed his first miracle—the transformation of water into wine. And Mr. Teal’s survival and transformation had certainly been miraculous. There was the first miracle that the paramedics had bothered to pick him up at all; and the second miracle, that he arrived at the County Hospital just in time for his resuscitation. There was the third miracle of his reconstitution in his bed on E6; and there was the miracle of his transformation—falling in love with Jessie.

But it was not only miracle and transformation that made the wedding of the Teals stand out in my mind as the Wedding at Cana. It was also, and even more—Cana.

Cana was just a little village in Palestine, and the wedding was nothing special. Yet everyone in the village attended—Jesus’ mother and cousins, his aunts, his friends and relations, the rich and poor, the children, the elderly, the beautiful unmarried women, and the men looking for wives.

And at the Teals’ wedding, when I saw the nurses in their mothers-of-the-bride-and-groom outfits; the other patients, dressed up and streaming into the chapel; Dr. Bart; and many others I didn’t even know, what hit me was that the hospital was Cana—a little village and a true community. And that a great part of Mr. Teal’s transformation had to do with this community—with its patients, its staff, its priest and nun, its open breezeways, its groups of smokers and scalawags, its doctors, nurses, and administrators.

After hospitality, I decided, community was the second principle of Laguna Honda.

What do I mean by community?

Community comes from the Latin communio, for which the Oxford Latin Dictionary gives two derivations. Communio as a verb comes from munio—wall—and means “to build a wall around.” So a community is defined by the wall—symbolic or otherwise—around it. Everything inside the wall is the community, and everything outside the wall isn’t.

That was a good definition of the community of Laguna Honda: You were a member of it just by being inside its wall. Because the hospital did have a wall, a real wall of polished rocks, piled up and shellacked by patients long ago. And we were a community simply because we were behind that wall and stuck with one another—doctor, patient, nurse, administrator, and budget. We had to do the best we could with what we had.

But communio as a noun derives from munis—gift; so communio also means “those who share a gift in common.” That was true of the hospital’s community, too, though it was not as obvious as the wall. At the Teals’ wedding, when I saw almost all of Laguna Honda pouring into that church, sitting rapt during their vows, and, yes, even crying, I understood that it wasn’t only me who was interested in the Teals, who made time, who was touched by them.

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