For the Life of Me
The long siege of pain had almost lifted. It may have been that my body had exhausted its capacity to hurt, or, by means of the intensity of the pain, had almost cured itself. The childhood chicken pox virus retreated from the nerves, to be stored in the tissues beyond sensation, leaving behind a small residue of feeling to remind me that until recently, it had been in total command of all my time and senses.

Not once had a I prayed for a cure, for if God was not attentive or present or even nearby, how could I ask Him for a favor? But prayer had served in other ways: it had distracted me from my body for very short periods of time. It had given me the transitory illusion of clear, inner emptiness from which the pain, like every other sensation, was absent. But when it asserted itself over the barriers of unknowing it presented me with the specter of mortality, goaded me into continuing my search.

Now, without my familiar, I was praying entirely alone. The cruel hand that had gripped my side for more than a year had almost withdrawn; the space around the area felt empty. To Julian of Norwich, severe illness brought on "revelations," the wondrous appearance of the Lord Himself. For me, pain produced contradictory responses, at one time fury at the force that was a disturbing distraction, and at another, the rare opportunity to see everything more vividly, with a clarity I could only wonder at, in which details of my present life were intensified and acutely delineated.

Shingles and its aftermath had been both affliction and gift, a salutary reminder of the approach of mortality . . . and intensification of the present moment. As for the future, I could not bear to think of it.

I returned to my hour of prayer free of the incubus that had clung to me for so long . . . Even when I found that, as a parting gift, pain had left me with a precarious gait — I was, as they say of the old, "unsteady on my feet" — I accepted this quid pro quo as a lesson: I was forced, at long last, to sit still.