The Hospital as Museum

Hope for the ultimate future

Inside the abandoned hospital on Ellis Island. A place I’d love to tour.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like if our hospitals became merely museums. I would love for that to happen. I would love for my skills to be an anachronism, the stuff of history books, no longer essential. I wish that the chest compressions on the dying, the endless needle sticks, the scalpel cuts to make airways or remove damaged organs or cancers were all little more than scary stories from the past.

How wonderful if it were someday the stuff of reenactors, the way men line up in blue and gray on long quiet battlefields and fire clouds of impotent gunsmoke at other men, with whom they will later share a meal, a drink and a laugh.

How much more so if every place of suffering were like this. Imagine if we had laughing, casual tours of all the places where bombs fell, where men, women and children died, where famine or pestilence ravaged and filled the earth with families wrapped in sheets together, where soldiers took their last breath. Try to contemplate a time when every place of separation or accident held no more terror. If even the vast, deep ocean with its cold, almost endless chasms could no longer hold any power, how wonderful it would be to sail over its surface once more.

What if every tomb were empty, every cemetery merely a garden; maybe the names remained on irrelevant stones, and those once dead made a game of finding their own names and the names of others they love.

Because I am a Christian I believe that there will come a time, a time unknown, possibly a time beyond time, when the dead are resurrected. And it is an idea, a hope, a prophecy which Jesus himself discussed.

Indeed he told us to care for the poor, the sick, the stranger. He commanded us to love our enemies. He also told us to be moral; to stop sinning and to be diligent about not only our words and actions but our very thoughts.

But however inconvenient it may be to the modern, secular mind, however unsettling to the merely moral believer, Jesus did other things like perform miracles and cast out demons. And along the way he also said “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26)

I think about this as I walk through the hospital at night. I wonder if someday, after that resurrection, we might be able to take tours with those who live again. If they might say with a chuckle, “that was the room where I died on the operating table. I recall leaving my body. The pain had been so great and it was suddenly gone. You know, I have never known pain again? How wonderful? And we are all together as I had hoped!”

When my footsteps fall on empty hallways, when I peak into hospital rooms, when I recall sorrowful things I have seen, I imagine what a wonderful, inexpressible thing it will be when all of the sorrow, all of the pain, all of the loss and misery is gone and all things are set right.

I suspect the even the memory of loss, if such memory persists, will be like the memory of a fleeting injury, a twisted ankle, a toothache that inconvenienced us, rather than as the thing that seemed such a torment, or a final sorrow, in the confines of time.

We so often turn our religious faith into ultimately limited politics, and use our politics as a form of twisted faith. But Christianity in particular, without the hope of the resurrection, without the hope of all things set right, is just another reminder (albeit a beautiful one) to be nice to one another.

St. Paul addressed this when he said “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.  And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” 1 Corinthians 13: 12-14.

But I have seen enough tears fall, heard enough screams of sorrow, tended to enough pain, witnessed enough death to know that I have no alternative other than to cling to the hope of resurrection and renewal. Nothing else makes any sense.

Revelations 21: 1-4 says this:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man,

and He will dwell with them.

They will be His people,

and God Himself will be with them as their God.b

‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’c

and there will be no more death

or mourning or crying or pain,

for the former things have passed away.”

Keep your politics if you wish; they have a place, to be sure.”

I am beautifully haunted by the idea of a world with no more tears, no more death, crying or pain. This is what I believe. This is why I believe. And when I walk down those night-time hospital halls, when I walk through the over-grown cemeteries of my ancestors, when I read about the horrors that man visits upon man, it will continue to be this hope that runs through my mind and lifts me up and carries me forward until that great day.

Maybe someday I will be a tour guide for those great, suddenly useless hospitals…

That’s a retirement gig I can get excited about…