Holding God in My Hands: Personal Encounters with the Divine
For years now, the religion writer and journalist Paul Wilkes has taken time off on Thursdays to walk rounds in a certain Wilmington hospital. (He doesn't identify the facility, but he tells us it has nine floors and revolving doors at the main entrances.)Wilkes, who worships at St. Mary Roman Catholic Church, serves as a eucharistic minister or, more properly, an "extraordinary minister of Holy Communion."He carries the Host--the bread which Catholics believe has become the body of Christ--to patients too sick and too frail to attend Mass. Occasionally, he administers it to overworked medical staff and caregivers as well.As every TV programmer knows, hospitals are thick with drama, so Wilkes has witnessed some extraordinary human stories unfolding. He writes about the experience in a small devotional memoir, "Holding God in My Hands."What a cast of characters: An AIDS patient who's come home to die. A teenaged mother about to give her baby up for adoption. A dying woman who can't get past the bitterness at employers who never appreciated her and children who never visited often enough. An affable but alcoholic Mexican farm worker whose liver is finally giving out.To each of them, Wilkes tries to say the right words, to offer a comforting prayer.Wilkes readily admits he's not a saint. Some of the patients aren't very nice, illness hasn't improved their dispositions and he has to steel himself to be civil. Sometimes, though, these are the patients who surprise him, who shock him with an epiphany of spiritual insight.In such books as "The Good Enough Catholic" and "Beyond the Walls" (about the Trappist monks at Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, S.C.), Wilkes has argued that spirituality isn't just for cloistered mystics. Ordinary people, he contends, can have contact with God, flashes of the Divine, if only they open themselves to the experience.For him, many of these moments came in the hospital as the petty cares of the world fell away and families faced the really tough, existential questions. What would you do, or say, if you knew death was coming? Why do horrifying accidents and loathsome diseases happen to nice people?In the hospital, Wilkes writes, "the well-fortified beachhead of our intellect and rationality is useless against the onslaught of pain, worry, desolation. And here God comes to us, so sweetly, so openly."For Christians who see the bread and wine (or grape juice) of Communion simply as cherished symbols, some of Wilkes' Catholic outlook will seem a little alien. The book's message, however, transcends denominational boundaries. As one elderly Jewish lady (who went to synagogue and watched the evangelists on TV) told Wilkes, "It's all the same, don't you think? You know--God?" --Ben Steelman, StarNewsOnline 10/2/10