Offering A Heart In The Darkness
Coal-colored clouds packed with the punch of a summer monsoon pushed over City Hospital on a Friday evening as Sister Clair Hayes walked through the emergency room looking like a streak of sunshine in a pink blouse and floral jacket and with a permanent-press smile on her face.
She had been there since 6 o’clock in the morning, been there because she is a Catholic chaplain and this is where she wants to be, in a hospital where the pain is sometimes louder than thunder and the needs of the suffering as constant as the breeze outside.
“I try and figure out what do you do when you can’t do any more?” the nun said. “That’s my job: to be with people when they ask, ‘How could a merciful God allow this to happen?’ And, know what I say? ‘I don’t know.”’
Sister Clair Hayes walked into a convent in 1954 wondering if she should join the Sisters of Divine Providence. She never looked back and has spent 42 years teaching school, working in prison halfway houses and, for the past three years, as a chaplain at the Boston hospital, where she can be found almost anytime night or day holding a hand or saying a prayer with someone who - almost always - has just lost a piece of the heart.
“I don’t know why you’re here,” Sister Clair Hayes was saying. “Helping people doesn’t make news. There’s no sex, no violence, no pornography. It’s just a story of what happens when you say ‘Yes’ to God. There’s no interest in that today.”
She is there for families of children killed in car crashes, homicides, fires and horrible accidents. She is there for people dying of AIDS and babies born already down two strikes because their mothers were addicted to crack or carried the HIV virus. She is there most of each day and the beeper on her belt is always calling her back to hallways where pain can be endured only with a huge inoculation of faith.
City Hospital is a marvelous place where doctors and nurses ask “How can we help?” rather than “What is your HMO?” It is a building filled with the eternal trauma of the poor and their enormous afflictions that run much deeper than anything that can be treated with pills or scalpels.
There are skilled personnel and spectacular machines that symbolize the incredible power of drugs and modern medicine to cure or alleviate illness. And then there is Sister Clair Hayes, who symbolizes a simpler power of God and prayer as well as someone to lean on when loss finally arrives.
“I guess I’ve always had the ability of knowing when to talk and when not to talk,” she said. “Some people call it a gift. I call it ‘God,’ but I’d rather be good at something that brings a little more joy, to tell you the truth.”
For some time, we have had all these churches being burned in America. This particular form of arson is easily understood, too: Many cannot stand the idea there is a God and this God actually does consider us all equal: black, white, brown, rich, poor, nitwit or nobleman. And the idea that somebody you figure is beneath contempt or subhuman has an allotted space - a church - where the playing field is forever level drives them into a mad illogic, forcing them to fight faith with fire. By burning it down, they feel bigger and better.
Now, Sister Clair - a living reminder of such faith - is walking between the trauma unit and emergency room and everyone knows her: nurses, orderlies, cops, ambulance attendants, patients too. Outside, the rain arrives in sheets, but right here, there is the brightness of her beliefs.
“A bad day is when there’s a lot of sadness without explanation. When I feel helpless because I can’t make a difference. When it’s 2 a.m. and a 12-year-old is dead and the family is saying, ‘Sister, Sister, pray with us. We have to have a miracle.’ And you know the only miracle is that somehow, some way they will survive something this awful, this tragic. Then, when it’s over and they are leaving, you realize how humbling it is to have people say ‘Thank you’ for coming into their lives at a time of such devastation.”
She starts talking now about a 6-year-old girl who just died of AIDS; a child who a few weeks ago asked Sister Clair to tell her about God and heaven and if it hurt to die: “They beeped me and when I called in, the nurse said, ‘Your little friend went home today.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Well, honey, now you know where heaven is and what God is like.”’
Sister Clair Hayes stood on the ramp outside the emergency room entrance at City Hospital as she recalled her young dead friend. Then, with moist eyes, she looked toward the brightening western sky where the outline of a bright new rainbow had formed.