A Quiet Place To Pray And Contemplate

A slow-moving, gray-haired priest in black clerical attire looked back into the room on his way out.

“Well, take it easy,” he said to the only person in the little ground-floor chapel at Sacred Heart Medical Center early Sunday afternoon.

Then the door closed and it was quiet. The man seated in the dimly lighted chapel looked down at the cream-colored rosary beads in his hands.

He was an older man. Maybe 65. Maybe 70. His face was expressionless.

He wore glasses and had on sneakers.

The chapel, a rectangular room not far from the hospital’s main entrance, has six rows of padded seats facing a wall adorned with a crucifix. The man sat back in the fourth row.

Up by the crucifix, one candle burned inside a red glass tube. Most of the time the flickering flame was the only motion in the room.

The shadowy movements of people in the adjacent hallway were visible through the chapel’s colored-glass windows. And sounds of life as usual came through the wall.

Outside the door, there were eruptions of laughter. A woman said she didn’t much care for this year’s Bloomsday shirt. A baby vocalized. The hospital intercom relayed messages.

“Dr. Cook, four-eight-five-oh. Dr. Cook, four-eight-five-oh.”

It all seemed loud. But then there would be a stretch of near silence. And the man’s slightest shift in position seemed to fill the chapel with a fabric-on-fabric sound from his jacket or slacks.

Subtle throat-clearing seemed dramatic.

Once or twice, you could even hear the rosary beads in his hands.

Who knows what brought that man to the little chapel Sunday. Maybe his wife of many years was terminally ill. Perhaps he had a grandchild facing surgery.

He needed a place to pray. And he had found it.

After more than half an hour, he got up from his seat and genuflected on the carpet. Holding a plastic bag from the hospital gift shop in one hand, he made a sign-of-the-cross with the other.

Then he walked out of the chapel and out of the hospital. The sun had come out again.

A little bit later, a few blocks away at Deaconess Medical Center, a young woman with long black hair walked into the little chapel on the ground floor of that hospital. She sat down and folded her hands together in her lap.

, DataTimes MEMO: Being There is a weekly feature that visits Inland Northwest gatherings.