Cathedral of St. Helena, Helena, MT, National Register of Historic Places
I’m going to tell you a story…a story that tripped me up for years and eventually led to the unraveling of my faith in the form of the evangelical Christianity I had followed for decades. As I look back over the years, and over the stories I have shared, it’s hard for me to believe it took this long to reach the conclusion that my belief system needed to be pulled apart, examined piece by piece, and rebuilt on not knowing…no certainty about anything…an embrace of the mystery of life and the universe.
I had left the church where I had worked after I fell down a flight of stairs and broke my neck. I felt unmoored. My husband and I often passed by a beautiful cathedral on Sunday mornings on the way to get a Starbucks, and I noticed that the people seemed different than the people I had been used to seeing. There was something about them that intrigued me. They dressed differently. I pictured them as “thinkers,” although I had no real basis for thinking that. But I was curious…and I missed church and being with people. I couldn’t imagine someone at the Cathedral would tell me that I had allowed Satan to steal my ministry (see last post, “What the What,” for context).
Eventually, we decided to attend a mass in this beautiful building and see what it was all about. In the evangelical churches I had attended, we were taught that the Catholic Church was about as bad as it gets. The Pope, we were told, is the antichrist. The parishioners worship Mary more than Jesus and they bow down to statues. They were probably going to hell since they were deliberately disobeying one of the Ten Commandments.
But I had just graduated with my bachelor’s degree from a Catholic liberal arts college and had heard differing points of view. The inside of the Cathedral was mesmerizing and the people were gracious and seemed sincere in their faith. As the bells peeled right before mass started and after it was over, I was reminded of the movie “The Bells of St. Mary’s.” I loved everything about it…the structure, the reverence, the smells and the bells. We continued to attend.
That summer after graduation, I was visiting my daughter and her family, when one of my small grandsons ran to me as I was sitting on the couch. Since I had broken my neck six years earlier, I could not lift anything heavier than a half gallon of milk. As he ran towards me, I made a split decision and took him into my arms and swung him up next to me onto the couch. Doing so tore my rotator cuff.
The pain in my shoulder became worse over time. This concerned me greatly. I had been accepted into a master’s program and needed to be ready to start in August. But my physician let me know I needed rotator cuff surgery. He thought I’d be recovered by August and able to attend my program.
A week before the surgery, a friend of mine, someone I knew in a Foursquare church many years before, emailed me something she had written a few years before. It was what some may consider a “prophetic word.” It was a writing done in a style in which it seems as if it is Jesus Christ speaking. I opened it, read it carefully, and thought, “This is a little much for shoulder surgery.” I folded it back up and stuck it in a drawer…until…
The night before the surgery I took it out and opened it up to read it again. “Couldn’t hurt,” I thought. A phrase in the writing stuck out to me and reminded me of something I had forgotten to tell the doctor.
There was a line in her email…"Let go under the anesthesia of the Spirit,” or something like that. It simply reminded me to tell the anesthesiologist about my neck problem.
As I was wheeled into the operating room, I met with him. I asked him to be careful with my neck, as I had broken it a few years before. He promised and told me he would use a flexible scope and be gentle. I counted backward from one hundred.
“Mrs. Hoenigsberg! Mrs. Hoenigsberg!” If the anesthesiologist wasn’t shouting at me, it sure seemed like it as I tried to wake up after the surgery.
“Mrs. Hoenigsberg…I need to tell you something! I saw a large mass in your throat! I’ve never seen anything like it in twenty-five years. You need to go get a CT Scan right away! I’m going to go talk to your husband.”
Then he walked out. I was alone in the recovery room.
I tried to make sense of what he had just told me. Still very groggy, I felt confused and frightened. I wanted somebody, anybody, in the room with me. No one seemed to be around.
“Nurse?” I called out several times and finally, a young woman wandered back into the room.
“That guy just told me I have a mass in my throat.” I looked up into her face, trying to communicate my fear and my need for reassurance.
“I know, he told us,” she said. “You’ll be able to go home in a few minutes so you can call your doctor and arrange to have a CT scan.”
My husband helped me get dressed and once in the car, we hugged each other tightly. I felt on high alert. I called my physician from the car on the way home and got an appointment for a CT scan the following day. He got me in for my follow-up appointment the day after the scan.
“I don’t know what the anesthesiologist thought he saw, but there is absolutely nothing in your throat,” he started.
“Oh good!” The reprieve made me want to hop off the examination table and skip out of there.
“But…” he continued. The CT scan caught a little bit of the underside of your brain and there is a tumor there…right next to the brain stem.”
“Oh.”
“He couldn’t have possibly seen that in your throat, so it’s actually lucky for you that he thought he saw something. I’m going to have you see a neurosurgeon in Missoula.”
I have a brain tumor! I tried to wrap my mind around the words. I have a brain tumor. I’ve had a lot of terrible things happen in my life but never once did I think I’d ever have a brain tumor. That only happened to other people.
My husband and I drove home, both silent, both in shock. Once home, I called the neurosurgeon in Missoula and scheduled an appointment, and then I again opened up the “prophetic word,” my friend had sent me…the one that was “over the top” for a shoulder surgery. And I was stunned at what I read.
NEXT WEEK…THE REST OF THE STORY.
Well here you go again....the endless miracle of your fascinating life and your ability to over come and join back into the land of the living....A great call on your life sweet Linda!!