By the time they reached the rectory, Oliver was starting to feel at ease with his new boss. Over the next four years, the two got along very well, despite their widely different backgrounds. They were often found embroiled in philosophical debate that to anyone else looked like a heated argument. Father Oliver approached problems from a pragmatic, reality-based point of view, while Father Coyle preferred the academic, idealist approach. They were a formidable team, and the parish prospered.
Oliver’s only sister had called six months earlier and broke the terrifying news that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It was an especially cruel twist of fate because Mary’s deepest desire, to have and raise children, had never been fulfilled because of a condition called primary ovarian failure. Eugene, her husband, had died nine months earlier, which meant Mary was facing her ordeal alone. Oliver took a leave of absence and flew to Chicago. He hadn’t been home in almost thirty years, and his unease grew when he found a mere shadow of his beloved sister in a hospital room. She was dying, and dying badly. She looked more like a concentration camp victim than a fifty-eight-year-old social studies teacher. She didn’t have the strength to lift her head and kiss Oliver, and before either could say a word, they both started to cry.
Oliver stopped collecting the missals and recalled his sister in her younger days. He remembered the glow in her face while she raced her spider bike around the block, pigtails flying, skinned knees pumping away at the pedals, and peals of laughter echoing off the neighbors’ houses. He refused to believe that this person lying in that bed could at one time have been that little girl. He had seen terrible, horrible things in his work for God, but they all paled to insignificance when compared to his realization that this was his sister. It was an obscenity beyond compare. How could God take one of his most perfect creations and distort it so? Every priest had crises of faith, and John Oliver was no exception, but he had always been able to find his way back to God. Despite all his experiences, his belief had never been truly tested until he watched cancer devour his sister, cell by cell. She was in severe, unremitting pain, and nothing the doctors or nurses did seemed to make a difference.
He stayed with her in the hospital for seven weeks, and with every tablet of Dilaudid she was forced to take, Oliver cursed his indifferent God. After the first month, he had stopped eating, stopped sleeping, and stopped being a priest. He didn’t doubt the existence of God; he blamed Him directly for his sister’s agony.
Father Oliver sat down on the hard wooden pew and remembered a day in early December. He had been alone in the hospital’s garden, and everything around him was dead. “Your son died in three hours,” he yelled up to the gray sky. “Why are You being so cruel to Mary? Where is all Your mercy and love now that we need it the most?” No one answered on that cold, late fall morning. It wasn’t until the next day that God answered. Mary was being taken home; the hospital could offer her no more comfort than her own bed. A hospice team would meet them at home and assist with the transition.
For the next three weeks, the hospice team members lived with Mary and Oliver. A group of five did tag-team shifts around the clock, attending to her every need. They anticipated all the bumps ahead and helped the brother and sister negotiate them. Oliver watched in awe. The depth of concern they showed Mary was beyond any financial reward. These people weren’t doing this kind of work for a paycheck; their devotion was much too deep, too genuine. It was almost holy. Mary wasn’t a case or even a patient: she was an individual, she was a widow, she was a sister, and she was going through the most difficult period any person would ever face. They didn’t see an incontinent, eighty-six-pound, semi-comatose problem; they saw a girl in pigtails riding her spider bike around the block laughing as loud as she could. They saw God in his sister, and Father Oliver began to see God in them.
Mary died December twenty-third, two days before Christmas Day, the birth of Christ. She was at peace now, and her brother slowly began to make peace with their maker. By the New Year, he had returned to Colorado Springs. He hadn’t recovered, but he was close enough to be a priest again.
He never talked with Father Coyle or his bishop about his experience, even though he knew he should. He knew he had to confess to someone, or at a minimum talk it through, but it was too soon, still too sensitive. Everyone wanted to know how he was doing, but he just smiled and told them that he was doing just fine. It took another month before he actually began to feel fine again, and by that point, there was no reason to reopen the wound. That was when things began to happen.
Oliver set the missals down and knelt on the padded kneeler. He looked up at the crucified Christ hanging over the altar, but didn’t feel worthy to pray. He had never believed that God tested people. Life tested people, and Jesus had lived and died to show us how to survive those tests. Oliver had preached this a hundred times, but over the last six months, he had ignored his own preaching. And now, God was ignoring him.
“Hell isn’t a place, it is the condition that exists after a person has removed himself from the grace of God,” he whispered to the darkness. It was hard to believe that less than a month earlier, his life had been returning to normal. “Your torment was pure and redemptive; mine is deserved,” he whispered to Jesus. Unconsciously, he rubbed the fine scar that stretched the length of his right thumb.
It had begun on February eighth, his mother’s birthday. He was just getting over a respiratory infection, and for the first day in five, he felt good enough to shave. For forty-eight years, he had used a straight razor without ever having a problem, but that morning, as he was reaching for it, he cut his right thumb. The blade sliced cleanly down to the bone. For the first instant, he marveled at the beauty of the glistening white tendons, his brain refusing to accept what had just happened. Then pain and blood forced the issue. He tried to squeeze the wound closed, but his palm quickly filled with blood. When it came to blood, Oliver had always been a “fainter,” and true to form, his head hit the floor just after the first drop of blood. He was out only an instant before consciousness began to re-form around him. His blurry eyes focused on the water-stained plaster on the ceiling, and his lethargic mind wondered idly who was going to paint it. It took a few moments for his head to completely clear and process how he had ended up on the floor. He had managed to wedge himself into the small space between the bathtub and the commode, his neck, twisted at an awkward angle, was beginning to ache. He rolled over onto his back and felt a pool of warm blood ooze into his nightshirt. He squeezed his lacerated thumb and managed to climb to his feet without looking at the bloody hand.
He was reaching for a washcloth when he suddenly felt everything around him change. The rectory had always been poorly insulated, and every morning the frigid, winter air managed to seep through the porous walls, chilling the bathroom to just above freezing. This morning had been no exception, at least until now. The air abruptly became unnaturally stagnant and increasingly warm. The cold mirror began to fog over, and Oliver wiped at it with his good hand. It was hard to move through the heavy air and harder to breathe. He slowly wrapped his hand and was about to sit on the commode when it struck him that he was no longer alone.