On pins and needles.

It started with tingling in my fingers: pins and needles. I found myself at St. Vincent’s having a nerve conduction test to see if my elbow was transmitting trouble to my hand.  The gentle, concentrated Indian doctor moved her soft dark hands across my pale, cool skin placing and releasing electrodes. Ten lists this week: she did nine of them. Elbow, wrist, arm, hand, fingers, small electric shocks invading nerve paths, something external controlling me from within: only a small amount of pain, but a disconcerting twitch that becomes a shade more daunting when it becomes a repeating drumbeat.

            I couldn’t help knowing that somewhere in some leather bar people are enjoying electric shocks with their sexual passion; or that somewhere, under grave duress, others are suffering shock torture inflicted by politics, religion, or simply the whim of their captors. We’re only trying to find out the truth here.

            The shocks failed to reveal the real situation, so we had to have some needles. A little more pain with this: sharpness, particularly in the wrist, as I had to bend the wrist ever farther, deeper into the pain. I wouldn’t like to dramatise this sharpness. Elbow, arm, hand, wrist, little dots that remain on the skin for a day or so but do no lasting harm, little cross marks inked into place where the needle has to go.

            I looked out the window over the roofs of the hospital complex and leaned into this really negligible pain. Crucifixus etiam pro nobis came into my mind: so why is the Creed a proper subject for reflection while the machine (rather noisy) roars away recording (Recordare) the flinching of my nerves for future reference? I’m no Latinist; I can hardly conjugate a verb. But I do listen to quite a lot of music.

            The most famous needle in the New Testament is the one whose eye the camel can’t get through. Or can it? Does this animal have magical properties derived from modern physics where a wave is a particle and a particle is a wave? The Kingdom of God is hard to get into, especially if you’re rich. Therefore be poor. And the disciples say: ‘Who then can be saved?’ We’re only trying to get at the truth here.

            Remember, gentle Jesus, that you did it all for me: for us, pro nobis, for all of us. If I can lie there, invaded by needles, pricked by physical pain— however limited— and yet find myself without guile in the presence of the truth of our salvation, it only proves one thing. Wherever you are, wherever you go, the Divine will remind you of itself.

            Everything in this story is small: little pains, small needles, very small camel. Only the truth is great.