Mid-Way through my LONG DAY

Howdy!

I was pleasantly suprised a few minutes ago to log into my email account to find the inbox simply bursting with correspondences. It was good to hear from Abba Enyak (Father of Ethan "Ryan wanted to name me Rahner" Abercrombie). It seems that Eric (Enyak is his Ryan-christened name) might soon be moving to Florida where his wife will make loads of money and Eric will be gainfully employed by a hospital and they will be happy to hire a Jesuit tutor to come to Florida to tutor their son in theology.

I spent the last eight hours doing what were here at Loyola Medical Center call "Magis" training. Magis, Latin for more, is the disposition to patient care that employees are to strive from. Although our trainer did not put it as such, the attempt to strive for the "more" in any setting originates with the recognition that any job worth doing at all is worth doing well. Too often we approach tasks with an attitude of "good enough" but striving for the magis enjoins upon each of us to do more, to meet our customer or patient in the midst of chaos or hurt or disorientation in order to meet more fully that person's needs. For Ignatius Loyola, this magis was not undertaken to get good customer-service evaluations, but was generated by his desire to do all things for the greater glory of God.

This paragraph, with the addition of a few sentences, could have sufficiently covered the material that I just spent four hours of my day learning. Yep, I'm drinking from the cup of bitterness and I'm thinking about ordering the whole dang bottle!!

At least hippa was interesting...not. (Note: Hipaa is not a girl hippo; it is, rather, a set of directives concerning patient privacy).

So anyway, my day is now half over. The boring half, at least. At 6:00 I have to attend a "fitness center" orientation and then I begin my on-call shift at 6:30 which will go until 12:00am. I'm pretty nervous, really: I wore a nice tie today and I don't want anyone to bleed or sneeze on it. Truthfully, I am very excited about this evening and really hope that I am able to be with people in their hours of dire need.

I was able to celebrate with a large family the sacrament of the sick yesterday. The priest who anointed the woman is from Ireland and is a lovely man of deep faith and prayer. It was hard not to be moved, to not see the healing power of God's grace as a family gathered to pray with one another for their mother/grandmother/wife. This makes me sad when I think how we often take our health for granted and resist or neglect to say the things we can and should say when we are well and wait, sometimes too long, until sickness presses us to say what we should have been saying all along. There's a mouthful! I hope this woman knew during her life how special she is to her family and I hope that they took the opportunity to tell her many times before...not the words are wasted now, but I can't help but to think that much healing and life-giving love could have been shared so much earlier had family members taken the initiative to share with one another.

So that does it for today. I'm heading over to Loyola University Chicago tomorrow afternoon to spend time with the scholastics (Jesuits in the first-studies program) and possibly see a movie. I want to see Hostel but I don't know that there will be many takers to see it with me. I'm cooking dinner for my community on Sunday and then I will be at the gym bright and early on Monday morning, followed by a full day's work. It's busy, but I'm so glad to be doing something!