Whatever you're facing...
Heaven Can Begin Now

Our eyes do not see you, but we have this excuse: Eyes see surface, not reality.

Rumi

"This is the kingdom of heaven!" Father Brinckerhoff's words launched me on a lifelong experiment: trying to discern heaven right where I am.

Sometimes it's easy. Driving through the Rocky Mountains when the aspens are turning yellow. Stepping into St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, the wall behind the altar thronged with saints ascending. In such places heaven seems to shimmer just behind the visible world. In others...

One of the tough places for me is Memorial Hospital in New York City, where John and I go for his annual cancer checkup. The world's premier cancer center, Memorial is a bewildering complex of buildings on Manhattan's upper east side. The Head and Neck department is on the third floor of Sloane-Kettering. And there, in a waiting room facing a row of examining cubicles, John and I have now spent some three hundred hours.

"Waiting" room is right; never less than two hours, often as many as four, while nurses and doctors, adept at avoiding eye contact, emerge briefly from one cubicle and disappear into the next.

What makes this place an especially unlikely precinct of heaven is that in this unit everyone's medical problem is visible. There are bandaged eyes, swollen cheeks, lopsided jaws - in John's case a scarred neck and a partially missing ear. There we sit, patients and family members, isolated in our separate fears. Tables hold magazines, but few people pick them up. Some talk in lowered voices, some hold hands. Most simply stare, unseeing, at reproductions of Van Gogh apple trees on the walls.

I pretend to look at the pictures too as I study the people in the room. Today on our right are two bearded Hassidim with long sideburns and flat black hats. Father and son, I decide. To our left sit an elderly black couple. Beyond them two women in saris whisper over the bandaged head of a little boy. Old and young, we gather in this room from all over the world. In that way, at least, Memorial Hospital is like heaven. No nation or race excluded.

Patient records today are computerized, but in a drawer of the appointment desk is one old-fashioned file card, ragged with years of handling. "We wouldn't throw John's card away for anything," the receptionist tells me. John is one of the survivors, in his late seventies now, in his midthirties when we first sat in these chairs.