The View from Mt. Zion
Recently my wife Jane underwent surgery to remove a very large ovarian tumor at the UCSF cancer center (still known as Mt. Zion Hospital) at Divisadero and Sutter Streets in San Francisco. Not knowing much about post-operative procedures following this kind of surgery, I expected she would be no longer in hospital after-care than a couple of days. It turned out to be two weeks – due to a slower than usual return of her digestive system to normal. This meant my spending whole days, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. (punctuated by quick round trips every third day to Sonoma to feed our birds!), staying with her, putting her to sleep with my scintillating conversation, walking her through the corridors, encouraging her to restrain her Missouri stubbornness and follow the orders of the endless caregivers who attended her – until the stress of the whole situation left me more worn out than Jane. Adding to that was the work traffic through which I had to maneuver each morning and evening to and from my son’s house in the Sunnyside section – vying with city drivers to assert my right to “cut in” or “gun my engine” to cross crowded intersections. When would it ever end?
I spent time in her hospital room reading a book I had a hard time understanding until then. I understand it very well now thanks to the enforced concentration. I also had lots to time to look out of her fifth floor window to survey the Pacific Heights region of the city flanking California Street – a rising landscape which when the sun is shining radiates as gleamingly white as any Mediterranean city. And the general impression made on me of the architecture was cubic – the buildings low or tall taking the shape of squat or high cubes covered with equally rectangular windows row upon row. It was mostly a residential region with little artistic display. Whatever Victorians were there seemed lost in that panorama of efficiently cubic construction.
Except! Right there in the foreground, a few blocks from Jane’s window, surging up out of all that monotony, was the gothic shape of St. Dominic’s church – with dominant tower and flying buttresses; and just beyond that on a slightly higher level the old synagogue of Sherith Israel (the Remnant of Israel) – with its slated dome resting foursquare upon classical façades and aimed at the Polar Star (and God) as if it were the center of the universe.
And I thought, whatever the motives that placed those two sanctuaries there amid the pragmatic architecture of that residential span, both were there right now for me – to lift me out of the stress, the weariness of the past three months spent battling with cancer’s grip on Jane. They were there to remind me that beyond the unrelieved sameness of a merely pragmatic modern world there is still our great tradition, the great drama of a divine intervention and presence in our lives – narrated and celebrated from age to age by our Hebrew and Christian heritage – to raise my hopes, to help me, too, surge up, to take in my creed’s overview of our existence that makes all things meaningful in an everlasting way.
I approached this scary moment in Jane’s life and mine with all the worry, the lamentation that preoccupied the disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke’s Gospel. But as I surveyed those two architectural contradictions of secular skepticism I felt they corresponded to the arrival before me of that very stranger who warmed the hearts of that worried pair and left them with eyes wide open!