St. Columba-By-The-Lake, Montreal, has meant a lot to me. It was the community into which my first-born daughter came to life, and where she was given the new life of baptism. I suppose it was also our “house of prayer,” although Presbyterian churches are rarely distinguished as prayer centres. Of course St. Columbans do pray and, like Leap year, prayer occasionally is a topic.
Readers with some longevity in this community will remember a call to prayer some 13 years ago. My daughter, Alexandra (Alex, to all but her father), had been hurt in a traffic accident. I remember the next day, about five in the morning, when I met a surgeon named Wally Temple. He ran through some of her injuries—fractured skull, pelvis, and cheek-bone, and a liver that was pâté (his colourful choice of words!)—and said that he would surgically enter her abdomen and do what he could. Her life hinged on the mending of this internal organ. When he told me her chances were 50-50 I sensed that he was shading his prognosis to give me some hope.
St. Columbans got the news in short order and offered prayers. It surprised and gratified me. The congregation was there for her baptism but said goodbye to her when she was a two-year-old. Our subsequent conversations revealed that this prayerful assurance went much deeper than an idle comment. The prayers in Pointe Claire were said in concert with others, including a brief prayer ritual at her bedside at 9 o'clock each morning. Various friends, some of them clergy, would come into her room for a liturgy at one of the few quiet moments in the Intensive Care Unit.
After a month in Calgary's Foothills Hospital, most of it in ICU, she was released and, shortly thereafter, began university as a somewhat atypical 18-year-old. She went, alone and by plane, still wearing a drainage tube from her liver.
Two years ago in August, Alexandra married Geoff. They live in Calgary. She returned there after graduation to complete her interrupted childhood. Now an X-ray technologist, the idea of working in the hospital where her life had been in the balance, had some appeal. She also wanted to meet Wally Temple again. I understand he is a part of Christ's Body. He's been an advocate of the public health care system. She still works at the hospital and, occasionally, these two people with a special relationship, meet.
This past summer a baby arrived and for Alexandra, telling Temple the news was an important phase of baby-waiting.
This is a long round-about way of talking about the prayers of St. Columbans. I don't know that I want to pick up the mindless chant “God always answers prayer.” (I know that some Christian believers find this an important faith statement. It sometimes sounds to me as if the Creator of the universe is beholden to a slice of world population that is well-to-do, religiously correct, and lives in the western world!) I am persuaded, though, that the prayers people utter tend to whirl around our universe without constraint of time and space … perhaps a little like comets. They are there, and they have consequences in the mystery of our existence that human beings can never fathom. I know that the prayers of St. Columbans blessed us who watched and waited. I know that Alexandra still retains evidence of those long-ago prayers, both in her files and in her heart … perhaps even in her body. There are mysteries here that exceed the grasp of my human mind.
Recently, I received an email from Alexandra with the subject heading “Wally Temple.” I want to share it with you:
“The only way I knew I could tell this guy we're having a baby is to run into him, and I did just that on Wednesday. I was actually going to my old room on unit 102 to do a portable, and he was in the next room chatting with a patient. He had on a Garfield tie and a black jacket and pants (with maybe a hint of navy blue) and chatted with her for quite some time. He said his home number was listed in the phone book and challenged her husband to a re-match of ping-pong. What a swell guy!
“He saw me out of the corner of his eye after I'd been waiting for a few minutes, and said 'Hi, sweetheart, how are you?' He finally came out and asked if I was married yet (I think that's the last time I saw him) and I told him we were having a baby. He started to look kind of misty, patted my belly, and said 'God is on your side.' I kind of got misty too, and feel like my baby has been blessed!”
