God

Posted on August 4, 2005 in Psych Wards

Leah and I walked our friend down the hallway towards the exit. Our friend — who’d earlier announced that she’d converted to the “Capitalist Church” — giggled as we arrived at the locked door at the end of the ward. “You have to know the secret password!” she said. I smiled. “I know how I can get it,” I chuckled and went toward the nurse’s station. Our friend, interned for a manic episode, told some other patients “This is my nurse. He’s my pastor.”

A woman came up to me. Sadness leaked from her eyes. She looked up and asked “Are you God?”

Not wanting to propel myself into grandiosity or have a laugh at the poor woman’s expense, I said “no”.

“How do I find God?” she asked.

“Look within,” I replied. “Close your eyes and wait for that still small voice.”

I left her confused. Should I have told her that I was an agnostic who didn’t know whether there was a God? What was she seeking from God? Release from her condition? A hand reaching through the taupe walls and removing her from the hell of the Huntington Beach psychiatric ward? Did she cry because the beard on my chin had been attached to me and not to Jesus?

Friends who heard this story told me that I should either have said “Yes” or replied “No, you are.” The first might well have earned me either a permanent boot from that ward or a dose of Haldon. The second would have added to her mania.

Many years ago, I had an episode in which I believed that there was no one else in the universe except for me, that all the scenery and all the people were my own inventions. Nasty jerks sometimes played with my mind: it scares me to think that some of them went on to medical school. Descartes Demon haunted my dreams and waking moments. Every mean act, every drop of rain was, I believed, created by me. Why did I punish myself, I asked. If I controlled the universe, why couldn’t I make it stop hurting me?

That is why I did not tell the woman that she was God. It seems funny on the surface, but I know full well the terror that the belief in one’s omnipotence can raise, the powerlessness of the powerful that is part and parcel of a manic delusion.

Having left the woman with no answer, I got an aide to release us from the ward. Leah was very upset about the ward (it was not a pleasant place) and about our friend. I reminded her that our friend’s mania would pass as the meds took effect. But what would happen to the other woman, I wondered. Who knew she was here? God?