The Gargoyle

there was a good chance that I would not survive. So the doctors told me that I had little choice but to lose, as quickly as possible, a man-sized portion of my pancreas. Why not, I shrugged. Within five hours of my diagnosis, I was wheeled into an operating room, where the anesthesiologist told me to count backwards from ten. I made it only to six.

Burn patients cannot use regular anesthesia and what we are given instead-ketamine anesthesia-often causes delusions. For once, I had a most pleasing hallucination, an unexpected bonus in an otherwise woeful experience. I was looking over the ocean, a lovely English woman at my side, and what could be better for a burn victim than a dream of water?

· · ·

I awoke to learn that half my pancreas had been removed. For good measure, the surgeon also took out a handful of nearby intestinal tissue that had also been damaged. I guess he decided that since he was in there already, he might as well grab everything he could. Piece by piece, I was becoming medical waste. Who knows, maybe someday the doctors will strip-mine me into complete nothingness.

Marianne Engel was in a chair in the corner of my room, reading, wearing something drab. After a few moments of my eyes adjusting, I could see that it was a visitor’s gown. When she realized I was awake, she came towards me, the cover of her book proclaiming Non Omnis Moriar.

“Why are you here?” I was hoping for an answer that would stroke my considerable ego.

“I came to see your suffering.”

“What?”

“I envy it.”

Forget her mental illness: it’s impossible for a burn victim to abide a person who says that she envies his suffering. I fought through my anesthetic fog to mount as angry an attack as I could muster. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was not pleasant.

When she understood how her words had offended me, she tried to explain. “I envy all suffering, because suffering is necessary to become spiritually beautiful. It brings one closer to Christ. Those who suffer are the elect of God.”

“So why don’t you set yourself on fire,” I spat, “and see how beautiful you become?”

“I am far too weak,” she answered, not seeming to register my sarcasm. “I’m afraid not only of the flames, but of dying before my suffering becomes complete.”

The braindope pulled me back into the darkness. I was glad to be removed from this conversation.

· · ·

The exact nature of Marianne Engel’s illness was still unclear but when she suggested that “those who suffer are the elect of God,” my best guess became schizophrenia.

Schizophrenics often have a particularly difficult time with religion, and some doctors suggest this relates to the age of onset: the condition most commonly develops between seventeen and twenty-five, a period when many people are first confronting their religious beliefs. Schizophrenics often have intense periods of heightened awareness-or outright delusions, such as auditory hallucinations-that can lead them to believe they’ve been specifically chosen by God. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that they often have trouble understanding that the symbolism of religion is metaphoric.

Christianity is based upon the idea that Jesus died for the sins of all mankind: to redeem us, Christ was tortured and nailed to a cross. A schizophrenic, attempting to understand the story, might reason thus: Jesus is the beloved Son of God, and Jesus endured incredible suffering, so those who endure the most pain are God’s most beloved.

There is a long tradition of devout believers who feel that suffering brings one closer to the Savior, but a human face is always better than a general theory. For this reason, allow me to present the life of one Heinrich Seuse, German religious mystic. Born in 1295, Seuse would become one of the most important religious figures of the time, known as the Minnesдnger-the “singer of courtly love”-because of the poetic quality of his writings.

Seuse entered the Dominican house in Konstanz at age thirteen and, by his own account, was completely unexceptional for the first five years of his religious life. At eighteen, however, he experienced a sudden illumination-a feeling of heavenly delight so intense he was unsure whether his soul was separated from his body. He considered this event so important that it was with this that he begins his life story, The Life of the Servant.

Some scholars claim that The Life of the Servant is the first autobiography in the German language, while others argue it’s not an autobiography at all. Much of the actual writing appears to have been done by Elsbeth Stagel, a young woman from the convent of Tцss, who was the most favored of Seuse’s spiritual daughters. She apparently documented many of their conversations to use as the basis of the Life without Seuse’s knowledge, and when he discovered what she’d done, he burned part of the manuscript before a “message from God” instructed him to preserve what remained. No one knows how much of the Life was written by Stagel and how much by Seuse.

The Life is a fascinating narrative, and provides wonderful details of the visions Seuse received throughout his life: God showed him representations of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, and departed souls appeared to him to give updates on their afterlives. Good stuff, and terrifically dramatic! But the most striking writing in the Life is Seuse’s-or Stagel’s-descriptions of his self-inflicted tortures.

As an adherent of the belief that bodily comfort makes one spiritually weak, Seuse claimed he did not go into a heated room for twenty-five years and that he refrained from drinking water until his tongue cracked from the dryness, after which it took a full year to heal. He restricted his intake of food-eating once a day and never meat, fish, or eggs-and once had a vision in which his desire for an apple was stronger than his desire for Eternal Wisdom, so to punish himself he went two years without consuming any fruit. (One wonders whether he could not simply have recognized the moral of the story and continued to eat actual-as opposed to metaphorically forbidden-fruit.)

On his lower body, Seuse wore an undergarment that had one hundred and fifty sharpened brass nails pointed inwards, at his skin. On his upper body, he wore a hairshirt with an iron chain, and under that a wooden cross the size of a man’s outstretched hand and studded with thirty more brass nails. With this fastened between his shoulder blades, every movement-especially kneeling to pray-forced the nails to dig into his flesh, and later he would rub vinegar into his wounds. Seuse wore this spiked cross for eight years before God intervened in a vision, forbidding him to continue.

He wore these punishing garments even when he slept-upon an old door. When he lay down he shackled himself with rings of leather because if his hands were free, he could use them to swat away the rats that gnawed at him during the night. Sometimes he broke the restraints in his sleep, so he started wearing leather gloves covered in more sharpened brass tacks that would slice up his skin as effectively as if he’d run a cheese grater over it. Seuse kept these habits for sixteen years until another vision from God instructed him to throw these sleeping aids into a nearby river.

Rather than bring Seuse relief at being forbidden to keep punishing himself, these divine interventions bothered him greatly. When a nun asked how he was doing, Seuse replied that things were going quite badly because it had been a month since he’d known pain and he was afraid that God had forgotten him.

Such physical torments, Seuse realized, were only a beginning; they didn’t allow for a tangible sign of his great love for the Lord. To remedy this, he opened his robes one evening and used a sharpened stylus to carve the letters IHS into the flesh above his heart. (If that’s Greek to you, don’t worry: IHS is the abbreviated name of Christ in the Greek language.) Blood poured out of his ripped flesh but he claimed he barely felt the pain, such was his ecstasy. The scarified letters never vanished and he wore the wound in secret until the end of his life; it soothed him in times of struggle, he claimed, to know that the very name of Christ moved with each beat of his heart.

Seuse died in 1366 after a long life which, one can only surmise, must have seemed even longer than it actually was.

I find it interesting that Seuse had his “illumination” at age eighteen, just when schizophrenia most