The Interior Passage
By Erin Ryan
(Quotes from The Life of Antony are taken from the Classics of Western Spirituality edition, translated by Robert C. Gregg, Paulist Press, 1980.)
I woke up one morning to find that a small lesion had broken out on the right side of my body.
For a while I lay there rubbing this blot, mulling over the night’s disturbing dream. I’d been trying to escape from a house where I sensed some kind of impending, unclear danger. I couldn’t find a door. At last I spied an open window in the kitchen—but then I paused, knowing there were important papers in the house. Should I turn back and save them first? Or just get out?
As I hesitated, in the dream, the floor began to rumble. And then an enormous black worm broke through the floor, grabbed me and tore me in pieces.
That was when I woke and found the lesion on my side.
All throughout the day at work, I returned to the eerie memory of the worm. In the afternoon I had an appointment with a gastro-intestinal specialist. My right side had been bothering me for months now. Sometimes I felt pain; other times it was more like a dull, consistent pressure inside me, near my appendix. The general doctors couldn’t find anything wrong.
When I got to the hospital, the nurse ushered me into the examining room, weighed me and asked me the usual questions: Was I allergic to any medications? Did I smoke? Had I ever had heart problems? As she filled out her paperwork I looked at a huge poster on the wall depicting "Diseases of the GI System"—pink, inflamed intestines and other internal organs were pocked with little dots to indicate diverticulitis or gallstones.
"So that’s what it looks like," I said to the nurse, indicating the GI system.
"That's right," she said. “Most people just say 'Yuck.' But isn't it amazing all that fits inside that little space in your body?"
I examined the poster while I waited for the doctor to come, imagining what horrors might be going on inside that little space in my body. Whatever it was, surely it looked far worse than those tiny pockmarks.
***
Later I lay on my bed, depressed, staring out into space. The doctor had not offered any suggestions as to what my problem might be. I felt helpless, as I did after every doctor's appointment: No one knew what was wrong with me. No one cared.
The lesion on my belly seemed to be growing. The doctor had decided it was "just a little rash."
My eyes fell on the two bookcases at the foot of my bed, and in an effort to distract myself from woe, I scanned the familiar titles idly until I came to The Life of Antony, by Saint Athanasius.
Ever since I first learned of him I'd been drawn to this bold ancient monk—famed for being the founder of Christian monasticism—who had deliberately left his third-century Egyptian village and gone out past the fertile, safe regions near the Nile to live in a tomb in the desert. The desert was known as the domain of the dead: the place where the demons resided.
I went over to the shelf, took down the Life, and opened to my favorite passage in Chapters 9 and 10. Artists from Breughel to Dalí had depicted this scene as "The Temptation of Saint Antony." Here, the demons, furious that he'd invaded their turf, were desperate to drive him away:
Now schemes for working evil come easily to the devil, so when it was night time they made such a crashing noise that that whole place seemed to be shaken by a quake. The demons, as if breaking through the building's four walls, and seeming to enter through them, were changed into the forms of beasts and reptiles. The place immediately was filled with the appearances of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions and wolves, and each of these moved in accordance with its form. The lion roared, wanting to spring at him; the bull seemed intent on goring; the creeping snake did not quite reach him; the onrushing wolf made right for him—and altogether the sounds of all the creatures that appeared were terrible, and their ragings were fierce. Struck and wounded by them, Antony's body was subject to yet more pain.
As I read this, suddenly I saw my own black insides as though they were in a vision before me—the disease, the worm, clinging to the cavity of my belly like ash. I could feel the demons battling within me, coating my insides with their pesitlence and sin.
***
I lay awake that night, despondent, certain that no cure could ever be found for my misfortune.
Near morning I fell into a restless dream. This time, I was in a dark room. I could see no exit to the outside. Behind me rose a wall; in front of me I could sense a vast empty space, a space I knew instinctively led nowhere.
The only light came faintly from my left. I went toward it, expecting to enter a second room. Instead I found myself in the opening to a stairwell. I climbed the stairs and emerged into a bright, ornate room with a white carpet.
There was a child, a young boy, sitting on one of the couches in the room; I barely had time to look at him, because immediately after I stepped inside, a white snake rose up from the carpet and swallowed the boy in one mouthful.
Then it turned and stared directly at me.
I turned to run, but stumbled, for there was no exit, nowhere to go—
I woke in a panic. It took me a while to realize I was safe, for now, in my familiar narrow room, with the street light glaring through my torn shade. No snake. No worm. But there was still pain in my side. I couldn’t fall asleep again now that I was conscious of the pain.
I felt for the book beside my bed, and opened to the temptation passage from The Life of Antony where I left off before:
But unmoved and even more watchful in his soul he lay there, and he groaned because of the pain felt in his body, but being in control of his thoughts and as if mocking them, he said, "If there were some power among you, it would have been enough for only one of you to come. But since the Lord has broken your strength, you attempt to terrify me by any means with the mob; it is a mark of your weakness that you mimic the shapes of irrational beasts." And again with boldness he said, "If you are able, and you did receive authority over me, don’t hold back, but attack. But if you are unable, why, when it is vain, do you disturb me? For faith in our Lord is a seal and a wall of protection." So after trying many strategies, they gnashed their teeth because of him, for they made fools not of him, but of themselves.
At work the next day, I told my dream to the woman at the next desk.
"It gave me such an evil stare," I said to her, about the white snake.
"Are you sure it was evil?" she asked. "White is usually the color of purity."
"In some cultures it’s the color of death."
"Not just death," she said. "Rebirth."
I was still stubbornly on the death path, though. "It ate the child. And it wanted to eat me! That can't be good."
"Maybe the child was you. Or like a symbol of you, or a ... guide to show you what to do," she said. "Maybe the snake was supposed to eat you, but the dream ended too soon. You never got to see what was going to happen."
I pondered this.
"Go back to the dream if you can," she told me.
***
The GI doctor, in his very brief consultation with me, had scheduled me to have a colonoscopy. The people at work knew I'd been leaving early for doctor's appointments, and now I was regaled with stories about other people's colonoscopy procedures and told, many times, that I wouldn't feel a thing.
The day before my colonoscopy I ate nothing. I took my medication after work. Three tablespoons of Fleet's Phosphosoda with 8 ounces of water. Two Dulcolax tablets, 255 milligrams of Miralax dissolved in 64 ounces of Gatorade. Two more Dulcolax tablets. Through the night the pain in my side got worse than it had ever been, almost like something in me was fighting back against the pills.
Next morning, nearly numb, I took myself to the hospital. The nurse was very kind. She asked me the obligatory questions. I told her I'd taken everything that was prescribed.
In the dressing room, I changed into a hospital gown and lay down on top of the boxy wheeled medical table while the nurse placed my purse on a shelf below, in the cavity of the table. In my bag I carried The Life of Antony. I liked having it near me. For luck, I told myself.
The nurse pushed me into a huge hall where several half-sedated people lay on gurneys. She started an IV. "We won’t give you the sedative until the doctor talks to you," she said. "He's almost done with the procedure he's been working on."
As I waited for the doctor, I reached down, got Antony from the shelf and read the end of the passage about his battle in the tomb:
In this circumstance also the Lord did not forget the wrestling of Antony, but came to his aid. For when he looked up he saw the roof being opened, as it seemed, and a certain beam of light descending toward him. Suddenly the demons vanished from view, the pain of his body ceased instantly, and the building was once more intact. Aware of the assistance and both breathing more easily and relieved from the sufferings, Antony entreated the vision that appeared, saying, "Where were you?" And a voice came to him: "I was here, Antony, but I waited to watch your struggle. And now, since you persevered and were not defeated, I will be your helper forever, and I will make you famous everywhere." On hearing this, he stood up and prayed, and he was so strengthened that he felt that his body contained more might than before.
The nurse came back with the doctor. They wheeled me into the room where the procedure was to be done. "I'll be very careful," said the doctor, in a gesture to put me at ease. "There's a one in a thousand chance I'll make a tear, but that almost never happens."
The first thing I saw when we were entering the room was a huge poster of the digestive tract—the same sort of poster as before, only this time it was a clean, healthy picture, presumably what one hoped to find when she got the results of her colonoscopy.
There was a monitor above the bed, and I asked the nurse, "Is that where you'll see inside me?"
"We will," she said in a friendly way. "But you won't see anything." They started the IV sedative, and immediately I was back in the dream of the white room.
It was exactly as I had left it. The white snake was still looking at me. My impulse was still to run. And I still knew that if I did, I would have nowhere to go but down to the room from which there was no exit.
This time, though, I noticed that the serpent's look seemed to be warning me of something.
From below I began to hear rumbling. The floor even on this high level began to tremble ... then came a crash, and a slow slithering sound.
The white snake turned its attention away from me and looked at the door. The slithering noise was coming up the stairs, getting closer, and the serpent backed away from the door and swayed a little, waiting for what would arrive. Soon I could see a shadow growing closer upon the door—
—and through the door broke the black worm. Huge as the serpent, ugly and pulsing, obviously bent on devouring me.
When it was clear that both creatures wanted to devour me, they began to fight. Around and around the rivals lunged; on and on the battle for my soul raged in that room. Dream-time can be strange: What is only a blip in outer time can seem to the dreamer to take hours. To me it seemed this battle went on for about 20 minutes.
No escape for me. No hope. One of these creatures was going to get me, or maybe they would tear me in two. But then a phrase from Antony rose to my mind, something I had read not long ago. "If you are able, and you did receive authority over me, don't hold back, but attack," I said to the creatures, echoing the saint's taunt to his own demons.
Immediately—as the beasts did in Antony's story—the worm let out a great howl and retreated.
The white snake stayed where it was.
I knew then what to do, the way you know things in dreams without explanations, and I stopped fearing the snake and offered myself up to its graceful jaws.
The moment it swallowed me, I woke up. The first thing I noticed was that the pain in my side had vanished. Everyone had been warning me I would be groggy, I wouldn't remember anything after the procedure, but I felt fine. In fact, I felt quite well. Quite peaceful.
I also realized how quiet the room was. I could see the doctor—he who had been so confident about not making a tear—standing by the television monitor with someone else I vaguely recognized as the aide who administered my sedative. The two of them looked ... it was hard to tell. Frightened, bewildered, maybe. Pale. They stared at the now-blank screen in something like disbelief.
I raised myself a little. "How long did it take?" I asked the kindly nurse, who stood near my table.
She stared at me. She also looked pale. After a long pause, she said, "It went on for about 20 minutes."
She held something in her hand. I recognized it right away as a sheet of digital photographs of my insides. One of my coworkers had shown me the photos from her own colonoscopy printed out on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet like this. Hers had depicted her appendix, a seed-shaped blob that was a sort of sickly ocher color.
But my sheet of photographs, the one the nurse was holding, had no color on it at all. Just a few small pictures of black and white swirls appearing to do battle with one another. And the last photograph on the page was only white—a clear, pure, blinding white.
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