The Knight of Faith

“The Knights of the Infinite Resignation are easily recognized: their gait is gliding and assured. Those on the other hand who carry the jewel of Faith are likely to be delusive, because their outward appearance bears a striking resemblance to … Philistinism.”

Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

A team of doctors was circled around a bed in the intensive care unit of the county hospital. The boy before them had just at that moment raised his head and disgorged a stream of blood into the air. It fell with a slap onto his white sheets and dripped off the side of the bed onto the floor. The bells on his monitors were clanging and the nurses were hustling about, offering him a basin and wiping up the blood on the floor.

Three doctors had pushed aside ventilators and ducked under thick, tense tubing to get close around the bed. Morning sun rushed through the windows, lighting the dust in the room and gracing the doctors' faces with an innocent flush. Old or young, they looked rich and strong in the Georgia morning light. They were listening to a medical student with a gray beard as he presented the bloody patient. A young woman at his side was his senior resident, a clumsy person with a degree in English poetry from Yale. And the handsome man at the foot of the bed was their attending staff, a well-published academic in the South.

The patient was a boy, and his face was heavenly white against the sheets. So unexpected was this sight at the county hospital, where the beds flanking him held two intoxicated and purpled men, that several doctors hurrying through the room paused and looked twice before moving on.

Just then the presentation was cut off when the boy gushed …