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engenders a profound sense of hope even at the dark occasion of
our most painful lament. This hope is more than just unrealistic wishful
thinking because it is built on the foundation of Christ's resurrection,
which assures us that God's grace cannot be defeated even by death itself.
In essence, then, we may have two responses to creation - delight and lament - both of which emerge from our gratitude to God for our redemption, and indeed the redemption of all things, in Christ.
    In the remainder of this chapter we explore the theological meaning of
the nurse's religious experience of doubleness and awareness of the presence of God reflected in that doubleness. We begin by focusing on the
nurse's experience of the goodness of God as it is met in and mediated
through the nurse's clients and colleagues. Then we turn to a consideration
of the role of lament in light of the nurse's awareness of human limitations
and of the sometimes tragic character of life.
The Goodness of Creation
    Theology reflects on religious experience, so a theological consideration of
nursing practice must seek the experience of God in that practice. But where
do we encounter God in nursing? As we mentioned earlier, Schleiermacher
describes a religious person as one who seeks God in all things. A sovereign
and creative God is present to us in all of our experiences, if we can learn to
attend to that presence. When we return to the case of Ann, where do we encounter God? We recognize the presence of God, in a very basic sense, in our
recognition that Ann's suffering and weakness are conditions to be ameliorated, not celebrated. In the nurse's double consciousness, the awareness of
the goodness of creation and of its Creator takes priority over the awareness
of tragedy. It is only because of the expectation of goodness and the assumption that the world is well and beautifully made that the recognition of tragedy and the protest of the lament make sense.

    The Westminster Catechism, a seventeenth-century tool for Christian
education, captures this sense of the priority of goodness with its deceptively simple first question and answer. It begins by asking, "What is the
chief end of humanity?" Why are we here? The catechism provides an
equally simple answer, one that any child can learn and understand, but
also one that can sustain a lifetime of inquiry. Our purpose is to "glorify
God and enjoy him forever." The purpose of human existence is to glorify
God, to bring delight to the divine, and this is the same as to enjoy God
and bring delight to ourselves. We were meant for happiness, for delight.
And in the context of health care that means that health, the goodness of a
body and mind functioning as they were made to function, is part of the
way the world should be. But how can this be expressed and experienced in
the context of nursing practice?
    Enjoyment specifies a kind of affective response to the experience of
divine goodness. An affection is a kind of emotion that does not simply
come and go. It is deeply rooted in the core of our personalities. An affection, then, is like a basic disposition toward God and God's world. Calvin
describes the world as the "theatre of God's glory," and he describes our
human role as that of spectators who take delight in the display of divine
majesty on the stage of creation before us (Lane 2001). In our role as spectators, we discern in the ordering of creation some of the intentions of its
Orderer; we sense in the powers that sustain us and bear down on us the
presence of the Power that creates and sustains the whole. James Gustafson
explains how our affections are formed by our awareness of the creation's
capacity to mediate the presence of its Creator. He describes how our affections are formed in gratitude so that we become thankful people:
    As with the sense of dependence, so in the sense of gratitude the goodness provided by the natural world, by cultures and societies, by other