Jones and I are standing on the sidewalk and I am asking him about his dream from the previous night.

What was it about, Jones? 
Santa.
What was he doing?
He was bringing presents.
Did you get to open any?
Yes! There were chocolate eggs, and inside of them was apple juice!

returning to the hospital always feels like stepping into a church, into the holy. Everybody there, whether they know it or not, are in a state of pilgrimage, of prayer.

In the atrium a motley assembly of musicians formed. They were a group of people recovering from mental health and addiction issues, with a few ringers tossed in to add some structure to their compositions. The conductor, an energetic and wiry tangle of holistic cliches, worked hard to inspire her students but most of them remained tense, staring flatly at the floor rather than the crowd that had gathered across from them. Their voices were thin and straining, but still, the congregation rose with the music, an original composition called, “Coming Through Darkness.”

And how did they do that?

How did each one of them push trauma to the side to stand where they were that day?

Oh Lord, let their music, that glowing idea, comfort us all.

And then down the hallway there was a display of art created by patients as part of their therapy. Out of all the generic scenes of landscapes and flowers and pets, there was one work that stood out to me.

Mary of the Roses.

As if floating above the others, as if shining.

And I imagined the woman painting it, how with each brush stroke another layer of her anxiety fell away until this new, beatified horizon emerged.

As I left the hospital, a First Nation’s man beating a drum stood outside on the sidewalk, the flames painted on a food truck rising behind him.

We nodded at each other and I remained, watching and listening, as steams of indifferent people passed by.

A tall, homeless man shuffled down the sidewalk and when he walked into the music, without a word he started to dance. First with his fingers. Slow pointing. Cool pointing. And then his body began to move.

His shoulders, his legs, his fingers, his head, all in surprising and beautiful concert with this simple drumming. Suddenly, he was the revelation of hidden genius–he was a burning bush in our midst. He danced for perhaps a minute and then he stopped, and falling back into the broad, rigid silence from which he came, he continued silently through the day.

There was something that seemed miraculous about this, and the drummer and I– the only people who had seen it– grinned at one another.

“It’s part of the magic of the flow, “ the drummer said. “I like to do this in front of the hospital. People are scared and preoccupied, and then they hear the drum calling to their spirit and it lifts them. Spirit takes them places, it unhooks them from their mortal self and for a moment they are free.  We are signposts in this world, here to help people find their way.”

Miracles, right that moment, unfolding all across the city.

Recently, he’s gone so far as to start referring to the man as Saint Donald, and as absurd and even ironic as this strikes the vast majority of the populace, people have been reporting miracles involving Donald Trump for quite some time:

A golfer who lives in Anaheim claims to have seen an apparition of Donald Trump floating above the 13^th green at the prestigious Trump National Golf Club. Normally, the golfer would have laid up and played for a par, but the Trump apparition seemed to be telling him to go for it, and so he did, holing the 260 yard shot for an eagle. “It was a damn miracle,” Chip Anger said, “I’d never done anything like that in my life.”

It was reported the Donald Trump came upon a Miss Universe contestant taking a bath and that she tried to entice him to bathe with her.

However, she was not Donald’s type, as he does not like small breasts, and so he refused, but not wanting to leave the young woman devastated, he turned her bath water into Trump Super Premium Vodka.

An evil and disgruntled contestant on The Apprentice had been making designs to assassinate Donald Trump, as she was certain she was to be the next who was to be fired. While in the boardroom she poured some poison into his glass of Trump brand water, and sure enough, just as Donald uttered the words, “Ereka, you’re fired!” his glass of water spontaneously shattered.

A man’s wife would not have sex with him. She would not even stimulate his genitals with her hand, and was planning on leaving him, so this man asked Trump for some advice on how to bring back her love. And Trump blessed a Trump brand steak for him, and said: “Serve your woman this steak, and after she has eaten of the Trump brand steak and tidied up, her lust for you will be huge.” And after the man had done that, his wife gave him great love, and it remained that she could not be far from him and was always eager to please him.

One day while some of his luxury condo dwellers were busy enjoying their opulent homes of burnished marble and luxurious platinum, all the power went out. When Donald Trump was told of this problem, flames, like flashes from a flint when struck, leapt from his tiny, vulgar fingers and all electricity was immediately restored.

Every culture, language, disposition and illness imaginable was there, all lumped together. There were police officers guarding jittery prisoners, old, African women wearing tribal dresses spitting into clay pots, thick-necked Eastern European men with narrow eyes, a furious construction worker with a broken arm and a smirking teen with an infected belly button piercing. Nurses, tough as nails, stood like fire hydrants and shouted down anybody who tried to intimidate their way past triage, while cocky EMT workers, like bodyguards, struck poses around them.

A few affluent people who felt they didn’t belong there looked inconvenienced and glowered busily on their cell phones, every once in awhile looking up, hoping to find the eyes of somebody else who shared their dissatisfaction with customer service, while dotted amongst were the homeless, some of whom were just looking for shelter. They were aware of the disgust the entitled felt about sitting amongst them, and one of them, a holy and ruined man of 60, was an oracle. He issued forth a stream of undirected words, each one burning with some combination of genius, madness and menace, which then hung in the room like the smoke of prophecy.

Toronto, like a lot of cities, or at least by virtue of the way a lot of us assemble in cities, is a de facto gated community. Here, the gate was open. There was something almost Medieval about the scene, the squalor of it, our suffering so intimate and visible, our secrets now manifest. There was no separation of our humanity or of our innate and arbitrary vulnerability—we were all just there, hoping for intervention and mercy.

This, of course, is the destiny of each one of us, but it’s rare that we catch a glimpse of it. We don’t see or share in the suffering of other people on a daily basis. Those people, the sick, scared and wounded, are behind closed doors, and we just imagine that they don’t exist, or that they inhabit a land we will never visit, but this isn’t true.

I was driven to the ER by a cab that day, and I could see the driver’s eyes in the rear view mirror, concerned, looking back at me. (It turns out I had a respiratory virus that was making it very difficult to breathe.) I’m sure he could see that I was scared, and gently he began to speak to me, “It is okay, you are going to be alright, my friend, I can see that. You are going to be fine. Okay? No, I do not need your money. It is my pleasure to have the opportunity to help.” He smiled at me and nodded his head, “Yes, go now, get better, you have a life yet to lead.”

It was as if a saint had taken me in transit, and his blessing, his encouragement was a beautiful miracle unto itself.