I am a physician who views his root identity as one called to heal. Yet, I experience myself as broken, as one admonished by the phrase, “Physician, heal thyself.” Perhaps you, too, in your healing ministry, experience yourself as a broken healer. Let us together explore some notions regarding the healer as broken, examine the nature of healing, and consider the relationship of the healer to one healed.
The Healer as Broken
More than most, healers—all of us—share in the mortality and brokenness of all. We experience our brokenness as physical, mental, and spiritual. We are not immune to the wear and tear of too many sleepless nights, lack of exercise, ulcers, heart diseases, cancer, strokes—the lot of man and his human condition. In our care for our patients, we ponder their decline and see ourselves, as though we were looking into a mirror and watching our own deterioration. We breathe sickness, suffering, death, and dying—we inhale the phenomena like a chain-smoker, all the while with a finger on our pulse and a self-reflective mind awaiting our own inevitable collapse. We move through the world of sickness and suffering, not as an observer, remote and detached, but as a participant, one victim among other victims; the days, the nights, become a blur of tormented faces, racked bodies, confused minds—and endless stream of suffering humanity passing by—not so much before us as with us, as together we march toward death.
As we minister unto others, we must not be surprised at our own capacity for betrayal and even evil. As broken healers, we will find in ourselves the darkness that is part of our interior. Rage, sadism, violence, disgust, hatred, rejection, malice, envy, greed, pride, jealousy, lust, rebellion are part of us. In our encounters, these dark forces often surface, tempting us to injure those we seek to heal. Also, long exposure to suffering creates a numbing effect—an anesthetization of our sensibilities best classified and expressed as indifference.
The recognition of these forces in us is an opportunity for humble growth. By acknowledging our weaknesses and seeking forgiveness when appropriate, we find healing as we seek to heal. Fruits of the penetration of our brokenness are compassion and a release of the spirit of healing.
Two other virtues—not often discussed, but direct fruits of our brokenness as healers—are an experience of sorrow, and growth in tenderheartedness.
As healers, we experience sorrow in our relationships with others—sorrow in our errors of judgment, sorrow in our limited capabilities, sorrow in our neglect and indifference. We inhabit a world of sorrow, a world deeper than regrets or sadness, a world in touch with the aches and pains of the human heart. This pain-filled world is more than just a reaction—“I am sorry”: it is deeper than that. Sorrow is a property of love, when there is nothing it can do to change the suffering of the other person, other than suffer with him. Sorrow presupposes care, concern, and love. A measure of our love is a measure of our sorrow.
Tenderheartedness is more than sympathy. A virtue, opposed to indifference, it is an interior stance—an attitude more easily recognized by another person than by oneself. It involves having tender feelings, but tenderheartedness is more than just feelings. There are times when storms of anger, revulsion, frustration, and even rage arise in our encounters. Tenderheartedness relates to the will to treat others, as you would have them treat you—no matter what the circumstances. It is to have a human heart, a will to encounter a human person, not a disease or a process. It is the constant struggle not to let our beliefs, prejudices, and feelings create barriers in our encounters. Tenderheartedness must not be misconstrued as the evasion of a hard decision or even softness in the face of a necessary confrontation; the denial of emotion; or retreat before the truth of physical, mental, or spiritual realities. Rather, it is an interior stance of openness, of receptivity: an I-wish-you-well attitude. It regards you as a friend and its communications are I-wish-to-help-you. A measure of the depth of our personal experience of our brokenness, a tender heart radiates kindness, patience, and compassion.
Brokenness is a precondition for healing. This power to heal, an incomprehensible mystery, the Way of Divine Love, can be experienced, even though not understood. When God says, “What do you want?” we say, “To be healed, to be reconciled.” We expose our brokenness. Touched by his healing power, we experience the healing of our own bodies, minds, and souls. But, we also discover, he says, “Go and do likewise.” In the mutual dependence of the healing encounter, we learn that He heals us as we consent to heal others. We are reconciled as we reconcile. We discover that our brokenness is a precondition for healing. Our search for health of mind, body, and soul through the medium of God’s power to heal becomes the source of healing for others—our brokenness co joined to his. Exploding then from the very depths of our brokenness comes the power to heal. As we assent to heal one another, to care for one anther, God assents to heal us, to care for us, so that, in the process of healing, we find healing—because that is the medium through which he chooses to encounter us.
The Nature of Healing
The essence of healing is not the alleviation of suffering (although that is an important element), but reconciliation. Genuine healing is not simply a repair process, a replacement of spare organs, or the eradication of an infectious illness. Genuine healing transcends the repairing process to include deep integration of body, mind, and spirit.
Healing involves a reconciliation of the body as made subject to mind, and mind made subject to spirit, and spirit made subject to the Spirit of God. This reconciliation is an integration, a harmony, a tendency toward wholeness, a subjection of priorities—body to mind, mind to spirit. Our bodies could be put in the service of our minds, harnessed to a spirit of power, of domination; a Herculean body could be put in the service of an ascetic, disciplined mind, put in the service of the spirit of this world, characterized by exploitation, domineering, a will to power in relationships. Alternatively, a disciplined body could be harnessed to an orderly mind, put in the service of the suffering servant, characterized by love, gentleness, service, justice, and peace in relationships.
There are priorities in healing. God’s priorities may not be ours. Perhaps, his highest priority is the healing of the soul, then the mind, then the body. The phenomenon of human suffering is a mystery and will remain so. But sometimes it seems that the body is allowed to suffer and the mind assaulted for the sake of building up the spirit-generating virtues. Our allocation of resources reverses these priorities. Most of our attention is directed toward the body, little to the mind, and virtually none to the spirit.
Isaiah’s account of the Suffering Servant is at the heart, in mystery, of all healing. Here is deep mystery: healing from a Suffering Servant, whose stripes, whose brokenness, are the very source of healing. We, as healers, are invited to share in the brokenness of the Suffering Servant; we are invited to explore our own brokenness, to co-join it to his and share, too, in his power to heal. Medicine is a composite of knowledge, individuals with knowledge, medications, technology, procedures, patients—a composite of healers, patients, and assorted media through which they relate. To result in a healing encounter, all this must be permeated by the spirit of the Suffering Servant.
The Healer’s Relationship to Others
We, as healers, in our relationships with the suffering other, experience our human insecurity. We experience our limitations, the fragility of our lives, our essential oneness with the suffering other person. This experience may be characterized by the statement, “There but for the grace of God go I .” We may penetrate the suffering of the other in empathetic degrees. First, through knowledge of the suffering other, we acquire a conscious awareness of the content of their suffering. Through our ongoing relationship, we immerse ourselves in the other’s suffering through empathetic understanding. As our intimacy progresses, we can progress to “feeling” the other’s pain. This pain and suffering is like that which occurs in a loving family when a child is sick or brother ill. There is a final degree of involvement, very rare and unique, that belongs to the mystical realm. Imitators of the Suffering Servant—St. Francis of Assisi, The Little Flower, Saint Theresa, Padre Pio—voluntarily assent to suffer for others. Somehow the vitality of their voluntary sufferings showers spiritual, mental, and even physical healing on others, even though those individuals may be unknown to them personally. This is the concept of a mystical union whereby all of us are somehow tied to one another and affect one another, both living and dead, through the mystery of our forming one body. So our healing relationships with others are concrete (physical), mental, emotional, and spiritual. We concretely touch and provide services that are physical; we intellectually and mentally engage the content of their suffering and devise plans of therapy and solutions to their problems. We engage them emotionally as well. We relate spiritually to them through our prayers, our dialogue, our worship.
Community
Another important aspect of our healing relationships is the necessity of community. The phenomenon of healing is not an individual event, not only in the obvious sense of support personnel, nurses, secretaries, chaplains, doctors, janitors, therapist—all of those individuals who make a healing encounter possible—but also in the sense that the power to heal resides in the community. It is not the property of doctors or nurses or account managers. For that matter, it is no one’s property. It is a gift that dwells collectively in the community and can manifest itself most forcefully when the whole community mobilizes itself to care for the suffering other. So it is a communal event in the direct, supportive, healing relationships of family and friends, and in the invisible relationships of prayer and church services. We broken healers must then pay attention to one another, learn to listen to one another, have respect for one another’s unique healing gifts, affirm them, develop them, and allow them expression in our communal ministry.
In our communal healing ministry, we should come to listen reverently to the testimony, the witness of the suffering other. We must receive the communications of our patients as more than factual exchanges. We must listen deeply for the faint sounds of the divine spark writing us a letter of love in the concrete humanness of our sufferers as we hear the disclosure of their story, of who and why they are, of the pains and hurts of being them. As we grow in our regard for suffering others, we may come to feel for them as though they were our sons or daughters, our brothers or sisters. This tender regard can progress to experiencing them as our very other selves. In this experience, we see that others’ suffering is their own and not ours, and that their relationships, personal history, traditions, and so on, are distinctly theirs and not ours. Yet, somehow we complement and complete each other; somehow we are one.
And so the whole communal aspect of the healing process should be approached just so—as a big family. This brother with cancer, this one with heart problems, this sister with leukemia, this little brother with AIDS.
Two young men with AIDS died last week. During their long difficult struggle dying, they came to know the heart of rejection. They lived at the center of isolation. They were perceived as biological founts of contagion, viewed with suspicion, distrust, contempt, and hatred. Never have I encountered such despair as gripped these young men. The last one to die was fecally incontinent. His mother cared for him. Her family and other children shunned them. They had no money, no food, no gas. Their washing machine broke.
And where was I?
The second one, a Catholic, was discharged from the hospital, and died at home shortly afterwards without even the spiritual consolation of his Church!
And where was I?
An 85 year-old man who provided care for his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife, as well as caring for an invalid in-law, fell and broke his ribs; he was told that he could not drive again. Faced with the impossible situation of caring for two invalids and not able even to care for himself, he despairingly took a rife and shot his wife, his in-law, and himself.
And where was l?
Let us today answer that question. Let us commit ourselves to a new beginning—let us form ourselves into a community of prayer, love, compassion and tender concern for one another.
Let us become a humane people concerned about the least among us. Let us become a humane society seeking the common good. Let us become a humane world espousing the survival, nurturing, unity, and needs of all humanity.
Copyright 1986
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