Journal of Sacred Work

( Editor’s Note: Friday’s meditation is authored by Catherine Self, a consultant who works regularly with us at The Baptist Healing Trust. Cathy is a veteran care giver having spent nearly thirty years as a physical therapist, hospital leader, and health system vice president in charge of staff training and education. She grew up as the daughter of Christian missionaries in Mexico and she is currently completing her PhD – Erie Chapman)

   A physician tells of his experience as an intern at a large
inner-city hospital in South Africa. On his first day of rounds, the
young M.D. encountered patient after patient suffering from the searing pain of
incurable esophageal cancer. In every chart the young physician immediately
began writing orders for effective pain management. Over the following days, horror
and anger set in as the doctor realized no one had received even one dose of pain
medication. Even after confronting the nursing staff, nothing changed. While his
own hostility toward the nurses continued to rise, their contempt for this well
meaning doctor in turn deepened. Then the nurse administrator summoned him to
her office to demand that he cease harassing her nurses. “Young doctor, you need
to understand these patients are invisible to us. They are not from our tribe, we cannot see them.” …

   In the 20 years since that experience, this physician has come
to realize this story is not simply a
Third World phenomenon. This doctor believes that physicians and nurses fail to respond
with meaningful compassion to their patients’ pain and suffering because our
health-care system makes invisible those who most need our compassion. Hospital
systems have been built as holy places of science, and have replaced the
crumbling foundations of compassion, love and caring on which they were
originally built with stones of technology, productivity, and sustainability.
Our patients have become the “other” whom we cannot see. When did this “us vs.
them” change take place? How did our patients become members of a different
tribe?

   If we are honest, we all have the potential for blindness to
the “other.” Perhaps the other includes the mentally ill, homeless man who has
so little and needs so much. We may not “see” the 92-year old, frail and
confused woman who constantly cries out for reasons we do not understand. At
times, members of the other tribe come dressed as frightened, demanding and
ever present family members whose needs are seemingly endless. Our blindness
may be for those whose faith expression is different or whose culture is
foreign and even threatening. Perhaps our eyes become blind to the child or
spouse who asks for more when there is nothing left to give. And what about the
“other” who, when presented with our offerings of compassion, rudely pushes
them away or reacts with unexplainable anger?

    One of my favorite poems was written by Miller Williams,
whose work became visible to many of us only through his reading as the
inaugural poet for Bill Clinton’s second presidential inauguration. He reminds
me that pain and suffering runs deep in everyone
I meet.

The Ways We Touch

Have compassion for
everyone you meet,
even if they don’t
want it.

What appears bad
manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of
things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.

You do not know what
wars are going on down
there where the spirit
meets the bone.

   Erie Chapman has recently written in the Journal about sacred eyes that bring us word of the world within. Our
physical eyes can only see the externals, the very things that separate us into
tribes and make us invisible to each other. And yet, aren’t we all, every one of us, desperate to be
seen, to be known, to be loved? It is only with our sacred eyes, our hearts
filled with Love that we can even begin to see “down there where the spirit
meets the bone.”

   But having seen will we remain? Will we sit with the pain,
embrace the suffering, and offer the compassionate gifts of presence and of
love until our own spirit meets that spirit “down there?” Or will we walk away,
seeing only tasks to be completed and chores to be done?

   Today’s meditation does not come with easy answers, only
challenging questions. Today I ask myself “who is my other?” Toward whom have my
eyes grown blind and will I once again dare to look, to really see? I do not
“know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone,” but
it is a place I am called to. May your hearts be so filled with Love that with
sacred eyes together we meet there.

-Catherine Self