I have come to Pennsylvania for a conference of some 200 people who are involved in the ministries of Rachel’s Vineyard and Grief to Grace. More than 200 delegates from all over the world are here in one of the epicentres of the abuse scandal. In both these ministries we have for many years been hearing first-hand testimonies of clerical abuse which I wouldn’t even be able to put into print.
In order to try and shift the perspective slightly, I decided to talk to the conference about Jesus Christ, the Divine Physician. This ancient title for Christ first appears with Origen in the 3rd century. Many historians give as the reason for this the prevalence of cults of gods with healing powers in the ancient world. Christians, it seems, wanted to baptise this pagan culture.
Actually, the title’s real origin is in revelation. The Gospel records some 40 miracles of healing and Jesus describes himself as the physician when he says he has come to call not the virtuous but sinners. So powerful was the figure of Jesus the healer than many in the Roman world believed that Christianity was actually a church for sick people.
Christ as doctor finds poignant modern expression in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets: “The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part; / Beneath the bleeding hands we feel / The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.”
In order to heal, we must first stand in a certain relation to the wounds – we have to come close. The Lord does not heal from a position of detachment and safety.
The wounded surgeon with the bleeding hands is a powerful contrast to the sterile, scrubbed genius of the operating theatre skilfully delivering healing from outside the chaos and mess of disease. What is effective is the “sharp compassion” – in other words, the best instrument of healing is the ability to suffer with others. Such an approach contrasts strongly with all that medical or psychological sciences teach about cultivating professional detachment.
Anthropologically there is a powerful connection between healing and divinity, Illness has always been among the greatest problems that trouble the human spirit.
Sickness threatens the survival of the organism, but therefore takes man into a spiritual realm and makes him review his relationship to the Good, his need of divine help.
Modern advances have brought healing for diseases and medical traumas that to our ancestors would previously have been fatal. But these have had the effect of changing the way that we perceive and treat illness.
It becomes a reality in itself, considered as an object, and treated just for itself by medical science. We no longer treat it as a reality of the person so much as a defect of the organism. Indeed, we now have doctors who are more like mechanics in the sense that they are specialists in treating just one part of the body, not a person.
Medical advances have promoted the idea that illness and sickness are simply organic crises. It is this kind of objectification which has led to the kind of ethical messes we have seen around end-of-life issues like the Alfie Evans case.
Arguments about quality of life predicated solely on the status of the organism ignore all the spiritual aspects of his relatedness to others, and the value of suffering and love. It is this objectification which has led to pregnancy being viewed by some as medical crisis to be “cured” by abortion.
For all its advances, medicine has now begun to take us further away from the essence of our bodily reality, because hard-wired into the human person is the spiritual, the sense that my body is not an object, an avatar, but that what happens to it profoundly affects every part of my personhood.
The Church is also a body, and she is very sick. We cannot go on treating this crisis as though it were just a problem of one organ, or as though we can just let the clinicians treat one part. The whole body needs to mobilised to combat this sickness, which is spiritual, not organic only, and which affects liturgy, catechesis, moral teaching, the integrity of the sacraments, and prayer and devotion. The clinicians themselves need to stand in a different relationship to the wounds and to learn from the Divine Physician the “sharp compassion”, which comes from identifying totally with Jesus’s his desire to heal at whatever cost.
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