I have always been fascinated by how things work. As a child I wanted to know bees made honey, how a car engine worked or what made it rain. I often spent time finding the answers to my questions or asking adults to explain. I remember having great satisfaction with knowing how something worked. In addition to haw certain things worked at a very early age I also had a strong curiosity about the big questions in life. How did the Universe work? Where did we come from? What are we doing here on Earth? Is there something else beyond our sense? I had a vague notion that these questions were important and that their answers were equally important.
As I grew up my curiosity led me to a career in medicine where I found out much about how the body works. I became a cardiologist as I was fascinated by the heart and how it managed to pump blood around the body for 80 years or so without interruption and most of the time without complaint. In medical school and in my early career I had to focus on learning the vast number of facts about medicine and like many young adults lost some of my early wonder about life in general.
My education was all about the mechanisms of the world. In college and medical school it was all about the mechanisms of how the world worked. I had a triple major in college-economics, zoology and chemistry. All these fields are about the mechanics of how things work. Like most people, all my education was about what happens out in the world and none of my education was about what happens inside of me. Like many people, I would have to learn how important what happened inside of me the hard way by the school of hard knocks. I entered t he world after medical school confident that science and technology could solve all the problems in the world. I believed that humans lived lives that were predetermined by their biology. Depression was simply a chemical imbalance in the brain. Religion and spirituality were crude attempts to explain the world to the uneducated and unscientific mind. They were myths that led to suffering and unfulfilled promises. Religion was truly the opiate of the masses. I was educated way beyond these myths. I was a scientist and a scholar in medicine. I had an active and successful research career and had won many awards and scholarships. Humans should move beyond the mythology of religion and get with the program of progress that science offered. I was set in my beliefs and nothing could shake them.
Fortunately as a physician I had the opportunity to learn from my patients. As an intern I had profound learning experience that changed my life forever. Something was about to shake all my beliefs and that something was a farm woman in her late 40’s. She was a bit overweight and yet you could tell that she was strong and physically fit. She had piercing blue eyes and dark wavy hair with a jet of grey. She had a sense of ease about her. I did not see this sense of ease in my colleagues. I entered her room for rounds one morning for the first time. She had ovarian cancer that had spread and had fluid in her abdomen from the cancer. She was admitted to the hospital now for one last try at chemotherapy and radiation. I asked her rather lamely “how are you feeling?” “Fine “she said before she turned the tables…“You look tired, come and sit down and have a cookie, they are homemade.” She then began to ask me how I was doing with my internship. Was I taking care of myself? Who did I have to make me dinners? She seemed to be interested in me than in her own condition. I had a reassuring sense that she really cared about me even though she just met me. I left her room with a strange sense of warmth. I also had a burning question emblazoned on my mind “Why?” Why was she like that? How could she take the time to care about me when her life was literally falling apart right in front of everyone’s eyes. For heaven’s sake the woman was dying. “Wasn’t I taking care of her and not vice versa?” Yet it was clear that she cared even though she was dying. How could someone be that way? What did she have and how did she get it? I talked with her every day on rounds for the next week. She said she was Amish and had a very simple deep and abiding sense of who she was and what her purpose was in the world. She was on Earth she said to try to love others. She had a deep sense of humility and yet a very strong will. She was not that afraid of dying but was very worried about her three children. She had something that insulated her from the cares and worries of the world. She could be peaceful in the face of suffering and separation. In the face of losing her ability to work and do many of the things she loved. She had something that neither money nor power could buy. She had something deep and abiding and as real as a house or a car. In fact in a certain sense this force in here was more real because it had the potential to survive her shortened life while the house and the car had no chance of having any effect on her future once she was in the grave.
I had encountered something that my years of education had given me no preparation. I had encountered selfless love that was so clear and so present that it was almost frightening to my rationale mind. It scared me because I knew that this was not my world. My world was one of striving to get what I needed and what I wanted. Yes, I was polite but I would not really grasp how to be selfless. My life was all about me and getting my needs met. Yet, although the feelings I got from her were somehow foreign, they had a familiarity to them. As a child I had known the soothing words of my mother who held me and cared for me. But I was an adult now. Was there a place in my world for that kind of tenderness? For really caring? I just didn’t know right away.
She easily saw the worries and tension in me and the sense that I was exhausted both physically and emotionally form my work. I was in way over my head from an emotional standpoint and she could sense this. I was twenty five at the time and medical school had not prepared me for dealing with the suffering which I was seeing on a day to day basis. Yes, I knew how to make the diagnosis and deliver the right treatments but I had no idea what to do with the suffering. I had no idea what to do with my patients suffering because I had no idea what to do with my own suffering. Suffering is a forbidden word in our culture today. Let me say for the record that after practicing medicine for 25 years that everyone has suffering. Birth and death involve some suffering. Change involves suffering. Love involves suffering. Anyone who is really alive can see that joy and suffering are two sides of the same coin. The Amish farm lady understood this in a simple but elegant way. She lived in a way that was close to her heart, close to her joy and close to her suffering.
It happened one night when I was on call at the University Hospital. It was about 10 PM when a floor nurse called. The patient in room 788 has low blood pressure abdominal pain and a fever. I knew immediately that it was her, the farm lady with the piercing eyes. I had a sense of profound pain for a brief second. She was special to me. She seemed to love me. I quickly buried my feelings as I entered her room. This was a familiar way for me to survive the pain of dealing with sick patients—bury the feelings and move on. She was ashen and looked very ill. Her abdomen was tense and very tender. She probably had an infection in the fluid in her abdomen. I knew that this was a very dangerous infection. She reached for my hand and held it tightly. “I am so glad that you are here “she said very clearly. “I hope you are taking care of yourself.” She said. I was stunned. She was deathly ill and still caring about me. I had to remove some fluid from her abdomen with a needle and send it for culture. She needed antibiotics in the veins, lots of IV fluids and medicine to keep her blood pressure up. She waxed and waned out of consciousness and kept mumbling about her children and her husband. I had done all that could be done and I watched her in the process of dying with a feeling of helplessness. She died the next morning surrounded by her family. I with great sadness as she took her last breathe. There was a powerful sense of her presence in the room right after she died. Everyone was crying and yet there was an unexplained sense of peace in the room.
She had shaken my faith in science. Did it really hold all of the answers to the important questions in life? All the science and psychology that I had learned could not explain what she had given me or how I felt about being with her. She had exuded a sense of love that was palpable. She surrounded her family in a sense of love and caring which was very powerful. I had been fortunate to have walked into her field of love and caring and had been deeply moved by her presence. Maybe life was more about a sense of being in the world and less about the mechanics of how things worked? Maybe science as I knew it did not have all the answers? What did she have that I did not have? What role did her spirituality play in giving her this kind of presence? Could I get some of that in my life?
This was one of the most important encounters of my life. It kept alive my sense of wonder and my sense that there was something more to life than what our current culture had to offer. More than money, success, and power could offer. This simple farm woman offered something more powerful than material success, scientific achievement or career advancement. It was something that one could not explain with science or psychology. Why did she treat me so kindly when she herself was dying? Like everything else I encountered I wanted to know how this worked. What was it about her life as an Amish woman that led to her to act this way? Clearly her spirituality played a major role in shaping her actions. How could spirituality work to create such an effect on someone? What was spirituality? How did it work in a given person? These questions were very vivid in my mind as I about my medical training. This is the genesis of this blog. I see a pressing need for a clear sense of a universal definition of spirituality that would go beyond the myriad of religions which would confuse anyone who does not have a PhD in Religion and lots of time to study each sect on its own merits.
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