As a young adult in seminary, I had an aversion for hospitals, its smells, and rows of debilitated people. Simply entering one made me squeamish. I couldn’t imagine myself attending to the sick and dying. Besides, God was calling me to a religious order dedicated to youth work: schools, gyms, hockey rinks, youth centers and camps with active adolescents, NOT smelly hospitals with patients on oxygen or hooked up to IV’s.
I knew I would have to get over or through this fearful reluctance if I were to become a priest, and that was done by my field education program in major seminary. Supervised by a true professional and pastoral giant, I learned about the work of various departments, their importance as well as their challenges. I learned the purpose of a pastoral visit, with its boundaries, and how to communicate with patients. Most importantly, I learned how to minister to patients while leaving my personal baggage outside the room.
My practical healthcare training did not end there. Soon after ordination I got heavy doses of the other side: patient experience. A painful and enlightening journey spanning the next twenty years impacted both my future secular employment and priestly ministry. The best ophthalmologists, the latest research, the variable therapies including drops and injections, numerous procedures and surgeries could not save the vision of my right eye from glaucoma and iritis. The loss of physical vision however spurred my spiritual vision. I had spent time in the school of suffering, sacred time and sacred space.
Suffering provides a particularly unique type of solitude. There’s the physical pain which no one else can feel in the same way, the anxious waiting for the latest test results or surgical outcomes, the loss of abilities, and the separation from “ordinary” life. Those depressing moments provide opportunities for contemplation, opportunities to dive beneath or search above the physical aspects of life which one takes for granted. Within those moments one can experience the presence of the Divine. God suffers with us.
Dealing with my own pain and suffering enabled me to be more effective in my concurrent parish ministry: visiting the sick, attending dying AIDS patients, presiding at funerals for tragic losses. My battle with glaucoma/iritis paled to those whom I was called to minister.
Soon after leaving priestly ministry, I found myself in what would become a twenty-year career in healthcare, most of which I would spend with patients, listening to their experiences and then working with hospital staff to improve them. My firsthand experiences as a patient proved to be a professional edge in training medical staff in communication and empathy skills.
Over the past few weeks, I have had the privilege of accompanying two women to their deaths. From the outside, some see this as the dark side of being a priest or the opposite of a baptism or wedding. It is not. It is, instead our greatest privilege. When death is expected and accepted, we enter a sacred time, a sacred space, and even a particular joy.
We Celtic Christians speak of the thin spaces — times and places where the veil between time and eternity, human and divine, heaven and earth is so thin that we can practically feel/smell/taste the other side. Such was the case when I celebrated the Anointing of the Sick with two daughters over their dying mother. Such was the case with my final visit to a dear parishioner. The smell of eternity lingered in the rooms, with a sense of peaceful, grateful, and faithful closure.
How blessed and privileged am I to share in these moments! God has turned an early fear of my life into a source for wonder and joy. I get to enter people’s lives as they are putting it all together, for the last time. I get to share their sacred times, their sacred places.