I am a
physician, not an expert in theology or philosophy, and I never knew
St. Josemaria personally.
I do, however, consider myself an expert in one thing: stress. Like
many of my colleagues, I am a connoisseur of stress. We have an ice-cream
shop in the United States called Baskin-Robbins. It has forty-one
flavors, and if stress came in forty-one flavors, I would have tasted
each and every one of them. A recent poll listed medical internship
as one of the top five most stressful jobs in the US.
On July
1, the first day of internship, the only people in teaching hospitals
more nervous than the new interns are the patients who know that they
are being cared for by green recruits, fresh out of medical school.
My first night on call, I was awakened by a page from an anxious-sounding
nurse who said, “Come quick. Mr. Jones's heart rate is in the 200’s
and I can’t find his pulse.” I sped off toward the unit, flipping
through the little book that tells me what to do in emergencies, my
heart rate rivaling that of Mr. Jones. Much to my embarrassment, I
tripped on a wire and made the final leg of my journey on my stomach
as if “sliding into home plate”. I glanced at the EKG then gave my
first order as a physician. “Let’s get ready to shock him.” Much to
my relief, my resident calmly walked in and shepherded me through
the resuscitation.
That was
the beginning of a love-hate relationship with my pager. On busy days
my pager would go off 40 to 50 times, calling me to emergencies or
asking for sleeping pills or enemas. Occasionally we would receive
a welcome message from a friend, like “let’s eat.” We called that
“friendly fire.” Eating, sleeping and other functions we had once
considered vital became subject to the dictates of our pagers and
the condition of our patients. During my internship year it was routine
to work 30-hour shifts and 120-hour workweeks in the intensive care
unit, caring for the city’s sickest patients on a few hours of sleep,
or none. We worked with little to no sleep, fueled by caffeine, adrenaline
and the fear of making a mistake.
Within
a few months of internship, the idealism with which interns initially
embrace their role often gives way to a kind of cynicism. This is
reflected in the slang commonly used in the hospital subculture. Patients
who were very sick and not likely to leave the hospital soon became
“rocks.” One might ask an intern on the geriatrics service,” How big
is your rock garden?” Getting a new patient from the emergency room
during a night on call was called “taking a hit.” We began to use
“torture” analogies to describe our work. “I really got flogged with
pages last night…” Or, “I was hit hard.”
We helped
each other work through experiences like having to tell a young mother
that she was full of cancer, or making an error that led to a patient’s
death. The emotional, physical and existential stress took its toll
on us. The changes in personality produced by this stress were described
as “becoming toxic.” It was an accepted part of the job, and we learned
to overlook our colleagues' depression and irritability as “toxicity.”
Each one of us ultimately faced the questions, “Why am I doing this?
What is the meaning of my patient’s suffering? What is the value of
my work?”
But there
was no time to think about or answer these questions. Products of
a contemplatively challenged society with few spiritual roots, the
majority of us kept working and kept going, hoping that the angst
brought on by our work would pass with time. My workplace was desperately
in need of a soul. For me, that need was met by St. Josemaria’s teaching
about the possibility of contemplation in the midst of a frenetic
work life, which helped me to transform my work from an experience
of sheer stress into a place where I can encounter God.
My experience
of contemplation and an inner life began on a Himalayan peak in Northern
India, surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags, thin bits of cloth whipping
in the wind, as if echoing the prayers of pilgrims before me who had
climbed the mountain in search of peace and spiritual help. I added
my brightly colored flags to the faded and tattered ones. I had left
my home, my culture and my religion behind and was spending my junior
year abroad in India. A poster child for generation X, I had been
baptized Catholic but fell away from the Church in childhood despite
the example of a very devout mother and a Catholic education. I was
turned off by what I considered to be the “corruption of organized
religion” and the materialism of my society.
When I
went off to college I had a deep spiritual longing. I majored in –isms
and Indian Studies and longed to “escape” from the world and from
the ordinary. In Existentialism 101 I was intrigued by Martin Heidegger’s
concept of “authentic existence,” a state of “mindfulness of being”
in contrast to the “forgetfulness of being” in which one surrenders
to the everyday world and becomes lost in its concerns. I lived a
double life--my spiritual interests were my own, private quest and
were not integrated with the reality of my social and school life.
I climbed
the mountain because there, far away from the worries and stresses
of the world, I felt peaceful. I was able to forget about the contradictions
and inconsistencies of my own life. It was easy to have a spirituality
that demanded nothing of me that I didn’t want to give. I felt I had
escaped the “world” and material things with all their negative influence
on me. I had moments of light and inspiration. Once, when I was spending
time in Dharamsala, in Northern India, where the Dalai Lama lived
in exile, I noticed that bells would ring at odd times. I wondered
what they meant. I went up to an elderly Tibetan woman, and asked
her what the bells were for. She smiled and laughed: "They are
to remind you that it is now." At that time, I did not grasp
the meaning of her words. It was only later, much later, through the
words of St. Josemaria, that I came to understand them.
As soon
as I returned from India, my Buddhist veneer wore off. Fighting with
my brothers and full of complaints, I was really longing for my mountain.
I had no way of integrating my “spirituality” with the reality of
each day.
It was
about that time that my mother introduced me to some women in Opus
Dei.
I was
immediately fascinated by their ideal of being contemplatives in the
middle of the world, something I thought to be a contradiction. I
was moved by their obvious love for and intimacy with God, who was
a person to them, someone loving and understanding. These women were
busy professionals, and threw themselves into their work, but somehow
had a depth and peace that helped them absorb the bumps in the road
that seemed the throw me off kilter. Through my friends in Opus Dei
and the life and teaching of St. Josemaria, I came to a deeper understanding
of the truths of the Catholic faith. I began to pray and came back
to the Sacraments. I no longer needed a mountain retreat to feel close
to God. I had discovered Him in the center of my soul.
The quest
to live with constant knowledge of God’s presence and providence was
the “authentic existence” I had been searching for. So much of my
life had been spent living on a level of worry and stress, trying
to be “in control” and railing against my limitations. Rarely living
in or enjoying the present moment, I ruminated on the past or was
concerned about the future, having unrealistic expectations like “saving”
all of my patients, never making mistakes, or always “looking good”
to others. I realize how little I listened to people, how my worries
about work and the people I loved crowded my consciousness.
I began
to understand the inner struggle that was needed in order to overcome
the restlessness and anxiety that had characterized my life to that
point, and the transforming power of the sense of being a child of
God. God was no longer an impersonal spectator, or harsh critic, but
rather a loving parent, who was intimately involved in the happenings
of each moment. St. Josemaria described this awareness of being a
beloved child of God as divine filiation. It is the wellspring from
which his whole spiritual life flowed.
So much
of my ‘toxicity” stemmed from a lack of inner life and not knowing
how to have balance in my life or expectations. Martha was toxic when
she complained to Jesus that Mary wasn’t helping. It wasn’t because
Martha was working and Mary was loving. It was because Martha didn’t
see that work could be love. She had forgotten that God himself was
so close to her and that through her work she was serving Him. She
was thinking only of herself and this is what led to her unhappiness.
As is
described beautifully in Dr. Coverdale's book, in a moment of incredible
stress, when everything seemed to be going against him, St. Josemaria
sat on a streetcar, and was suffused with a deep, profound, and permanent
knowledge of, and confidence in, God's love for him. That confidence,
that experience, of knowing that he was a beloved child of God was
what allowed him to go forward. This was a life-transforming moment
for St. Josemaria. It enabled him to have an incredible optimism and
resilience in the face of disappointments, disasters, and betrayals
of all kinds. His whole life is a testament to the power of one who
knows how to become a child.
This power
is beautifully illustrated by a vignette I read many years ago. It
occurred during the terrible earthquake in Armenia that I'm sure many
of you remember. A grade school had been leveled, and large number
of children were buried and presumed dead. There was no heavy machinery
available to help remove the rubble. Long after the other parents
had given up from exhaustion, one man doggedly continued digging for
over twenty-four hours, until finally he heard the voice of his child.
The little boy was saying was saying, "Daddy, I knew you would
come. I knew you would come." He just kept repeating that. It
took a number of hours to actually extricate the child completely,
and later relief workers marveled at that child's apparent lack of
post-traumatic stress disorder, which many people can have after a
horrible experience like that. For the child, the experience had only
confirmed the love of his father for him.
I remembered
this story in the days following September 11, as I saw the toll that
event had taken on my patients, who have cancer, and on their families.
A young child is buried alive, but survives unscathed, while thousands
of people are shaken to their core, and require anti-depressants or
anti-anxiety medication, because of an event they witnessed on television.
At its roots, anxiety is a fear of loss, a fear of rejection, a fear
of meaninglessness. It comes from living without a sense of the providence
of God, or from losing it.
St. Josemaria
often repeated and meditated on the words “Omnia in bonum”: All things
work together for the good of those who love God. He said, “My children,
see God behind every event and circumstance." It has always interested
me that the Chinese character for “crisis” is the same as for “opportunity.”
For St. Josemaria, accepting the events of each day as the will of
God gave them a new meaning. Each “crisis” was now an opportunity
for union with God and growth in virtue.
He used
to say, “Don’t say, “That person bothers me.” Think that person sanctifies
me.” This simple advice has helped me to see the difficult situations
I encounter in my work as something positive, something God sends
me so I can grow in some way. This point of view gives my work a sense
of meaning. It has even helped me to be on better terms with my beeper.
Instead of swearing every time it goes off, I have learned over time
to think, “God is calling me.”
In Christian
terms, as I carry out my work for God, I am somehow participating
in his plans to make the world, and myself, better. I begin to see
the value of the mundane and the monotonous. I am able to have contemplative
moments throughout my day. When I write prescriptions, I picture the
face of the patient I am helping. When sit down to do dictations,
I offer that hour as a prayer for the patients whose stories I am
telling. When I go to visit a dying patient, I take their hand and
comfort them in some way and I become Veronica, wiping the face of
Christ. As St. Josemaria would say, the ordinary happenings of my
working day can “sanctify” me. In other words, I become less centered
on myself and more on God and others.
Here is
another quote that I love: “I will never share the opinion- though
I respect it- of those who separate prayer from active life, as if
they were incompatible. We children of God have to be contemplatives:
people who, in the midst of the din and the throng, know how to find
silence of soul in a lasting conversation with our Lord, people who
know how to look at him as they look at a Father, as they look at
a Friend, as they look at someone with whom they are madly in love."[1]
I do battle
with the things that separate me from God and lead me to anxiety and
toxicity on many fronts. E-mail is an ever-present temptation, addiction
and vortex. I realized that it had become a source of anxiety for
me and led me to interrupt my work and not work well. So I only check
it twice a day. What a conquest! The daily struggle to put my work
down when it’s time to go is another thing I have learned, based on
the inspiration of St. Josemaria. In that way my work doesn’t dominate
me.
There
are many beautiful stories of how the Spirit of Opus Dei has helped
people to find meaning in their work and do it for the love of God
and others. One that has stuck with me particularly is about a friend
who is a member of Opus Dei who runs a very large hotel in Houston.
As you may know there is a huge medical center in Houston. People
come from all over the world for treatment. My friend gives people
who work in her hotel inspirational talks every week about their work,
trying to inspire them to do their work well. One day, one of her
employees, someone who made up the rooms, cleaned them and changed
the sheets, said to her, "I just want to thank you, because ever
since one of your talks when you told us about that priest and his
work, every time I make a bed I think I'm helping the family of some
small child who has leukemia and who is here for treatment. And I
love my job now."
There
is another story that has always stuck with me. When you work in a
contemplative way, it has amazing effects on the people around you.
This is a true story. It happened in a prison in mainland China. There
was a political prisoner in solitary confinement, and he had only
one little window he could look out of to try to connect with the
outside world. Every day there was a man who came and swept the courtyard
outside of the window. It was the same man every day, and the way
that man did his job saved the life of the man in confinement. It
saved his sanity. Every day he would look out at the man as he swept.
The man didn't do just a cursory job. He swept beautifully; if he
missed a spot he went back and got it. And he worked with such a sense
of purpose. That little thing allowed the man in solitary confinement
to think, "There has to be a meaning in what I am going through,
and I can make it to the end." This was a man without any specific
faith. After they were both released from the prison, the man who
had been in solitary confinement found out that the other man was
a Catholic bishop who had been in prison for, I think, over twenty
years. Every day, while he swept, he was offering his work to God.
But Christianity
is not an inoculation against the daily struggle with our weaknesses,
unexpected contradictions, friction with others and fatigue. Christ
himself faced and embraced the difficulties of being human. I have
a lot of devotion to the stressed Jesus, the tired Jesus, the anxious
Jesus. Jesus’ public life was a lot like internship and residency.
He was up all night and had no time to sleep or eat; he went from
one patient to the next. Jesus showed his infinite wisdom by choosing
to come to earth in the pre-beeper era, but people managed to find
him even when he tried to hide. Jesus even got “toxic” to show us
his humanity.
There
is a beautiful scene where he is with the apostles, and they are trying
to cure someone, and they are just not making it--they can't cut it.
There is a big scene, and they pull him in and ask, "Why can't
we cure this man?" And the first thing Jesus does is to look
up to heaven and say, “O faithless and unbelieving generation. How
long must I put up with you?” That has given me a lot of consolation,
and a lot of devotion to the humanity of Christ, who chose to experience
the frustration that we all experience every day.
How did
he do it? Christ drew his strength from his rich inner life, nourished
by prayer. He saw things with a supernatural vision and was spurred
on by his mission, to redeem humanity out of love. He embraced every
moment as full of meaning and saw it with the perspective of eternity.
Through
my friends in Opus Dei, I discovered the joy and the adventure of
developing an inner life. I began to dedicate time to prayer and draw
strength from the sacraments. I began to see that my desk is my altar,
the place I can sacrifice myself for others, the place I can encounter
God. On a good day, I accept the double bookings, emergency calls
at 5 p.m. on Friday, patients who arrive an hour late, and hours of
disability forms as coming from God’s hands; on my bad days, my job
is ”flog” and I can get quite “toxic.” Every day I start again.
In addition
to bringing me closer to God, my work gives me the opportunity to
reach out to others. I try to do this more by my example than my words.
As most of my patients have cancer, there are many opportunities to
affirm their dignity and speak with them about their spiritual concerns.
I'm sure you are familiar with the old adage that there are no atheists
in foxholes. Well, I can tell you that there are very few atheists
among those who are struggling with cancer. As a devout Catholic in
an agnostic academic environment, I try to open the minds of my colleagues
to the concept of a loving God and the possibility of an inner life.
Through my profession as an oncologist and teacher I try to help foster
respect for the elderly and the dying. I sometimes find it hard to
swim against the tide and have to ask for more courage.
There
is a beautiful quote in an article by Cardinal Ratzinger written around
the time of the canonization of St. Josemaria, in which he describes
this sense of divine filiation, and the effects that can have for
the individual person and for the world. He says, " Those who
have this link with God, those who have this uninterrupted conversation
with him, can dare to respond to challenges and are no longer afraid
because those who are in God’s hands always fall into God’s hands.
This is how fear disappears and courage is born to respond to the
contemporary world.”
I'm eternally
grateful to St. Josemaria for helping me to realize that I didn't
need to go to the top of the mountain in order to find God, and that
I could find Him in the center of my soul. I would like to end with
these words of his: "My children, heaven and earth seem to merge
on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your heart."
By
Jenny Driver, MD, a Fellow in Geriatric Oncology, Harvard Medical
School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She gave this presentation
at the Conference entitled "Passionately Loving the World"
in Toronto, Canada in January of 2003. The conference was held to
commemorate the Centennial of the birth of St. Josemaria Escriva,
the founder of Opus Dei.
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