The reflection below was given at the service of anointing at the NACC’s 2023 retreat in Mundelein, IL.
By Kathy Heffernan
When I was in college I went on a campus ministry immersion trip to Haiti. We visited an orphanage and went to a school in Cite Soleil, one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of the western hemisphere. We also went to one of Mother Theresa’s homes for the dying. There we met a woman lying on a gurney in a darkened hallway in the back of the building. She was all alone.
The doctor with us went over to her and began talking to her gently and unwinding the very soiled bandages around her face. One side of her face was extremely swollen. We stood back in the corner, afraid and shocked, as the unwinding of the bandages revealed a very large cancerous tumor on the woman’s face. The doctor continued to croon lovingly and wrapped the wound in clean bandages after applying ointment. She asked each of us to come up and greet the woman.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Come up and say hello.” One by one, we came up to her. None of us knew what to say. We had never been in the presence of such suffering. Some of us didn’t go to meet the woman. Some of us went up very shyly and gently shook the hand she held out to us. She couldn’t speak because of the cancer. We couldn’t speak because of our fears.
Afterwards as the doctor was saying goodbye, the woman began gesturing frantically as if trying to remove something from around her neck, She had several necklaces on, one of which looked like a rosary. “Oh …” the doctor’s voice broke as she realized what the woman was trying to do. “She wants to thank me,” the doctor said quietly. “She wants to give me her rosary.”
We were all deeply moved at the gesture of this sick woman who, in her greatest hour of need, wanted to give back from the little she had in response to the kindness shown to her.
The next day we heard that the woman had died in the night.
This story has stayed with me for decades. Not only because it is a story of this woman’s healing into death but also because it shows the possibility of the spiritually healing power of illness, aging and dying and the compassion that flows in response. As chaplains, the spiritual work for each one of us is to face consciously and courageously these inevitable stages in life so that we can gently companion others through these challenges. The Persian poet Rumi didn’t know about chaplains 800 years ago but I think he described our work well when he wrote: “Through love, all pain will turn to medicine.”
Through love, all pain will turn to medicine. That is our work.
Recently I was with a patient who was in great distress because she was afraid she was a burden to her family. But I wondered aloud with her if her vulnerability, her need for care, might be a way that she was, in fact, ministering to them. “You are giving them a sacred opportunity to care for you” I said.
She paused. “That helps me a lot, actually” she said. “I feel better.” I think she found refuge, in that moment, in the reality of God’s beloved community — a community in which the blind are not left on the side of the road like Bartimeus or abandoned in a dark empty hallway when they are dying. A community in which we cannot tell the difference between those who heal and those who are healed.
The sick among us are part of the broken body of Christ. Our care for them is sacrificial, sacramental and a spiritual practice of love. As we anoint our brothers and sisters tonight, may we not only pray for their physical and spiritual healing but also pray in gratitude for the ways they reveal to us God’s love and the way they teach us courage and peace and grace. May love, the love of our God and the love of community truly turn all pain to medicine.
