A More Excellent Way: Recovering Mystery in Contemporary Care
Fr. Joshua Genig, PhD, Chaplain, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital
This presentation will address the role of mystery in the care of patients in the ICU of a university research hospital (though applicable across units and specialties). Specific attention will be paid to the disparity between modern and post-modern approaches to mystery and how medical care has often been conducted in the vein of the former. However, with Post-Moderns and Millenials now being trained as medical clinicians, there is an opportunity to return to a more ancient manner of understanding humanity, illness, suffering, and even death, as this 2020 conference proposes. Yet, to fully integrate our patients into this more excellent way, we must begin with full and robust collaboration between spiritual care and medical clinicians, as will be delineated in this paper.