For the Life of the Patient: the Eucharist and the Physician-Patient Encounter
Jonathan Avendaño, Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC
John Donne in one of his Holy Sonnets wrote, “I AM a little world made cunningly/Of Elements.” Secular medicine has reduced patients and their health care concerns to objects of manipulation. Christian responses to modern/post-modern secularism in medicine tend to emphasize imago Dei and “wholeness.” However, humanity often still remains an object of the physician’s gaze in these discussions, and unfortunately the actual patient frequently falls out of view.
Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World argues that the fundamental problem in common Christian sacramental understanding is the collapse of the world’s “ontological sacramentality” – its being inherently sacramental (p. 129). In other words, the world ought to be understood as the very site for communion with God. The true "leitourgia" – “liturgy” or “mission” (p. 25) – of the Eucharist is the becoming of the Church into the true life of Jesus Christ; it is the bridging of the false gap between spirit and nature. The Eucharist goes beyond the false dichotomy between natural and spiritual to reveal the true reality of Jesus Christ present in creation. The Christian Eucharistic mission, as Schmemann would have us understand it, is to see all of the world as full of Elements for the true presence of life in Christ. Schmemann calls it an ascension to true reality where the mystery is revealed.
Such a Eucharistic worldview should also fundamentally alter the Christian health care clinician’s imagination of the patient encounter. Drawing from Schmemann’s work and my own experiences (both in patient encounters while volunteer interpreting and in participating in the sacramental life of a Latino Episcopal Parish), I endeavor to give an account of the patient encounter as liturgical and Eucharistic. I hope to demonstrate how recovering the sacramentality of the patient can help health care workers no longer see patients as objects but as subjects – health care workers enter the lives of patients, not the other way around. Instead of instrumentalizing patients, health care clinicians can understand their patient encounters as sacramental ascensions – places of encountering the true presence of Christ.
Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World argues that the fundamental problem in common Christian sacramental understanding is the collapse of the world’s “ontological sacramentality” – its being inherently sacramental (p. 129). In other words, the world ought to be understood as the very site for communion with God. The true "leitourgia" – “liturgy” or “mission” (p. 25) – of the Eucharist is the becoming of the Church into the true life of Jesus Christ; it is the bridging of the false gap between spirit and nature. The Eucharist goes beyond the false dichotomy between natural and spiritual to reveal the true reality of Jesus Christ present in creation. The Christian Eucharistic mission, as Schmemann would have us understand it, is to see all of the world as full of Elements for the true presence of life in Christ. Schmemann calls it an ascension to true reality where the mystery is revealed.
Such a Eucharistic worldview should also fundamentally alter the Christian health care clinician’s imagination of the patient encounter. Drawing from Schmemann’s work and my own experiences (both in patient encounters while volunteer interpreting and in participating in the sacramental life of a Latino Episcopal Parish), I endeavor to give an account of the patient encounter as liturgical and Eucharistic. I hope to demonstrate how recovering the sacramentality of the patient can help health care workers no longer see patients as objects but as subjects – health care workers enter the lives of patients, not the other way around. Instead of instrumentalizing patients, health care clinicians can understand their patient encounters as sacramental ascensions – places of encountering the true presence of Christ.