On Learning to Be the Suffering Body: Illness, Faith and Christian Community
Aaron Klink, MAR, MDiv, ThM, Chaplain at Pruitt Hospice in Durham, North Carolina
This paper argues that visiting the sick is a practice that is both vital for, and integral to individual and corporate Christian discipleship. However, too many Christians accept “prosperity Gospel” notions that claim suffering and faith cannot co-exist. Benny Hinn and other “healing preachers” make the news. For the most part, the common practice of faithful care of the ill and dying never does. That dichotomy can create an illusion that faith saves one from suffering, depriving one the tools of learning how to endure suffering in light of faith. The Christian hope for healing makes this tension apparent, for we await
redemption from the ravages of illness. The visitation of the sick, learning to “bear one another's burdens” reminds us of our Christian connection to a larger fellowship that we can become isolated from during illness. By learning to be present to conditions we want to reverse, the illness and suffering of beloved others, we learn to wait for eschatological transformation when denied our hope for healing in this present life.
This Christian understanding of illness as a communal task to be borne, is a not a major component of secular bioethics. Contemporary secular bioethics stresses autonomy's per-emience, partially because secular bioethics arose in response to forced medical experimentation by Nazi physicians and in the US Tuskegee experiments. Some Christian ethics continue to argue for autonomy's preeminence in Christian bioethics.[1] Mentally competent Christians should be allowed to make decisions about their medical care. However, the Christian tradition teaches us that we are not isolated individuals but part of a larger “body of Christ”.
We have to learn how to be the body of Christ. Stanley Hauerwas argues in The Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church that “Medicine needs the church not to supply a foundation for its moral commitments, but rather as a resource of the habits and practices necessary to sustain the care of the sick over the long haul. For it is not easy matter to be with the ill, especially when we cannot do much for them other then simply be present.”[2] However, Hauerwas partially inverts the order of formation. In Matthew's Gospel Jesus makes visitation of the sick a commandment of discipleship. “I was sick and you visited me.” Christians learn to follow Jesus as they learn the costs and rewards of accompanying the sick. Caring for the sick teaches us to behold suffering in others without turning away.
That ability to be present with the ill arises from our deep conviction of God's presence among ill members of the body. In many congregations only the pastor visits the sick. However, churches must reclaim the practice of having other members visit. In his landmark lectures later published in The Patient as Person Paul Ramsey argued that “Acts of caring for the dying are deeds done bodily for them which serve solely to manifest that they are not lost from human attention, that they are not alone, that [humankind] and their loved ones take note of their dying and mean to company with them in accepting the unique instance of the acceptable death of all flesh.”[3] Reaching out to the isolated ill is part of living out the realization that when one member of the body suffers all members suffer.
Part of this practice will be making illness a more public matter in the church when it can be done in the context of support rather then the context of shaming or harm. Now, in the congregation I attend, the pastor of the congregation I attend, tells people at our weekly congregational dinner who in our fellowship has been hospitalized, where and why. Pastors can no longer call a hospital to see if a member is hospitalized as they used to be able to do. During a recent extended stay in the hospital, several members of my congregation visited after hearing I was ill. Some were professional chaplains, my pastors visited. Others were simply saints of the church, including an eighty year old lay leader who stopped by one afternoon after spending the morning building a handicap ramp for another member so he could get into his house when his mobility was impaired. In the presence of the visitors, I was reminder of my place in Christ's body. I see hospice patients in rural North Carolina who have been members of churches for 50 or 60 years, the pastor never visits, and other members don't visit, and they feel isolated and cut off from the embodied communities who have sustained their faith for so long. It is a tragedy.
This paper seeks to reclaim the centrality of bearing the suffering of others through the visitation of the sick as a central practice of Christian discipleship.
[1] Orr, Robert. Medical Ethics and the Faith Factor: A Handbook for Clergy and Healthcare Professionals (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press 2009)
[2] Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. p. 81
[3] Ramsey, Paul. The Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics
redemption from the ravages of illness. The visitation of the sick, learning to “bear one another's burdens” reminds us of our Christian connection to a larger fellowship that we can become isolated from during illness. By learning to be present to conditions we want to reverse, the illness and suffering of beloved others, we learn to wait for eschatological transformation when denied our hope for healing in this present life.
This Christian understanding of illness as a communal task to be borne, is a not a major component of secular bioethics. Contemporary secular bioethics stresses autonomy's per-emience, partially because secular bioethics arose in response to forced medical experimentation by Nazi physicians and in the US Tuskegee experiments. Some Christian ethics continue to argue for autonomy's preeminence in Christian bioethics.[1] Mentally competent Christians should be allowed to make decisions about their medical care. However, the Christian tradition teaches us that we are not isolated individuals but part of a larger “body of Christ”.
We have to learn how to be the body of Christ. Stanley Hauerwas argues in The Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church that “Medicine needs the church not to supply a foundation for its moral commitments, but rather as a resource of the habits and practices necessary to sustain the care of the sick over the long haul. For it is not easy matter to be with the ill, especially when we cannot do much for them other then simply be present.”[2] However, Hauerwas partially inverts the order of formation. In Matthew's Gospel Jesus makes visitation of the sick a commandment of discipleship. “I was sick and you visited me.” Christians learn to follow Jesus as they learn the costs and rewards of accompanying the sick. Caring for the sick teaches us to behold suffering in others without turning away.
That ability to be present with the ill arises from our deep conviction of God's presence among ill members of the body. In many congregations only the pastor visits the sick. However, churches must reclaim the practice of having other members visit. In his landmark lectures later published in The Patient as Person Paul Ramsey argued that “Acts of caring for the dying are deeds done bodily for them which serve solely to manifest that they are not lost from human attention, that they are not alone, that [humankind] and their loved ones take note of their dying and mean to company with them in accepting the unique instance of the acceptable death of all flesh.”[3] Reaching out to the isolated ill is part of living out the realization that when one member of the body suffers all members suffer.
Part of this practice will be making illness a more public matter in the church when it can be done in the context of support rather then the context of shaming or harm. Now, in the congregation I attend, the pastor of the congregation I attend, tells people at our weekly congregational dinner who in our fellowship has been hospitalized, where and why. Pastors can no longer call a hospital to see if a member is hospitalized as they used to be able to do. During a recent extended stay in the hospital, several members of my congregation visited after hearing I was ill. Some were professional chaplains, my pastors visited. Others were simply saints of the church, including an eighty year old lay leader who stopped by one afternoon after spending the morning building a handicap ramp for another member so he could get into his house when his mobility was impaired. In the presence of the visitors, I was reminder of my place in Christ's body. I see hospice patients in rural North Carolina who have been members of churches for 50 or 60 years, the pastor never visits, and other members don't visit, and they feel isolated and cut off from the embodied communities who have sustained their faith for so long. It is a tragedy.
This paper seeks to reclaim the centrality of bearing the suffering of others through the visitation of the sick as a central practice of Christian discipleship.
[1] Orr, Robert. Medical Ethics and the Faith Factor: A Handbook for Clergy and Healthcare Professionals (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press 2009)
[2] Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. p. 81
[3] Ramsey, Paul. The Patient as Person: Explorations in Medical Ethics