The Afflicted Other: Rediscovering Hospitality with John Donne and Simone Weil
Winifred Belk, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

How do we care for the sick and dying person in a way that precludes the inevitable event of alienation within our current healthcare system? As people living in a death-denying culture, we have come to accept an implicit service offered by modern healthcare systems, the sanitization of dying. We find it necessary to abdicate the messy responsibilities of caring for the dying to healthcare professionals who can do so in a way that is sterile and efficient. However, professionals themselves also abdicate their responsibility to the dying person by confining care to the object of the person's body at the expense of their personhood. This leads to our current crisis in modern healthcare by which the final stage of dying is haunted by loneliness brought about by a neglect of the relational needs of the person. In his own experience of the isolation of a near-fatal sickness, Donne discusses the cure to loneliness as the hospitality of the community. Hospitality, according to Donne, is the community's whole-hearted embrace of the human person. The community achieves an attentiveness to the person by accepting the frictive aspects of illness and death, thereby participating in liturgy with them. The underpinnings of this liturgy involve the use of social and emotional rituals which restore the sick person's broken sense of self by reaffirming his relationship with others. This includes the community partaking in the joys and sorrows of the sick person, delivering medical care in a way that honors their bodies, and helping the person prepare for their death by the enactment of sacred rituals. John Donne's perspective on hospitality will help us to refashion our understanding of healing and what it entails as the restoring of sacred relationships with the body, self, other, God, and our encounter with death.