The “Benedict Option” in Medicine? Christian Contemplative Practices as a Healing Balm for Clinician Burnout
Panelists: Matthew Frederick, MD, Emergency Medicine, Seattle, WA; Christy Frederick, Creator of Girls Weekend retreats; Kate Nowakowski, Medical Student, Loyola University, Chicago; William Pearson, PhD, Anatomist and Medical Educator, Medical College of Georgia
Moderator: John Yoon, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, University of Chicago, and Associate Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency Program, Mercy Hospital & Medical Center
While a growing “epidemic” of clinician burnout is being increasingly recognized, it is described primarily as a mental health issue. In the medical literature, rarely is the phenomenon of burnout conceptualized as having spiritual and theological implications. Can burnout be understood as a form of “spiritual suffering” experienced by health care clinicians? If so, might Christian contemplative practices serve as a “healing balm”? In this panel, we explore the Christian tradition for paradigmatic Christian exemplars whose lives and practices might offer hope for a contemporary “healing balm” for clinicians. For example, St. Benedict, who facing the unimaginable future of the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, withdrew from mainstream cultural life and established a new form of community organized around specific Christian contemplative practices. Accordingly, some have called for a similar “Benedict Option” in medicine— a strategic withdrawal from the mainstream secular culture and modern ethos of medicine in order to nurture their own medical communities of Christian faithfulness. Alternatively, how might the introduction of Christian contemplative practices within health care training environments serve as a “healing balm” for emerging clinicians vulnerable to the experiences of burnout in contemporary health care institutions?
Our panel members will envision together what it might look like to integrate Christian contemplative practices into the practice of medicine. One of our panelists will share his own journey with physician burnout, and the way that the Theology, Medicine and Culture (TMC) fellowship at Duke University not only facilitated his own healing from burnout but also offered spiritual practices that helped clinicians such as himself to engage a number of vocational and existential questions arising over the course of medical training. Another panelist, a graduate of The Living School for Action and Contemplation, will share about how clinicians might approach the process of selecting a specific spiritual practice, and in particular highlight the practice of Centering Prayer—a spiritual practice developed by a Trappist monk (Fr. Thomas Keating) from the Roman Catholic tradition. Our third panelist, a medical student, will share about students’ experience with the Physician's Vocation Program at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine--a longitudinal curriculum rooted in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola that exposes students to a combination of community and theological education coupled with prayer, spiritual direction and service. Our final panelist will address the issue of burnout through the theological narrative of idolatry in the old and new testament (i.e. that burnout is in part a function of idolatrous systems that are dehumanizing/in exile), and then discuss the ways redemptive communities that practice spiritual disciplines are needed in order to recalibrate our chief affections as well as illuminate the narratives that are operative in our work environments and in our own lives.
Our panel members will envision together what it might look like to integrate Christian contemplative practices into the practice of medicine. One of our panelists will share his own journey with physician burnout, and the way that the Theology, Medicine and Culture (TMC) fellowship at Duke University not only facilitated his own healing from burnout but also offered spiritual practices that helped clinicians such as himself to engage a number of vocational and existential questions arising over the course of medical training. Another panelist, a graduate of The Living School for Action and Contemplation, will share about how clinicians might approach the process of selecting a specific spiritual practice, and in particular highlight the practice of Centering Prayer—a spiritual practice developed by a Trappist monk (Fr. Thomas Keating) from the Roman Catholic tradition. Our third panelist, a medical student, will share about students’ experience with the Physician's Vocation Program at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine--a longitudinal curriculum rooted in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola that exposes students to a combination of community and theological education coupled with prayer, spiritual direction and service. Our final panelist will address the issue of burnout through the theological narrative of idolatry in the old and new testament (i.e. that burnout is in part a function of idolatrous systems that are dehumanizing/in exile), and then discuss the ways redemptive communities that practice spiritual disciplines are needed in order to recalibrate our chief affections as well as illuminate the narratives that are operative in our work environments and in our own lives.