The Rhythm of Attending: A Theological Consideration of Suffering and Narrative Theory
Chaplain, Eva Bleeker, BCC, MS, MA/CE, MA/MC

The clinician must witness and attend to the suffering of others daily, and anyone called to medical or religious vocation experiences the effects—the cost—of being present with pain. Yet we must continue to employ our training and live out our callings on behalf of the suffering other. This exposure to suffering requires a special kind of attention. How can we develop this capacity for listening, for empathy, for attending to pain? This paper aspires to build an ethical and theologically grounded orientation toward receiving accounts of pain, a stance that can be implemented by any clinician or religious professional.
In service of the goals stated above, this paper incorporates several concepts:

• The theological basis of the paper flows from the Christian faith tradition. Two aspects of the kenosis found in Philippians 2 are central: (1) the humility of Jesus and (2) his self-emptying on behalf of the other.
  
• The philosophical theory of Christian mystic Simone Weil carries the concept further and frames self-emptying as a form of “attending.” Weil, whose activism sometimes included forms of medical advocacy, says that “extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man . . . attention which is so full that the I disappears.”
  
• Humanities scholar and physician Rita Charon—the pioneer of the newly-forged academic discipline known as narrative medicine—incorporates a Weil-like sensibility in her understanding of clinical attending. In describing the efforts of health care to bestow attention i.e. to attend the suffering stranger, Charon says that “we clinicians donate ourselves as meaning-making vessels to the patient.”
  
• The paper then returns to kenotic themes, considering self-emptying in light of narrative theory, specifically narrative humility and reciprocity. These concepts will be described in the context of the patient-clinician dyad.
  
• And to end where we began, Charon articulates a fascinating metaphor to describe the kind of listening implicit in attending to suffering. The metaphor relies on the systolic and diastolic motions of the heart and utilizes the language of self-emptying. Her recommendations, while grounded in phenomenology and philosophy (and, for the author, connected directly to Christian theology), are wonderfully practical and easily implemented by anyone who is present with pain.