On Healing and Witness

An address by Dr. Kathryn Challoner to the annual conference of Episcopal Church Women of the Diocese of Los Angeles, February 2004.

Dr Challoner I have been asked tonight to describe how my life as a Christian and a physician has been driven by the imperative in Matthew 25 to care for the poor and the indigent so I am going to try and describe my personal ideology a bit and how it daily shapes my life. I have also been asked, by popular demand, to describe to you a little of the events of last summer's mission to Liberia and I do have some slides on that whole experience..

I have always loved our Anglican Baptismal covenant - especially the two promises:

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself ?
Will you strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being ?

That invigorating dynamic and in-dwelling Christ urges me to love and serve. So to quote another Episcopalian, Bill Doulos, I have to keep seeking -- because the health and power of Christ in me demands that I serve Christ in others. I need to search - to give my life a loveliness, a hopefulness, an expression of mercy. I need to live in that promise and in that vision. I can stop seeking about as easily as I can stop breathing.

Many of you know this quote from a sermon from Bishop Weston of Zanzibar that has haunted me as long as I can remember:

"Christ is found in and amid matter. Spirit through matter - God in the flesh, God in the sacrament. Christ is mystically present in you. You cannot worship Jesus in the tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. Go and look for Jesus in the ragged, the naked, the oppressed, in those who have lost hope . Look for Jesus - and when you see Him gird yourself with His towel, and try to wash His feet.

"Will you serve Christ in all persons?"

I try to serve Christ in the Emergency Room of LAC+USC Medical Center, in the Jail Ward, in the inner city and in Africa. That is the life I have chosen and which brings me joy.

The idea of serving Christ in other people is familiar to all of us. When we give food to the hungry, comfort those in pain and in prison, heal the sick, shelter the homeless, we are performing a service to our Christ. That is the blessing and incredible privilege that fills our days.

Jesus provided a model of how God relates to persons and how we should relate to each other. He illustrated both a passion for God and a compassion for persons by caring for them, forgiving them and ministering to them in their physical and mental brokenness. Indeed we might say (and I am not a theologian but I believe this) that Jesus died because of his realization that trust in God required this sort of commitment to all of humankind.

Our lives of fidelity, in other words, must be lives of increased vulnerability to the suffering that comes with identification with frail and broken people.

I think Anglicanism has always recognized the inevitability of suffering. Life invariably involves suffering. The brokenness of life - of healer and patient - is there for anyone to see. Salvation did not mean an end to suffering - but I believe that it did mean an end to isolated suffering.

In some cases my medical training counts for little. But I have found that I can be a witness. What matters may be my presence, my willingness to respond by reaching out to hold the hand of another human being.

A hand to hold.............................

I know Christ is there - suffering is never isolated - but I also know that sometimes we are the Presence of Christ in this world.. We are now the hands and the feet and eyes of Christ. We are the hands of Christ and they may be holding onto Him through us - hanging onto His hands by hanging on to ours.

To quote Thomas Merton: "This is the great work of God's love which is designed to over throw the powers of this world - that will be performed in many obscure and unknown men and women - in these souls Christ will enkindle in the latter days of the world - the fire of a greater charity".

Like many others who have witnessed to us over the centuries, I don't know how to be the church in the world without loving and serving the sick and the poor. And I don't know how to believe in God without holding onto this baptismal covenant and this vision. There is a need here to willingly descend to the deepest depths - to meet suffering on a very real level. To quote Kenneth Leech ; the desert tradition spoke of the need for penthos, inner grief, a quality of life that can only come through sharing pain, sharing something of that descent into Hell. We have to share the pain and grief of those who have lost hope.

One of the most vital aspects of spirituality is the building up of resources to live in darkness and desolation. Recognition of the stark reality of this life can easily lead to despair. The whole work of contemplation in the midst of action is a sharing in darkness and desolation, a sharing then in the dying and rising of Christ.

So I am drawn to seek out my nourishment - the Eucharist - as often as I can access it. Then fed by the Eucharist and strengthened by community, a restless urging rises up within me, and I am propelled into commission and into service.

I find there is nothing I can do about this cycle - it pulls me along inexorably with it. Communion to service to communion - in an unending pattern that I am caught up in and that I cannot leave and would never wish to leave.

I think there are five steps of this journey we take and that I walk.

This first step is that Love always will respond to need. There is no problem in seeing the need. It is brought to us in horrifying detail every day - in the media, TV and all around us. Instinctively that calls forth a response to Love - and this is experienced by everyone I know. You want to help, to heal, to serve. The closest parallel I can make is how a mother responds to her children being hurt. Overwhelmingly you want to hug and "make it better."
Then if you are anything like me - paralysis and fear sets in. How can I fix this ? Statistics can do that - they can desensitize, drag you down. This is too much to deal with and a deadly inertia can set in. I find the best way to deal with this is to look at history. Was there ever a time when a small group of ordinary people changed the world ? Well yes - there was, and we are the church - the "called out" ones... Believe that all things are possible through Him who loved us.
Then the realization of this commitment strikes you. This is going to take everything you have: your time, your talent, your financial resources - maybe even your life. It will consume you... You have to say Yes - and that is OK - because our God is a consuming fire.
Now I know this may never happen to you but it happens to me all the time. I get angry, tired, frustrated, disappointed. It happens in the County Hospital, the prisons, the inner city and in the Third World -- at the lack of responsiveness , lack of understanding, agendas and priorities perhaps that are not your own. You have to be careful - for if this leads to bitterness - it can totally derail you. I need the spiritual disciplines and sacraments of the church to keep my goals uplifted and to keep me focused.
We are fed by Communion,
We are strengthened by Community
We are Commissioned in ministry.
So we return to that living water We return to that bread and wine then we go forth to share that Love Which was ours from all eternity. I am under a Rule of Life. I go to Eucharist 3-5 times a week. I have said the daily Office for as long as I can remember. I go on retreats whenever I can break free. I read all the wonderful spiritual writings of our tradition. I am now a Novice in the Franciscan Third Order. I have a wonderful Rector and Spiritual Director. And I have all of you -- my Episcopal Community that helps me and partners with me and supports me every step of the way.

Sometimes I think we all feel that the World's needs are increasing like molten lava in an overdue volcano. As with the statistics we hear every night on our TV's, of famines and floods and war. We can feel overwhelmed, even immobilized. But then as a great Christian physician, Dr. Paul Brand once said - we can think of the ministry of Christ. He healed people but in a localized area. In His Lifetime, he did not affect the Celts or the Chinese or the Aztecs. Rather he set in motion a Christian mission which was to spread throughout the world responding to human need everywhere. So I work in my corner of the world just as you work in your corner of the world. We begin with our resources, our neighborhood and our theater of service. And although we cannot change the world individually, together we can fill the earth with Christ's presence and Love. The ancient formula is that God then transforms this small offering of our lives and God creates a new world.

Liberia

All of this may explain a little why I returned to Liberia on my Third Medical Mission and why I still plan to return to Africa now. People ask me how I feel. To be frank - I feel discouraged. My hospital has been evacuated and looted three times and now only bare walls are left standing. Even the roofs are gone.My teaching files and slides and manuals have been destroyed. Equipment and medicines have been looted.

The outreach medical van that I bought for the Episcopal Diocese of Liberia was hit by a rocket. My medical student recently had his life threatened and I had to move him to Ghana to finish his medical education. There is STILL widespread looting and fighting and rape and anarchy. A nation lies in ruins.

Edmund Burke said "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing."

Liberia is a living hell.

But we follow a Christ who descended into the depths of Hell and brought it up into the Resurrection Light. Let our prayer be for that resurrection for a dying nation and for peace.