Illness and Caring for the Sick - #3

How should Christians be sick? Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches state that, when sick, we should practice patience. "(T)he retention of 'patients' in medicine and the continued practice of patience by patient is key to the good practice of medicine (Christians among the Virtues, 1997,166)"

Patients are impatient for all sorts of reasons. First, we don't want to wait for our bodies. We expect that they will function like cars. Second, we think pragmatically. "(M)odern medicine is fueled by the utopian presumption that illness can be cured or tamed by skill or science (167)." Doctors should be able to fix us. Third, we feel powerless when we encounter the technical, administrative, and bureaucratic complexity of medical centers. When receptionists, nurses, technicians, doctors, and billing agents control hospital visits, we get scared. Fourth, we place impossible burdens upon medicine. "Modern medicine was formed by a modern culture that forced upon medicine the impossible role of bandaging the wounds of societies that are built upon the premise that God does not matter (169). Fifth, modern cultures expect that medicine will keep us alive. There is always hope, always something that "they" can do. Medicine, is expected to hide our own deaths from us. "Medicine becomes an insurance policy to give us a sense that none of us will have to come to terms with the reality of our own death (ibid.)."

What does it mean to be patients with patience during times of illness? While medicine midwives our birthing and surrounds our dying, it does not form our moral life. Nor does it help us to acquire virtues. Yet, patience is an integral virtue for the Christian life.

God authors patience. Nowhere is God's patience more manifest than in the life of Christ. God's patience made it possible for him to be conceived in a mother's womb, to await a time for birth, and to develop and mature over time. Jesus was patient with his obtuse disciples and patient with those who sought healing. He was patient in the suffering of his body, in his bearing of insults and humiliation in his passion , and in his death.

Medical care is one of God's gifts. "To care for one another when we cannot cure is one of the many ways we serve one another patiently. To be committed to alleviating the other's pain...makes no sense if we have not been made to be patient people....To be patient when we are sick requires first that we learn how to practice patience

When we are not sick God gives us ample resources for recovering the practice of patience (176)." First, we have been given our bodies. As embodied persons, we are creatures destined to die. "The trick is to learn to love the great good things our bodies make possible without hating our bodies (ibid.)." Secondly, we have been given one another. Living with others teaches patience. Sharing or stories requires patience. Third, we have been given the ability to take time for leisurely sabbatizing, for having children, for writing poems. Practices of patience are part of the narrative of God's patient care of cosmos and creatures. "(I)llness and death can be met with grace and courage (178)."