A Life of Service

A few years ago I posted a note about Rachel Naomi Remen and her views on life and healing.  She is a physician who specializes in end of life care, and in training doctors to think more holisitically about their patients.  In that post, "Exactly what's needed,"  I told her story of the beginning of the world and how each of us has the ability to restore order in the world.  Whoever we are, whatever we are, we are exactly what is needed to help restore wholeness.

Today I attended a short seminar called "A Life of Service," which featured Dr. Remen.  She repeated her story, but then went on to talk about how these ideas can be applied to medicine and hospice care.  I'll talk about two ideas here: fixing and witnessing.

Fixing:  In the world of medicine we are focused on fixing things, we see the world as broken.  An alternative approach, Remen argues, is to see the world as hiding the goodness, the wholeness. Rather than fixing, we can help restore that wholeness, seek it out in everyone and everything.  She gives this equation: We help by using our strength, we fix by using our expertise, but we serve by using our "self" (our heart, our soul...).  We should spend less time on trying to fix something and more on trying to see the hidden wholeness in each other.  Since we are all human, and all connected, service is something we are, not something we need to learn.  Our own human suffering gives us common ground with others in pain.

Which leads to witnessing.  In service we don't take on someone else's pain, we don't take their suffering as our own. Your pain is your own.  But, we can recognize that the pain matters.  We can not dismiss it.  We can be beside someone in the face of pain. It is not our job to fix it, but to stand with it.