“When I look at a patient, in this case a dying patient, I really look at the primary core spiritual need that they are presenting to me. Is it a quest for meaning to try to determine what their life meant or what their faith means? Or, are they presenting a need for affirmation, support, […]
Spiritual Issues in the Care of Dying Patients … Read More »
Recently I asked my sober priest friend Monsignor Richey how I’d know if I was making any spiritual progress. The pious urge to pray many hours a day? I was thinking. Guru status? He pondered for a moment. “If crazy people aren’t afraid to come up to you and talk … that’s a pretty good
presence … (defined) Read More »
Quality of life is the provoking theme launched by Medicine and the Person as the subject of a systematic review for this year. Science offers us adequate tools for understanding the biological side of a disease. Nevertheless, we need different methods to understand the sick person who relies on us. Looking at the sick
my glance meets the glance of the other … Read More »
… he bears us in himself with compassionate love. The Hebrew text of the Old Testament does not draw on psychology to speak about God’s compassionate suffering with man. Rather, in accordance with the concreteness of Semitic thought, it designates it with a word whose basic meaning refers to a bodily organ, namely, rahamim. Taken
God shelters us in himself … Read More »
… this awareness leads to an otherwise impossible capacity for relationship … with our patients. “Piccinini explained in these words how involvement with his patients had come in ‘with a crash’ from the recognition of a common need and a shared question:’Sickness, suffering, pain, and death are the normal but sharpest expressions of human limitation,
… from everyone’s favorite Jesuit … 1. Allow yourself to be human 2. You don’t have to be someone else to be holy 3. You’re not married to everyone 4. Don’t let anyone prevent you from becoming the person you want to be. 5. You’re not Jesus Read Fr. Martin’s ‘The Five Best Pieces of
balance … and human-ness … Read More »
… count more than words in helping a sick person. [F]aith in what? In the love of God. This is the true response that can radically defeat evil. As Jesus confronted the evil one with the force of love that came to him from the Father, so we too can confront and win out in
serene and sincere nearness … Read More »
… He [Jesus] never refuses a single person who comes to him with an honest request … he turns no one away … “I think the most astounding thing … and really it is an astounding thing … is the infidelity of us, his followers, to just that point … that the following of Christ
he turns no one away … Read More »
… or love from suffering … because love is the self surrender of someone to another and this self surrender requires that we really die to ourselves in order to live in and through the other. The mystery of iniquity is the resistance to this. There is something in us that knows that that is
suffering is inseparable from love … Read More »
Coulehan discusses hope, especially in the context of hospice and palliative care… “Studies of terminally ill patients have demonstrated clusters of personal and situational factors associated with enhancement or suppression of hope at the end of life. Enhancing factors included interpersonal connectedness, attainable goals, spiritual beliefs and practices, personal attributes of determination, courage, and serenity,
hope … a song without words … Read More »
