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A Curer and a Healer As Well

Jerome Groopman tells of two experiences that helped shape him into the kind of doctor he is. The first was the sudden death of his father by heart attack some twenty-five years ago, when Jerry was still a medical student. On that occasion the attending physician told him “Well it’s tough, kid,” a response that he felt entirely inadequate.

About this disheartening event, Dr. Groopman writes “This experience explains in part my powerful commitment to care for patients and their loved ones in a way that my father and my family were not cared for – with genuine compassion and scientific excellence.”

This quotation comes from his fine book, “The Measure of Our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness.” He also talked about his father’s death in a notable television program, “The Healer” shown this past December as part of Dateline NBC. I found this documentary portrait of Dr. Groopman inspiring as he treated two of his patients who had diseases that turned out to be fatal.

The first, Gene Brown, a 39-year-old man with AIDS, is worn down after a thirteen-year struggle with the disease. He now has “the feeling that things are spinning out of control.” At this point Dr. Groopman begins treating him with a new experimental drug. The drug, however, ultimately does not work and Gene decides to call off further treatment.

However, his physician continues to care for him with particular concern for his spiritual well-being. Gene and he have an affectionate relationship, marked by mutual respect and love. At their last meeting, as they hug one another, Gene tells him, “Jerry, I love you” and Jerry replies in kind.

When the television interviewer asks Jerry Groopman if a time comes when he focuses more on the psychological and the spiritual, he says, “Yes, it’s in some ways much more difficult because it requires knowing the person and also knowing yourself and being able to open up to that person.”

The other patient, Elizabeth Sanderson, is a woman in her early sixties who suffers from breast cancer. She, too, goes through a series of ups and downs as various treatments work for a while and then fail to arrest the disease.

Throughout this agonizing cycle, Dr. Groopman  attends to her physical needs and the spiritual concerns of the patient and members of her family. As hopes for recovery fade, he nourishes for Elizabeth and others “a different kind of hope, a hope that their lives will end in a dignified and positive way.”

When I talked last week with Herbert Sanderson, Elizabeth’s bereaved husband, he welcomed my distinction between curing and healing. Speaking of Dr. Groopman, he said, “The healing that he does is the way his patients face death; that’s where it all comes together.”

The other major influence making Jerry Groopman the kind of man he is comes from the history of his family. Many members of his mother’s extended family died in the Holocaust. This agonizing legacy informs Jerry’s faith and spirituality. Referring to this legacy, he told me, “It enables me to be comfortable with people wrestling with doubt and uncertainty,” as so many of his patients must in facing their mortality.

Dr. Groopman also told me of his efforts “to find the sacred core in every-one.” When he succeeds at this, he says, “I’ve seen the soul revealed,” as it was with both Gene Brown and Elizabeth Sanderson. Both of them died in peace. Gene said “I’m a fulfilled man, I’ll tell you.” Elizabeth, surrounded by family members, said “I’m not afraid, I’m more overwhelmed with the goodness of God.”

At the end of the NBC documentary, viewers see Jerry Groopman as he takes part in a prayer service in his synagogue. He is shown reading from the Kaddish, the Jewish prayers for the dead. When you consider his work with dying people and his family’s history, this rite takes on poignant significance.

Asked what was going through his mind while praying, Jerry Groopman replies: “I was thinking what the lives of the people I cared for still mean to me.”

Expanding this thought, he adds: “They live in my heart and my memory. They have shaped parts of my life in very substantial ways and I express genuine and profound gratitude to them through that prayer.”

Richard Griffin

A Healer At Work

What strikes me most about Jerry Groopman is the way he loves his patients. Not only that but he shows that love in word and gesture. “You are a good hugger,” says Gene Brown, a forty-year-old AIDS patient shown in an extraordinary program in the series “Dateline NBC.”

This program, entitled “The Healer,” was televised this past December. I regard it as an altogether extraordinary service to the public at large, and to people who face illness in particular. Reviewing it on videotape has further inspired me with admiration for the two patients and the doctor who served them so well.

Dr. Jerome Groopman, whom this program highlights, serves as Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess. He has become widely known through his articles in the New Yorker and other periodicals. His two books, The Measure of Our Days and the forthcoming Second Opinions will enhance his reputation further.

In the first of these books he wrote about a highly successful middle-aged venture capitalist who realized at the end of his life that he had invested in the wrong things – money instead of family and what really counts. His patient’s  spiritual situation confronted Dr.Groopman with a difficult challenge, in his own words “to find some way to give him comfort and to allow him, at the end of his life, to find meaning and to pass meaning on to his family.”

Beyond Dr. Groopman’s impressive scientific credentials, his personal qualities make him an admired healer, something that emerges strongly in the television documentary. Here he brings the latest medical knowledge and techniques to help Gene Brown, mentioned above, and Elizabeth Sanderson, a deeply religious 64-year-old woman, who has breast cancer.

Dr. Groopman’s continued efforts to cure the two people shapes an adventure story in itself. Ups and agonizing downs characterize the struggle that these patients and their doctor wage against their diseases. Some reports the two people get from their doctor encourage them; inevitably, it seems, these upbeat indications are all too soon followed by the dashing of hopes for a cure.

Eventually, they both die, Gene at home after having decided to forego further medical procedures, Elizabeth in the hospital surrounded by family members. Both die at peace, with Gene saying “I’m a fulfilled man, I’ll tell you,” and Elizabeth saying “I’m not afraid, I’m more overwhelmed with the goodness of God.”

So, even though they were not cured, they were healed and could die without regret. That way of dying witnesses to their strength of soul and also to the rare ability of their doctor, Jerry Groopman, to enter into their experience with deep understanding and courageous empathy.

His patients often call him “Jerry” in recognition of the personal relation-ship he develops with them and they with him. This tall, physically impressive middle-aged physician with the sympathetic face, risks much himself as he listens to the hopes and fears of his patients.

The way he clasps their hands with his own, puts his arm around their shoulders, pats Gene’s knee and laughs at moments of humor – all reveal Jerry as full of human feeling. At the same time, he tells them openly where the treatment stands and what they can reasonably hope from it.

The last time he sees Gene, they embrace upon parting. Gene tells him, “I love you, Jerry” to which he replies “and you.”

How did Jerry Groopman get this way? In the video he recalls experiencing his father’s death. He and his mother were at the beside and, when his father died, all the attending physician could say was, “Well, it’s tough, kid.” About this response Jerry now says, “I would never imagine caring for patients and their families in any way like this.”

In an interview, I asked the same question of Rev. Herbert Sanderson, the husband of Elizabeth. “My suspicion is that Dr. Groopman’s patients have made him what he is,” he answered.

The interviewer in the documentary asks him if there comes a point when he focuses more on the psychological and the spiritual element in the patient. “Yes,” Dr. Groopman responds, “and it’s in some ways much more difficult because it requires knowing the person and also knowing yourself and being able to open myself up to that person.”

He seems to draw vital strength and inspiration from his own Jewish faith. The last part of the program shows Jerry Groopman in his synagogue for a worship service. The camera focuses on him lighting a candle and reciting the Kaddish in memory of the dead.

Asked what he was thinking about at this point, he answers: “I was thinking what the lives of the people I cared for still mean to me. They live in my heart and my memory.”

He adds, “They have shaped parts of my life in very substantial ways. And I express genuine and profound gratitude to them through that prayer.”

Richard Griffin

Prayer Group

Flash back to a brilliant November day: Five older people sat in a room filled with autumn light that streamed in from the garden. We had prayed silently together for half an hour, until one of us rang a bell marking the end of this meditation. Then we spoke about the experience we had shared.

Hamilton, an African-American aged 76, said he had felt “peace flowing by.” (I have given the real people described here other names to protect their privacy.) Lucy, hostess for the group, spoke of shared spiritual travel: “We’re on a journey toward surrender,” she said with quiet conviction. Of her husband, Ned, she observed, “He’s ahead of us, but we’re all going there.”

Ned has undergone serious loss of memory and takes part each week in group support sessions with others in his situation. He continues to experience the multiple effects of disorientation. Just that day he had lost his eyeglasses and had felt distress until he could find them again. “How difficult it is to lose things,” he remarked, “especially glasses.”

For myself, I feel uplifted by Ned’s courage. He knows what is happening to him as his memory falters but he moves ahead. Identifying with his struggle, his wife offers him loving support. So do the rest of us prayer group members in whatever ways we can – in silence and by word and gesture.

Ned’s ordeal gives an edge to our group’s spiritual experience. Knowing the likely outcome of his illness, we grieve for the confusion imposed on him in his everyday life. At the same time we admire, perhaps even envy, his fortitude and see it as a precious spiritual gift. The many adult years he has spent in the spiritual search have clearly prepared him for this time of trial.

Watching our friend Ned, we learn to face our own future with all its possibilities for something just as hard to bear. I look upon this prospect with foreboding but also, in faith, see it as freeing the human heart for possession by God in a life that continues forever.

Lucy brought our prayer session to an appropriate end, one that teased our imaginations and stirred our spiritual aspirations. She quoted a thirteenth century Persian poet named Rumi: “Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom / How do they learn it? / They fall, and falling / They’re given wings.”

This scene, marked by spiritual striving against a backdrop of trial and suffering, inspires me with new appreciation of meditation and its benefits for soul and body. Like the others, I come away from the experience refreshed and better prepared for the difficulties of daily life.

Flash forward to another meditation just this week. On this occasion the sky outside threatens to rain; partway through, the drops start to fall gently and I hear them in my silent prayer,

When afterward we talk about the experience of prayer, Hamilton tells how he keeps his hands open because he feels a spiritual energy that he wants to share with the rest of us. His feeling for us all is evident and moves me to admiration of this loving man.

He shares with us a poem that was used in his church on Sunday. It was written by Howard Thurman who, at Boston University, was Martin Luther King’s teacher and mentor.

“When the song of angels is stilled, / When the star in the sky is gone, / When the kings and princes are home, / When the shepherds are back with their flock / The work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the brothers, to make music in the heart.”

We all receive this as an inspiration for our prayer in this beginning of the post-Christmas season. Its agenda intimidates the realist in us, but we take heart from the power of the spirit.

When Lucy gently rings the bell in signal that our allotted time for prayer is over, she lights small candles for us to take home. The flame, she explains, derives from a candle lit by the Dalai Lama in the name of peace.

Richard Griffin

Encounter with a Famous Ancestor

A new friend, Ian, recently regaled me with the tale of his meeting one of his distant ancestors. At first, I found the story incredible but later discovered it to be, not the product of a fevered imagination, but a narrative solidly based in verifiable fact.

When he was a young boy, Ian took instruction from the vicar of the Anglican parish in the village where he lived. After one of his visits to the recto-ry concluded, the canon asked the boy if he would like to see something un-usual. He then led Ian to another room and brought up from its hiding place a large coffer. Opening this container the vicar lifted out a small box and opened it for the boy to view.

Inside the box was a human head, not merely a skull, but a head with flesh on it. Ian looked quickly at the head and then shrank back in horror. The vicar then explained to him that he had just seen the head of Oliver Cromwell, the famous anti-royalist leader who in mid-17th century England had overthrown King Charles I.

When Ian told his parents about this encounter, they expressed surprise that he did not know his family’s history. They explained that they were directly descended from Cromwell who was Ian’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

How Cromwell’s head came into the vicar’s possession is in itself a complicated story. After the restoration of the monarchy later in the 17th cen-tury, the British parliament decreed that Cromwell’s body be removed from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and hanged. It was then drawn and quartered and the head was cut off and placed on a spike on the top of Westminster Hall. Later it was passed around, sold and resold, until somehow the vicar of the village church received it. Now it is reportedly buried in Sidney Sussex College of Cambridge University, at a location known to only a few people.

I have related this admittedly bizarre tale, not to be ghoulish, but to stir reflection on the experience of time. At age 76, Ian now looks back on four centuries of history brought vividly to life by the encounter with his grandfather to the tenth power. For him, time is a living reality that takes him back to the earlier generations of his family.

No one else known to me can rival this personal story for its sweep and its drama but many people can reach rather far back into history. Out of family archives I recently held in my hands a photo of myself with a relative who was born in the year 1832. She was my grandmother’s Aunt Kate who came from St. Louis to visit her niece in Peabody, Massachusetts and ended up staying for forty years. She died after celebrating her hundredth birthday.

When you consider that this woman with whom I talked as a four-year-old, had grandparents who must have been born around the time of the American Revolution, history seems much shorter than we usually imagine it.

These anecdotes and reflections have been prompted by the turn of the centuries and millennia that we have lived through this month. I find it still hard to believe that I have lasted into this new era. Not so long ago, it seemed almost unimaginably far off, yet here we have arrived.

Of course, our marking of time has something arbitrary about it. You don’t have to keep to the method adopted by the western world. Instead, to cite only two alternatives, you can use the Jewish calendar and the year 5760 or reckon from the birth of the Buddha 563 years before Christ.

But however you observe it, time plays a dominant role in our modern life. Its rhythms give our lives meaning and give us reasons to look both forward and backward. Perhaps most important, these rhythms can prompt us to look more closely at the ways in which we have changed.

One of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner explains how the pas-sage of time has affected him: “As I grow older, less inhibited, dottier, I find it increasingly easy to move toward being who I truly am, let the chips fall where they may. I also find it easier to relate to others as they truly are too, which is at its heart, I suspect, rather a good deal like the rest of the human race including me. I find myself addressing people I hardly know as though I have known them always and taking the risk of saying things to them that, before I turned seventy, I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying.”

A group of elders to whom I quoted the first part of Buechner’s statement wholeheartedly agreed with it. They, too, have discovered themselves to have moved toward who they really are. And they welcome this unsuspected benefit of time.

Richard Griffin

Frank’s Death

News has come, suddenly and without my expecting it, that Frank has died. I knew that he had an illness serious in its long-range possibilities, but I never thought it would lead to death so soon. When I talked with him two weeks ago, he seemed on his way to recovery.

Frank and I had been friends for 57 years, ever since we first met as classmates in our small high school. We shared much in values and outlook on the world. We had also shared in many of the weddings, baptisms and other events that marked the life of our families through the years.

Frank’s death marks only the second time in my lifetime that I have lost a close friend. It still comes as a new experience, upsetting because I feel unpre-pared for a world without him. In recent weeks we had talked about the activities we would share together as he moved more fully into retirement. Now that will not happen and I feel deprived.

He was a fine person who spent his life in public education because he believed it the most important work he could do. In his early years, he had given up a career that could have been much more lucrative in favor of teaching and school administration. After retirement five years ago, he devoted himself in large part to caring for his wife who had been afflicted with a crippling disease.

Spirituality always took a central role in Frank’s life. The religious values imparted to him growing up in a large family remained vital for him. When I talked with him during his recent hospital stay, I sensed that he was prepared for whatever might happen to him. With communication born of long friendship, I could tell that he had been thinking about death and the issues it posed.

Though I feel shaken by his departure, Frank’s death does not upset my own convictions about what dying means. Rather, it has strengthened them.

Ever since my own boyhood I have held a deep faith that dying leads to new life. Even aside from the teachings of religion, I have always judged it in-credible to think that death brings an end to everything. Given all the complexity and built-in value of each human life, I could never believe that this life does not continue.

Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite spiritual writers, expresses this faith in a way that accords with my viewpoint. In his most recent book” The Eyes of the Heart,” he explains his conviction that dying brings new life. I identify strongly with the reasons he gives to support his faith.

“If I were God,” Buechner writes, “and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn’t imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done.”

Secondly, “life doesn’t feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness, and that we expe-rience all the horrors that go on both around us and within us as horrors rather than just as the way the cookie crumbles because, in our own innermost hearts, we belong to Holiness, which they are a tragic departure from.”

Amen to this faith that human life does continue in splendor transformed by our loving God. At least, this has been my conviction since childhood, a con-viction that I regard as a divine gift. In that confidence I join Frank’s family and friends in committing him to God.

Only a few weeks ago, I wrote another column in which Frank played a part. My article dealt with long-lasting friendships and I included him among those closest to me. In the light of his death, a quotation he gave me for that piece has taken on new meaning.

When I asked him what our friendship meant to him, he told me this: “One of the things that we have been able to do is know one another well enough to wish it would go on forever.”

I remain convinced that Frank’s wish for it to go on forever has a solid basis in reality.

Richard Griffin

The Green-Eyed Monster In Retreat

“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.”  This statement, made by the famously witty and acid-tongued writer Gore Vidal, gives expression to the vice called envy, classically listed among the seven deadly sins.

Vidal’s unlovely sentiment would not draw our attention if it did not carry with it at least some little truth. When we examine our hearts, we can all feel some temptation to begrudge other people their success. That temptation is something that I have felt many times and, frankly, given in to more often than I like to admit.

I remember once feeling very nervous about approaching a colleague, several years younger than I, who had already established a reputation for his writing. His published poems and short stories had won him an acclaim that made me envious. Talking with him made me feel ill at ease because I recognized in him a talent much  superior to my own.

The passage of years has worn away my tendency to feel envious of those who have scored notable successes. Though I still feel the temptation on occasion, by and large I now embrace the achievements of other people and even enjoy sharing in their good fortune.

This change of attitude, I like to think, has happened because of growing appreciation of a spiritual reality. That reality is the vital connection that each of us has with one another. As I grow older, I have turned my back on individualistic achievement and come to treasure the bonds that tie us all together as brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

I feel this way most of all during Sunday worship. There, other members of the community and I are joined together in recognition of God. “We give you thanks for your great glory,” we pray in unison. And we pay attention to our oneness as we exchange the embrace or handshake and say to your neighbor, “Peace be with you.”

So, instead of envying the fellow near me whom I recognize as the author of an article on spirituality that has just appeared in a national magazine, I congratulate him on his success. No matter that I would like to have written that article myself. That he has done so I recognize as an achievement that I share in too because the author is part of my spiritual community.

Each one of us is a gifted person. We have received talents that enable us to make our way in the world. However, those gifts, as I  have come to see more clearly than when I was younger, are also intended by God for us to serve one another. That other people have so much to offer is not a threat to me, but rather an advantage.

With this changed outlook, I can survey the people in my worshipping community and rejoice in their spiritual gifts. I recognize fellow parishioners who have dedicated their lives to serving the poor. Others who spend their time educating disadvantaged children come into my line of vision. And I spot yet other men and women whose artistic creativity brings much value to the larger community.

I also recognize and appreciate the physical beauty and graceful personality of others, younger and older. Some people among us clearly have the gift of making us feel accepted and valued as persons. I admire the resilience of my companions who have shown patience and courage in putting up with the physical insults connected with  old age and the unexpected  illnesses that surprise the young.

All of these gifts have a spiritual dimension and go to make the community a force for good. The diversity of the gifts attests to the prodigal impulse of the creator who has given them for the benefit of all.

As a person prone to relapse, I may well slip back into my old habits of envying the achievements of others. After all, there is something typically American about seeing ourselves as in competition with everyone else. But I now realize more clearly than before how false this approach to life truly is. Instead, we can allow spirituality to teach us how the talents of others in our community do not diminish us but widen our lives.

Richard Griffin

People of the Century

Like Janus, the god with two faces, I find myself at this dramatic turning point in history looking forward to the 2000s and backward over the 1900s.

Surveying the past century, I here identify a few of the public figures who have had a notable impact on my life and times. In doing so, I have arbitrarily chosen three prominent people in each of six categories.

In the political sphere, Franklin D. Roosevelt looms largest. He was the first president I was conscious of. As a boy, I thought he would always be my president, just as for me as a Catholic, Pius XII would always be my pope.

Later Harry Truman emerged to take a place the national consciousness and mine. I remember listening to him the first time he spoke to the nation. He sounded to me like a hick, and I won-dered how he could ever lead us the way his predecessor had done.

And third among American political figures, John F. Kennedy stands out. Though I now realize that historians may not rate him highly, still the new spirit he brought to Washington and the country at large, featuring respect for intellect and culture, buoyed up my morale.

In another sphere, spirituality, the three Americans who have marked my life most are Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King. All of them people of deep faith, they wrote and acted so as to support and extend that faith in me and my community. All of them had human defects but their concern for justice, peace, and poor people place them high in my temple of spiritual heroes.

As a boy I used to frequent movie theaters and the double features they offered. Looking back, I conjure up three stars who have left strong memories in me: Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, and Bette Davis.

I loved the hard-bitten gangster films that the first two starred in; the love stories of Bette Davis tended to bore me but left a strong impression of what screen acting could be.

In literature, three writers stand out for me: Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward Angel, Sigrid Undset for her great trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, and Walker Percy.

Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, published posthumously in 1940, is the kind of book you had to read in adolescence to feel its full impact.

Something similar can be said of Undset’s three volumes. With their stirring stories of religious and sexual passion, they ex-tended the narrow boundaries of my thinking and feeling as a teenager.

Walker Percy, in novels such as Love In the Ruins, brought a sophisticated and somewhat pessimistic Catholic sensibility to the world with which I strongly identified.

As a life-long sports fan, I have rooted for Boston major league teams through times of both glory and slump. Among the many athletic heroes who occupy a prominent place in my psyche are Ted Williams, Bob Cousy, and Bobby Orr.

Though he sometimes made it hard to like him, Ted Williams remains the consummate artist of the perfect swing.

Cousy first showed how entertaining and exciting it could be to perform sleight-of-hand on the basketball court, and Orr revolutionized hockey by becoming a big-time scorer as a dashing defenseman.

Finally, 20th century America will be remembered by social historians for the rise of the elder liberation movement. That leads me to cite three leaders among the many who led the way toward asserting the rights of older Americans.

Senator Claude Pepper in his own old age stood out as a champion of public policy recognizing both the needs and the contributions of elders.

Ethel Percy Andrus founded the now giant advocacy organization AARP (known, as of recent months, by these initials alone) that enrolls Americans middle-aged and older for rights and benefits.

And Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, an organization never large in numbers or resources, but an influence for change in the way older people are regarded in this country. Maggie, living into her nineties, was a dynamic figure who insisted that Americans, old and young, should advocate together for basic social change.

So this is my list of twentieth century threesomes enshrined in my personal hall of fame. You will quite reasonably argue with my choices and omissions. I have left out whole areas of importance and, even within the categories chosen I have ignored many who helped change America.

Perhaps the best way for you to retaliate is to make your own list. It’s fun doing so and reviewing candidates can stimulate your interior life. I fully expect that your selections will differ from mine dramatically. If you wish to share your memories with me, you will find me an appreciative reader.

And, of course, this exercise raises the question of who will be the people of the new millennium most influential in our lives and in those following us.

Richard Griffin