The Journey Within

“Can I ask you something?” he asked pointedly. I could tell he was measuring his words out with the question. Oh boy, I thought, here we go again.

“Don’t take this the wrong way but…how can you believe in God? You have an MD and a PhD, and you’ve been involved in science, so I just have to ask.” The man asking the question was one of my new friends in the residency program. He is a thoughtful, skeptical colleague with a sharp intellect and a taste for mental gymnastics. He studied me closely as he sat with his arms crossed on the other side of the table, waiting for me to answer.

There it was, another start to a lively discussion. I was six months into my intern year in general surgery at the University of California San Diego, and to be honest, I was surprised I had made it so many months until my first how-can-you-believe-in-God talk. My friend and newest sparring partner, on this occasion, provided many of the same arguments I have heard before—the replacement, for instance, of a Higher Power with capital S- Science, forgetting as the Catechism reminds us, “Science and technology are precious resources when placed at the service of man and promote his integral development for the benefit of all. By themselves however they cannot disclose the meaning of existence and of human progress” (CCC 2293).

As Pope Benedict XVI reminds us in Faith and the Future, “Positivism, exact scientific method, is unbelievably useful and absolutely necessary for the mastery of the problems of ever-developing humanity. But positivism as a philosophy of life is intolerable and the end of humanity.” He goes on to say that “seen in this light, inquiry about God is not the forlorn effort of the obsolete world that is trying to keep itself alive after its time has run out, but the most necessary thorn in the flesh of our minds, forcing us constantly to search for ourselves and to expose ourselves to the full responsibility of being human.”

In light of this misappropriation of the role of God to science, and taken with the restlessness of a soul that does not know God, I have grown accustomed at least to expecting the confusion my colleagues feel when they find out I am a practicing Catholic who also loves practicing medicine and engaging in scientific research. These conversations about God and the question of whether belief in God is compatible with medicine and science began when I was a first-year medical student. I grew up in Georgia and went to college in North Carolina, so the Bible Belt influence may have sheltered me from religious confrontations for a large part of my early life. Most of my friends participated in some kind of religious organization. I had friends across the ideological spectrum from atheist and agnostic to devout members of a variety of religions including my own, but we rarely talked about our religious differences.

Then I moved to New Hampshire and started medical school at Dartmouth. My first God-talk at Dartmouth was a wake-up call to me. The subject was birth control. It was the first time I had ever been asked to defend something I believed in, and I wasn’t prepared.

I was raised Catholic, and I knew the Church did not endorse birth control, but I didn’t have the language to explain why, or the biological understanding to explain fertility awareness or natural methods of family planning (FABMs/NFP).

Over the course of my eight years at Dartmouth in the MD-PhD program, I continued to find myself engaged in these conversations, often at inopportune moments. Most of the time the conversation was friendly. Occasionally it wasn’t. On a few occasions it was downright ugly. In those instances, I was given the usual angry message that I shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine because of my pro-life beliefs. Some of my colleagues labeled me “judgmental” and told me that I was “the reason women hate their bodies.”

In graduate school, my entire lab once spent almost an hour yelling at me. The topic was abortion. I wish I could say that it didn’t faze me but what actually happened was that I hid in the microscope room afterward and cried.

After I pulled myself together, I walked over to the Catholic student center—Aquinas House at Dartmouth. I sat in the back through daily Mass, and then I talked to the priest afterward. He told me something that I’ve carried with me through all of my subsequent debates and God-talks. He said, “Don’t forget that a large part of the witness is in how you forgive.”

I took that message to heart, and I started praying in new ways. Suddenly, I was no longer afraid. Prior to that encounter, I always worried that I would be labeled and misjudged. I started to learn how to articulate my beliefs, but I did not yet have the courage I needed. After that encounter, I realized there’s an intense freedom in living out the faith. In the short span of a few years, I went from squirming to relishing these conversations. I started reading and searching for answers and I began to crave the depth of the bond forged through these interactions. In my lab, we reached a new level in our friendship and it transformed our work environment.

During that time, my relationship with God flourished. There was a monastic rhythm to my day-to-day schedule. I started my days with morning prayer, I attended daily Mass and received the sacraments regularly. I prayed the rosary, and I wound down the day with night prayer. On Sundays, I tried not to do any academic work. This opened up time to build and maintain relationships, to read, to write, and to pursue other elements of human flourishing. I did not see it at the time, but God was using this time to show me how to pursue the “essential truth” that Father Jacques Philippe so aptly summarizes in Searching For and Maintaining Peace: “To permit the grace of God to act in us and to produce in us…all those good works for which God prepared us beforehand, so that we might lead our lives in the performance of good works (Ephesians 2:10), it is of the greatest importance that we strive to acquire and maintain an interior peace, the peace of our hearts.” I now understand that for my practice, the pursuit of this inner peace is essential because it is both what drives me forward and recharges my batteries, made possible only through God’s grace.

And so, by the time my friend in residency opened up the door to a conversation about God, I was almost a decade into a personal transformation that God has so beautifully woven together. Dartmouth’s motto is “Vox Clamantis in Deserto” (the voice crying out in the desert), and God knew what He was doing by bringing me there for eight years. In the wilderness of New Hampshire, my heart was broken open and set free. The peace I found in medical school has carried me through the transition to residency.

My day-to-day job is fast-paced and often unpredictable. Sometimes my patients have life-threatening or life-ending illnesses. I find endless opportunities to pray throughout the day. Even when the condition is very not life-threatening, I find that God is speaking in ways I could not have anticipated. I had an idealistic vision that being a Catholic physician meant that I would have a lot of long conversations about beliefs with my patients. Because I chose to pursue residency training in surgery, I rarely have extended conversations with any of my patients. This is not the same as saying I never have opportunities to talk about beliefs with my patients. In fact, my patients are the ones who bring up their beliefs, and so I am provided with opportunities to connect with them on this level. More than that, I am often inspired by the faith of my patients and their families.

For instance, one afternoon I was checking in on a patient after a neurosurgical procedure, and there was concern for syndrome of inappropriate antidiuretic hormone secretion. I explained to the patient and his wife why we were monitoring the patient’s sodium levels so closely. I outlined the best—and worst—case scenarios, after which the patient’s wife looked directly at me and said with intense conviction, “It’s going to happen the way you said [for the best-case scenario].” I looked into her eyes and saw the kind of faith that makes mine look like a dabbling hobby. An hour later, the patient’s sodium level came back from the lab. It had normalized. I went back to deliver the news. The patient’s wife met my gaze with the same resolute confidence and said simply, “Thank-you, Jesus.”

It would be far too lofty an ideal to try and sum up in the short span of a few paragraphs what it means to be a Catholic physician. Moreover, it likely means different things at different times and in different situations. It is a vocation, as well as a continuous opportunity to meet people where they are and walk with them for some time, sharing their burdens in a personal way. It is humbling. It is a journey. It is exhausting, and frustrating, and it sometimes feels like an impossible weight to carry. It is also beautiful and fruitful.

Hebrews 11: 1-3 tells us that “Faith is the realization of things hoped for and evidence of things unseen…by faith we understand that the universe was ordered by the word of God, so that what is visible came to being through the invisible.” As Catholic physicians we are called to bring hope and light to our patients, to walk with them in their vulnerable moments, and to anchor ourselves to God so that we can live out our vocation with courage and above all with unconditional love. We are in a unique position in our modern medical world to be a “stumbling block” to our colleagues as St. Paul might say because we understand that science and medicine, both, perhaps unconsciously in our age, predicated on the unspoken assumption that there is order in the universe and both are in fact entirely compatible with the existence of God.

Beyond our interactions with our patients, we are called to bring that hope and light to our colleagues as well. In an age where burnout is rampant, we have access to the spiritual cures. We have daily opportunities to live our vocations out loud. By regaining the right to be fully Catholic and fully engaged in medicine, we can recover from some of the emotional exhaustion and disillusionment we face and channel our energy into renewing our workplace by reclaiming our mission. We are called to be different because at the root of it all we understand that in this world love is always intertwined with sacrifice. As Catholic physicians, our vocation centers on entering into the bittersweet: giving our lives to the pursuit of the sweet joys of health while walking side-by-side with our neighbors through the bitter valley of suffering.

There is no guarantee that our walk through the valley of suffering will be easy. It likely will not be easy at all. There may be times when faith is tested, when it is hard to see any beauty in the journey and to maintain that inner peace. I have found myself on many occasions throwing my hands up in frustration and asking God, “Why?” Why, for instance, does my pager have to go off every four minutes? I sometimes get to the end of my day and can barely muster up the energy to drive home. What I have found, though, is that God is always there in my exhaustion, waiting to pour His love into my heart.

If I am feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, if I am finding myself asking God where He is in the midst of what is going on in medicine right now, if I feel my tank is empty and I can’t remember why I am practicing any more, I know that God is here with me right now, in this moment. I was called and chosen for a unique purpose, and I responded to that call. God may be leading me on a path I didn’t expect. I may not be able to see a clear “why” right now, but I don’t lose hope. We have been set apart and given what seems like a daunting task—to love without holding back. To love in a way that dies to self in order to break through the darkness around us.

It requires constant work to journey forward because we must not let ourselves become doormats; at the same time we must gently lead by example. The resources that will help us the most are the ones we often neglect because we just don’t have time. Spiritual fuels like retreats and silent prayer, opportunities to build community and strengthen relationships, protected time with our loved ones are necessary for us if we are to live out our vocations as Catholic physicians.

It is important not to be afraid of giving more than anyone thought possible. God honors generosity. Remember the words of St. Paul from 1 Corinthians 10:13, “God is faithful: He will not let you be tried beyond your strength, but with the trial He will also provide a way out so you may be able to endure it.” It is time for us to reclaim the joy of our vocation, to transform our practices, to make radical changes in our own hearts and thereby touch the hearts of those around us. It is high time we lived proclaiming ourselves as Catholic physicians, loving boldly and generously.

The time is now. Let us begin.