“Com-Passion”: Journeying to Joy by “Suffering-with” Your Patients

In our age of affluence, many are unaccustomed to and uncomfortable in witnessing the suffering of others, but medical professionals unflinchingly face the suffering of their patients every day. Why? What is suffering theologically speaking? What is the first suffering in history? What was the worst suffering in history? How can joy accompany suffering?

One can find answers to these many questions from the insights of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and from his Apostolic Letter, On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering (OCMHS). The late pontiff offers wisdom there that can aid healthcare professionals in fortifying their resolve to accompany patients through their sufferings and thereby find joy. ¹

The very first suffering is depicted in Genesis: “It is not good for man to be alone.” ² Adam was what St. John Paul calls a “solitude” without communion. ³ To be alone is the root of all suffering. As St. John Paul states in On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering: “Suffering…contains within itself a singular challenge to communion and solidarity.” ⁴ Why is this true? It is because from all eternity, God is a union and communion of love. The three “solitudes” or Divine Persons of the Blessed Trinity are in a perfect communion of persons. ⁵ Thus, patients who experience isolation in their suffering can be ministered to by healthcare professionals who take seriously their sacred mission. It is not merely finding out a diagnosis or treatment that provides relief; accompanying patients in their time of suffering is profoundly impactful. Patients rely on someone—the medical professional who knows his or her calling of “com-passion” (“with suffering”) and really tries to understand their aches, pains, wounds—in helping to ameliorate the sufferings by journeying compassionately with them.

The Catholic healthcare professional can also enter more deeply into his or her radical calling by meditating on the worst suffering in all of history: Jesus’s being all alone on the cross. St. John Paul explains: “…Christ …perceives … this suffering which is the separation, the rejection by the Father, the estrangement from God.” ⁶ The late Holy Father is echoing the words of Christ from the cross: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” ⁷ What is to be made of this expression of the bitter dregs of suffering of Christ from the cross? To be sure, Jesus is quoting from a psalm which ends triumphantly. ⁸ However, perhaps the grave utterance of suffering in this passage provides a unique insight that can be applied to healthcare professionals’ involvement in their own patients’ suffering, taken from Good Friday’s event.

The theology of Good Friday is profound. ⁹ To quote from Catholicism for EveryBODY: “Christ’s crucifixion involved every kind of suffering: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.” ¹⁰ As theologians such as Joseph Ratzinger have noted, Jesus has taken on all suffering from time immemorial; this includes the suffering of the patient of the healthcare professionals, even if he or she does not consider or believe in Christ’s “vicarious substitution.” ¹¹

What is it about suffering that accomplishes our salvation? What is the soteriology, the study of the Christ-event on the cross, and how does this affect physicians’ work? Let us return to Jesus’s cry of abandonment: “It is a paradox that, in order to bring us into union with His Father, Jesus Himself had to suffer a total loss of union. He experienced the extremes of isolation before His death” ¹² What Adam experienced in his solitude in Genesis was a precursor to the New Adam, Jesus Christ, who experiences the very dregs of sorrow: He who knew the Father from all eternity now experiences God-forsakenness. No wonder he cries out, “My God, my God” ¹³ rather than, “My Father.” He who was always in union and communion with the Father now experiences solitude, loneliness, and abandonment. He who knew love and belonging eternally now experiences the worst suffering in history. “His was an experience of Hell. What is Hell? Ultimate loneliness. Ultimate isolation. No communion—the opposite of God’s plan for us.” ¹⁴ When the healthcare patient experiences utter isolation, it is a share, albeit miniscule, in Jesus’s forsakenness by the Father. It is not the diagnosis of cancer or congestive heart failure or schizophrenia which is the ultimate suffering; it is the experience of being all alone.

And where do healthcare workers come into play? Precisely here. As St. Paul writes, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh, fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ on behalf of His body, which is the Church.” ¹⁵ Jesus went to the bitter end, and yet, He also wants his disciples to, as the Catechism states, “extend [his mysteries].” ¹⁶ Thus, healthcare professionals extend Christ’s redemptive act to others by “suffering-with” them in their time of isolation “But precisely through the suffering [Jesus] accomplishes the Redemption….” ¹⁷ That means the healthcare professional, like Mother Mary, is a co-redeemer in a profound way. Living in profound acknowledgment of his or her co-redemptive act, the healthcare working accompanies the other, as Pope Francis puts it: “The Church will have to initiate everyone—priests, religious, and laity—into this “art of accompaniment” which teaches us to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other (cf. Ex 3:5).” ¹⁸ To accompany the patient is to partake in Jesus’s Gift of Self on the Cross, thereby bringing the gift of communion to patients in a poignant way. When doctor and nurses and PAs and medical technicians and patient care advocates give the gift of self—when they love—they pull the patient out of the depths of despair into union and communion, should the patient receive such a gift.

But how does joy come about? We might call it the “boomerang effect.” The medical professional who accompanies his or her patients “unleashes love,” and love, real love, always brings about joy. St. John Paul underscores this co-redemptive act: “We could say that suffering… is present…in order to unleash love in the human person, …one’s ‘I’ on behalf of other people, especially those who suffer.” ¹⁹ Being bodily present to one’s patients is like throwing a boomerang across time and space to the cross. But the boomerang of love doesn’t stop there; it goes to the resurrection. The splendor of the Resurrection always brings healing, even if the healing is not temporal but eternal. To be sure, the Catholic healthcare professional ought never shirk his or her earthly duties of working hard to figure out a diagnosis and path to healing. Yet, the healthcare professional ought to remember the eschaton, the end times. The healing of loneliness through the eternal solitude-for-communion in heaven is always in the back of his or her mind, as he or she seeks to demonstrate that there is someone who cares, now and for eternity in the ultimate communion of persons of heaven.

Even as the medical professional is a co-redeemer with Christ in accompanying his or her patients, we can turn the tables and say that the patients are co-redeemers with Jesus for the physician! In the Theology of the Body, St. John Paul emphasizes that the gift of self is not only in giving; the gift of self is also in receiving, with fruitfulness abounding. ²⁰ St. John Paul makes this profound point regarding suffering:

Saint Paul speaks of such joy in the Letter to the Colossians: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake” (88). A source of joy is found in the overcoming of the sense of the uselessness of suffering, a feeling that is sometimes very strongly rooted in human suffering. This feeling not only consumes the person interiorly, but seems to make him a burden to others. The person feels condemned to receive help and assistance from others, and at the same time seems useless to himself. The discovery of the salvific meaning of suffering in union with Christ transforms this depressing feeling. Faith in sharing in the suffering of Christ brings with it the interior certainty that the suffering person “completes what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”; the certainty that in the spiritual dimension of the work of Redemption he is serving, like Christ, the salvation of his brothers and sisters. Therefore he is carrying out an irreplaceable service. ²¹

Make no mistake about it. Medical professionals who go toward suffering are also to receive the grace of the resurrection from their patients. A major task is to see everybody as someone who brings to the physician the path to joy, very different from seeing the patient as a burden or mystery to solve. The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor shows this in her statement regarding formal evil, which can be applied to the material evil of diseases or problems of patients. She writes: “…[E]vil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.” ²² Thus, doctors receive from patients, and patients receive from physicians, as mutual members of the Mystical Body of Christ.

St. John Paul puts words in the mouth of our Lord, words which could constitute the calling for doctors and nurses and counselors and physician assistants and more: “Follow me! Come! Take part through your suffering in the work of saving the world, and salvation achieved through my suffering! Through my cross!” ²³ I witnessed this personally and profoundly through GOLD (Gospel of Life Disciples and Dwellings) ²⁴ who walked with my terminally ill friend, Patrick Powers, ²⁵ in his last days. A man who had previously run numerous marathons, done backflips readily, and, with his wife Brenda, raised five children, Patrick joyfully though with difficulty received such end-of-life care. Yet those like Sister Maria of the Trinity ²⁶ helped Patrick to see that he was helping her and all of those who accompanied him. Patrick was serving them by allowing them to participate in his own cross. One morning, Malena, ²⁷ a GOLD housemother, and I witnessed Patrick seeing beyond the Veil between time and eternity. It was amazing. Patrick then turned to us: “Can you see those people?” Without skipping a beat, Malena replied, “No, Patrick, we do not yet have the eyes to see the spiritual as clearly as you do. Thank you for showing us that it is real; the afterlife is real.”

The Catholic medical worker can be likened to Mother Mary who stood at the foot of the cross and contemplated the mysteries before her. As Pope Benedict says, “Mary is the compassion of God, displayed in a human being who has let herself be drawn wholly into God’s mystery.” ²⁸ She held her Son in her womb (in Hebrew, the word womb means, “God’s compassion,” ²⁹ ) at the Incarnation, and she, like the doctor, continues to accompany her Son at the foot of the cross “with-suffering” until He let her go (another suffering for her). Her receptive “yes” to her Son’s gift of self saves us from eternal isolation, for she received salvation for all. Mary is the icon for medical professionals; she did what they are called to do: “Gradually, as the individual takes up his cross, spiritually uniting himself to the cross of Christ, the salvific meaning of suffering is revealed before him. …It is then that man finds in the suffering interior peace and even spiritual joy….” ³⁰ Joy is much, much deeper than happiness. It can accompany the greatest suffering, for the Father’s Will brings peace and joy.

May healthcare professionals take up this sacred calling to live in the mystery of suffering, “Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” ³¹ as they participate in the compassionate, co-redemptive work of our Lord.