I’m game, I said. I’ve got nothing to lose. How do I change my attitude?
Well, said the religious man, you stop trying to figure things out and you believe.
Believe, I said. Believe what?
Why, everything, he said. Everything you can think of, left, right, north, east, south, west, upstairs, downstairs and all around, inside, out, visible, invisible, good and bad and neither and both. That’s the little secret. Took me fifty years to find out.
Is that all I have to do? I said.
That’s all, son, said the missionary.
O.K., I said. I believe.
Son, said the religious man, you’re saved.
William Saroyan, A Word to Scoffers
Tara Geraghty’s three-year-old daughter was rushed to the ER with what they thought was pneumonia but was actually high-risk stage four cancer. The doctors didn’t know how she was breathing. Tara “prayed for her like I have never prayed before. She was on every prayer list you could imagine.” Fully cured, she’s now a healthy and robust 11-year-old who they call the “miracle kid.”
At age three months, Helene Casinelli Pileggi developed spinal meningitis, was given last rites and was not expected to last the night. Her parents, Catholics, stayed by her side and prayed. She recovered, much to the surprise of her doctors and now, at 39, she teaches kindergarten and says the rosary every morning.
Close to dying with atrial fibrillation, Jackie Williams lay in bed and determined to turn her life around, beginning with prayer. Later, they wheeled her into the operating room and prepared to perform an ablation to stop her irregular heart rhythm. Meanwhile, members of her church prayed for her. When she awoke in the recovery room, she asked her mom if the operation was successful. Her mom answered they didn’t do it! Her heart never went into aFib, and to this day, never has.
A recent poll found that 72 percent of Americans believe in the power of prayer. Moreover, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), those who attend religious services have been associated with a lower risk of death, suicide, substance abuse and less depression.
“This systematic review, analysis, and process, based on highest quality evidence available and expert consensus,” says JAMA, “provided suggested implications for addressing spirituality in serious illness and health outcomes as part of person-centered value-sensitive care.”
Or, in plain English: Ignore the spiritual side of the patient at your peril.
That spiritual side may be tied to a religion, or, as William Saroyan’s missionary in A Word to Scoffers preached, it could be simply “everything you can think of.”
Hospital chaplains are learning that, at times, the nondenominational approach is the right approach. When recognized as such by a patient, for example, one Chaplain was kicked out of the room. “My religion is CNN: politics and knowledge!” the patient roared. The chaplain returned the next day, sat down and picked up the conversation from that point: “What do you think about what’s going on now politically?” The result: a lovely chat and a strong bond.
Another chaplain brought a dying patient out of the doldrums when he picked up a piece of bread from the patient’s tray and said, “Bread is really amazing, isn’t it? Just to enjoy the taste of a piece of bread! Maybe life is not meant to be lived according to external accomplishments. What if it’s okay just to enjoy the days you have?”
The patient, given a purpose to go on living, brightened up.
Then there was Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review, who was hospitalized in 1964 with near paralysis of the legs, neck and back, in severe pain and high fever from a life-threatening disease of the connective tissue called degenerative collagen illness. But Cousins was a man of faith. He was a devout believer in laughter.
He ordered the nurses to feed him a steady diet of Marx Brothers movies and old Candid Camera reruns. On that regimen, he literally laughed the disease away and lived in good health for more than another quarter century.
Cousins did more than recover. His example forced the medical profession to acknowledge that there’s more to healing than medicine.
Much more.
But we already knew that.
Photo credits: Mission to La Junta, Colorado by Mennonite Church USA Archives via Flickr.