Being a human is never over: Remen excerpt #1

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., is Professor of Family Medicine at Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine and Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UCSF School of Medicine. She is the founder of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness (RISHI), which was at Commonweal for decades and is currently at Pure Healthcare in Dayton, Ohio. As a medical educator, therapist, and teacher, she has enabled many thousands of physicians to find individual meaning and purpose in the practice medicine, and thousands of patients to remember their power to heal. Dr. Remen has had Crohn’s disease for more than 65 years and her work is a unique blend of the wisdom, strength, and viewpoints of both doctor and patient.

Dr Remen writes: Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.

Perhaps the unique process which is a human being is never over. Even at death. (Italics added.)

Perhaps the world is one big healing community and we are all healers of each other. Perhaps we are all angels. And we do not know.

I think that prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. When we pray, we stop trying to control life and remember that we belong to life. It is an opportunity to experience humility and recognize grace.

Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways, it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times which were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder.

I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don’t seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places; life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. And unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal (Riverhead books, 1996),pages 220, 224, 270, and 293.