Meds, MRIs, Miracles: A Hospice Chaplain Rereads Genesis
Four decades ago, babies born two months early, as I was, rarely survived. Shortly after I was born, my grandmother, the daughter of devout Eastern-Rite Catholic Ukrainian immigrants, summoned a priest to the hospital to baptize me. She always maintained that my condition improved because of that event.
So questions of faith and medicine, and moments of grace both powerful and unexpected, accompanied me from the beginning and, as it turned out, set me on my vocational path.
St. Paul states, “God’s power is made perfect in weakness.” I sometimes hated that line.
As a child I spent a great deal of time with doctors and physical therapists. When I started using crayons in preschool, my mother noticed that my hands shook, leading me to be diagnosed with a rare form of cerebral palsy, a condition common among premature infants. The doctors prescribed different therapies and medications to try to get my hands to shake less and become more usable. I vividly remember being in the back of my parents’ car after a day of appointments at Duke Medical Center. I looked up at the Duke Chapel spire, its grey stone still looming against a grey sky and the falling snow. I wondered where God was amid my struggles. I learned stories of Jesus’ healings in Sunday school. Duke Medical Center’s official motto is “Where Miracles Happen.” I wanted someone to make my hands work normally, be it by miracle or medication. My hands did improve enough to allow me to navigate the world, but many tasks remain difficult. My hands never healed.
Lacing Up
In grade school other kids called me “Shaky.” My special education teacher got an old typewriter that she set in the corner of her small classroom. One day she sat me down and held up her hands. I saw that she was missing most of one of her fingers, the result of an accident when she was a child. “You see, Aaron, my hands are not normal either, so I understand. I learned to manage, and with time we will help you manage this too.” I felt understood and learned to type.
I grew up in a Lutheran congregation my parents had helped found in Raleigh, N.C. (My grandfather was a devout Lutheran raised by Swiss immigrant parents on an Ohio farm.) The Lutheran tradition trains adherents to look for God’s grace everywhere. Learning to shave was not an easy thing, so my father bought me an electric razor because the normal kind left me full of cuts and nicks. Tying my shoes was another tough chore. One day at a high school summer program, a good friend of mine stopped me in the hall as we set out for the day. “Stop, Aaron, I am tying your shoelaces, so they stay tied.” He tied them without a hint of judgment, rose to his feet, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Done, let’s go.”
I knew immediately that I had just been shown grace in the most powerful way I had ever known. St. Paul states, “God’s power is made perfect in weakness.” I sometimes hated that line. But having a body that often needed help affirmed that Paul was right, as much as I wanted to protest otherwise.
A Chaplain in the Making
My congregation had a rigorous two-year confirmation process that required us teens to memorize Luther’s Small Catechism. Luther explains Christianity by stating beliefs in a question-answer format. “What does this mean?” is followed by an answer. I had more questions, and a pastor who had studied theology in both Germany and the U.S. encouraged me to ask them, lending me books so I could read more. I found theology so fascinating that I majored in religion in college and went straight to seminary after graduation. Intending to enter parish ministry, I discovered during a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education that my passion was chaplaincy, since it let me use my own experiences with the medical system to better understand my patients’ fears, doubts, and questions, as well as my own.
I looked for God everywhere I went, and struggled to articulate how God might be present in the suffering of my patients. They were far more articulate about that presence than I could ever be. I learned that silence was often more deeply pastoral than some trite theological formula or Scripture verse that did not touch the depths of the questions and only weakly comforted the anxieties of patients and families wrestling with the suffering they felt. What could one say about God’s healing power to a teenager with cystic fibrosis? I learned that the most pastoral thing to do was be present, hold a hand, and stay quiet.
Working in chaplaincy let me earn a living asking questions that have always haunted my faith and life. “Where is God when my body is failing? How to persist even when you feel vulnerable? Where do I turn when the best specialists declare that there is nothing more that can be done? Where is God in disability and sickness?”
When Medicine Fails
I did a year of graduate study in medical ethics at Duke after finishing at YDS. On my first day back on campus, I rode my bike along the same road I had traveled in the car ride with my parents as a patient 25 years before. Seeing Duke Chapel’s spire once again, I realized I was still confronting the questions I had as a child about the presence of God in the growing economic and technological juggernaut that is medical research and practice in the U.S. By now, though, I knew more about Scripture and what the Christian tradition said about illness and suffering. Culture increasingly asked people to turn to medicine for salvation, and only when medicine failed would people turn to God. I had seen ways that faith communities could walk with people who were suffering illness and affliction.
Along with centuries of Jewish and Christian tradition, I do not read Genesis literally. Still, those who developed the traditions underlying the text of Genesis knew about suffering, they came from communities that had survived famines and wars, had watched loved ones become sick, frail, and die. They knew that the world did not always operate according to what they believed was God’s true design. Yet Genesis states that God creates humanity in God’s image, and God’s spirit sustains the body from the first cry to the final breath. In the Lutheran tradition we make the sign of the cross on the foreheads of those we baptize, publicly declaring them “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.” It is a public declaration that God has claimed believers’ bodies and will watch over them until they are transformed in the resurrection.
Platelet Counts and Public Policy
I trust the truths that Genesis teaches—they sustain my work as a chaplain. I often witness modern medicine’s inability to regard us as whole persons. It dissects our bodies into tiny parts and determines health by numerical values: platelet counts, weight, PTINR, t-cell counts, or physical images revealed by x-rays, MRIs, and CAT scans. Medical science assigns a specialist to each bodily system tasked with fixing that system like a mechanic restores a car. This approach often fails to consider how bodies, which is to say persons, are harmed or sustained by the ways we are enmeshed in the consequences of social life, politics, or environmental policy. Medicine has not traditionally explored the impact of the economic and social systems that shape our bodies by restricting access to healthy food and medical care. Medicine does not account for how sin, injustice, and finitude mark the human body.
Six years ago, I developed a life-threatening blood clot while lifting weights at the gym. The advanced technology and skilled surgeons at Duke Medical Center saved my life. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return,” the Ash Wednesday liturgy tells us. The scar that that surgery left is huge and hideous. It appears before me in the mirror daily as a reminder or my body’s fragility, and life’s fragility, in ways I do not always welcome.
Hold a Hand, Listen to a Story
Yet Genesis teaches that we are created in the image of God, who the Christian tradition holds to be triune, and that it is not good for humans to be alone. As a hospice chaplain, I accompany patients who have come up against modern medicine’s ultimate limits. The mechanics of the body declare the body’s condition is beyond repair. At that point the mechanics have no other wisdom to offer. I try to remind our staff to encounter bodies as created things. Even dying bodies are sustained by the Spirit until it leaves them.
As a chaplain, I hope my ministry helps people remember that even amid the pain and humiliations that accompany advanced illness and the dying process, their bodies are creations of God, worthy of reverence and care. God works even among the fears, pains, or regrets that illness and diminishment can stir at the end of life. I hold a hand, listen to a story, and say commendatory prayers that declare trust in God’s nearer presence as they pass from this life into the life to come.
I do not deny scientific medicine’s power—its tools have saved my life and improved my functioning as much as its knowledge allowed. However, faith gives me a way of seeing and understanding the body as God’s good creation and sustained by God’s spirit. That vision, given by faith, matters more than ever in a world that tries to reduce bodies to scientific biology alone. In my ministry, it is that vision that I try to keep before me.
The Rev. Aaron Klink ’05 M.Div. is a hospice chaplain in Durham, N.C. His writings on theology, ethics, and medicine have appeared in Christian Century, American Journal of Bioethics, Lutheran Quarterly, and other publications. Besides his Yale degree, he has a B.A. in religion from Emory University, an M.A. in systematic theology from Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, and a Th.M. in ethics from Duke Divinity School. He is an ordained pastor in the Church of the Brethren, dually aligned with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.