Love as a Spiritual Template:

Life-threatening disease permits us to initiate a dialogue with the connections that lie beyond our physical self. Consider that love is the universally understandable and most widely accessible example of spiritual connectivity. For example, as I grew up during the Cold War of nuclear arms race, I never had any difficulty understanding the love that Russian parents must feel for their children. When the specter of nuclear annihilation hung over all of our heads, it was that universal constant of love that every human being felt for his own family that seemed the one power to which the world could appeal to stay the hand on the nuclear trigger. I know that the pain of watching children suffer today is the same in Mogadishu as it is Arizona. It is love’s commonality that creates spiritual connections.

There is another quality about love that tells us about its underlying spiritual qualities. I often ask the audiences I address: “How many of you have ever felt love for another human being?” Usually, there is hardly anyone who does not raise his or her hand in response to that question. Then I ask: “Prove it!” Of course, no one can prove we feel love for another person but we all know that we do. That is a universal quality of spiritual connections: we know they exist and there is simply no need to prove them.

So illness puts us back in touch with our need to love and our desire to feel love. So, as patients and physicians, we need to be ready for that. We need our friends, families, and doctors to be supportive as we enter our individual spiritual challenge. We each need to feel our team is behind us as we seek the courage to reach out for those spiritual connections because that is where we will finally find the inexhaustible well of strength we each need to face mortality. Being connected allows us to marshal energies and strengths far beyond our own physical reserves.

We all want our physicians to use the latest scientific research and medical technologies to help us treat our illnesses. What would we think of a doctor who ignored that my spiritual needs might be just as great as my physical ones? By contrast, imagine how unbalanced it would seem if a doctor came to us and proposed that he or she would only attend to our spiritual needs but completely ignore our pressing physical ones. It is equilibrium that we seek: a harmony between physical and spiritual forces.

As physicians, we are all too aware that a sad, depressed, isolated, lonely patient will simply not have the same potential for as rapid and as full a recovery as one who exhibits a positive, upbeat attitude. A patient who’s surrounded by loving family and friends will have a far better chance to heal quickly than one who is left unwanted and unattended. There’s not a physician in practice who has not had the experience of watching an enthusiastic patient overcome overwhelming odds to recover. We know that “spirit” matters.

We all watch sporting events and love to see those memorable occasions where a competitor harnesses his or her inner courage and resolve to become the winner. We fully accept that, in athletic contest, often victory will come down to the psychological and emotional differences between opponents and not just the difference between physical disparities in age, height, or strength. Why is it so easy to accept that “heart” matters so much in everyday athletics and not acknowledge that these same issues are at play every day in the ICU or the OR.

Courage, heart, and hope are all intangible ingredients. But they are nonetheless essential for the recipe to recovery. And just as we would never tolerate finding out that our doctor was not taking advantage of a better test, a more effective drug, or a less dangerous technique, we should not accept a physician who ignores the spiritual influences on our healing. We are far more than mortal machines. We are immortal beings enrolled in a journey of the flesh. Our soul uses the sensory experience of life to enrich and expand itself. In the end, it is our soul that infuses the physical dimensions of life with purpose.