Visceral Resonance

A Theological Essay on Attending the Sufferer

Ann Sirek

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725272514
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

It is possible to eclipse a felt sense of physical dread or the expansive feeling of flourishing with the cognitive habit of universalizing our experience. We belong to a culture that surrenders the sacred vitality and dynamism of sensed experience to critical analytic cognition. Cognitional theories and emotions-as-cognitions dominate our understanding of the self; physiologic and anatomic models of normalcy dictate our approach to the body; socio-economic models of global utility shape the common good; abstract moral principles eclipse the holistic sensation of advance towards flourishing. Following Thomas Aquinas on the sensory nature, this book outlines a different approach, in which the depth that lies under cognition and emotion is exposed, allowing human movement to come into focus. Such movements as recoil, contraction, embrace, glee, letting go, crying, etc.--the passions--arise from the sensory interiority, where imprinted experiences of body memory are concealed and shaped by the rational/non-intellectual cogitative sense with meanings of harm and/or wellness. When movement is retained as sensory experience and not universalized by the mind, then the experience of a sufferer becomes permissible in ethics discourse as an expressed felt-sense of emerging mysteriously from dread and advancing towards flourishing.

1

The Dynamic Body, according to Thomas Aquinas

In this first chapter I will sketch out an understanding of human nature that will ground the medical, the pastoral, and indeed the personal art of attending the sufferer. I write for those whose concern for the sufferer—the impoverished widow, the lost orphan, the disenfranchised foreigner of Scripture—centers around a questing for the truth; I wish to flesh out that truth by an exploration of the dynamics of human corporeality. Just as the medical professional uses physiology to ground her approach, the theologian often uses philosophy to ground his hermeneutic. What I propose to do is to use my firsthand experience (as a physician) in the medical art of attending the sufferer as a lead into the theology, and then to use the selected theological texts to further illumine the approach to a particular sufferer. I want to articulate an understanding of human nature as illumined by theology, rather than understanding the human body scientifically as illumined by physiology. In medicine, the artful practice of attending the sufferer is currently taught by drawing upon the humanities such as history, literature, the performing arts, and the visual arts, as well as by explorations in philosophy and spirituality. The exploration of theology as a resource for the art of attending the sufferer has been hindered perhaps by a bias of modernity that upholds an opposition between religion and science. Such a wide variety of resources, as well as the built-in biases of modernity, lead to the question, “Can one identify a unifying heuristic undergirding the art of attending the sufferer?”

My intention is to flesh out this question and begin a conversation, both scholarly and practical, around the fundamental aspects of our approach to suffering and, even more importantly, our approach to the sufferer. It is to the medieval Christian tradition and specifically to the scholarship of Thomas Aquinas that I now turn, mindful that the hospitals and hospices of contemporary Western cultures have their origins in the monasteries of medieval Christian Europe. I have chosen to explore the European Christian tradition because it is the tradition of my ancestors, a tradition in which I was raised. I am not naïve to the hurt and harm left in the wake of Christendom and its colonialist strategies. It is not the politics that I wish to explore but rather the wisdom of the tradition around suffering; there might be (and indeed I think there is) something worth transposing into the context of the post-modern sufferer. In this vein then, it is my sincere hope that readers might feel invited and inspired to explore their own religious/spiritual traditions to discover the aspect of meaning in birth, life, suffering, death, and after-life. Such explorations will enable a broader conversation and perhaps a renewed wisdom in how we care for the sick and the suffering—and for ourselves.

I begin with an anecdote to illustrate the not infrequent tension between a professional’s intent to follow evidence-based, clinical guidelines and the sufferer’s agenda of healing and wellness. An Indigenous woman once challenged my approach to her diabetes: “Why are you doing all this to me? I don’t want it!” It was an awkward moment in which I realized that my efforts to teach her home blood glucose monitoring and dietary carbohydrate awareness had not been perceived as helpful. My intuition was that her succinct exclamation was less about diabetes and more about her sensed victim identity. Her initial presence had been difficult—mute, passive, and angry—and I had intentionally focused upon the measurable outcomes of her diabetes management. But she, the sufferer, was finding her voice and insisting upon my attention. She was undergoing some sort of identity shift, which, though awkward for me, was potentially a movement of emergence out of her past bondage toward a freedom for flourishing. In order to be present and attentive to her process, I required more insight into this human dynamic of emergence from suffering into flourishing. There was something required of me that was quite distinct from the competent management of her diabetes; in fact, I had to temporarily suspend the practice of scientific medicine in order to allow her experience of suffering to come into focus. “What would it be like if you considered diabetes care as something you do for yourself?” I suggested rather tentatively. But this capacity to “do for yourself” is easier said than done; it becomes part of the healing process. And healing is an experience that (arguably) may fall more into the domain of the human spirit than into the domain of physiology-gone-wrong. This chapter (and indeed this book) is about healing in terms of the domain of the human spirit—embodied.

Thomas Aquinas writes about the spiritual journey with a perspective that, although perhaps privileging the working of the intellect and the will (the view “from above”), does offer a detailed account of the structure and dynamism of the material (i.e., corporeal), sensory nature. My way of reading Thomas Aquinas is a kind of scanning for the experience of sensory nature as it undergoes a transformation of ever-increasing vitality toward the telos of a beatific, eternal resting in God. This emphasis upon the sensory aspect of human nature (the body) will be called the view “from below.” My method is to extrapolate the insights of Thomas so that a rigour begins to emerge around the art of attending corporeal suffering. Schooled in the analytical ways of science, the critical mind of modernity, (including the clinical mind), has perhaps acquired an unfortunate bias that overlooks the innate intelligence of the sensory corporeality. To this end, the medieval paradigm is helpful: our modern, default heuristic of analysis, diagnostics, and therapeutics comes into focus as a bias. Not wrong, but just one of many ways to view the world. I intentionally avoid approaching suffering in terms of psychology, sociology, and biology; science has already been done in fine scholarly tradition. I propose a perspective that views suffering as an evil or a stumbling block, which besets one like an illness, hindering one’s progress toward flourishing and well-being. I position suffering as that starting point from which the fallen (meaning vulnerable, not bad) human being must work out a differentiated and particular emergence into personal flourishing. This pursuit of flourishing and vitality—that is, the fullness of being—is a process that involves a progressive integration of all aspects of one’s human nature. Note that when viewed from above, the sensory and the intellectual natures are seen ideally as an integrity or hylomorphic unity. But from below, we see the fallen state in which that integrity, in some particular way for each person, has become broken; there are capacities that have become immobilized or silenced in the wake of some particular experience of evil (harm or hurt). Imprints of evil-as-hurt exist in each person-as-sufferer, and those imprints, according to the Christian tradition, are heal-able and transformable. When I was ready to see my patient as a sufferer rather than as a diabetic, I could then also see her sensory nature coming alive with the arduous passions of anger, fear, and hope. Just as I had to bracket off her diabetes for the time being, the reader must understand that in writing this essay, I am bracketing off the prevailing view from above, in which the sensory nature, with its experiences of suffering and flourishing, is understood in terms of abstract conceptualizations. My intention is to focus upon the experience (rather than the abstract concepts) of suffering and transformation as I work towards a foundation for the art of attending suffering.

In this first chapter I will build my position in three stages. First, I will outline the kinds of movements that Thomas Aquinas describes in the sensory nature: apprehension of, appetition toward, and finally abiding in the good. Second, I will offer a descriptive definition of “suffering” as a hindrance to these sensory movements in pursuit of the good. Finally, I will submit that the higher intelligence called practical reason is distinct from speculative reason in that it works directly with the sensory nature’s orientation to avoid being harmed and to advance towards flourishing.

These elements, outlined in the first chapter, will be further elaborated in the subsequent chapters towards proposing a theological foundation for attending the sufferer, a foundation that is not in the analytical mind but has its locus in the felt visceral sensations of our human corporeality. Moreover, the elements highlighted in this first chapter will call forth a ...