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Originally published July 16, 2010

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“You cannot understand caregiving unless you do it,” says Arthur Kleinman. “Acts of caregiving come as close to what I think religion is as I could name.” Watch more of Bob Abernethy’s conversation with him.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: This week (May 14) in Wausau, Wisconsin, jury selection began in the trial of a mother charged with reckless homicide. She relied only on God, not a doctor, to heal her sick daughter. The girl died. The mother was a member of a sect that teaches reliance on faith and prayer alone to heal. She was not a Christian Scientist, which does not forbid medical treatment. Christian Scientists are also active in trying to create legislation that balances the state’s duty to protect children with parents’ trust in God. But should there be any exemptions from prosecution because of religious faith? Lucky Severson reports.

LUCKY SEVERSON: The 911 call was from Kara Neumann’s mom, by Kara’s bedside at home in Wisconsin.

911 OPERATOR: Just feel by her nose and see if she’s breathing.

LEILANI NEUMANN: Okay. Is she breathing? Is she breathing? Is she breathing?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.

Ms. NEUMANN: No, she’s not.

SEVERSON: It was too late to save the 11-year-old girl suffering from juvenile diabetes. Dr. Norman Fost, a pediatrician and ethicist at the University of Wisconsin, says her death could have been prevented.

“Criminal prosecution is a way of the state saying that we care about our children.”

Dr. NORMAN FOST (Pediatrician and Ethicist, University of Wisconsin): Millions of Americans have diabetes, and most children with diabetes are living reasonably normal lives. There are complications later in life, so that life expectancy may be curtailed. But Kara Neumann had many, many decades of happy life ahead of her.

SEVERSON: Dr. Fost says he has seen many kids, like Kara, often suffer and die needlessly because their parents refused to take them to a doctor and instead put their faith in the healing power of prayer. The Neumanns reportedly subscribed to the teachings of Unleavened Bread Ministries, an online religion.

University of Wisconsin religion professor Shawn Peters says there are a surprising number of religious groups that preach faith healing based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and a fervent belief in the power of a loving God. Peters authored a book called “When Prayer Fails.”

Dr. SHAWN PETERS (Professor of Religion, University of Wisconsin and Author, “When Prayer Fails.”): They look to passages from books of the Bible such as the Epistle of James. The fifth chapter of James has this passage that begins, “Are any among you sick?” and then it seems to spell out treatment — and it’s treatment that doesn’t include secular medicine. It’s treatment that includes prayer and anointment with oil.

SEVERSON: In a small, private graveyard in a Portland, Oregon suburb there are at least 75 tombstones of children whose parents belonged to a small church called the Followers of Christ that relied on faith healing in lieu of medical treatment. Russ Briggs left the church after he buried two baby sons in this cemetery.

RUSS BRIGGS: There’s something about holding your child in your arms while it dies. It’s — it’s just — it’s terrible.

SEVERSON: Professor Peters says the cases we hear about are only the tip of the iceberg.

Dr. PETERS: It’s sort of a hidden tragedy in communities that are not part of mainstream America. We just don’t know what’s happening to the kids in those church communities.

SEVERSON: Until 1999, parents of kids buried here were not prosecuted because Oregon law had a religious faith-healing exemption. Oregon closed the exception, but more than 30 states, including Wisconsin, still allow them. But that didn’t stop the district attorney in Wisconsin from charging Kara Neumann’s parents with reckless homicide, and that’s when Joe Farkas with the Christian Science church stepped in. The church helped write the first law, which after the Neumann arrest was viewed as protecting reckless parents. Now the church is proposing new legislation which Farkas says will give children more protection.

Russ Briggs

JOE FARKAS (Christian Science Church): We never intended it to be in any way perceived as a shield for reckless behavior. So as people very much involved in that law we always had wanted to protect children, and we felt we had to step in with a solution.

SEVERSON: Christian Science may be the largest and best known of all the faith-healing traditions. The church has full-time paid practitioners who pray for the sick. Joe Farkas is one of them. He says healing represents a fundamental connection Christian Scientists have with God.

Mr. FARKAS: We expect a good outcome because we’re praying to an all-good God. We don’t believe that suffering is ever the will of God or that someone should die because it’s God’s will. We see that the outcome from successful prayer is always good.

SEVERSON: Farkas says the legislation the church proposes is designed first to protect kids, but it also outlines a number of factors for a jury to consider, including the length of the illness. But Dr. Fost says the proposed changes only serve to protect the parents.

Dr. FOST: So if a child has been ill for a long time, then the prosecutor should say, “Well, let’s see. He/she was ill for a long time. Maybe that gave the parents reason to think that this wasn’t very serious, because she hadn’t died yet.” The point is that there should be no criteria — no special criteria — based on religious beliefs.

SEVERSON: The bottom line, according to Rita Swan, is that the proposed law would actually make it more difficult to prosecute faith healers. Swan is the founder of Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty.

RITA SWAN (Founder, Children’s Healthcare Is a Legal Duty): There is one condition about the child’s age. Well, what does that mean? Does it mean that parents have no legal duty to get medical care for a teenager? The conditions are vague. They’re contradictory. They’re confusing to the jury. There’s no state in the country that has a law like this.

SEVERSON: Joe Farkas insists that the church would never dictate that Christian Science parents shouldn’t seek medical care.

Mr. FARKAS: Our church does not have any strictures against seeking medical treatment, and it also does not shun any of the members that do seek medical attention.

Rita Swan

Mrs. SWAN: I’m not saying that the officials come and threaten you with a gun or with some terrible punishment, but the theology itself says that Christian Science is the only method that really heals disease.

SEVERSON: But Rita’s sixteen-month-old son Matthew died. Matthew had meningitis that was not diagnosed until it was too late and, she says, not until her Christian Scientist practitioner finally told her to go see a doctor under the pretense that Matthew might have a broken bone. Rita and her husband ended up leaving the church, disillusioned about its teachings—the same teaching that continue to inspire Joe Farkas.

Mr. FARKAS: We have studied and read about the healings of Jesus, and Jesus demonstrated that all sorts of illnesses could be healed. I’m not walking on water, but I have seen things that have been quite dramatic, and I have read cases of things that have been dramatic.

SEVERSON: Farkas says he has witnessed his own wife’s dramatic healing.

Mr. FARKAS: The doctor she went back to recommended that she have her uterus removed now. We didn’t have any kids at the time and that was quite a blow to hear that we couldn’t have kids. One night when my wife was praying, a sense of divine love was felt by her and some words came to her consciousness. When she woke up in the morning, she was completely healed.

SEVERSON: Farkas says Christian Scientists love their kids and would never be reckless with their health, but the church is opposed to another law the Wisconsin legislature will also be voting on this session that removes all religious faith-healing exemptions — a law that Rita Swan supports.

Mrs. SWAN: I know in many cases parents are relieved. It takes the moral burden of decision-making off of the parents’ shoulders. They no longer have broken a law of the church.

Professor Shawn Peters

SEVERSON: Dr. Fost says he would never discourage spiritual healing — that prayer plus medical care is probably better than either one alone. But the law, he says, needs to be there to protect helpless kids.

Dr. FOST: I don’t think the point is to punish the Neumanns, and I’m not in favor of sending them to jail if they are prosecuted. But I think criminal prosecution is a way of the state saying that we will — we care about our children. We’ll protect them.

Prof. PETERS: There is no criminal intent. I mean, in all of the hundreds of these cases that I have looked at, part of what makes them so tragic is that the parents are doing what they think is best for their children. The punishment that they care about would be the punishment in the hereafter. That is what is significant.

SEVERSON: If convicted the Neumanns could go to jail for 25 years, but faith-healing parents are seldom put behind bars.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWS WEEKLY, I’m Lucky Severson in Madison, Wisconsin.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a special report today on Lourdes. For Catholics, it’s the most popular pilgrimage site in the world, after the Holy Land. Sick people go to Lourdes hoping for miraculous cures. But the attraction goes beyond physical healing. All those we talked with — the sick and the well — said they had a profound spiritual experience. Our correspondent is Don Kladstrup.

DON KLADSTRUP: It is, in many ways, a spectacle: a spectacle of faith, of devotion, a place of suffering — and of hope. Father Jim Martin:

Father JAMES MARTIN (Author, “Lourdes Diary”): People are drawn here for many reasons — for physical healings, but also just to get closer to God, in a place with a great community of believers.

Sister NOREEN FALCONE (President, Order of Malta, Washington, D.C.): This is a pilgrimage. We are on a pilgrimage here for a week. But our whole life is a pilgrimage, to someone of faith.

Noreen Falcone

KLADSTRUP: On a winter day in 1858, Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old peasant girl, was gathering firewood near a grotto when she saw an apparition. Afterwards, Bernadette would describe what she saw as simply “a lady in white.”

People today associate Lourdes with miracles, where healings occur and illnesses are overcome. But over the last 150 years, during which time more than 200 million people have come to Lourdes, only 67 miracles have been confirmed by the Catholic Church.

Fr. MARTIN: Well, you could say only 67 or as many as 67. I think that, you know, people have been drawn to Lourdes not only for the miracles but also because it’s a place of great faith.

KLADSTRUP: Thousands of people have claimed to be cured here. But the Catholic Church does not certify a miracle unless the affliction was incurable and the cure was both unexplainable and permanent.

Every day, 30,000 gallons of water flow from the spring. The water goes into a system of nearby spigots where visitors drink from it, wash with it and carry it home. It’s described as a symbol of devotion. Although chemical analysis ascribes no special properties to it, some people aren’t so sure.

NICOLE DIGKMAN: I had a car accident a few months ago. And I have a whiplash. And yeah, I’m hoping it will be — it will get better.

Water from Lourdes

KLADSTRUP: The seriously ill who come here are known as the “malades” — French for “the sick.” A Catholic humanitarian group, the Order of Malta, brings malades here for a week every year, along with companions and helpers. Noreen Falcone is president of its Washington, D.C. association.

Sr. FALCONE: They are hoping that they’re going to have a miracle — that they’re going to be miraculously cured by going to the waters and to the grotto and asking the Blessed Mother for a miracle to make them well again. Our mission is more to give them support and to hope that they come to terms with their illness.

KLADSTRUP: The domain of Lourdes, as it’s called, covers a large area adjacent to the town. There are 22 places of worship, the centerpiece being the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. Another basilica — this one underground — seats 25,000. Volunteers escort the malades through the sprawling grounds in carts in order to conserve their strength. Matt Coles is 24. Though never a smoker, he has stage four lung cancer.

MATT COLES: It’s such a blessing to be here, especially with my wife and son.

Coles family

LUCY COLES: It’s just such a peaceful place, and to be able to come here with Matt, and be part of this and have a healing experience whether it’s spiritual or physical.

KLADSTRUP: Ray Troup came with his 12-year-old son Joe. Troup lives in constant pain due to nerve damage in his lower back. He can’t stand, or sit, for any length of time without severe muscle spasms.

RAY TROUP: I came here to ask God for healing so that I can better support my family. And if it not be his will, then I’m just asking for the grace to get through each day.

KLADSTRUP: Stacy Persichetti is a Georgia woman with two small children. A year and a half ago, she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.

STACY PERSICHETTI: One day you think that you’re just fine and everything’s going along and then the next day, you know, I was told that I had, you know, a level — a grade three cancer and that I’d have 12 months to live.

KLADSTRUP: After lengthy treatment, the cancer was gone. For Stacy, this is a pilgrimage of thanksgiving — and of hope that the cancer won’t return.

Stacy Persichetti

Lourdes is a town of 17,000 people, nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees, near the Spanish border. Six million people come here every year. Hundreds of hotels, restaurants and shops line the narrow streets. The souvenir stores specialize in statuettes, rosaries and containers for the spring water. They are not allowed inside the domain, which is only a few steps away. Here, the atmosphere is one of reverence. People line up to pass through the grotto where the apparition took place. Noreen Falcone:

Sr. FALCONE: When you go over to the grotto and you look at the faces of the people who have come here, you see faith so strong in the eyes of these people.

KLADSTRUP: The stone, touched by hopeful hands for 150 years, worn to a shine. Father Jim Martin …

Fr. MARTIN: There’s a sense of holiness, of not only being in a place where something important happened, but also being in a place where 150 years of pilgrims have come and run their hands over that same place.

Ms. PERSICHETI: It was such a powerful moment — the fact that a year and a half later I have no cancer when one doctor had told me that I was going to be dead by this point. Such a miracle to me. And there’s been so many miracles, not only physical but also spiritual miracles that have occurred here.

KLADSTRUP: After passing through the grotto, Ray Troup knelt in prayer with his son.

Ray Troup and his son Joe

Mr. TROUP: It’s tangible. All my concerns, all my worries — everything just left. You could just pray so intensely and so easily. It was such a wonderful experience.

UNIDENTIFIED PRIEST (saying prayer): So, as we begin this pilgrimage let us pray, asking the Lord, “Lord bless this candle, which is the sign of faith, of light in our hearts. When we are discouraged, give us light. Help us to see the light of the eternal life that you promised us.”

KLADSTRUP: The words of the apparition to Bernadette, “Go to the spring and bathe there,” are followed by many thousands of those who come here.

Sr. FALCONE: People that come here believe if they bathe in the waters, they’re going to, that’s where the miracle would begin. It has happened. It doesn’t happen every time. It is a cleansing, but it’s a cleansing of your mind as well.

KLADSTRUP: There are 11 pools for women, six for men. Photography inside is strictly forbidden.

(to visitor Patricia Walker): How did it feel to be there?

PATRICIA WALKER: It felt — well it was exciting.

KLADSTRUP: Was it what you expected?

Waiting to bathe in the pools

Ms. WALKER: I didn’t know what to expect. But it was pleasant and it was cold.

D. J. CAREY: It was moving, very moving, very spiritual, enlightening and just kind of euphoric.

KLADSTRUP: Bernadette said the apparition told her, “Have the people come here in procession.”

Fr. MARTIN: In Catholic theology, after the celebration of the mass, they reserve what’s called the Eucharistic host, which we consider the real presence of Jesus. And so that’s processed through the street as a way of people coming into contact with Jesus in that way. And it’s a very ancient tradition that goes back to medieval times. And it’s really very popular in Lourdes.

KLADSTRUP: At a special mass during their pilgrimage, the malades and others are anointed. The anointing of the sick is a sacrament in the Catholic Church.

Fr. MARTIN: Through symbols like oil and the laying on of hands, we communicate what the Apostles asked us to do, which is to pass on Christ’s healing power.

KLADSTRUP: Ray Troup:

Mr. TROUP: During the sacrament of the sick, right after the anointing, all of a sudden I was just filled with joy. Since I’ve been here I’ve grown in prayer, patience, peace. I’ve already received a miracle as far as I’m concerned.

A procession of torches at night

Mr. COLES: It’s quite possible that I’ll have cancer for the rest of my life …

Ms. COLES: I think the miracle …

Mr. COLES: … and that’s OK.

Ms. COLES: … has already happened, and just allowing us to come here. And I think our faith will only be strengthened by the presence of all these people — by the presence of Mary having come here. And I don’t think that we could — we could ask for anything more.

KLADSTRUP: As night falls on the domain at Lourdes, the torchlight procession begins. Father Jim Martin describes it as an expression of popular devotion.

Fr. MARTIN: People say the rosary all together, in a procession with the malades and their companions and visitors. And they sing Marian songs and hold candles, not only as a way of illuminating the darkness, but also as a symbol of their faith. In most of the world, the people who are poor and sick are ignored. In Lourdes, they are number one.

KLADSTRUP: Noreen Falcone has been to Lourdes 12 times.

Sr. FALCONE: It never gets old. It never gets old. Wellness of body is not really what our life here on this earth is about. It’s really about wellness of mind, wellness of heart, wellness of soul.

KLADSTRUP: Stacy Persichetti:

Ms. PERSICHETTI: When you experience Lourdes, even if you never came for a physical healing, I don’t think that you can come away from it without being a changed person.

KLADSTRUP: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Don Kladstrup, at Lourdes.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a profile today of perhaps this country’s best known Unitarian Universalist minister, Reverend Forrest Church of New York. He has a new book out called “Love and Death.” Last week, Church’s congregation gave him a 60th birthday party. But it was a celebration with great sadness just underneath the joy.

It was a love fest at the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the Upper East Side of New York. The members honored Reverend Forrest Church, their pastor for 30 years, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. His wife was there and their children, and his 85 year old mother. The covers of his 24 books were on display. But there was a great poignancy to the festivities because everyone present knew that Reverend Church is terminally ill. He has incurable cancer of his lungs and liver, and he guesses he has less than a year to live.

Reverend FORREST CHURCH: I’m being gifted a month at a time and rejoicing in that. But eventually the treatment will lose its valence, and the barbarians will storm the gate.

ABERNETHY: Church says he was astounded at his reaction to being told he is dying.

Rev. CHURCH: I went straight to acceptance. I skipped shock and disbelief and anger and resentment. I went directly to acceptance.

ABERNETHY: The key, Church says, was being able to settle unfinished emotional business.

Rev. CHURCH: The only way to reconcile yourself, make peace with yourself, make peace with your neighbor, make peace with God, find salvation, is to break through and love — to forgive and to love. You don’t change the person you forgive. You change your own heart. So anything that you can do to reconcile also means that at the end of your life, when you’re given a few months to live, you can look back without regret.

The two saddest words in the English language are “if only,” and they ring with the most poignancy at a time that a person gets word that he or she has a terminal illness: “If only I had stopped drinking; if only I had dared to change careers when I could; if only I had reconciled with my father when I had a chance.”

ABERNETHY: Church did have time to say goodbye to his father, the late U.S. senator, Frank Church, during his father’s last months. But he concedes he was slow to realize his duty to his family now.

Rev. CHURCH: When I was talking about not having unfinished business, my wife quickly pointed out to me, “Well you may not have unfinished business, Forrest, but your children have unfinished business, and I have unfinished business, and let’s get down to it.” I realized this wasn’t about my death. This was our death, and that focused me in on them. This was a time to listen, embrace, and say “I’m so sorry,” and crying together and then singing — singing the old songs.

ABERNETHY: A lot of crying?

Rev. CHURCH: There was a lot of crying.

ABERNETHY: During and in spite of his illness and treatment over the past two years, Church wrote two books. He confessed to his congregation one of the reasons for his productivity.

Rev. CHURCH (during sermon): Steroids! Every week, the good folks at Memorial pumped me full of steroids. They helped me tolerate the poison they were pumping into me to kill the cancer. For two or three days after every treatment I was flying. I haven’t been so high since the late ’60s.

ABERNETHY: Like other Unitarian Universalists, Church rejects many aspects of Christian doctrine. He neither blames God for his illness, nor asks God for healing.

Rev. CHURCH: I don’t pray for miracles. I don’t pray to cure my incurable cancer. I receive and consecrate each day that I’m given as a gift. I have no idea what happens after we die, and so I go with Henry David Thoreau who, when he was asked about the afterlife, said, “Madam, I prefer to take it one life at a time.”

ABERNETHY: At the same time, Church says he has come to believe that without God there is nothing.

Rev. CHURCH: God is what sustains me. I am connected with that grace and power. God is that which is greater than all and present in each. For me, Christianity is a faith about love — love to God and love to neighbor. That is right in the heart of my very being. I am a Christian Universalist. I believe that the same light shines through every religious window, and it’s interpreted. The windows are different. It’s interpreted in different ways. It refracts in different ways.

ABERNETHY: Church calls what he wrote in his new book a coda to his theology.

Rev. CHURCH: My lifelong belief that love and death interwoven were the heartstrings of religion. The greatest of all truths is that love never dies, that every act of love that we perform in this life is carried on into another life and passed on into another life, so that centuries from now the love carries, and that is the work of religion. The opposite of love is not death. It is fear. Fear is what armors our hearts. If our hearts are armored, they’ll never be broken, and I have seen so many people get hurt in love and then try to protect themselves against it, and when they protect themselves against love, they protect themselves against the only thing that is worth living for.

The secret of it all is that it’s not about me.  To the extent that we’re self-conscious, absorbed, we cannot be conscious of the world around us, of God and of our neighbors.

I have preached on living in the present for my entire career. Only in the here and now can we love God and love our neighbor, can we redeem the day.

One of the beautiful things about a terminal illness–your friendships become stronger. Your loved ones become more vital and more present. Each day becomes more beautiful. You unwrap the present and receive it as the gift it is. You walk through the valley of the shadow, and it’s riddled with light.

ABERNETHY: At the close of all the other tributes to Church, his wife Carolyn made hers.

CAROLYN CHURCH: I want you to know how much at peace Forrest is. He’s at peace because he’s become the man he wanted to be. He couldn’t have done that without you. You have loved him, you have supported him, you have forgiven him, and that’s really made all the difference. So darling, 60 years. Happy Birthday!

ABERNETHY: And if love could heal him, there would be many more.

Q: There came a day in 2006 when you received a call from your physician. Tell me the story.

A: He called right after I’d had a barium esophagram and said, “Bad news. It looks like you have inoperable esophageal cancer.” I asked him how long. He said, “Months, and probably a few. We’ll try to make you comfortable.” My wife was just taking off that very day for India, and my first major task was to make sure she kept her life going while I was helping to keep mine from falling apart. For about three weeks I thought I had three months to live. It soon became clear that they could operate. They did. They operated successfully, and then I had a reprieve before the cancer came back again in February of 2008 in an incurable form.

Q: What’s your outlook now?

A: The treatment has been remarkably successful. I’m on an experimental treatment, and I’m being gifted a month at a time and rejoicing in that. But eventually the treatment will lose its valance, and the barbarians will storm the gate.

Q: How long do you think you have?

A: I’ve stopped guessing. I’ve predicted my demise too often and too early to continue to do so. So I will just accept whatever comes. I would guess less than a year. If I’m lucky — I’m already lucky — this eventually will stop working, this treatment, and then the cancer — I’ve got cancer in my lungs and in my liver, and it will quickly spread, and then I will not be resistant to it.

Q: You have written about your surprising acceptance of what has happened.

Rev. Forrest Church

A: It was right after my wife went away for three days. I sat down with my closest friends and with Gary Dorrien of Union Theological Seminary and just to sort of test this acceptance. I didn’t bargain. I didn’t get angry. I was surprised to go almost directly to acceptance. I skipped disbelief and anger and shock and resentment. And I tested that because I was unsure of it, whether I was just hiding myself in a pink cloud. Every minister spends a lifetime preparing to ace the death test. I mean, that’s what we do. We can’t fail that test, having gone through with so many others. It would cast a shadow back on his or her ministry if he or she were not able to embrace death and welcome it as an actual part of living as much as one has encouraged one’s parishioners to do. But I did discover something that I hadn’t really recognized before, and at least I think it works in some cases. I’ve always been amazed that some people, regardless of how physically ill they are, seem to go gentle into that good night and some seem to just fight bitterly all the way. And there’s some courage in the fighting. I understand that. But it came to me that there may be a difference. All of us die in the middle of our story. There may be a difference, however, between having ongoing business, which we all have, and having unfinished business. And we have unfinished business, and each person knows what it is in his or her life. The one thing you’ve postponed doing, waiting for the right time. Whatever it happens to be, if you’re given a terminal sentence, you do not have time to finish your unfinished business, and that casts a pall of regret over your life. And so your final days are lived regretting what you have not done, or have not stopped doing in some cases, and not freeing you to embrace the past, say yes to it, and then live fully in the present in a way that you really are not ever able to do before.

Q: That’s what’s happening to you now?

A: That’s what’s happening to me, and this is something I’ve preached on. It’s a Buddhist notion, in many ways. I call it having nostalgia for the present, looking forward to the present, not being caught up in things we can’t do anything about. But when you’re living in the rush of life it’s very, very difficult actually spiritually to focus on that present. When you are given a terminal illness and you are not regretful of your past, so that you can embrace it and say yes to it, then you can live in each day and fill it with all of its amplitude, all of its glory, and you can celebrate what is, not mourn what isn’t.

Q: Suppose you do have a lot of regrets a lot of unfinished business. What then? What do you do?

A: Well, I have seen some amazing two-minute drills — people who have, during their last months, just worked all out to reconcile with their children, to do the things that they need to do to make peace with life, to make peace with God, and who have pulled it off. I mean, these are spectacular acts of courage. The level of difficulty of the dive is high, however. You don’t have much time, and it does mean that you are concentrating your whole life on redeeming that which is past, rather than moving gently forward and embracingly into the next chapter.

Q: What has been the role of God in all this experience?

A: Well, God is what sustains me. I am connected umbilically, I feel, with that grace and power. It’s not an omnipotent God. God didn’t do this to me. God doesn’t throw babies out of third-story windows or cause tsunamis. But God is that which is greater than all and present in each. And when that which is present in you relates to that which is present in all, you are sustained. You are billowed by the ocean of divinity, and you are made safe. There’s a great degree of safety in that being a part of, rather than being apart from.

Q: As a Unitarian Universalist, what was your idea of God in years past, and how did that evolve or change?

A: I began believing in a kind of abstract God. It was an intellectual — it was a head-trip God. I was closer to a Jeffersonian Unitarian than I was to an Emersonian Unitarian. It was much more of a scientific entrée. I divided the rational from the irrational. It was a kind of a search and destroy mission where I was taking the butterfly and pinning it on the board and examining it very carefully and deciding that it was very beautiful, but it doesn’t fly. And over time, partly through crises in my own life, very much through sitting by my parishioners at their bedsides, and through my father’s death, I began to sense that this moved from my head to my heart. And I began to believe that I — in some ways, without God there is nothing. I did not — as I said many times, God is not God’s name. It’s our name for that which is greater than all, and yet present in each. It’s our construct. It’s our symbol. But it’s an arrow pointing toward a reality that is invested in us.

Q: Is God, for you, a person?

A: I am a person, so I relate to the personal part of God’s amplitude. God is so much more than a person. Otherwise, God becomes an idol. Sometimes I believe that we’re divided between fundamentalists of the left and the fundamentalists of the right, and the fundamentalists of the left or the right set up a tiny, little God on their altar and worship it. And the fundamentalists of the left torch that God and throw it down and say there is no God. I ask people to tell me a little about the God they believe in, because I probably don’t believe in him, either. I believe in something that’s much more capacious, much more mysterious, something like Rudolph Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the tremendous and fearful, powerful, fascinating mystery.

Q: How did that move from an intellectual sense of God to one that was very open to mystery affect your reaction to your condition?

A: I have long believed that religion itself is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are the religious animal. We asked, “Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? What is life’s meaning? What is life’s purpose?” Now, we don’t always come out with religious answers. But these are religious questions we ask. We’re not the animal with advanced tools or advanced language. We’re the religious animal, and so at some point death requires our search for meaning. Without death, we would not have to search for meaning, and we would not have to search for purpose. My own sense of the purpose of life, it’s to live in such a way that your lives will prove to be worth dying for. And that puts an enormous moral, ethical impetus behind our work in this world. I take it one world at a time. I’m agnostic about the afterlife. I haven’t gone there. It could not be, though, any stranger than this. There’s no afterlife that could be stranger than life itself. And we need, first and foremost, even as we’re dying, to celebrate the miracle of this day.

Q: I want to take you back just a moment to this question of dealing with unfinished business. You have a reference in your book to those sad words, “if only.”

A: The two saddest words in the English language are “if only,” and they ring with the most poignancy at a time when a person gets a word that he or she has a terminal illness. If only I had stopped drinking. If only I had dared to change careers when I could. If only I had reconciled with my father when I had a chance. Those “if only” questions which cannot easily or even practicably be answered in the last innings of one’s life cast a pall over those days and lead to an enormous feeling of regret.

Q: How then do you make up for it?

A: There are some things you cannot make up for. There are some things that therapy over a lifetime helps you to make up for. What you try to do is to jar yourself into the moment if you possibly can, to take your regrets and your expectation and try to let go of them so that if you’ve blown that, don’t blow this. You still have so much time. In my case, when I was talking about not having unfinished business, my wife quickly pointed out to me, “Well, you may not have unfinished business, Forrest. But your children have unfinished business, and I have unfinished business, and let’s get down to it.” I realized this wasn’t about my death. This was our death, and that focused me in on them, on their needs, on our shared journey, and all of a sudden life was filled with intrigue and wonder and challenge, but a different challenge than I had imagined.

Q: What did you say to your children, and what did you invite them to say to you?

A: Well, each one is different. We have four children, and each child had a different set of issues. But the one thing I learned was that I couldn’t make this right for them. One of my jobs in life is, I’ve always felt, to make things right, to make things work, to make them happy. I couldn’t do that. So I had to listen to their pain. I had to let them express it. I still have to do that, although we’ve now, since I’ve had these dual six-month diagnoses, we’re getting pretty good at circling the wagons and lighting the campfires and crying together and then singing the old songs.

Q: A lot of crying?

A: There was a lot of crying, often the crying ignited in me from them. Again, I didn’t want my death to be a bother to people, and that was just simply a wrong call. I wanted everything to just go on as if nothing were happening. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but there’s a truth to it as well. Particularly around my family. Wanted the house to be happy. House wasn’t going to be happy. It’s one thing for me to make my peace with God and leave. It’s another thing for my children or my wife to be abandoned, and that actually was where I had my growing, in letting them call the shots, letting them let me know what they needed when they needed it and responding to their needs with listening more than with talking. I’ve always talked my way through and out of things. This was a time to listen, embrace, and say I’m so sorry, and that brought them around to the point that now they are, in a certain way, embracing my death and have learned from my death, even as I hope they have learned from my life.

Q: You referred to your late father and indicated you wished you had been able to reconcile with him?

A: I did reconcile with him in the early ’70s. When he ran for president in 1976, I took off six months from school and campaigned for him. So my reconciliation with him — he was very much against the Vietnam War, but I didn’t believe that he’d gone far enough, and I was a flaming radical in the late 1960s and I basically washed my hands of my father and his establishment corruption. We had made complete peace by the ’70s. He died in 1984. So that wasn’t the issue. He had always said, “I wish I were just walking down the road and struck in the middle of a thought and struck by a heart attack and died.” He had had cancer when he was 25 and I was two months old and given himself only three months to live. So, I began my life in a bassinet of cancer. But this made him commit himself to living his life as fully, richly, and quickly as he could. He did die young. He died at 59. That’s when I was diagnosed with my own cancer, and I felt that was clearly going to be the end of the story. But I did notice something about his — he had three months, and it was a period for him of reconciliation with his own lack of confidence in his legacy. He believed that once you were out of office and once you were out of power, you were instantly forgotten, and those three months were an opportunity to just celebrate him. And the one gift of a terminal illness that is given to us which is not given to someone who is struck down by a stroke or struck down a heart attack and does not come back to life is that we are given the opportunity to receive all of this love, and we’re given the opportunity to return all of this love, and that’s why these months can be the most precious months of one’s life.

Q: You have made great use of these months. You have been very productive and you’ve put down on paper your deepest beliefs. Let’s talk about some of those.

A: In a way, love and death allowed me to write a coda to my theology, to my lifelong belief that love and death interwoven were the heartstrings of religion. I do have a mantra that I’ve come to live by over the past three years, and it’s served me very well. It’s “Do what you can, want what you have, and be who you are.” Doing what you can is doing all you can. It’s not just, you know, muckin’ by, but it’s not trying to do more than you can, stretching yourself out and forcing you into a failure. Wanting what you have is to recognize that we tend to only want things that we don’t have. It’s like we’re looking out through a lightly stained glass window with all sorts of different projects, our vocational and avocational and parent and children projects, and then our health is down there. But you never try to look through the glass that says “health” until it clouds over. Then we push our nose right up against it, and all we can see is the darkness in the glass, and our whole world goes dark. If we back up from it and say, “I want friends who love me. I want a family who’s helping me. I want the sun to come up, and I want the day to be beautiful.” All of these things, all those prayers get answered, and if you want what you have, finally you come around to saying, “I wouldn’t be appreciating all of these things with nearly the same intensity if this one pane had not gotten dark.” And then to be who you are, probably the hardest of all, is not to try to fake your existence. It is to accept, embrace who God has made you. Each one of us unique, each one of us with flaws and gifts, and each one of us special, and then to take that and return it to the world in such a way that you will live your life in such a way that it will prove to be worth dying for.

Q: You referred to the idea of getting permission to die. What does that mean?

A: Well, there is a sense that I have gotten often from deathbeds when I was in my parish, my parsonage role — that people feel that they’re failing their loved ones when they die. And I can understand that. The father is abandoning his family, let’s say, or a mother is abandoning her children. And there is this sense that they have to hang on, that death is a defeat, and as long as everyone is telling them, “You can make it. Don’t — you can beat this,” if a kind of lie surrounds the proceedings, then when the person is not making it and is not beating it, she’s going to feel a failure and she’s going to feel that she’s failed the people who said, “You’re going to make it” — her children. So the children have an obligation and the spouses have an obligation, when the time comes, to say, “It’s okay. We’re ready for you to go. We love you. We thank you for everything you’ve done.” And then, in a way, giving death becomes like giving birth. It’s “You’re getting closer. We’re holding hands. You’re going to make it. It’s beautiful. You’re doing great.” That’s the way when my father-in-law died, my wife and her mother basically were coaches to him, holding his hand and urging him onward and telling him that it was going to be okay, that he was almost there. He’s really going to do it. That’s giving permission for people to die, and then they can do it without their last thought being, “I have failed my family” or “I have failed my loved ones.”

Q: You have expressed an idea about talking to your children as the end came.

A: In its very essence, it is to shut up and just listen, to hear where they are coming from, what their needs are, not to try to make things that aren’t right for them prematurely right. Let them express themselves. Let them work it through and embrace wherever they are, and then you move slowly from there. It’s not a one-evening proposition. And different of the children will respond in different ways. Different of them will have much more expressed needs. Others will have to be sort of sought out and tell me what you really feel. You need to almost be direct with them.

Q: Can you give an example of how that works?

A: Well, with one of my children, it was clear that she was enormously bereft, and I was trying to make her feel better. And before I could make her feel better, I had to allow her to feel worse. And I had to allow her to express her sense of abandonment, and her sense of loss and her sense of fear. And we did that kind of in a dance. But when we came through the dance, she came up to me one day and she said, “By the way, Dad, don’t talk about this any more, about us, because I’m now just fine with this. I think you’re done a wonderful job.” And it wasn’t I who did the wonderful job. It was she who did the wonderful job working it through.

Q: Back to the core beliefs you’ve identified and put down. You said the secret of it all is “it’s not about me.”

A: It’s not about me. That’s right. We stand in our own light. Not only that, when we get days in light we forget, like, what a shadow we might be casting. We somehow have to recognize that self-consciousness and consciousness are opposites. To the extent that we’re self-conscious, self-absorbed, we cannot be conscious of the world around us, of God, of our neighbors, and believing that Jesus’ two great commandments, to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves, are the hearthstone of my faith and I have got to get out of the way of that if I’m able to perform those functions. Fortunately for a minister, it’s a little bit easier because whenever we get too caught up in our own petty grievances, or our own petty resentments, or disappointments, or failures, the window blows open and death blows through and blows all the detritus off of our plate, and we encounter that which really matters, and we are in the bosom of a family that is grieving, and trying to come together, and trying to make sense of what life is and what death is, and all these little things that are nagging at us just become almost embarrassments. They just disappear from the plate.

Q: There’s another sentence that you wrote: The greatest of all truths, you said, is that love never dies.

A: Well, the greatest of all truths is that love never dies. I’m not certain about life. Life may go on forever and may not. I don’t know about the afterlife. I know that love is immortal, that every act of love we perform in this life is carried on almost like a little patina of pearls. It’s carried on into another life and passed on into another life so that centuries from now, not named with our name, not signed with our signature, but initiated by us and carried on through our heirs, the dependent web of being which we’re a part, this network of neighbors and lovers and strangers, the love carries, and that’s the work of religion. The work of religion is to make sure that the love carries more strongly and further than the division and the hate, and there is the danger of religion — that we will end up defining ourselves against rather than defining ourselves with. But I do believe that love never dies, and that is the gift that one can give immediately, of course, most importantly, to one’s family and close friends. But it spreads far beyond that.

Q: Is that what you mean when you speak about love after death?

A: There is love after death. I’m not certain about life after. There’s some kind of life. I’m just not certain that it’s a personalized life. We came from the cosmos. We return to the cosmos. But the thing that we ought to be amazed about — the odds against our being here are just infinitesimal, just infinitesimal. You have to go back not just to the right egg and the right sperms of your parents. You have to go back all the way through history. None of our grandparents and great-grandparents going on died before puberty. None of them died in the Great Plague. If you go back to the 11th or 12th century, most of us have 2.5 million ancestors, all of who made it and connected at the right time. Then you go back beyond that to the pre-human ancestors and the urparamecium and then to the pinball of stars back to the Big Bang, and we’re kinetically and genetically connected to everything that preceded us. The universe was pregnant with us when it was born. The odds against this are staggering. And so we tend to miss it when we say, what did I do to deserve this? Well, we didn’t do anything to deserve being alive. With life comes the certitude, the promise of death, and we need to embrace that with the same kind of celebration, almost, that we embrace our birth.

Q: For traditional Christians beliefs in the afterlife, eternal life with God, heaven — these are very, very important beliefs and give people close to death great comfort. What is it that gives you great comfort?

A: I do believe I came from God and that I shall return to God. It’s just that the definitions of heaven I received and hear about almost seem like punishment for good behavior — an eternity of anything to me is frightening almost. I see eternity as a depth in time, not a length of time. I see us connecting spiritually within the temple zone but in an eternal trench, as it were, that can get us deep or help us soar, and that is available to me every minute I live. I have no idea what happens after we die. It cannot be stranger than this. Being alive is too strange for words. So I won’t be the least bit surprised if all of a sudden everything is topsy-turvy and I’m in a new world. But I can promise you it won’t be the world that is predicted. And the other thing I’m concerned about would be afterlife. I see a lot of religion as being a life-defining exercise. It’s almost as if we put this world down and this life down in order to live forever in one that is promised to us, and that leads us away from the love to God and love to neighbor injunctions. It leads us away from our ethical imperative, from expressing our ultimate concerns in ways that are redemptive in this world and in our larger neighborhood. And so I go with Henry David Thoreau, who when he was asked about the afterlife said, “Madam, I prefer to take it one life at a time.”

Q: Let’s talk again about the relationship between love and death.

A: The opposite of love is not death. It is fear. Fear is what armors our hearts. If our hearts are armored, they’ll never be broken. We do not have to worry as much about grief and pain at a time of loss and a terminal illness or even betrayal. We don’t have to worry about those things because we have armored our hearts. When you open your heart, you become vulnerable, which means susceptible to being wounded. Grief is in a way a gift because the more we grieve, the more we loved. The more we care, the more we’re hurt, the more we gained in our relationship. And so there’s a ratio between grief and love that can be tampered down by not opening your heart, or it can be extremely painful if you have opened your heart because there’s such a deep sense of loss. But in the balance of time the gain is so much greater than the loss that one can only celebrate the time together, one can only celebrate the love, and the grief becomes an afterthought to the love. But love is grief’s advance party. There’s no question about that.

Q: There’s an undertaker in Michigan I interviewed, Thomas Lynch. He’s a poet, too. He says grief is the tax we pay on loving people.

A: There you go. That’s it. That’s good. That’s a beautiful summation of that, and I have seen so many people get hurt in love and then try to protect themselves against it, and when they protect themselves against love, they protect themselves against the only thing that is worth living for.

Q: You also have some interesting things, I think, to say about visiting in hospitals.

A: It’s amazing how uncomfortable people are in hospitals, understandably. You’re surrounded by death. You feel that you might catch it. You look through all of these doors as a kind of impersonality about the place. You’re afraid you’re going to say the wrong thing, that you will not get it right with the person you’re going to visit. People stay away from their friends for those very reasons. But then what happens is you go into the hospital room and you don’t know how to act, and there’s some very simple tricks. First of all, touch the person that you’re with, because all the touch that they’re getting is invasive. It hurts. Goodness knows, the nurses are trying to do their best and they’re wonderful. But they are hurting you when they touch you. So touch. Also sit down at the level of the person in the bed. Everyone’s looking down at you. You begin to feel like a lab rat or something when you’re in the hospital. And if your friends stand up and look down at you, they become sort of confused with the medical authorities. So that’s another thing. And then simply to open the conversation by, “How are you feeling? How are you feeling spiritually? This must be hard.” Let the person take the lead. But don’t talk about nothing. Let it come out. The worst thing you can say to a person who is clearly dying is, “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to beat this. You’re going to get better.” It’s just like an insult to that person’s living reality. Whereas if you say, “This must be really hard,” they will tell you to what extent it is and to what extent it isn’t. And then they will be connecting with you at a deep, human level. There are fewer occasions in life that we imagine to really connect from one person to another at their very depth. The times of death and dying are among the most precious of those.

Q: And don’t stay too long, you say.

A: And the other thing is don’t stay too long. Don’t prove your love by wearing the poor person out. Five to ten minutes is perfect, enough time for you to bless them and then not to fatigue them.

Q: As you look ahead to your own death, is there anything about either death itself or the immediate time leading up to it that frightens you? Are you afraid?

A: I’m not afraid, because I’m living so much in the present. I’m not afraid of what’s going to happen in the immediate weeks, say, before I die. I’ve seen, however, that it can be brutal, and I anticipate it being painful, being disoriented. I’m not going to live through that before it happens. I do know, and I know this from particularly my experience with my father, but other parishioners, that there is a tendency among some people to disappear into themselves as they go through the final passage, and that involves some pain for all of your loved ones, because you are cutting them off. Perhaps this is natural. It is you’re letting go of your ties so that you can leave more freely when you’re leaving. But it’s something that I’m going to hope not to do. I’m going to hope to hold on to them and remember that they are as important as I am and that this is more painful for them than it is for me. I will be at peace wherever I am, whether I’m in heaven or sleeping eternally in the earth. I will be at peace, and they will be in turmoil, and I pray that I will be able to overcome my own instinct, perhaps, to just let go and hold on to them long enough and well enough that they will recognize my presence and my love even as I’m dying.

Q: You mentioned praying. To whom do you pray, and how do you pray?

A: Every day I pray to God for what I have. I pray to God for my children. I pray to God for giving me– with my parents. I pray to God for the sun coming up. I pray to God for the tasks I have to do, even today when they’re more limited, the limited tasks I’m still able to do. I pray to God for all of those things that I would otherwise take for granted. And once I pray, I know that I will receive — my prayers will come true. I don’t pray for miracles. I don’t pray to cure my incurable cancer. I receive and consecrate each day that I’m given as a gift, and those are the prayers of consecration, and if I’ve done something wrong, which I do every day despite this attempt to live in the present and be always living, I always do things wrong. I ask for forgiveness for that, and part of that is so that I’m able to forgive myself and get back to the program.

Q: When you pray to God, do you have a picture in your head?

A: I don’t have a picture. I have a sense of peace. I’m praying to the deepest part of me and the deepest part of the cosmos, the Creator. I’m just connecting. I’m reaching out, getting outside of myself, getting as far out as possible. I don’t anticipate that there is a little set of headphones up there taking my instructions down and fastening them onto underlings in a cosmic bureaucracy to act on or against. My God doesn’t work that way. It is a sense of being connected to the All, to that which is greater than all, in fact, and present, and age. And that connection is a healing connection because it connects us to ourselves, gives us integrity, gives us peace to our bidding for forgiveness and our confession. It connects us to others through reconciliation. I also pray for people from who I’m anywhere estranged that they will have a good day. I picture their faces in my mind and remind myself that they’re going to die. We’re all mysteriously born and fated to die. The same sun sets on each of our horizons. Truly, we are one. And those moments of oneness are the moments of religious peace for me. And then I pray to be reconciled with or one with God, that the Creator and the cosmos, all three of those things, bring unity and an integrity to me — and they’re very traditional ways of praying. But the goal is to move from division, which I believe to be sin. When you’re divided against yourself, when you’re estranged from your neighbor, when you’re alienated from God to salvation, when you’re are peace with yourself, you can say yes to your neighbor and can say yes to God.

Q: For you, what is the essence of Christianity?

A: The essence of a truly living faith, I believe, is awe and humility. We must be awestruck by the fact that we’re here and by the cosmos itself, and we must be humbled. The most beautiful of all etymologies is human, humane, humility, humble, humus. It’s dust to dust, ashes to ashes. That brings us humility, but also the awe for being able to even comprehend that or to embrace it. I’m a Christian Universalist. I believe that the same light shines through every religious window, and it’s interpreted. The windows are different. It’s interpreted in different ways. It refracts in different ways. The fundamentalist of the right says that the light shines only through their window. The fundamentalist of the left says, looking at the bewildering variety of windows and worshipers, that there is no light. But the windows aren’t the light. The windows are where the light shines through. You cannot pass through every window and get enlightened by it. You must find, and often you’re born into, a faith that will teach you the elements that will save you, and for me Christianity is that faith. It is a faith about love, love to God and love to neighbor that is right in the heart of my very being. I also believe that Christ created the church in dying, by passing his love on to his disciples. The church is truly the body of Christ in that sense. I think that’s the key. The key is the love imperative, often forgotten, often denied by the church through history. Often Jesus continues to be sacrificed on the altar built in his own name, but I do think that essential reminder stands not only at the heart of Christianity, but at the heart of my own form of universalism.

Q: What do you do if you can’t love?

A: If you can’t love, you have been probably very badly hurt. There are some people who are pathologic. There are some people who simply are born, evidently, without the empathy gene. I exclude them from my general analysis. They certainly exclude me. But for most of us, love is always an opportunity that can very easily be trampled on, sacrificed, from the very earliest days of one’s life. I mean, child beating can take away your trust in life. Abandonment can take away your trust in life. So there are many reasons to harden one’s heart. But for as good a reason as you may have, and I counsel with people who at the age of 55 and 60 are still agonizing over what their parents are doing to them or did to them, the only way to reconcile yourself, make peace with yourself, make peace with your neighbor, make peace with God, find salvation, is to break through and love, to forgive and to love. You don’t change the person you forgive. You chance your own heart. So anything that you can do to reconcile also means that at the end of your life, when you’re given a few months to live, you can look back without regret, you can look back at peace, and you can move forward with an embrace of each day that is given to you and the opportunities that it affords, and the depth that it gives you to relate more profoundly with your family, your loved ones, and your God.

Q: That ability to live in the now is something you are experiencing greatly?

A: I have preached on living in the present for my entire career — nostalgia for the present, looking forward to the present — and I was always preaching to myself, because I was hung up in the past, and I was apprehensive about the future, mostly about things that never happened. But I knew that was right, that we could only end the here and now act, that the past is a chimera. We make it up as much as we experience it, and the future is a complete crapshoot. So only in the here and now can we love God and love our neighbor, can we redeem the day. One of the beautiful things about a terminal illness, one of the truly beautiful things — yes, there’s a lot of pain and discomfort and sometimes agony, but if you have made peace with your past and have no unfinished business, you do not have a full plate for the future, and you are invited into the present, and your friendships become stronger. Your loved ones become more vital and more present. Each day becomes more beautiful. Every day is a gift unto itself, and you just unwrap it. You unwrap the present and receive it as the gift it is. And that is, for me anyway, an unexpected boon during this time of trial. You walk through the valley of the shadow, and it’s riddled with light.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: If you’re homeless in Washington, D.C. and sick, perhaps close to dying, and you end up in a city shelter, the people who work there might telephone a place called Joseph’s House and ask if they can take you in. It was founded by a Christian doctor who speaks about trying to see God in everybody. It’s staffed by a few people on salary and volunteers, and it’s funded by government, foundations and private donors. Lucky Severson paid a visit.

JOSH (Volunteer, Joseph’s House, greeting Melvin White): Hello, how are you doing Mr. White? I’m Josh. Welcome.

LUCKY SEVERSON: Melvin White could not be greeted more warmly or graciously if he were checking into a five-star hotel.

PATTY WUDEL (Director, Joseph’s House, to Volunteer): Would you just hang this up for Mr. White?

SEVERSON: This is Joseph’s House in Washington, D.C., the equivalent of a five-star hospice — an extraordinary place that comforts the dying with a mixture of Christianity and Zen Buddhism. More than likely it will be Melvin White’s last home. He is suffering from the final stages of colon cancer. Melvin says for years he was a cook at a local hotel and a pool hustler on the side. After he got sick, he got evicted.

MELVIN WHITE (Resident, Joseph’s House): I came home from work from the hospital from chemo one day, start the key in the door, and it turned back in my hand.

SEVERSON (to Mr. White): They changed the lock?

Mr. WHITE: Changed the lock on me.

SEVERSON: Melvin is the kind of person who Dr. David Hilfiker was thinking of when he founded Joseph’s House 16 years ago as a place for terminally ill, homeless, African-American men with nowhere to die but the streets.

Dr. DAVID HILFIKER (Founder, Joseph’s House): This was a very special place for many men. It became the first, the only place that they ever loved, ever had, that said, “You can stay here as long as you live.”

SEVERSON: For probably many of these men, this was the most loving home they ever had in their lives?

Dr. HILFIKER: Absolutely, absolutely. And certainly, I mean, they had been on the street for 20 years, and this is a chance to have a home.

SEVERSON: Although most of the 300 or so patients who have called Joseph’s House home have been black men, more and more are women, like Theresa Batch. She has colon cancer.

THERESA BATCH (Resident, Joseph’s House, talking about Tiffani Boerio): Well, she meets me every morning and greets me, so I call her “sunshine.” This morning, the first word that came out of my mouth: “Hi, sunshine. Praise the Lord for you.”

SEVERSON: Theresa has been here three months, has some good days and some bad. She is surrounded by the proud faces of Joseph’s House alumni.

Ms. BATCH: I look at the families that passed on, and some of them that didn’t, that made it through the cancer that they had in their bodies, you know. And I see the beauty of their souls and their minds and their hearts, you know.

Ms. WUDEL (Commencing the house meeting): It’s a special meeting, because today was the day that Melvin White came to join us.

SEVERSON: Patty Wudel runs the place, to use a phrase of hers, with “exquisite attention.” Patients are treated as honored guests, something they are not accustomed to.

Ms. WUDEL: Folks have suffered with addictions for a long time, suffered with not belonging, not being wanted or missed for a long time, carry a lot of regrets that their life turned out the way it did whether they were really responsible or not.

SEVERSON: She was attracted to Joseph’s House partly because of the emphasis on the social Gospel.

Ms. WUDEL: The Beatitudes sure play a big part for the foundation of Joseph’s House as a place of justice and compassion, with Jesus as an important teacher.

SEVERSON: Patty was also attracted because the therapy here includes the tenets of Zen Buddhism.

Ms. WUDEL: It’s developing a self-awareness, paradoxically to be able to forget myself and serve the needs of the person in front of me.

Dr. HILFIKER: Our hope is not to present God to anybody, but to see God in everybody, and to allow that person to have the relationship with God that is deepest for them.

Ms. WUDEL (to Mr. White, at meeting): My wish for you is that you will find deep healing here in all the ways that you really need it.

MARY (Volunteer, Joseph’s House, to Mr. White, at meeting): I’m so happy that you are here, and I hope that you can sort of find physical warmth and joy and peace.

JOHN (Resident, Joseph’s House): You just lay back, man, and let them do all they need to do, and you will be well. I know you’ll be satisfied.

Mr. WHITE: You know, I feel a whole lot better in just in this one day than I have been in the last couple of years, you know.

PRISCILLA NORRIS (Nurse, Joseph’s House): What is amazing to see happen over and over again is those who are sicker are cared for and paid attention to by those who are at that moment are stronger, and I don’t mean us.

SEVERSON: Priscilla Norris is the Joseph’s House nurse.

Ms. NORRIS: It fills my heart to meet another person and serve them, because I’m a well person right now, and they are not a well person. It isn’t a helping as much as it is a serving.

Ms. WUDEL: So many people wake up in the morning and are grateful that God woke them up to live another day. And kind of looking at their day from my point of view — feeling well and healthy — their day looks pretty rough. But it makes me think and wonder about my own gratitude for being alive in my own life.

Ms. BATCH (Singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”): “…and the home of the brave.”

SEVERSON: The first day we were at Joseph’s House, Theresa filled the house with blast of sunshine. A few days later, she couldn’t get out of bed. But she was never alone. Her buddy, Tiffani Boerio, was at her bedside.

TIFFANI BOERIO (Volunteer, Joseph’s House): I just want to be with her. I mean, I came to work this afternoon at one o’clock because I knew that she hadn’t been doing well when I left on Sunday. And it was just compelling just to sit with her. And I think for me that is just one way to love her.

Ms. NORRIS: Those of us who have known Theresa all know that she has other times gone into these deep sleeps for two or three days and then popped up like the Energizer bunny. It’s not my sense that she’s going to pop up from this one, but I’m hoping that she will.

SEVERSON: Patty and Priscilla grew especially close to one patient, William. Both were with him when he died.

Ms. WUDEL: I felt the blood stop flowing in my friend. Time stopped still then. It was a profound, sacred moment for me.

Ms. NORRIS: There is so much more to a human being than the body, and the sensation of mystery and of soul is tangible. It’s mystical and it’s mysterious. It is the closest I can possible get to what I see as God.

Ms. BOERIO: In some way the world has changed for me because of that experience, and I think that, yeah, in a lot of ways I will never be the same.

BREY CRIBBS (Volunteer, Joseph’s House): It definitely made me less afraid of death. In our society I feel we don’t experience much first-hand of death, and I really saw how it was a reversal of the birth process.

SEVERSON: Brey Cribbs is a social worker, a seminary student, and a volunteer at Joseph’s House.

Mr. CRIBBS: More and more you become less capable, and you need the support of people to just take care of you. But at the same time there’s a childlike quality of the person that tends to become much more joyful and more peaceful.

SEVERSON: Staffers and volunteers agree they are the ones who learn life’s lessons about things like love and selflessness from people who have never caught a break, like Joshua Murray.

Ms. NORRIS (to Mr. Murray): They can solve it; you’ll still need to let infectious disease know that you don’t need the urgent care.

SEVERSON: Joshua is taking radiation treatments for lymphoma, which he says doctors told him is a result of the HIV virus he was born with 23 years ago. His twin brother escaped the disease.

JOSHUA MURRAY (Resident, Joseph’s House): I don’t blame anybody. You know, I was born with it and, you know, I just have to take care of it. I don’t blame my mother for, you know, giving it to me. I was mad, but I didn’t blame her, you know. So, I’m still living.

Dr. HILFIKER: For me the perfect image of the house is a party going on down here, with music and people that we’ve invited and decorations and people dancing, and somebody upstairs dying at the same time.

SEVERSON: A few years after Dr. Hilfiker started Joseph’s House, he was suffering from bouts of deep depression, and he told the patients he could no longer be their doctor. He says one of them, a former drug kingpin and a tough guy named Peewee, taught him a lesson he won’t forget.

Dr. HILFIKER: Right away Peewee spoke up. “Yeah, doc, we’ve been noticing something wrong. You just take care of yourself, and we will still be here for you.” And it was just very simple. But what it was ultimately was an acknowledgment of my brokenness, from a person who was very broken. It was really the turning point in my accepting my depression.

(Group reciting the Lord’s Prayer): Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…

SEVERSON: Every Thursday the group comes together in prayer. On this day, their thoughts were with Theresa Batch. Theresa died after spending three months with the family at Joseph’s House, and she knew she was loved.

(Group reciting prayer): …and deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Washington.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Have you ever had the feeling that your doctor doesn’t have enough time for you, or, if you’re a doctor, that you are under so much pressure it’s hard to be compassionate with your patients? There is a physician in Northern California who thinks medicine is losing its soul, and she’s trying to rescue it. Rachel Remen is a best-selling author, a popular speaker, and herself a lifelong patient. Kim Lawton reports.

KIM LAWTON: Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen is leading a national campaign to rediscover the practice of medicine as a spiritual endeavor.

Dr. RACHEL NAOMI REMEN (Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and Founder and Director, Institute for the Study of Health and Illness): Medicine for many, many people isn’t a job. It’s a way of life. And it’s a way of life that’s characterized by certain very traditional values — values like compassion and service and reverence for life. These are not the values of science. These are the values of what might be called a spiritual path.

LAWTON: That means helping other doctors transform how they view their profession.

Dr. REMEN (In Meeting): I was taught to cure people, and what that meant was that my relationship with my patients basically was a relationship between me as an expert and my patient as a problem.

LAWTON: Oncologist Jennifer Lucas says she’s become a better doctor by following Remen’s advice and ignoring something they both learned in med school: that in order to maintain professionalism, they should keep an objective distance from their patients.

Dr. JENNIFER LUCAS (Oncologist): There’s this big line that you are not supposed to cross. But people are really looking for ways to connect with you as their physician and to make you human.

LAWTON: Lucas tries to build relationships with her patients by bringing in values such as compassion and empathy — values, she says, that motivated her to become a doctor in the first place.

Dr. LUCAS: I’ve cried with a patient on many occasions. I will share my sadness if something is going on that is particularly difficult for everybody. It’s good for me, it’s good for the patient, it’s good for their families, and they have a sense that, you know, they are really being cared for.

ROSEMARY GUDELJ (Patient): I didn’t expect to have a doctor like her, because it was a serious illness, and she gave me so much reassurance and love from the very beginning.

LAWTON: Dr. Remen believes the medical profession is suffering a severe spiritual crisis. She says the economic pressures of modern medicine, such as the growing influence of insurance companies and a focus on the bottom line, are all taking an overwhelming toll on physicians.

Dr. REMEN: If you are seeing 25 to 40 people a day, there’s very little you can do in the way of connecting to people. And these people are hurting. These are people who are frightened. They need so much more than a prescription. And they go by you in this unending line, you know, seven minutes at a time. It does something to someone to have to face that day after day.

LAWTON: What it does, she says, is generate cynicism and burnout.

Dr. REMEN: What happens is you begin to live below your own level of excellence. If you do that long enough, something begins to die in you, and that something is the soul of your profession.

LAWTON: As director of the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness, Remen encourages doctors to reclaim the soul of medicine. The institute sponsors a project called Finding Meaning in Medicine. Doctors from diverse religious traditions, including some with no religious affiliation, gather once a month in small groups to discuss a chosen theme.

Dr. REMEN: The topic is one of the basic values of medicine. It might be something like compassion, or it might be listening, or it might be grace. And the price of admission to this little meeting is that you bring a story from your professional work as a physician about the topic of the evening.

LAWTON: At this gathering in Dr. Remen’s Northern California home, the topic is relationship.

Dr. DAVID GULLION (Oncologist) (To Group of Doctors in Finding Meaning in Medicine): When you have a relationship, you share your love with patients. And what’s wonderful is how much they share with me.

LAWTON: Oncologist David Gullion says he joined Finding Meaning in Medicine in hopes of sustaining his passion for his emotionally draining work with cancer patients.

Dr. GULLION: In some patients, it seems like you give bad news after bad news, and [you have] to be able to do that without it really wrenching your own insides to the point that it becomes impossible.

LAWTON: He says the group gives him an opportunity to talk about things doctors don’t usually share, especially with other colleagues.

Dr. GULLION: It is a forum where you can really share your heart, share your soul, and know that it’s a safe sanctuary to do that.

LAWTON: Even beyond the world of medicine, Remen is a widely sought-after speaker and author who looks for the spiritual in everyday life. She encourages her audience to consider how they can be a blessing to others.

Dr. REMEN (Speaking at Podium): What matters is who you have touched on your way through life and who has touched you. What matters is becoming a blessing.

LAWTON: Her two best-selling books, KITCHEN TABLE WISDOM and MY GRANDFATHER’S BLESSINGS, are compilations of stories like the ones she urges doctors to share.

Dr. REMEN: A story is a container for meaning and value. That’s why parables are so powerful in all the world’s religions.

LAWTON: Remen doesn’t like to talk a lot about her personal spirituality, but she acknowledges diverse religious influences, including Saint Luke the Physician and her grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi. Her home is decorated with Buddhas.

Dr. REMEN: These are all reminders to stay awake and pay attention, because the mystery that’s at the heart of life can speak to you at any time, anywhere.

LAWTON: Much of her thinking about health, spirituality, and life was shaped by her own illness.

Dr. REMEN: I have Crohn’s disease and I’ve had it for 52 years. I have had eight major surgeries. I am a chronically ill person. I haven’t been a well person in more than half a century.

LAWTON: Doctors told her she would be an invalid who would most likely die by the age of 40. Instead, she says, her illness gave her internal strength and helped her look at the world differently.

Dr. REMEN: I no longer ran from other people in trouble. I actually became stronger as a person, much more loving, much wiser as a person, and in the end my body has never healed from this disease. But I truly believe that I am much more a person because of it.

LAWTON: She says it’s the difference between curing and healing.

Dr. REMEN: You know, we can’t cure everything. Life can’t be fixed, and science is limited. But the ability of people to grow beyond their limitations, to become more than who they are, is really not that limited.

LAWTON: She believes that message can help heal the practice of medicine itself. I’m Kim Lawton in Northern California.