Blessings and Miracles May 2005 About 3 years ago I went in to this Rabbi for a blessing. "He said why don't you bless your patients!" I looked incredulously at him. Are you kidding? Me! Bless my patients! What do you take me for! Some clergyman! And even if I do They might think I'm giving them the "last rights" or that I have some how given up on them or even having failed as a physician! so instead am resorting to prayer instead of medication! But he persisted... So, out of respect for him I began to mutter words like "God Bless" at the end of every session. Those two words! At first embarrassed I kinda got used to them after a while! My gosh what a difference it made... I had no illusions about myself - make no mistake I remained a flawed human being With no "sacred credentials" to presume such sanctity As the power-to-bless... All I was doing was following the advice of this Rabbi. What is a blessing? What does it mean to bless another How can a blessing mean anything today, in the context of technological and medical power, those incredible advances we have made in medicine and the human ability to cure disease? How come we need to resort to age-old rituals and sacred words in an age of such advanced scientific medical advance? To bless is to first and foremost to give To give of one's inner self From the depth of one's being Beyond one's professional capability and medical or diagnostic prowess. To give from that place of vulnerability and woundedness we all share To give in a posture of humility To lie side by side with the patient on his or her side of the aisle To relinquish the power invested in as a doctor To become a healer and carry the burden of this suffering in those words Then it is to invoke To surrender to the Higher Power that guides us all To admit defeat in the presence of Him who givers life To admit we can only do what we can do To realize the limitations of our science and art and the craft of medicine To see the limits history and current research places on us To admit we have only gone so far and no further To surrender to our own limitations as human beings and care-givers. Then to it is to ask Always asking for the gifts Of life and light Of healing and repair Of the heart The pure heart To remove all resentment and fear To bathe us both physician and patient In the warmth of knowing and feeling the Presence The gift of Providence That all will be taken care of That He is Present to this pain and suffering That it has meaning after all. Finally it is to bestow The deeper connection That I as healer am present in ways beyond the prescription and the injection The prodding and the poking The examination and the words The diagnosis and the categories The X-Rays and MRI's The mastery of the human body and pathology The abilities and the lack That I am present in my own woundedness and frailty In my own humanity and mortality For you the patient. To connect in this deeper way In the knowledge of my limitations In the realization of my own pain Reaching to yours. And miracles? Can these occur? Are they real? Can they be measured? Can't everything just go away Can't things go back to what they were before this crisis? Can't we just make this a bad dream? That never happened after all? Maybe, just maybe This terrible sickness is a gift That shows you and I In such a devastatingly real way Just how miraculous our ordinary life was and is What we took for granted all the while As ordinary Now seems so desirable and miraculous The morning breeze The deep blue sky above with white puffs of clouds whispering by The green, deeper-than-green lawn after a fresh rainfall The flower that recently sprouted outside my window The fresh scent of lilac or ivy unsuspectedly wafting by me on a walk The child giggling and cooing to its mother The sounds of Glen Gould's Beethoven The beauty of art and architecture The magnificence of the largest body of fresh water stretching to the horizon on a calm day, that incredible Lake Michigan! And the raging sea washing up on the rocks, such awesome power. The trickling sound of a brook as it cascades down a fall The taste of goose pate as it first touches the palate in its complexity of flavors The deep red wine full of body and vigor sliding down so creamily The strength of good single malt with friends The night sky full of myriads of stellar beings Each looking down at me form such a distance they no longer exist The warm touch of my wife's hand unconsciously passing over my face during the night The feeling of that first hug when my darling children return home The feeling of safety when I am with my parents The tear that wells up when a Pete Seeger song accidentally crosses my consciousness (when flicking the radio dial), surprising me from out of no-where! The sense of holiness by the grave of the Saint in a god-foresaken hole in the Ukraine! The sense of gratitude in waking up each morning alive And that first conscious breath That delicious sense of being And knowing that I have been privileged to live yet another day. These are the miracles for me The miracle of the ordinary-yet-not ordinary life As I live it The life I desire The life I wish to return to The life I took for granted for so long For so many years The life I now see as so precious And so miraculous I ask to be granted a little more time To live that life That is the miracle for me.