\u201cWe are the medicine\u201d. This was a quote from a physician at the beginning of my study as an Anam Cara apprentice. Anam Cara is a celtic phrase that means \u201csoul friend\u201d, basically a midwife of the soul. This physician spoke to us on the importance of this phrase, \u201cwe are the medicine\u201d as a way of valuing the clinician at bedside. Who they are as they show up is more important than anything else. It begs the question if we are the medicine, how well do we know that medicine? My favorite concept from this lecture as I encounter my daily work as a Hospice Chaplain, is that I am an ambassador of life as I sit bedside to someone leaving this life. I have a responsibility to invest in this medicine and to get to know it and spend time with it\u2026.in other words, it is worth knowing myself, to know what brings me Quality of life, and to invest time and energy into me. Not is an egocentric way, but in a way that gives me grounding as I encounter very difficult situations. I can tell you; my job gets much harder when I have not spent time investing in this medicine! For those of you who hung out with me in Oxford, you know it\u2019s dancing that is my investment into myself\uf04a.<\/p>\n
In Francis Fukuyama\u2019s book Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment, the author explores the rise of Identity politics and our contemporary cultures shift from tribal and community understanding to individualistic ways of understanding. Fukuyama attempts to help us understand our political reality and how it came to be. He states \u201cWhile economic inequalities of the last fifty or so years of globalization are a major factor explaining contemporary politics, economic grievances become much more acute when they are attached to feelings of indignity and disrespect.\u201d In a time of extreme individualization, it is not wonder our politics have been twisted into this identity. When encountering other cultures and ethnicities, individuation is very different then the western mindset.<\/p>\n
As we face all we have encountered these last few years with Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Pandemic, endemic, wars\u2026.etc, we are faced with trying to understand human dignity, who has it, who gives it, why do some never wrestle with it and others never find it? This understanding of the \u201cconcept of identity is a modern phenomenon\u201d , This idea that \u201ceach of us has an inner self that is worthy of respect, and that the surrounding society may be wrong in not recognizing it.\u201d Beverly E. Mitchell wrote an article for the American Baptist Historical Society, called \u201cHuman Dignity as a Theo-Political Reality\u201d, where she attempted to define human dignity. She introduces the concept of \u201cdefacement\u201d. Dignity is hard to grab onto as a concept when we don\u2019t have to put a face to the situation. Beverly asks during all her lectures to keep the face of those she is talking about in mind, as a way to reject defacement. In the Bible we are told that we men and women (ALL HUMANS) are made in the image of God, Imago Dei. We as Christians believe this, even if some of us have to weave through gender language to recognize that God is not a He, God is God, God is she, God is you, God is me. We are all made in his Image. Wouldn\u2019t our world change if we all were able to give dignity to the other by this simple truth? Not we are made in the image of God, but\u2026 or in spite of\u2026 what if we were truly able to suspend judgement, to give dignity to the others we encountered by just looking at their face and believing wholeheartedly and say to them \u201cyou are made in the image of God and it\u2019s beautiful\u201d.<\/p>\n
Day after day, year after year, century after century we continue to deny the dignity of others. Mitchell calls this \u201cThe sin of defacement is the assault on the dignity of another. To deface someone or a group is to deny them the respect and honor due to them by virtue of their full humanity. It is to fail to see their sacredness.\u201d What are we to do? Or as Fukuyama states in his last chapter, \u201cWhat is to be done?\u201d He states \u201cWe will not escape from thinking about ourselves and our society in identity terms. But we need to remember that the identities dwelling deep inside us are neither fixed nor necessarily given to us by our accidents of birth. Identity can be used to divide, but it can and has also been used to integrate.\u201d In other words, \u201cWe are the medicine!\u201d<\/p>\n
[1] Kearney, Michael. Lecture \u201cWe are the Medicine\u201d given to Anam Cara apprenticeship in Bend, OR, 2015.<\/p>\n
[1] Fukuyama, Francis. Identity: The demand for dignity\u00a0 and the politics of resentment. (New York, Picador, 2018) 10-11<\/em><\/p>\n [1] \u00a0Fukuyama, 24<\/p>\n [1] Ibid, 24<\/p>\n [1] Mitchell, Beverly E. \u201c<\/em>Human Dignity as a Theo-Political Reality\u201d, American Baptist Quarterly 27, no. 2 (June 2008) 108.<\/em><\/p>\n [1] Fukuyama, 163<\/p>\n [1]<\/span> Ibid, 183.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWe are the medicine\u201d. This was a quote from a physician at the beginning of my study as an Anam Cara apprentice. Anam Cara is a celtic phrase that means \u201csoul friend\u201d, basically a midwife of the soul. This physician spoke to us on the importance of this phrase, \u201cwe are the medicine\u201d as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2858,2489,1839],"class_list":["post-33379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anamcara","tag-dlgp02","tag-fukuyama","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33379"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33382,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33379\/revisions\/33382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}