Originally Published in the Spring 2001 Spirituality & Health
Hospital Visits: The Best Gifts You Can Bring
James Kullander

During my recent year as a student chaplain in a New York City hospital, I walked into patients’ rooms — and their lives — when they were more physically, emotionally, and spiritually vulnerable than they had ever been. I sat with Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists, with people who grew up in one faith and now had none to speak of, and with people who proudly claimed to be atheists. They all had questions: “If God is good, then why am I suffering so much?” “Where is Jesus now that I need him?” (From a Buddhist): “If everything is empty, then who am I?” I’m not sure what kind of saint or genius you would need to be to answer those questions. At first, I gamely tried to answer. Eventually I learned a better way.

One evening a patient who read the Bible daily and went to church every Sunday asked me why I thought Jesus was punishing her. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

But I knew the feeling. So I asked her, “What makes you think Jesus is punishing you?” She began telling me the things she believed she had done wrong. I asked her why she thought what she did was so wrong. We went on like this for quite a while, and I left her room believing she was less likely to reproach herself or to believe she was being punished, and more likely to remain open to the enigmatic ways of how God might be involved in her life.

I also realized something: Her questions — like most patients’ — were really a way of asking if she could tell me what was troubling her. The kindest thing that I could do was not to try to answer the question — not to lecture, scold, or judge, or even try to cheer someone up — but to mirror the question and listen.

When you listen, you offer a package of the most valuable healing gifts you can give: compassion, consolation, and forgiveness. The Latin etymology of the word “religion” means to repair or reconnect, and I’ve realized that it is through our shared unknowing that we find our greatest connection to one another, and to what is sacred.

Not having answers pierces through human pretense and divisions of race, class, education, and even religion. The transcendent — whatever name we give it — is just that: transcendent and not entirely knowable. To live with this mystery is to be human, and the more we can each learn how to be human, the more we will treat each other as we would like ourselves to be treated. This is the golden rule we learn as children, forget as adults, and relearn sometime down the road — if we’re lucky.