One Doctor's Spiritual Journey (So Far)

Health Progress, May/Jun 2006 by Phelps, Gregory

SUMMARY

In 2003, the author of this article, who is on the staff of a Tennessee hospital, entered St. Louis's Aquinas Institute of Theology's program in health care mission, seeking to fulfill his longing for greater personal spirituality. Three years later, he is preparing to graduate with a master's degree, and is looking forward to sharing what he has learned with fellow physicians and others.

The author credits the program with offering him a much broader understanding of why Catholic health care is a ministry, not just a not-for-profit enterprise. He sees his work at St. Mary's as an exercise in spirituality, and he sees his profession as a personal ministry. He now wants to share what he has learned.

The author, who has helped initiate new programs for physician spirituality at his hospital, also speaks at community events about the healing mission of Catholic health care. He hopes that all doctors will reclaim their ancient tradition of providing compassionate care for poor, underserved, and vulnerable persons, and seek to be healing presences to those they serve.

I am sitting in south St. Louis, in the congregational home of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, participating in a four-day intensive schedule of presentations about personal spiritual formation. As I do so, I begin to ponder how I, an Episcopalian physician from Knoxville, TN, got to this place.

It is not just the physical place-a Catholic convent-but also the emotional place I am in that amazes me. Although I have always been filled with a sense of purpose, I could not always formally name what that purpose was. To say the least, my spiritual journey has taken a few interesting turns. What follows is the story of how I got here and where I am going.

"WHERE DO YOU GO TO CHURCH?"

I grew up nominally Presbyterian, attending the socially prominent Kirk in the Hills church in Bloomfield Hills, MI, a Detroit suburb. My brief tenure there was notable primarily for the time I escaped kindergarten Sunday school and interrupted the service by running into the nave screaming that the teacher was after me.

I later changed denominations for a theologically trivial reason that was eventually to have a big impact. My sister accompanied a friend to an Episcopal church choir performance and ended up joining the choir. Soon after that, I joined the choir to be with my sister. My brother followed, and, finally, our parents came to hear us sing. That lasted until high school when, like many high school students, I lost track of the point of attending church.

In fact, I didn't return to church until I was in my family medicine residency. My wife Gayle and I had had our first child, Tiffany, and we talked about having her baptized. We made a few desultory visits to the local Presbyterian church to investigate baptism but did not form sufficient connections to carry through with it.

Two years later, when I started practicing medicine, my new partner in our small South Carolina town asked about my religious affiliation. I didn't realize then that, in small southern towns, one of the first and most important questions a newcomer will be asked is which denomination he or she belongs to. I learned this lesson on the day when I pulled up to our new home in a moving van and found the Episcopal pastor waiting on the lawn to greet me. Basically, I was drafted. Theologically inattentive during my decade-long absence from church, I had missed a controversy over a new prayer book, women's ordination, and a raft of other changes.

Tiny St. Mark's Church of Chester, SC, had only 35 parishioners. My wife and I had the only children under age 20. Given the circumstances, I had an opportunity to serve in multiple ministry roles, ranging from lay reader and chalice bearer to vestryman and day care center starter.

My interest in the church grew as I learned more and more about my adopted faith. It is a measure of my reading interests at the time that the number of religious and church-based periodicals I read grew at one point close to 15. I was on everyone's mailing list. My wife noted, with some annoyance, that my name on several lists had been transmuted from Dr. Greg Phelps into the "Reverend George Phillips." What I learned from all this reading was that I needed more formal education in theology. This education was to be a long time coming.

In large part it was through my work with patients needing behavioral health care that I learned how psychological needs are addressed in small towns. The fact that we were in a very rural environment meant that psychological care had to be tailored to the local resources. While there were no psychologists or psychiatrists in our county, there were many pastors. I learned that it was much easier, when talking to some patients, to bypass the "you think I'm crazy?" conversation about psychiatric help by suggesting counseling with a pastor instead.

After awhile, the rural family-medicine office where I practiced recruited a series of Methodist ministers to do formal counseling at our facility. I spent a good bit of time picking their brains. The ministers were occasionally supplemented by Fr. Richard Crozier, the pastor of our church and a close friend, who would sometimes drop by the office to visit me and my patients. "Don't worry," he'd admonish the occasional patient, indicating me with a jerk of his chin. "If he can't help you ... I can." I noticed that the patients who did well in the spiritual journey often did better in their healing journey. As the great British physician Sir William Osier once noted: "It is more important which patient has the disease than which disease the patient has."1