IF WE are in a hospital, we are surrounded by people we do not know and we are limited in our contacts with family. We will also find a change in our perception and use if time. We no longer decide our daily life nor distinguish between free time and work. We find the time becoming longer.
Slower and more burdensome
Furthermore the experience of different degrees of pain causes not only physical but also interior suffering, feeling of sadness, isolation and loneliness, worry and anxiety about the length of malady and the prospects for the future. As well as the stigma and discrimination that accompany certain illnesses, these feelings push the sick to the margins of society or sometimes to suicidal tendencies.
Illness and suffering always severely test maturity. False security gives way as ideals and motives not sufficiently grounded and assimilated cause a crisis. In a certain sense this time of testing stimulates a revision of one’s attitude to life, which become seen as precarious, fragile and vulnerable. While this realty is understandable on the intellectual level, during illness it becomes deeply sad, disturbing and capable of threatening one’s very existence.
How? When confined in a hospital, one can no longer avoid the fundamental question of the meaning of life. In sadly discovering vulnerability he or she feels defenseless, exposed and naked at the physical and existential level. Indeed, illness is a “revelation of the real situation of man”.
The Church and charity
The ministry to the sick brings us clearly to the deeds and words of Jesus on what it means to love our neighbor. This point Pope Benedict XVI clearly stressed in his first encyclical Deus Caritas est.
He wrote: “Love of neighbor, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful, but it is also a responsibility for the entire ecclesial community at every level: from the local community to the particular Church and to the universal Church in its entirety.
As a community, the Church must practise love. Love thus needs to be organized if it is to be an orderd service to the community. The awareness of this responsibility has had a constitutive relevance in the Church from the beginning… Thus the exercise of charity became established as one of her essential activities, along with the administration of the sacraments and the proclamation of the word: love for widows and orphans, prisoners and the sick and needy of every kind is as essential to her as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel. The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more she can neglect the sacraments and the Word.”
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