Compassion at the Center of Resilience: Rethinking Our Orientation to Suffering
摘要
Chaplain Keith A. Menhinick’s chapter explores the healthcare chaplain’s collaborative role in cultivating community resilience, not only for patients and their families, but also with and for nurses, physicians, social workers, and other healthcare professionals. In the hospital, we are confronted every day by human fragility and vulnerability, loss and despair. Chaplains collaborate with the care team in addressing such pain, helping a community learn to deepen and share their pain in ways that reconnect us with our shared humanity and values. That sharing also reveals the forms of suffering in our world that must be resisted and renounced as unjustifiable. Chaplains thus embody one example of how all healthcare providers can act as both spiritual caregivers and moral change agents. Through spiritual practices, presence, and activism, chaplains join with the care team to help a community share their pain and experience a sense of compassion for themselves and others, revealing compassion as the greatest source and center of our collective resilience.