Living Wittily

The Doctor, the Prisoner, the Nun and the Hospice Director….. Dr Sheila Cassidy

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I'm preparing a course for next year based on James McClendon's Biography as Theology. I read biography as frequently as novels. Indeed a well written biography can have the qualities of a good novel – character, plot, development, and a story that may or may not resolve as expected. Some of the best writing, and most enjoyable reading, can be found in biographies. And biography can be the best kind of story, and a rich source of theology as it has been lived, practised and embodied. And according to McClendon, that's the most important kind of theology, because only embodied theology makes a difference. 

In 1976 a young idealistic female doctor went to work amongst the poor in Chile. She treated a young man with a bullet wound in the leg and found herself arrested by the secret police. Her name was Sheila Cassidy. The account of her subsequent interrogation, torture and imprisonment was written as an early autobiography called Audacity to Believe, and tells the story of her struggle to find a faith adequate to her experience. I remember a couple of summer afternoons reading that book, and sensing the thrill of what happens when you have the audacity to believe God isn't on the side of the powerful – and that to our personal cost, God may call us to say so. Cassidy's own sense of vocation to be a nun was tested in the years afterwards but she quickly acknowledged that hers would be a different life and she returned to medicine.

Her subsequent career as a doctor, Director of a Hospice in Plymouth, and Consultant in Palliative Care, enabled her to use her medical skills much more widely, and to explore and expand her Christian vocation. The account of her life, and her passionate commitment to enhancing life and accompanying those late on in their life's journey, provide a study of that practical compassion that draws energy from the love of God. I think the phrase "The love of God" should always be understood as a playfully ambiguous genitive – the love of God (for us) and the love (we have) of God. What we do, we do for the love of God and by the love of God.

Vangogh56
One of Cassidy's prayers is one I use often. It sits in my mind alongside Van Gogh's Good Samaritan painting as a description of compassion as action arising from the love of God:

Lord of the Universe
look in love upon your people.
Pour the healing oil of your compassion
on a world that is wounded and dying.
Send us out in search of the lost,
to comfort the afflicted,
to bind up the broken,
and to free those trapped
under the rubble of their fallen dreams.

Sheila Cassidy

Comments

6 responses to “The Doctor, the Prisoner, the Nun and the Hospice Director….. Dr Sheila Cassidy”

  1. angela almond avatar
    angela almond

    What a superb prayer. I remember reading about Sheila Cassidy back in the 70s, but didnt know the rest of her story. I am interested that she is another who has gone on to serve in the Hospice Movement.Having faced death herself, she helps others who are close to it. Wasn’t it CS Lewis who said “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.” ??

    Reply
  2. angela almond avatar
    angela almond

    What a superb prayer. I remember reading about Sheila Cassidy back in the 70s, but didnt know the rest of her story. I am interested that she is another who has gone on to serve in the Hospice Movement.Having faced death herself, she helps others who are close to it. Wasn’t it CS Lewis who said “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.” ??

    Reply
  3. Terry McKinney avatar
    Terry McKinney

    Thank you very much for this portrait of Sheila Cassidy, Mr. Gordon. I’m writing in part wondering about your take on Mr. McClendon’s book. I’m putting together a six-week church course on autobiography as a faith practice; would the book be suitable for a group wishing to explore writing one’s autobiography in the context of faith? I’m grateful for your opinion on this, or any other advice you have. Sincerely, Terry McKinney

    Reply
  4. Terry McKinney avatar
    Terry McKinney

    Thank you very much for this portrait of Sheila Cassidy, Mr. Gordon. I’m writing in part wondering about your take on Mr. McClendon’s book. I’m putting together a six-week church course on autobiography as a faith practice; would the book be suitable for a group wishing to explore writing one’s autobiography in the context of faith? I’m grateful for your opinion on this, or any other advice you have. Sincerely, Terry McKinney

    Reply
  5. Jim Gordon avatar
    Jim Gordon

    Hi Terry, glad you dropped in. The McClendon book is quite demanding and I am using it in an Honours course (4th Year theology. I would also make a clear distinction between biography (a life as construed by a third party) and autobiography ( the life seen through the eyes of the self0. So I’d suggest using several autobiographies as ways of showing how writing our lives can be a way or reflection and growth. However because I am the one who is writing, and I do the selecting, and I can only see me through my eyes, my autobiography is inevitably partial, subjective and vulnerable to me constructing the picture of myself as I choose. So a critically appreciative reading of Augustine’s Confessions, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, Teresa of Avila’s Life, and Wesley’s Journal would give good classic models. But then more contemporary autobiography like Thomas Merton’s Journals, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Philip Toynbee’s Part of a Journey and End of a Journey, Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk,Frederick Buechner’s three volumes of autobiography, and one of the great mid 20th Century missionary accounts such as Geoffrey T Bull’s WhenIron Gates Yield. But your instinct is right – people writing their lives are helped to appropriate and assimilate important experience. Hope it all goes well.

    Reply
  6. Jim Gordon avatar
    Jim Gordon

    Hi Terry, glad you dropped in. The McClendon book is quite demanding and I am using it in an Honours course (4th Year theology. I would also make a clear distinction between biography (a life as construed by a third party) and autobiography ( the life seen through the eyes of the self0. So I’d suggest using several autobiographies as ways of showing how writing our lives can be a way or reflection and growth. However because I am the one who is writing, and I do the selecting, and I can only see me through my eyes, my autobiography is inevitably partial, subjective and vulnerable to me constructing the picture of myself as I choose. So a critically appreciative reading of Augustine’s Confessions, Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, Teresa of Avila’s Life, and Wesley’s Journal would give good classic models. But then more contemporary autobiography like Thomas Merton’s Journals, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, Philip Toynbee’s Part of a Journey and End of a Journey, Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk,Frederick Buechner’s three volumes of autobiography, and one of the great mid 20th Century missionary accounts such as Geoffrey T Bull’s WhenIron Gates Yield. But your instinct is right – people writing their lives are helped to appropriate and assimilate important experience. Hope it all goes well.

    Reply

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