In her book Sharing the Darkness, doctor Sheila Cassidy explores the forms of caring and support available within a hospice environment, and how these relate to pastoral care. Her work in palliative care, and her close interaction with patients and their families, brought her into contact with folk for whom suffering, fear and questions of mortality were daily realities.
How to sustain people in hopefulness, support their relatives through the anxiety, sadness and process of bereavement, and yet keep working with dedication and compassion towards their healing and the alleviation their pain, was aburden borne as part of a dual vocation.
As she tells in her early autobiography, Audacity to Believe, Cassidy had trained as a doctor, and had worked in Chile in the 1970's, and been arrested during the coup d'etat and its aftermath. She had treated a wounded insurgent and was tortured by state secret police to extract information which in fact she did not have.
Following her release after a major diplomatic crisis between the UK and Chile, Cassidy became a nun. But her medical training, itself a gift of God and too valuable to simply be abandoned, led her into work with the dying, and into further medical training.
By the time she wrote her book about her hospice experience she was workin in Plymouth. I remember reading that book, and being moved deeply by its model of care based on affirming and upholding the dignity and value of each person within and on the periphery of the hospice community – patients, relatives, carers and staff. It is in this context that she told of one of her inner strategies for coping with people's pain, fear and sadness, and how to bear the burden of expectations placed on her as medical director.
Here's what she did. She looked each day for the sign of the cross, a reminder of the eternal love of God intersecting in our own daily time. The suffering love of Christ, and the hope of resurrection beyond the cross, helped uphold her own faith and emotional resilience day in and day out. She looked for the sign of the cross and found it on window lattices, door panels, floorboards, garden fences, furniture joints. Over the years I started doing the same thing; not in the same continuous way as a form of devotional discipline, but alert to cruciformity wherever it turns up.
Today, standing in John Lewis waiting to pay for a new mattress, there was this old repair to the floor tiles with tape worn thin by the walking of a few thousand feet. And I remembered Sheila Cassidy, hospice director, doctor, former nun and outspoken and outstanding Christian, and her daily attentiveness to the sign of the cross. And I gave thanks.
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