Commentary: A metaphor for healing has the potential to transform the world.
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Not long after he was elected to lead the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis described an arresting vision of how people of good will might respond to a world cursed by violence, riven by suffering and threatened by environmental ruin: the field hospital — a metaphorical tent erected in a crisis zone, staffed by empathetic individuals poised to embrace the suffering stranger.
“The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity,” Francis said in a 2013 interview published in America magazine. “I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. You have to heal the wounds. Then we can talk about everything else.”
Francis’ metaphor of a field hospital summons familiar images of altruists who instinctively rush toward danger to ease suffering and save human life. These are not necessarily religious people: The pacifist stretcher-bearers tending to the wounded in the trenches of World War I. Doctors Without Borders fighting famine and disease around the world. The World Food Kitchen delivering sustenance to starving Palestinians. First responders who rush to the scene of a tragedy. Journalists who bear witness to brutality and the abuse of power. Activists who protest injustice and stand up for the vulnerable. Bodhisattvas who vow to ease suffering for every sentient being.
Francis, who died April 21 at the age of 88, had assumed leadership of a religious institution in disarray, riven by scandal and bitter doctrinal disputes between liberals and conservatives.
Sexual misconduct and abuse of power in the all-male hierarchy had turned many away from Catholicism, especially women. And organized religion of all kinds was losing its appeal, as increasing numbers of people think of themselves as spiritual, not religious.
Francis’ field hospital metaphor offered a fresh vision to how to respond to the evil and chaos in the world: an inclusive and altruistic community without walls that is a process rather than an institution: a place of healing and reconciliation, powered by individual acts of courage and compassion.
At a time when evil is often expressed in the faceless actions of authoritarian governments and institutions — mass detentions, demonization of minorities, obscene exercises of naked power — to serve in the field hospital of the present makes a real human difference. To respond to the human disasters unfolding before our eyes with individual acts of healing — person by person, wound by wound — has the potential to transform the world.
The idea of a field hospital — an island of calm in the chaos — has cosmic significance. To stand in solidarity with those who suffer is to speak the truth and take real action under daunting circumstances. In the bleak moral urgency of the present, this kind of courageous compassion can be a useful and necessary instrument to guide a wounded world away from evil and back to the original harmony that the creation myths of Genesis so vividly describe.
What does it take to serve in the field hospital of contemporary life? How do people of good will cultivate courageous compassion for the benefit of all? How can human beings evolve, individually and collectively, particles in an ever-expanding wave of compassionate energy that binds us together in peace?
Every era has its visionaries, prophets and saints: people who take heroic action in response to urgent moral crises. But saints are known to have sinned. Visionaries occasionally need corrective lenses. The words of the prophets are often ignored. Pope Francis’ prophetic voice is now silent. But his vision of a field hospital as a place of healing will continue to illuminate the darkness of our wounded world.
— By Joan Connell
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