Unexpected Discoveries

I haven’t posted lately because I’ve been doing a lot of reading.

 And thinking. Thinking about how often we learn important lessons almost by accident. It’s not what we go looking for, but what we stumble across that makes the difference.

Almost thirty years ago I took the summer off to study music and practice the piano 

What does this have to do with
preaching?

intensively. It was a kind of sabbatical before we had sabbaticals. I learned a lot about music. But through the process of practicing, preparing and performing music, I learned more about preaching than I ever did in any homiletics class.

The historian J. H. Hexter wrote a wonderful essay about the process of discovery. He said that every historian has a field of research that he or she pursues intentionally; but real breakthroughs often come, not from that research, but from other sources – a book on an seemingly unrelated subject, or a random personal experience.

Hexter described this phenomenon using the metaphor of the medieval village, which was surrounded by an area of cultivated land called “the Sown.” That’s where the people systematically ploughed, planted, fertilized and reaped. But beyond the Sown was an area of uncultivated land called “the Waste” where anyone’s animals were free to graze.

The Sown, he said, is like the chosen field of research – or, if you’re not a scholar, the thing you deliberately set out to learn. But our discoveries often come from the “grazing” we do – the books and articles we read, the movies we watch, the conversations we have with strangers and friends.

I’ve been grazing lately. Several months ago, I read an article in The Atlantic magazine about whether our expensive health care system is doing what it’s supposed to do – make us healthier. The author of this article referred to eight or ten new books about the challenges facing our health care systems.  

One of them was entitled Being Mortal by the Boston surgeon Atul Gawande.

Atul Gawande

Lo and behold, it was available in the local library. I had to put a hold on it because it was checked out (always a good sign.) When I finally got to read it, parallels to my experience in the church leapt off practically every page.

Atul Gawande writes about the topic he knows as a highly skilled surgeon. But he really writes what it means to be human in an increasingly complex technologically driven world.  And it’s about whether our institutions achieve the purpose for which they ostensibly exist – to enhance human well being. And, if they don’t, what we can do about it.

After Being Mortal, I read his other three books.

Complications is about the incredible complexity of modern medicine. But it’s really about the humanity of the physician. No matter how much skill and training one has, mistakes and failures are inevitable, because the doctors from whom we expect superhuman ability are fallible human beings, just like their patients.

Better is about how to improve doctors’ performance. But it’s really about the importance of character. Doctors have all the training, skill and expertise they require. What’s needed are diligence, the wisdom to do the right thing, and ingenuity. Sometimes I wonder if, in ministry, we are intentional enough about trying to improve our performance, and how we would measure that improvement.

The Checklist Manifesto is about how a simple tool can make an enormous difference.  Gawande argues that medicine’s shortcomings will not be improved by more information. The problem is that there is so much information, it’s beyond the capacity of the human brain to cope with. Gawande helped to develop a simple surgical checklist that has drastically reduced complications and deaths from surgery worldwide.  I wonder what simple tools we could devise in ministry to be more effective at what we already know how to do?

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters Most is about the health care system’s inability to deal with the frail elderly and the terminally ill. Modern medicine is about curing disease and fixing what’s broken. But what do you do with someone who cannot be cured or “fixed.” Modern medicine, Gawande argues, is in a state of denial about the basic fact of human existence: we are mortal creatures who eventually break down and die. What does it mean to help people experience the fullest life possible, right up to the very end?

These questions cut to the heart of what we are facing as churches. Like so many of our individual members, many congregations are getting old, breaking down, coming to the end of their life cycle. My work as Presbytery Support Minister has shown me how we tend to discount those congregations because they can’t be “fixed” – and how we fail to nurture the life that is still in them to the full. What "matters most" in the situations in which our churches find themselves?  

But the implications of what Gawande is saying go beyond the issues of terminal illness or frail old age. He’s talking about living a full, rich and meaningful life even as we honestly face of the limitations of our mortality. "What matters most?" is a basic question at every stage of our lives.

Surely the Christian community should have something profound to say about this. We claim to have some insights into what matters most . Isn’t mortality one of the great themes of the Bible? Isn’t seeing mortality as a promise to be lived into, not a problem to be fixed, central to the Christian vision? Could renewal in our churches be less about institutional expansion and more about empowering people to engage with these questions in their own lives, especially as our society ages?

Sometimes I think the thing we need to do is read less about what to do about the church’s problems, and ponder more deeply what it means to be human in God’s world. And if we can help people on that journey, we’ll never need to worry about being “relevant.”

In future posts, I’m going to delve further into Atul Gawande’s books. I’d recommend them to anyone. They’re easily accessible and highly interesting and readable.

You can also check out these websites:

www.atulgawande.com

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/pastepisodes/the-2014-bbc-reith-lectures-the-future-of-medicine-part-1-1.2946586

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2014-bbc-reith-lectures-the-future-of-medicine-part-2-1.2946642

http://www.ted.com/talks/atul_gawande_how_do_we_heal_medicine?language=en