Illumination from the "Edge of Life"

Listening Generously: The Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen
This is one of my favorite programs. I return over and over again to the formative story of hope Rachel Naomi Remen retold me, as her Orthodox rabbi grandfather taught it to her. It is the origin of the Jewish moral longing and commandment to "repair the world"; he called it "birthday of the world." In the beginning, Hasidic legend goes, something happened to shatter the light of the universe into countless pieces. They lodged as sparks inside every part of the creation. The highest human calling is to look for this original light from where we sit, to point to it and gather it up and in so doing to repair the world. This can sound like an idealistic and fanciful tale, but Rachel Naomi Remen calls it an important and empowering story for our time. It insists that each one of us, flawed and inadequate as we may feel, has exactly what's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch.

Our public life needs moral vocabulary like this as much as it needs sophisticated vocabulary for political, economic, and military analysis.

Right now, in fact, we need this kind of wisdom alongside hard economic analysis. We can use Rachel Naomi Remen's countercultural insistence that "living well" is never about eradicating our losses, wounds, and weaknesses. It is about understanding how they continually complete our identity and equip us to help others. In medicine she's seen time and again how even deep pathologies and failures become the source of unsuspected strengths. She believes that however difficult our lives become or how fraught our choices, most of us never lose our capacity to be whole human beings. We may forget that potential in ourselves, she insists, yet it can reappear full-blown in times of crisis.

The following passage from Naomi Remen's Kitchen Table Wisdom, which we read in this program, was written with physicians in mind. But it holds a resonant caution and challenge for all of us, I think, as we struggle to face — yet not be overwhelmed or numbed by — the suffering and frailty that are a fact of human existence near and far.

"The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet. This sort of denial is no small matter. The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance ourselves from life… We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn out because we've allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care."

I wish you a blessed Thanksgiving, and a renewed and enduring capacity to care.

I Recommend Reading:
Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
by Rachel Naomi Remen

"Coherent, elegant, mysterious, aesthetic," Rachel Naomi Remen writes in Kitchen Table Wisdom. "When I first earned my degree in medicine I would not have described life this way. But I was not on intimate terms with life then." Coherent, elegant, mysterious, and aesthetic are also apt words to describe the insights this book imparts in a rich medium of stories drawn from medicine and from life.