When do we receive real comfort and consolation?
Is it when someone teaches us how to think or act??
Is it when we receive advice about where to go or what to do?
Is it when we hear words of reassurance and hope?
Sometimes perhaps.
But what truly counts is that in moments of pain and suffering we find someone besides us.
More than any particular action or word of advice is the simple presence of someone who truly cares.— Henri Nouwen
DEFINITION
Origin: Greek
Noun: Sympónia, from συμπόνια
Meaning: Compassion, Sympathy, Commiseration, Charity, fellow feeling etcetera
HANNATU — A Paediatrician with a basket of Nail Polish
My friend Hannatu has recently completed an arduous residency in Paediatrics. She survived puzzling patient sicknesses, emergent injuries, and inhuman hours. Last week, with pride, invisible tears and bright-blue wrapping paper, I enclosed two books; one on the life of Mother Theresa and the other a compendium of household cures for tropical diseases for Hannatu. On the blank preliminary page of one of the books I wrote:
Dearest Hannatu,
I want to celebrate your completion of medical school and congratulate you on your Resident of The Year Award!
To honour you and mark this moment, I thought it appropriate to gift you with this book about Mother Teresa. Like you, she built her home where suffering lived. She dressed in compassion. She knew that “God is our God, the God of the living. In his divine womb, life is always born again. The great mystery is not the cures, but the infinite compassion which their source” (Henri Nouwen).
As a paediatrician, you will surely cure many sick children. At the same time, you’ll probably watch others suffer and die. Your gift to all of these patients will be your deep, rapid, and river-wide compassion. It’s a quality we noticed in you when we first met you. You have a servant’s heart for others…really, for the world. May God bless you as you bring your well-earned medical knowledge and heart of compassion to many children and their families
With pride and joy in your accomplishments,
Frederick Meliga
For the last 7 years, I have relished Hannatu’s residency stories. I feel as if I were there the day she first donned her yuck-green emerald scrubs and brought a basket of nail polish, makeup and glamour magazines and comics to a paediatric cancer ward.
I can perfectly imagine the time she put down her prescription pad and cried with the mother and father whose toddler was pronounced DOA after choking on a large button he found in the mother’s utility bowl.
Another story I will never forget involved an expectant couple who received fetal test results indicating their baby would be born severely deformed and with little or no cognitive ability. Hannatu listened to the parent’s concerns, worries, fears, devastation and even anger. When they both decided to see the pregnancy full term, Hannatu prayerfully and enthusiastically supported their decision.
9 months later, when the baby was born with a loud wail and impeccable health, Hannatu joined in an exuberant neonatal celebration.
Regardless of the results of Hannatu’s medical treatments and recommendations she is committed to being with her patient and their parents. She understands that compassion means being with (com) people in their moments of pain (passion). In rooms dense with the stagnant air of medicine and antiseptics standing beside beds tucked tightly in sterile sheets, Hannatu has accompanied the hurting as they face a melee of diagnosis, symptoms and options.
Her eyes, gentle and brown with concerns truly see the patients whom she serves. Her voice, never calculating or cold, sounds like the cautionary melody of a mother bird singing to the birdies in her nest.
We are all created with the ability, the need to reach out, to join ourselves with others, in love, to feel with and for others. The words sym-pathy (with passion) and em-pathy (in passion) both tell a story.
LUCI SHAW
A few months ago I visited Hannatu and her husband in Abuja. I was impressed by their artful, comfortable decor with was executed in shades of chocolate brown, white and cream. Their art, furniture, and floral arrangements took my breath away. Though Hannatu and Jasper have built an exquisite place as a home, Hannatu has built her true home in any place where people are sick and suffering.
Compassion means going directly to those people and places where suffering is more acute and building a help-home among them.
GOD’S WORD — Healing in The Pages.
God’s compassion is total, absolute, unconditional, and without reservation. It is the compassion of the one who keeps going to the most forgotten corners of the world and who cannot rest as long as he knows that there are still human beings with tears in their eyes. — HENRI NOUWEN
The Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments, tells us graphically about God’s compassion. Splangchnizomai, the Greek word meaning “to be moved with compassion” is found 12 times in the New Testament. It connotes a “spilling of guts,” indicating that when Jesus was feeling compassion it came from a deep, central place within Him. In essence, a compassionate spirit is Christ’s essence. And it literally moved Him from heaven to earth.
When I think of compassion, I immediately remember Jesus’ Passion. I remember the say He walked the Via Dolorosa (The Way of Suffering). And I think of the man named Simon, a Cyrene who was forced to carry the cross for part of the journey on that Jerusalem road. In all four gospels, Simon is merely briefly mentioned. But I like to imagine that he was a follower of Jesus. I see the way he trailed after Jesus, bearing the heavy, splintering on that cross piece. I imagine that as Simon dragged the cross behind a dehydrated, whip-striped Jesus he was portraying the world’s truest sense of compassion-actually being with Jesus during the archetypal passion. The Bible does not elaborate, but I like to think Simon had encouraging words for Jesus.
I can just hear Simon whispering to a battered, bruised, bloody, bedraggled Christ, “You can do it. We’re almost there.” Maybe Simon was once in the midst of one of the crowds that followed Jesus? Perhaps he even borrowed some of Jesus’ own words to comfort Him: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled…Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you…Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:3,6,10-12).
Christ made His home in first-century Palestine: eating, walking, speaking, befriending, dying… Simon the Cyrene made his home near the One who had come by carrying the cross, wailing with Christ, caring.
Many of my friends have been Simon to me. And when they cannot be next to me, the Bible is my Simon, walking with me, whispering words of encouragement when my days feel dark and dismal.
When I am suffering, I also turn to the story of the “Woman of Bleeding” in Luke 8. She wrestled through the crowd to get near to Jesus, and with last-ditch need and hope, reached for the hem of His robe. In His presence, she was healed. Near Him, touching Him with faith, close enough to hear His voice, she was healed.
One of my dearest friends, who sometimes struggles with depression, asks her husband to read Scripture aloud to her on particularly dark days. Because of my own knee cramps that sometimes prohibit me from kneeling while praying, I think her idea is brilliant. She says that when she is unable to read the Bible, hearing God’s Word read in her husband’s resonant bass calms her and makes her more aware of truth and light and God’s presence.
Words can be healing. It amazes me how opening the Bible to certain passages spreads a healing balm on broken bodies, hearts, and spirits. Whether we reach for the hem of Jesus ourselves or a friend does it for us, the truth of God-with-us, God as our true Home, helps.
In the Bible, God promises to be our Healer. He never promises a cure. But He promises, like Hannatu, to see our pain and be with us in it. No matter how chronic our hurt or how deep our depression, our Healer is waiting with a surprising, mysterious, ultimate healing. He is making His home with us. We may not understand this in the middle of the muck and mire of our circumstances. Cancer may not be remitted, depression may not always be assuaged, and babies may die too soon. But God will ultimately redeem, renew, and restore. When we need help believing this, reading the Bible (or having someone read it to us) can bring us closer to Jesus, near enough to touch the hem of His garment.
I am the LORD, who heals you… EXODUS 15:26
§§
Dei Profundis
Thanks for stopping by and reading this post to the end.
Dei Profundis will like to hear your thoughts and reviews on our posts in the comment section.
We love and appreciate all of you readers for the attentiveness, perusal, in-depth reading, and sharing. It is our sincere desire to sympathize with the core of your appreciative capabilities as we try to CAPTURE MOMENTS WITHIN THE CONCEPT OF GOD.
We crave your indulgence in helping us make Dei Profundis better. . . if you are blessed or the least enjoy any of our posts, kindly share — be our colleague and extension in spreading our passions and beliefs.
God bless you all.
XoXo ♥
© Dei Profundis 2022
Dei Profundis 