James Londis, an experienced healthcare administrator, currently directs the Office of Ethics and Corporate Integrity for the Kettering Medical Center Network. His journey is shaped by his past pastoral and teaching experience and his doctoral studies in philosophy. He writes from this perspective of healthcare and ministry.
This book, direct and to-the-point on key issues of faith-based healthcare and spiritual caregiving, may be considered an excellent text for health institutions and students entering health and pastoral care fields.
Londis paints a background from which he addresses several issues: Healing Beyond a Cure; Christian Spirituality and Healthcare Ministry; God’s Cure for Caregiver Burnout; and Suffering, Prayer, and God’s Plan for Our Lives. He begins with the description of the challenges facing today’s healthcare in its governmental and corporate mandate to treat wounds, but its seeming ineffectiveness in treating the spiritual dimension of woundedness. He reviews illness from a biblical perspective and from that of the current medical model that desires to take control of the disease (cure). He sums up the challenge: “Healing restores meaning, . . . and this is the religious and spiritual task of modern healthcare”—and no small task as pressured practitioners deal with the individuals and the families questioning their faith in God when the prayers offered in faith seldom result in a cure.
Londis points to Christ’s example and asserts that the caregiver must become “willing to engage in a spiritual ministry of healing by learning to feel as God feels about the patient”(xiii; emphasis added). Learned empathy, or what some might call spiritual development, is the ability to be able to open oneself up to another and respond through a profound awareness of the other person’s experience—to not only deliver compassionate treatment but also develop the capacity to feel as God feels. This could become a part of the preparatory process for healthcare practitioners regardless of their religious affiliation. Sabbath rest is recommended in order that caregivers recover and are refreshed. The author adds that there exists a responsibility to design systems, policies, and procedures that provide adequate rest for caregivers so that they may be healed even as they are healing.
Lastly, the author describes the struggle of finding meaning in the suffering and tragedies of life within the concept of a loving God. Whether or not the reader has formed an opinion on why bad things happen to good people, Londis shares his views of freedom of choice, and the consequences of those choices, without assigning blame to God or ascribing God’s direct involvement in determining every turn of life’s journey. When healthcare practitioners and their pastoral counterparts are prepared to understand these themes, they will comfort their patients in ways that promote healing.
