Bruce Feldstein, MD, spent 19 years as an emergency room physician before becoming a chaplain at Stanford's medical center. In a Q&A today, Feldstein discusses his job and unique background and offers his view on how faith and healing are intertwined:
We often think of healing in medical terms. But healing is more than fixing or curing. People who are dying can still experience healing. There are terminal conditions that can’t be reversed or fixed, but a broken relationship can be mended. There is healing in moving from brokenness toward wholeness, toward acceptance. There is healing in recognizing there is a part of each one of us that is pure and good. Within each of us, there is a human longing for meaningful connection. We help alleviate suffering when we create the conditions for connection with each other and what we hold sacred.
Rachel Naomi Remen put it best when she said, “We can offer healing with our humanity that we can’t fix with our science.”