Lifelong learning 

Rereading The Healer’s Calling written by the Franciscan friar and physician Daniel Sulmasy, I saw reflected some core instructions within the Rule of Benedict. The most striking similarities I conclude are the encouragement to learn by listening, and to strive for humility. 

Sulmasy concludes medicine draws one to pursue their deepmost  longing for meaning while accepting the imposed demands, sacrifices, and a certain amount of humility in surrender to reality and uncertainty.  In short – medicine exposes the need to admit what one does not know.  

At its core the practice of medicine should balance science, skill, and the interpersonal attribute commonly called art – in dealing with suffering and pain. Medicine’s lifelong learning and refinement of skills requires a series of mentors and the humility to submit to their wisdom and knowledge. Peers, associates, patients, families, classroom, laboratory, and clinical instructors are properly seen as teachers and many rise to the challenge as mentors 

So too, the Rule encourages lifelong learning, humility and a deepening engagement with one’s calling and community – a conversion, a metanoia, a conversio morum. Mentorship is paramount in religious formation and boldly demanded in the first words of the introduction to the Rule: “Listen, carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” The Rule is, as it claims to be, a text for a school – a school for the lord’s service. So, too, is medical education and training a school for the service of patients.  

In both medicine and religious life, self-discipline, delayed gratification, elements of self-renunciation have traditionally been part and parcel. Both developed long before twenty-first century contemporary distractions and societal mores, electronics, and artificial intelligence. Paradoxically, they are deeply personal, yet relational. Theology and science both have controversy, false starts, breakthroughs and apparent frustrations, but truth remains. The challenge is to allow the spirit of truth to work through us, one and all. 

The Rule, medicine, and a “life lived” in general, properly urge us to listen readily to appropriate readings and devote time often to reflection (4:55).  It encourages one in humility to “not consider yourself an exert or accomplished before you really are; but, to first be disciplined as you may truly be called so.” (4:62) 

Commitment, humility, lifelong learning, mentorship, performance with decorum and within guidelines appropriate to the vocation are, indeed, aspects of the caring and healing professions and to all seeking Christian maturity. Mentors function as spiritual directors to allow for what Presbyterian minister Ellen Branham calls “discernment partners” in the quest to engage with the question “what is truth”?  

Richard Fitzgerald