Dr. Dorothy Panelli on looking into another’s eyes

Pastoral Care as the Realization of One-ness

The other day a friend spoke of the shock of feeling she had looked into another’s eyes and seen, as it were, their soul. The experience caused her to recall Thomas Merton’s words where he described being amongst a crowd of strangers in a shopping precinct when he came to the overwhelming realization that he loved the people around him. Suddenly it seemed he knew “they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers” and he felt as if he had woken “from a dream of separateness, of spurious self isolation….” [1] My friend pondered what it was that she really saw as she looked into another’s eyes. Was she seeing the other in that intimate and revealing moment, or herself? Had she discerned something in the other or, in a moment of insight, uncovered an inner awareness of herself?

I suspect most pastoral caregivers understand something of what my friend (and Merton) are describing.

I remember a man – a bombastic, aggressive, outrageous, outspoken, somewhat crude, short, stocky little man – someone I would not normally "like." (To be "correct", I should probably say, "someone whose behaviour I would not normally like", but the reality is that I, like many ordinary humans, tend to get behaviour muddled up with the person who behaves, and so judge both accordingly.) From the moment he arrived in our hospital ward, he began to bargain and to bully, even producing his cheque book as if he could somehow buy "improved" care and save himself. The sad fact was that this man's disease was worsening and he was facing the prospect of death associated with catastrophic haemorrhage. His forthright conversation and bombastic manner belied and protected his fear – the depth of which we could not even guess at – until the day he told his story to both a pastoral caregiver and a medical student. Then we understood.

As I heard it retold, it seemed I saw this man with clarity, as if I was looking through a newly cleaned window. I could no longer judge him for his behaviour. I understood he was once again living a child's terrifying experience – the loss through haemorrhage of the person who, at that time, had been most precious to him – his mother (she had died haemorrhaging in childbirth when he was six and he had been called out of school to be beside her .... in his words, "The ambulance didn't come"). I understood that now, once again, he faced the loss of the life that was most precious to him – his own.

As I heard and understood, I found that though I couldn't like the bombastic arrogant man who was trying so hard to manipulate and control, I could "love" and care for the man who was the frightened, vulnerable child, facing his future so much "alone" (as, at some level, we all do). Though I had not lost a mother, though I had lived none of this man's actual circumstances, I did know what it was like to be scared and vulnerable, to feel I was a child alone and unprotected in her world. Having my own experience called into resonance with this man's experience I wanted care and “love” for him as much as I wanted it for myself. There was no way I could deny him all the fullness of that care – such as it was in our power to provide.

When he died, I missed him and grieved for him, much as I think he would have grieved for himself. I was not alone. I think many of my team felt the same way, because we had seen the child, who was the man, who was also each one of us.

My friend hits the nail on the head when she asks whether we are seeing the other, or only seeing ourselves when we find ourselves arrested by such experiences. I think we see something of both – the other and ourselves – and we know, as Merton says, we are one.

Endnote:
[1] Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, New York: Doubleday, 1966.

First and foremost, Dorothy Panelli would describe herself as "an ordinary struggling human". The mother of three emerging young adult children, she currently works as staff specialist physician within the Palliative Care Unit of Southern Health Care Network, Melbourne, Australia. Her background is as a consultant physician in Intensive Care and Resuscitation in both the private and public health care sectors and as a pastoral care worker working with oncology patients and their families and friends. Her formal pastoral care training (CPE) was undertaken at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital and at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, and she studied theology, gaining her Grad Dip Theol from Melbourne College of Divinity.

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