Most of us are not in community with the doctors we deal with nowadays. They are not good friends, they don't tend to be fellow church goers. They work and generally live at some distance. They are professionals, which means they do highly specialized or technical procedures for pay- as opposed to amateurs, that word literally meaning lovers, ones who do the things they do out of love. And though I appreciate the role of professional physicains a great deal, I also feel the need to know, when I'm sick, that I'm loved.


"The community is the smallest unit of health" (and well-being), says farmer-essayist Wendell Barry. I was fighting off a cold earlier this week and tired to avoaid contact with others. I did what I should have done. God is real, but so are germs, and I figure, why spread them around if I don't have to? Still, over the long haul, noe of us can ever be well in isolation frim one another. The smallest category of wellness is community, NOT the individual in isolation.

When I was a child, Doc Kinzie, our family doctor, was the most trusted, revered person we knew. He was also a member of our church. His wife Geneva taught high school English literature and was a licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren. She sometimes preached in the pulpit; sometimes Doc did too. In our church, there was no contradiction between modern medicine and belief in God; between women in leadership roles and our read of the Bible; hardly any contradiction between things secular and sacred. Sure, mean people exisited, graceless and stupid things happened, untimely and pointless deaths occurred. Then as now, in the church, and in every profession, however much respected, there was also stupidily and gracelessness and all those things that make life sometimes so furstrating. The other doctor in town, Doc Conners was, to quote my dad's blunt manner of speaking, a drunkard. But on occasion, when dad needed a doctor, and Doc Kinzie wasn't available, he would consult with Doc Conners. I asked him once how he could do that, and he said, "Well, Doc Conners is a pretty good doctor, even if he IS a drunkard!" I gradually accepted the fact that even the best of heroes and healers are only human, and even the weakest and most fallible of all can be helpful to us. When I went to Doc Kinzie for some childhood malady, I did so confidently. It wasn't that he was such a superior physician to the 'drunkard' down the road. But he was part of the extended family that was our church community. And we knew that he loved us. We knew that he cared. We expected to get the best he new how to give us. So: we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable and real in his presence.

All of us who were blessed enough to have been surrounded as children by grown ups who loves us know that (Barry:) "our sense of wholeness is not a sense of completeness-in-ourselves, but a sense of belonging to one another." Doc Kinzie's power to heal had to do with his having been OUR doctor; in a sense, he belonged to us. He could touch, we could trust, because as a whole, we trusted the entire extended family, the very faith community itself, of which he was a part.