Does God Go to Medical School?

Written the night before my first day of classes, back in August. Good times, good times. I guess I might never be able to answer this quesiton with any sort of credibility. Oh well.

8/10/14

One of the most stirring things about starting medical school—frankly the only thing that gives me any remote signal of peace as I am about to embark on this heated, mercurial climb towards a degree—is the prospect of writing what I hope will be the start of my book.

It will certainly have a captivating title. Provocative, alluring, inquisitive, just everything you need in a title. It will be the kind of title that upon reading, immediately takes control of your fingers—as if the title-processing part of the brain and the manual-motor-control part of the brain are dendritically linked, for some reason beyond any Darwinian explanation—and makes your fingers sensually rub along the edges of the binding and pull open the cover so you can read the synopsis that clings to the margin of the plasticky inside.

Then you’re still intrigued, maybe even impressed, so you flip straight through the meat of the book—as the cool wind and the stale smell it carries remind you why you love to read—to the back cover, which is there to put a hard, cold, merciful finality to the madness within. You do this in hopes that you will see a picture of the author, because you need more than anything in the world to put a face to the creator of such a title, so you can make a decision as to whether that face is cool enough, and decide whether it has depth, whether the eyes have seen things worth reading about, whether the mouth has spoken words that others have not thought to speak, whether the hair has tasted the kind of sweat that only the rawest emotions can force through the pores. And you crane your neck—despite it being a two dimensional image, which you full-well know is immune to the laws of stereo optics—to try to get a glimpse of the author’s hands peeking out from behind the border of the photo, because you can’t really know a face—and you definitely can’t fully know a man—without knowing something about his hands. You need more than anything to decide whether that face and the hands that have touched it are worthy to be the generator of such a bad-ass title.

I hope the book will function as a “how to find God in medical school”—if my faith is anywhere near where I want it to be, this might even be an appropriate title. But there is no controversy there, and controversy sells. Therefore, I prefer to ask: Does God Go to Medical School? This will be the title. It also more accurately represents my current apprehensions. The way I am feeling, that question seems legitimate, and worth asking.

God-loving, social justice hippies who for some reason decided to go to medical school will surely want to read this book. They might be afraid of it, because they will fear the answer to the question that the title so fearlessly poses. And since I can’t really know the answer until it is all said and done, they won’t find out the answer until the book is all said and done. And that will make reading the book all the more mysterious, and challenging, and impossible to put down. I need to get off my high-horse. I haven’t even made it through the fourth paragraph, and already this thing is a best-seller. Plus, I’m scared of horses. Their eyes are just too black. It makes them impossible to trust. But you know who else would want to read it? Probably my mother. So it has a huge target audience. God-loving, social justice hippies considering a career in medicine, and my mom, will love this book.

I finally made the decision to give this whole medical school thing a shot. This idiom was not chosen for wordplay on my becoming a physician, nor do I think it was chosen as a result of some subconscious spilling of childhood traumas involving my pediatrician, but I can’t know that one for sure.

I am pretty terrified about all this. One of the scariest things for me is the whole concept of time. I don’t know what is going to happen to it. It will slip through my fingers, as my mind is running 100 km/hr, and my body is still. It will slip through my fingers like an obese jellyfish, and I am definitely going to be inundated, and drowning, so it will be that sort of water-enhanced slippery with the jellyfish and all. It is just a complete 180 degree turn from everything I lived, came to believe in, had affirmed from last year. The mantra from my year with Bon Secours was more or less, “less is more.” The best song that captured how we intentionally lived our life was the Head and the Heart’s “Let’s Be Still”.

I learned that living life slowly means living life fully, and that sometimes doing nothing is really not that at all. I learned that being present is the supreme gift we receive and that presence is the greatest gift you can give. It is therefore, deriving from lessons of my pre-kindergarten education, the greatest thing that can be shared. I learned that time to reflect and be with God was time well spent, even if I wasn’t earning a grade or a promotion for it. Time was always on my side, because time didn’t matter. I could spend an hour cooking dinner, play the guitar for another hour, talk to my housemates about their relationships with people and Jesus and the little kids next door. I could do all this, and be filled by the simplicity and wonder of our existence.

It feels like I am throwing this all out the window. Each morning I will open my bedroom window, and drop this, and it will shatter against the hot cement of the parking deck that lies five floors below my 10th floor apartment; and every day I will have to race downstairs and quickly reassemble the fragmented lessons, so I can try to carry at least a chunk of that existence with me into lecture, and keep that haphazardly reassembled life in my pocket so I can stroke it throughout the day and be reminded of a time when I was at peace and in close contact with God.

Medical school does not seem to be a place for God. It doesn’t seem like the environment Jesus would want to hang out in, and if Jesus doesn’t want to be there, it’s probably because God is not, for Jesus always seemed to be in search of His old man. I haven’t even started yet, but that is the assumption I have made about God and Jesus, and the environment in which young men and women are pursuing a medical degree. It all seems incompatible.

It was all just simple last year—immersing myself in the warm waters of beautiful people, broken people, people who needed love because it was the only thing they were offered; people who needed God because He was the only one who would offer it. I am very much in a different world now. I need to learn how to find God in a different world.

The city I am in—Newark—is much like that place I came to know God so well last year (Baltimore). There is destitution and violence and crime, so that is comforting. It makes me think that God should be around here too, since he seems to have a preferential option for these people and places, or something like that. This makes my experience in Baltimore sound very selfish—like I was exploiting the poverty of a fractured city to serve as some sort of graced medium to deliver the Gospel to me, so that I may finally begin to understand the message of Jesus. I forgive myself for the selfishness, though. I love Baltimore for its ability to do just that.

The problem is this: I am in a similar city, but I am in a much different world. I am writing this in my room, in an on-campus building, and this on-campus building is teeming with young adults who are flying around to make the world a better place. Having just written that, it actually sounds like it would be a decent breeding ground for God and things holy, but no one has the time to let him in.

Something a second-year student said at orientation the other day made me cry. I am glad no one saw, but there were tears climbing over the lower lip of my eye, and sliding down my cheek in the third row of a cold, dry lecture hall.

The presentation was about the many unconventional paths students might take to medical school. The stories were meant to be inspiring. This student shared with us how she had to repeat her first year. She said she was too involved with her family. She was the eldest sibling, and both her parents worked full-time, so she was in a position where she would often be preparing dinners, picking her sisters up from school, and generally just being committed to the well-being of her kin. It cost her success in school, of the academic kind. She failed a course and was forced to repeat the year. She told us how the second time around, “School had to come first, and my family second. They would have to accept this.” She finished that year with honors. People were satisfied, awed by her courage, and I was crying. It was one of the saddest stories I had ever heard. I couldn’t help but wonder if her sisters were still waiting for a ride home from school. It all just flew in the beautiful face of everything I had come to know about the right way to live.

That is why this is hard right now. I am so confused. I hope God is here—He must be, right? it just comes back to that issue with time and space. I guess that is the difference: God is here, I just need to take the time to find Him. I don’t know what that will look like. Maybe God does, and maybe if I take the time, I can find out from Him how I can find Him.

#medschool