Visiting the sick

Many religions consider it an important act of charity, and piety, to visit the sick. While such visits are, in principle, voluntary, they become almost a duty, especially on the part of women. This includes women visiting family members, as well as religious orders of women that manage hospitals, or make their rounds to comfort the sick and the dying.

Lately, though, I’ve been seeing a potentially dark side to visiting the sick, especially when it is conducted not as a duty but as a task, even a mission.

I decided to write about this because I’ve seen the harmful effects from two perspectives. First, as a medical anthropologist who emphasizes the need for cultural sensitivity on the part of families and attending health professionals, I’ve seen how some of these visits lack cultural competence, sometimes even becoming cruel and terribly harmful to patients. Second, I’m writing on a personal level, as someone caring for elderly relatives and receiving requests from people who offer to visit, but whose religious zeal (I’m desisting from using another term) can obliterate the best intentions.

Visiting the sick is intended to comfort and even help to heal. For the dying, the visits are even more crucial, a time for affirming ties. With very close friends and relatives, these visits are fraught with emotions, and a measure of intimacy comes with the ability to tell the dying, “It’s all right, you can let go. We love you. We are here. We are all right, and we will take care of each other.”

These visits sometimes become occasions for the sick to ask for particular favors, from putting bank accounts and stocks in order to begging the last unmarried son to settle down. There’s an unspoken tradition here about fulfilling a deathbed request, even the impossible ones. A close friend told me about wanting to blurt out, “But mom, we don’t have same-sex marriages in the Philippines,” except that he knew it would send her off to the next world even more quickly.

Seriously, there are scripts—what and what not to say—that go with visits to the sick. But certain old scripts need to be reviewed because they are inappropriate—for example, the idea that one should visit the sick to convert the unconverted, or to make the patient repent. Some are more polite and say their intention is to help the patient in reconciling with the Creator or whoever.

Converting

Let’s deal with converting the unconverted. Being ethnic Chinese, I’ve seen this done many times with elderly relatives in a Catholic hospital. A priest or a sister comes around, and asks what the patient’s religion is. If it’s Buddhism, as with many Chinese until fairly recently, perhaps the patient would like to become a Catholic?

Overseas Chinese are a pragmatic lot; they know how to survive by playing the rules of a host country. This pragmatism also applies to matters related to the next world, with last-minute baptisms as a convenience. Typically, a local Chinese funeral goes from the funeral parlor to a Catholic church for a requiem Mass, and then moves on to the cemetery where a Buddhist monk takes over. The mourners are assured about the welfare of the deceased because a few days earlier, they had also consulted with Taoist priests and feng shui practitioners on an auspicious day for the funeral, and on the proper positioning of the tomb.

I remember a memorable experience, in the 1970s, with my paternal grandmother, a feisty devout Buddhist living in Davao who I frequently visited. One time I flew down because she had been admitted to and discharged from a hospital for some infection, and I wanted to be sure she was all right.

“All right” was an understatement. I found her still fuming from a visit, while in the hospital, from a Catholic priest who wanted to convert her. This is a woman who had built and managed a Buddhist temple. “I told the priest, I am Buddhist, and I will always be Buddhist,” she said.

I imagined her trying to make her point with her eclectic mix of Cebuano, Spanish and Chinese. I don’t know how she managed to say what she claimed to have said, but the priest did give up with his attempt at conversion. I don’t know if the priest thought he had failed… and lost a soul to damnation.

Repent, reconcile

Which takes me to the second point: getting the sick and the dying to “repent” or “reconcile.” It’s an obsession, especially with Catholics who believe their version of Catholicism is the only true religion. Just consider the continuing debate about whether Rizal recanted or not before being executed, and never mind that he was a good person, who died for others and for his country. Never mind, too, that Rizal’s writings, especially his correspondence with a former Jesuit teacher, Fr. Pablo Pastells, showed a man who was in fact trying to make sense of his personal convictions. The writings are deeply religious, deeply theological. What’s more important, it seems, was that his ideas were not in tune with the Catholic Church’s teachings in the 19th century, and that he had to renounce those heretical ideas.

Ah, I can hear some of you say now, but the Catholic Church’s teachings are timeless, transcending humanity and the world, and we must make sure the sick and the dying are one with these ideas.

So the task of people who believe this is to convince the sick that they have sinned and must return to the fold. Some are kind and gentle in their views, but insistent about the patient having strayed. Others can be brutal. I know of a young professor about to undergo serious surgery at the Philippine General Hospital, and a priest asked him about his views on reproductive health, practically lecturing him about reconciling with God’s views on reproduction.

When I heard that, I fumed. Who has the right to determine who needs repentance and reconciliation? And who has the right to determine how that reconciliation is to be done? A hospital administrator once asked me if it was right for one of its physicians, who was also a Protestant pastor, to go around “laying hands” (meaning, praying with hands outstretched over the patient). The problem was that he would do this not only with his patients but anyone else who happened to be in the ward!

It’s sad that a compassionate act, visiting the sick, should be so marked by insensitivity, with potential for causing so much distress.

Doubtless, there is room for a religious ritual if the patient requests it, or if the family knows that the patient wants it. But we have to be sure of how the patient views these rituals. The Catholic Church has renamed one of the sacraments as “anointing of the sick.” But many Catholics still use, and think in terms of, the old names—“last rites” and “extreme unction”—so a priest arriving for the anointing could look like the Grim Reaper.

When a well-meaning family friend came to visit my mother recently, offering to pray for her, our very wise midwife who cares for her diplomatically said thanks, but no thanks. She had cared for other elderly patients, and she said their blood pressure would rise when people came to pray for them, because they’d think they were dying.

My blood pressure would rise, too, if someday you came to visit me at home or in the hospital, offering to pray for me at my bedside. As my grandmother did, as my mother does, let me make my peace in silence, with loved ones who truly care.

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