In Search of the Healing Spirit

By Nass Cannon Jr. and John Cannon

The late Dr. Nass Cannon Jr. (MD) was a physician for the indigent poor for over forty years and an internationally renowned scholar of the theologian and monk, Thomas Merton. In Search of the Healing Spirit follows a narrative arc across several essays of Dr. Cannon's analysis and reflections on life and Thomas Merton's theological contributions. First articulated by Dr. Cannon at the outset of his journey to serve the poor, the guiding principle of the book is an exploration of what it means to be broken and called to heal each other, ourselves, and the world. As Dr. Cannon writes, "I am a physician who views his root identity as one called to heal. Yet, I experience myself as broken, as one admonished by the phrase, 'Physician, heal thyself.' Perhaps you, too . . . experience yourself as a broken healer. Let us together explore some notions regarding the healer as broken, examine the nature of healing, and consider the relationship of the healer to one healed." From this position as a broken healer, which implicitly embodies Merton's contemplative spirituality, Dr. Cannon's meditations over the course of his life of service increasingly weave in Merton's contributions in search of the true self on such pressing--and universal--topics as grief and loss, the eternal nature and healing power of love, and to do what we can for each other with the time we are given. Dr. Cannon's writings engage a twenty-first-century audience with insights--drawn from fifty years of study--that can aid lay persons, clergy, and academics to better understand what it means to be a broken person and through that brokenness to heal themselves and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Jun 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666755558

Book preview

Introduction

Our late father, Dr. Nass Cannon Jr. (MD), was born in 1943 as the youngest of four children to immigrant Lebanese parents who ran a small town department store in Farmville, North Carolina. He emerged from North Carolina tobacco country searching for his place in the world and cast his sights further afield. First to the University of Notre Dame, before returning to North Carolina for medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill, before venturing deeper into the South, where he landed in Birmingham, Alabama, as the city staggered out of the 1960s civil rights movement and into the economic dislocation of the 1970s. Against this backdrop, as the region’s steel industry shuttered, the urban core hollowed out, and income inequality surged, Dr. Cannon rose to become clinical professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Medical School. But as a devout Catholic, who spent his life growing in faith and wisdom, he was called toward addressing the plight of the poor to help in their healing. In 1983, Dr. Cannon became a physician at the county hospital recently established to provide healthcare to all, including those unable to afford medical services. At Cooper Green Hospital and Mercy Clinic, he held various positions over four decades, and served a third of that time as its chief of staff. In this role, Dr. Cannon’s life was devoted to fighting for healthcare equality and racial dignity based on the belief that healthcare is a right, not a privilege of only those who can afford it. Serving the poor and forgotten was central to his mission, teaching of medical residents, and personal life.

An inquisitive and caring soul, Dr. Cannon questioned the orthodoxy of commercialized healthcare and heeded his call to service as a longtime physician for the indigent poor. His search for spiritually nourishing healing ultimately led to his explorations concerning the theologian and monk Thomas Merton. Dr. Cannon did not see healing and spirituality as independent spheres but as conjoined parts of an individual’s overall health. Health and spirituality were intricate components of one’s path toward joy. In this way, he ultimately found that Thomas Merton’s passion for the fullness of life amid monastic quietudes paved a path worth exploring.

Dr. Cannon and Merton both started their deepest spiritual journeys in pursuit of their callings from a place of deconstructed bareness. Merton’s trials led him to Cistercian Trappists in Kentucky, where his brokenness served as fuel for the fire of his spiritual ardor and prolific theological explorations. Dr. Cannon, in his own way, confronted the notional idea of physician as exemplar and probed how a healer’s healing derived its greatest power from engaging with our shared human frailties. Dr. Cannon, through his essays The Broken Healer, A Quest for Health, and Concupiscence or Caritas challenged the relationship between healer, patient, and the institutionalizing forces of a desensitized healthcare industry amid unfettered capitalism’s more broadly corrosive effects on society. Dr. Cannon’s early search for the healing spirit is bookended with his revelation in The Tears of Things that binding oneself to a deep contemplative practice may sublimate rancorous grief and provide a means for processing grief, joy, and the love that lies between.

Dr. Cannon used Merton’s insights as a contemplative mirror to examine his own spiritual journey as a broken healer (No Mirror, No Light—Just This!), authenticity (Attending to the Presence of God), actualization of one’s full self through passionate loving engagement with the world (Thomas Merton and the Journey of Personhood and Thomas Merton and St. John of the Cross: Lives on Fire), the integration of monastic spiritual balance with lay professions (Stand on Your Own Feet! Thomas Merton and the Monk without Vows or Walls), before finally taking us toward joyful love (A Path to Peace, The Road to Joy, A Stranger No More, and Grow Foolish in Love).

In this way, Nass Cannon’s writings have been organized in this book according to themes that animated his life: health, spirituality, and love. These themes were present and alive in the three most important domains he traversed on his own road toward a joyful life—his call to medicine, his active faith, and in abiding lovingness toward all, especially his family. From the outset of his journey to serve those most in need, Dr. Cannon explored what it means to be broken and called to heal each other, ourselves, and the world. From this position as a broken healer, Dr. Cannon’s meditations over the course of his life of service increasingly wrestled with the transformative implications of Merton’s theology. This lifelong study of Merton and other souls on fire offers readers in search of the healing spirit a torch to illuminate new areas of healing, spirituality, and love on their own road to joy.

This collection of essays provides an exploration of the routes toward healing and reveals that through our brokenness we encounter godly love, which has the power to heal ourselves, each other, and the world.

Bryant Cannon

March 2023

Berkeley, California

1

The Broken Healer

¹

I am a physician who views his root identity as one called to heal. Yet, I experience myself as broken, as one admonished by the phrase, Physician, heal thyself. Perhaps you, too, in your healing ministry, experience yourself as a broken healer. Let us together explore some notions regarding the healer as broken, examine the nature of healing, and consider the relationship of the healer to one healed.

The Healer as Broken

More than most, healers—all of us—share in the mortality and brokenness of all. We experience our brokenness as physical, mental, and spiritual. We are not immune to the wear and tear of too many sleepless nights, lack of exercise, ulcers, heart diseases, cancer, strokes—the lot of man and his human condition. In our care for our patients, we ponder their decline and see ourselves, as though we were looking into a mirror and watching our own deterioration. We breathe sickness, suffering, death, and dying—we inhale the phenomena like a chain smoker, all the while with a finger on our pulse and a self-reflective mind awaiting our own inevitable collapse. We move through the world of sickness and suffering, not as an observer, remote and detached, but as a participant, one victim among other victims; the days, the nights, become a blur of tormented faces, racked bodies, confused minds—an endless stream of suffering humanity passing by—not so much before us as with us, as together we march toward death.

As we minister unto others, we must not be surprised at our own capacity for betrayal and even evil. As broken healers, we will find in ourselves the darkness that is part of our interior. Rage, sadism, violence, disgust, hatred, rejection, malice, envy, greed, pride, jealousy, lust, rebellion are all part of us. In our encounters, these dark forces often surface, tempting us to injure those we seek to heal. Also, long exposure to suffering creates a numbing effect—an anesthetization of our sensibilities best classified and expressed as indifference. The recognition of these forces in us is an opportunity for humble growth. By acknowledging our weaknesses and seeking forgiveness when appropriate, we find healing as we seek to heal.

Two virtues—not often discussed but direct fruits of our brokenness as healers—are an experience of sorrow and growth in tenderheartedness.

As healers, we experience sorrow in our relationships with others—sorrow in our errors of judgment, sorrow in our limited capabilities, sorrow in our neglect and indifference. We inhabit a world of sorrow, a world deeper than regrets or sadness, a world in touch with the aches and pains of the human heart. This pain-filled world is more than just a reaction—I am sorry: It is deeper than that. Sorrow is a property of love, when there is nothing it can do to change the suffering of the other person, other than suffer with them. Sorrow presupposes care, concern, and love. A measure of our love is a measure of our sorrow.

Tenderheartedness is more than sympathy. A virtue, opposed to indifference, it is an interior stance—an attitude more easily recognized by another person than by oneself. It involves having tender feelings, but tenderhearted­ness is more than just feelings. There are times when storms of anger, revulsion, frustration, and even rage arise in our encounters. Tenderheartedness relates to the will to treat others as you would have them treat you—no matter what the circumstances. It is to have a human heart, a will to encounter a human person, not a disease or a process. It is the constant struggle not to let our beliefs, prejudices, and feelings create barriers in our encounters. Tenderheartedness must not be misconstrued as the evasion of a hard decision or even softness in the face of a necessary confrontation; the denial of emotion; or retreat before the truth of physical, mental, or spiritual realities. Rather, it is an interior stance of openness, of receptivity: an I-wish-you-well attitude. It regards you as a friend, and its communications are I-wish-to-help-you. A measure of the depth of our personal experience of our brokenness, a tender heart radiates kindness, patience, and compassion.

Brokenness is a precondition for healing. This power to heal, an incomprehensible mystery, the Way of Divine Love, can be experienced, even though not understood. When God says, What do you want? we say, To be healed, to be reconciled. We expose our brokenness. Touched by his healing power, we experience the healing of our own bodies, minds, and souls. But, we also discover, he says, Go and do likewise. In the mutual dependence of the healing encounter, we learn that he heals us as we consent to heal others. We are reconciled as we reconcile. We discover that our brokenness is a precondition for healing.² Our search for health of mind, body, and soul through the medium of God’s power to heal becomes the source of healing for others—our brokenness conjoined to his. Exploding then from the very depths of our brokenness comes the power to heal. As we assent to heal one another, to care for one another, God assents to heal us, to care for us, so that, in the process of healing, we find healing—because that is the medium through which he chooses to encounter us.

The Nature of Healing

The essence of healing is not the alleviation of suffering (although that is an important element), but reconciliation. Genuine healing is not simply a repair process, a replacement of spare organs, or the eradication of an infectious illness. Genuine healing transcends the repairing process to include deep integration of body, mind, and spirit.

Healing involves a reconciliation of the body as made subject to mind, and mind made subject to spirit, and spirit made subject to the Spirit of God. This reconciliation is an integration, a harmony, a tendency toward wholeness, a subjection of priorities—body to mind, mind to spirit. Our bodies could be put in the service of our minds, harnessed to a spirit of power, of domination: a Herculean body could be put in the service of an ascetic and disciplined mind, and thereby put into service of this world. Alternatively, a disciplined body could be harnessed to an orderly mind, put in the service of the suffering servant,³ characterized by love, gentleness, service, justice, and peace in relationships.

There are priorities in healing. God’s priorities may not be ours. Perhaps, his highest priority is the healing of the soul, then the mind, then the body. The phenomenon of human suffering is a mystery and will remain so. But sometimes it seems that the body is allowed to suffer and the mind assaulted for the sake of building up spirit-generating virtues. Our allocation of resources reverses these priorities. Most of our attention is directed toward the body, little to the mind, and virtually none to the spirit.

Isaiah’s account of the suffering servant⁴ reveals, in mystery, the heart of all healing. In his account, healing arises from a suffering servant whose stripes and brokenness generate healing. We, as healers, are invited to share in the brokenness of the suffering servant; we are invited to explore our own brokenness, to join it to his, and share, too, in his power to heal. Healthcare, as a composite of care providers with specialized knowledge, medications, technology, and procedures, ensues in a profound encounter if permeated by the spirit of the suffering