Hospital Chaplain Says, Stop Seeing Yourself As A Disease

“Get down off your cross.”

Harsh words, perhaps, especially when you consider that the one who said them is a longtime hospital chaplain, and the woman she was speaking to had just learned that a year after going through chemotherapy, she was still cancer free.

“Within two minutes, she started retelling the story of her diagnosis, and her surgery, and her chemo, even though as her chaplain I saw her every day,” recounted Debra Jarvis, an ordained minister affectionately known as “The Irreverent Reverend,” during last year’s TEDMED conference. “She was using words like suffering, agony, struggle. And she ended her story with, ‘I felt crucified.’”

It was then that Jarvis asked this woman to do what would likely require more of her than anything she’d done before: “Get down off your cross.”

Something Jarvis has observed during her many years working in an oncology care unit is the tendency to “identify ourselves by our wounds,” as “survivors” of something that, although significant, does not and should not define us. “What if people decided to claim their trauma as an experience, instead of taking it on as an identity?” she said. “Maybe it would be the end of being trapped in our wounds and the beginning of an amazing self-exploration, and discovery, and growth. Maybe it would be the start of defining ourselves by who we have become and who we are becoming.”

As Jarvis knows all too well, however, despite our best efforts to distance ourselves from this or that physical condition, there are, in her words, “powerful forces” pushing us to do just the opposite.

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