5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

In the movie Patch Adams, a film based on a true story, Hunter Adams, better known as ‘Patch’, commits himself to a mental institution suffering from depression. He unsuccessfully attempts suicide. Whilst in hospital, however, he is able to make other patients laugh and he realises his gift for connecting with sick people.

Though successful in his studies, he is unhappy with the lack of contact students have with patients. The philosophy of the day was that doctors and medical students kept a cold distance from their patients. Defying this practice, Patch Adams begins to visit patients, and his humorous and compassionate approach results in great differences to patients in hospital.

The movie is critical of medical school teaching and practice. The dean of the medical school teaches students that they must never lower themselves to the level of their patients, who only want their professional expertise. He tells the admiring students that for professionalism’s sake, he must train the humanity out of them to make them something better: doctors.

Patch Adams, like Jesus, has the ability to draw people to himself. Adams treats patients with joy and love: people who experience his energetic ‘power’ of love and happiness are reassured, and which enables the healing process to begin.

Adams’ cheerful support of people takes it toll when Carin, a student doctor, is killed. He falls into depression and retreats to a cliff’s edge where he berates God for creating human beings and allowing them to suffer. This is the desperate prayer of a person completely given over to healing of others.

In his despair at the start of the film and when Carin dies, Adams can be compared to Job in our first reading (Job 7:1-4,6-7). He believes that happiness is indeed fleeting. But through humour and communication with patients, he becomes, in the words of St Paul (1 Corinthians 9:16-19,22-23), a servant to all.

We, too, should be critical if the Church in the past, now, or in the future, tries to train the humanity out of us, if it dares to tell us we are better that others, if we are told to ignore and reject those aspects of being human that, in reality, God has given us as gifts.

We should also remind ourselves that we are in this world to, every day of our lives, lighten the burden of others and not add to those burdens; that God gave us the gift of humour and laughter; and that in treating others with joy and love, we draw people, not to ourselves, but to Jesus.

We are here on this earth, not as “banished children”, but as God’s precious and priceless works of art. And so is everyone else on this planet.