Illumination from the "Edge of Life"

Listening Generously: The Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen

Dr. Remen is a clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine
and a leader in the growing field of integrative medicine, bringing together the best of modern
knowledge both scientific and spiritual. We speak about her art of listening to patients and other
physicians, the difference between curing and healing, and how our losses help us to live.

For the new year we revisit one of my favorite programs. As is often the case, I hear Rachel Naomi
Remen differently with the passage of time and in this season. I'm also struck this year by the title
we gave this conversation with her ? Listening Generously. The longer I do this work, the more
aware I am of listening as a discipline and vocation ? and something I do with and for all of you. This
is a great privilege, and a gift. I am immensely touched, though not surprised, by the deep reactions
many have had to last week's conversation with Jean Vanier. And I'm excited about the programs
ahead.
In January and February we have unusual, enriching conversations with, for example, Janna Levin, a
delightful young cosmologist on mathematics herndon family medicine and truth and meaning; Ed
Husain, a young British Muslim who provides stunning social and spiritual insight into radicalized
Islam in Europe; and Robert Millet, a leading religious educator of the Church of Jesus Christ of the
Latter Day Saints, and a lifelong Mormon, with a revealing introduction to Mormon spirituality and
theology.
But back to this program. Listening to Rachel Naomi Remen is nourishing. She is not a religious
figure per se, rather a kind of quiet modern-day mystic. Yet her wisdom is woven of personal and
clinical experience with the spiritual contours of human life that are often piqued and pondered at
this time of year, as many of us take stock and look forward.

As we do that, Rachel Naomi Remen ? like Jean Vanier ? would offer "prescriptions" that are
somewhat countercultural. She would not have us neatly resolve to move beyond our failings and
build on our successes. She would ask us to attend gently and patiently to the fullness of our lives ?
including and especially the losses large and small that define human experience. These include

transitions in relationships, place, and vocation that mark every year of life, unsettling and
rearranging our sense of self and our perspective on the world.
Living well, Rachel Naomi Remen says, is not about eradicating our losses, wounds, and weaknesses.
It is about understanding how they continually complete our identity and equip us to help others.
She's seen time and again how even deep pathologies and failures become the source of
unsuspected strengths. She believes that however difficult our lives become or how fraught our
choices, most of us never lose our capacity to be whole human beings. We may forget that potential
in ourselves, yet it can reappear full-blown in times of crisis. She's seen this happen to many others
and in her own life. The hope that her stories engender is itself a healing experience.
Rachel Naomi Remen and I speak about a formative story of hope in her own early life. Her
Orthodox rabbi grandfather, a student of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, taught it to her
on her fourth birthday. He called it "the birthday of the world": In the beginning, the world was
made of light. But by some accident, the light was scattered, and it lodged as countless sparks inside
every aspect of creation. Now she understands her work as a doctor as a version of the pursuit that
animated his life: the imperative to seek this original light in everything and everyone and gather it
up and in so doing to repair, or heal, the world ? tikkun olam. The task is more manageable than it
sounds, she says. We are called to heal that part of the world we can touch. We all have this
inclination and ability within us and with all of the components, light and dark, of the lives we have
led.
The following passage from Naomi Remen's Kitchen Table Wisdom, which we read in this program,
was written with physicians in mind. But it holds a resonant caution and challenge for all of us, I
think, as we struggle to face ? yet not be overwhelmed or numbed by ? the pain and suffering that
are a fact of human existence near and far.
The expectation that we can be immersed in suffering and loss daily and not be touched by it is as
unrealistic as expecting to be able to walk through water without getting wet. This sort of denial is
no small matter. The way we deal with loss shapes our capacity to be present to life more than
anything else. The way we protect ourselves from loss may be the way in which we distance
ourselves from life? We burn out not because we don't care but because we don't grieve. We burn
out because we've allowed our hearts to become so filled with loss that we have no room left to care.
I wish you fullness of life in the year ahead, and a renewed capacity to care.
I Recommend Reading:
Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal
by Rachel Naomi Remen
"Coherent, elegant, mysterious, aesthetic," Rachel Naomi Remen writes in Kitchen Table Wisdom.
"When I first earned my degree in medicine I would not have described life this way. But I was not
on intimate terms with life then." Coherent, elegant, mysterious, and aesthetic are also apt words to
describe the insights this book imparts in a rich medium of stories drawn from medicine and from
life.