The Hippocratic Oath for doctors is one of the most notable cases where an entire profession makes a covenant with those they treat to do no harm. While I would suspect that most doctors and certainly nurses would be intensely conscientious about their work, I wonder how often they reflect on their oath to do no harm to others. In the midst of hectic daily affairs and the mundane taking care of people who are ill or injured, how often does their oath inform their actions? Considering how many people get sick and die from infections that are acquired in hospitals, it would appear that at some point in the health care business that the oath is forgotten and neglected within the overall systems that we have to deal with.

For those who are interested in the way that some of the same basic principles are repeated across many different worldviews, the Hippocratic oath is an example of the silver rule, a negative formulation of the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”). While the golden rule focuses on our positive obligations to love and serve others, the silver rule focuses on our negative obligations to avoid hurting or harming others. These two rules are simply two sides of the same coin, as acts of positive love and service can seem tactical and mercenarial in nature if they are not combined with the avoidance of actions that hurt and offend.

I have to own up that this is an area where I could do a lot better. It is hard to recognize the wounded state of people in our normal day-to-day existence. While in a hospital, a doctor can assume that just about every patient has a wound or injury or illness of a serious kind (why else would they be in a hospital?), the sensitivities and emotional sounds of the people around us can be a bit difficult to recognize, especially when they lash out and hurt others in their pain and suffering, and it is all too easy to hurt those who are already wounded rather than doing what is possible to help and encourage those who are suffering. Even when we know that others are sensitive, and we know how and why they are sensitive, it is still difficult to behave in a manner that does not inflame those sensitivities even when we are trying really hard to do no harm. I speak, as often is the case, from painful personal experience in this matter.

As I was writing this entry an acquaintance of mine asked about a series of sermons given on the subject of agape love from a minister whom I know only slightly but greatly respect [1]. I had listened to at least some of these messages some time ago and stored them on my flash drive, but they had gotten lost amidst the trauma of my move from Thailand, and her reminder of these messages led me to go and save them again to my computer for me to listen to at a future time. Our obligations to love others go far beyond a mere oath to do no harm, but extend to the oath to bind up the wounds of others, to encourage and to build up. All too often we use our God-given gifts, be they our sharp wit or vast store of biblical knowledge, to tear other people down. Often it is necessary to tear down arguments and everything which is constructed against God, but it is important to distinguish between tearing down an argument and building up a person. Often, I have found that the intellectual ground that people stand on depends greatly on emotional issues that are too sensitive to discuss and that people feel they must defend even at great cost to their intellectual integrity and coherence of worldview.

Even when it is easy to recognize the brokenness of our world, of our institutions, our families, and ourselves, it is hard to act in a way that does not exacerbate our problems. Problems like alcoholism and other substance abuse, promiscuity, and workaholic and other perfectionistic tendencies often spring from sensitive emotional ground. People (and this includes myself!) will not let other people mess around on that sort of ground until they have shown themselves to be sensitive and caring and trustworthy. All too often, with good intentions, we simply lack the competence to handle the scalpel of doing emotional surgery on our friends and family and loved ones successfully. We end up bludgeoning our way around sensitive wounds and causing more scars and damage, making our relationships and those around us even more broken than before. At some point we have to stop ourselves and figure out how to craft our words and actions so that we can start to help others heal rather than add more wounds and injuries to those who are already full of them. It is far easier said than done, but there has to be a way to practice such matters to develop skill so that we do not simply behave like Civil War surgeons hacking off limbs and praying that the crippled left in our wake will not simply get gangrene and die. How to do that is the difficulty.

[1] http://members.ucg.org/sermons?page=1&field_sermon_speaker_value=petty&tid=All&title=