My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?:
Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?
Oh my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night and am not silent.
I opened my Bible to this page. Today I thought I should use my new big print edition Bible for this exercise. I just open the Bible somewhere and reflect on the words that first appear to my eyes.  This is what I saw today.  The fact is my Bible is worn from use. It is likely that I’ve come to this page over and over again. The Bible falls open here. It’s the opening of Psalm 22, the first words of which were said to be the last words of Jesus on the cross.
I have to be cautious though because this is a verse of self pity. In my narcissism and isolation I am prone to self pity.  I work as a healer, I’m a physician. My humility is that I insist the medication and charms and incantations cure but somehow I believe still that it is in the relationship.  I love the St. Francis prayer “Make me a channel”.
I feel this as I’m healing. At the end of a day of work I feel like I’ve had all the strength and energy drawn out of me. I can work differently. I can be removed and have the beurocratic boundaries up around me like the barriers lawyers and businessmen erect. But I don’t. I took an oath and I do the best I can to heal.
In psychotherapy it is as if we share spinal columns.  There’s a merger that is borderline in the pathological but yet is akin to walking a mile in another’s shoes.  In shared stories and vulnerabilities I meet the defeated in their wound.. I find the pain and shadow and go there. I am one with the nightmare. I find the nightmare within myself.  Then I reassure.  I rally. I cheer lead. I exhort.  I see disease as an enemy and I’m the Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain, Commander encouraging men and women to go another day.  I have magic potions. I have special ‘tests’ and ‘rituals’.  I have ‘names’.  I am Adam in the garden. I have a wealth of experience and secrets.
But now government has lost faith.  They are dishonourable.  They admit to defeat for the country. Like Nazis we find they have put their money overseas and are running to Argentina. That have plunged the country into inexorable debt and given themselves wages. They are spending recklessly overseas and buying future homes to flee to.
First they brought abortion and killed the children of our forefathers rather than paying mothers a living wage.  They lied and cheated and defiled.  They gave their Order of Canada to the greatest Nazi killer of our time Morgentaller, a survivor of Auschwitz who identified with his aggressor and hating catholics encouraged their abortions.
Today abortionists make more than those who deliver babies.  I am punished for keeping people alive. I am a fool. I am ridiculed in high places. They have stopped seeing patients and gone to committees. Everywhere committees gather to discuss the other. But no one wants to see the other. They take the money for the other and give themselves awards and celebrate each other in an amazing circle jerk but all the other has are waitlists.
Bombs are where the money is and dreams.  It’s Matrix all over.
Now we have physician assisted  suicide.  In Holland euthanasia began in compassion and then it developed into a profit centre like our jails.  Corruption is everywhere.  Especially in Quebec. The Liberal government of Ontario has the greatest world debt for a sub nation. I am sent letters upon letters for finding brain tumours with MRI challenged to justify my spending on the war against disease.  My patients can’t afford the medication.  The sick are impoverished while the leaders of democracy strut about like Czars and emperors.  The new Napoleon with his Sophie are a Hollywood favourite with million dollar jaunts and flaunting their wealthy living like Rothschilds in the 30’s .
And the UN has given us Agenda 21 wanting to kill off billions of people rather than celebrate the life we have.  People are the enemy.
Or so it seems.
I cry to God because my brother has cancer. My patients have cancer. And we’re all aging and death is nearer in years than ever before. I didn’t think of death like this since I worked with Aids patients.  Now in the epidemic of luxury I work with the drug addicted and they die.  I know them personally intimately and I am up against a wall.
My spiritual teaching is ‘surrender’.  I am to ‘accept’.  I pray the serenity prayer. I acknowledge my lack of omnipotence. But Jesus resurrected and resurrected Lazarus. He healed the unsealable.  I believe in miracles.  I have known so many. I have seen so many patients live who others said would die. I have truly known and walked in the sacred.
All around me the atheists are loud and they reduce everything to the limits of their own imagination. I am a scientist but their pseudoscience and their science business frauds are rampant. I am gifted in my theism by the science I have learned. I walk in Heisenberg and Planck and enjoy the multiverse and immortality. Yet as I withdraw and observe I recall Arjuna talking to Krishna about the war.  It’s not about the war but it’s about ones own participation.
I pray for my brother.
My dogs back was hurt and he was near the point of needing to be put down. But today he is well enough. I fear for his future. His hind legs lack the strength they once did but he is older as I am and my back legs lack the strength.
My life is harried. I am always trying to do so much. I’ve overwhelmed. I’m daily encountering emergencies. I’ve worked for decades in the areas of greatest need with the most vulnerable alone, without so little support.
I saw a couple of men yesterday and introduced them.  They had both suffered catastrophic brain injuries and were never thought to be well in anyway again.They really belonged in institutions but somehow struggled on the outside. I saw them.  I read literature night after night, studied journals attended seminars, asked colleagues, and did my best. It’s beyond anything I ever learned in school and there is no clear answer. Each is unique.  I was thankful for the wisdom of colleagues. Only a few of us work here and it’s not my thing though everyone says it is. It’s just so hard and no one else wants to do it.  Over and over gps tell me the called dozens of my colleagues and they’ve been turned down. There is no wealth in seeing sick. Everyone is cherry picking the well. But a decade later I watched these two interact and so enjoyed their laughter. A couple of soldiers who shared a common battlefield. I love their families. I love the community. I love health care. They epitomize all that is good.  I was so glad to be apart of it.  But there’s been so many tears.  I cry myself to sleep at night unable to help.
The rich and well get the first tier of care. There is Betty Ford for them and now they’re just opening places for the other to inject their existence away.
I am thankful. The sun has come out again today. I was so sun sufficient. For weeks now coughing all day and all night, exhausted, chest hurting from the work of coughing.  Pain in the intercostals.  Feeling in the morning like an elephant has sat on my chest.  Thinking I’m dying. Every night at 3 in the morning thinking I’m dying.  One night dragging myself to the couch and finding the phone and preparing to phone an ambulance but then I could breathe.  Breath, like everything I take for granted. Going to work embarrassed by the cough. Wondering if it’s a cold or just allergies.  Suffering and feeling the suffering of those I try to help with so few resources.
Always there are critics. The parasites abound. They are so far from the front lines but in their space station air head wisdom they can criticize but they are utterly incompetent in face of danger and lack the humility to admit to the depth of their cowardice. They are dying to. Their fear is ever obvious in their attempt at control.  I watch them cross their legs , the wrinkles at the edges of their eyes. They are in shock. I ‘d like to talk to them, reassure them. but they have gone to hide in their positions.  They have lost their humanity and take solace in the machines they worship. It’s the money. I can not but envy them. They are driven by the rankest of forces. Money buys them.  And I am little different.
I say I would be sailing if I were rich. But I am able to flee to the sea and still I linger asking myself how come God doesn’t heal me. I only ask for a miracle. A cure for cancer. I will die but let them live longer and suffer less.
I am suffering for not. I am on a cross and friends are calling, get down we need the wood. I am here another day.
There is another complaint.  I never had a complaint when I worked as a general practitioner. I never had a complaint when I worked as a general psychiatrist. I was so admired when I was in surgery and community medicine.  But now I’ve worked for years with the addicted and alcoholic and criminals, sociopaths and psychopaths.  I am alone so much in the community, one to one in a little office.  I have been attacked. Guns have been pointed at me. I’ve been held hostage. I’m afraid more easily.  A young man told me that some doctors get more complaints. I spoke with the forensic psychiatrists about ‘rate your doctor’ and how their patients loathed them.  I spoke with the head of addiction and physician care and he had two complaints against him and one to the human rights.  So I thought it was the field. I’ve had a complaint each year this last five years and each has been because the patients drug addiction has caused them to be denied work.
The last two have insisted that because I ‘named’ them ‘substance abuse’ and that because I did the urine test that showed positive then that was why they were given a DUI and that was why they were not allowed to work.  I’ve known dozens of doctors who covered for patients, colluding with their addiction and causing them to be a risk to others. There are no complaints of ‘sins of omission’.  I’ve done exactly what I was required to do and this young doctor , incredibly inexperienced, working in a beurocratic job suggests that I could somehow know better how not to get a complaint.
So it’s ‘blame the doctor’ and I really don’t want to be one any more.  It’s the soldiers fault who gets wounded in war. There’s someone in Ottawa or Washington who is avoiding the frontline themselves but studying grafts and showing how certain soldiers are the ones that get wounded.
I know this is a resentment.  The young man is a grandiose arrogant idiot but then I am the one who is suicidal. I’m the one who wants to go back to working in a hospital with all the dozens of people for every patient and the resources and the gang approach to medicine and the immense waste of resources. I miss the intensive care where no one was expected to live and they didn’t so no one could complain. I miss the years I did psychotherapy like the psychologists and wonder what is it that wants me to work where there is the greatest difficulty.
Why couldn’t I just sail a little boat in English Bay but instead sailed solo across the pacific at Christmas facing the greatest fears. What made me face 40 foot seas.  Why do I push myself to the limits. Why not get on a committee and work well within the ‘wire’.  If only I avoid the ‘other’ stay safe, play it safe, don’t rock the boat.
I really want to .  I wonder at a life with complaining hurting dying diseased people. I wonder at a life of despair.  The money isn’t good enough for the abuse I get. Accountants make a whole lot more and don’t have people pulling guns and knives on them.  I am threatened routinely. If you don’t write what I say to write I’m going to lose my job and you’re going to be sorry. I refuse to collude.  I am increasingly being the fall guy for insurance companies that didn’t want to pay in the first place but now blame the doctor and the patients complain that the doctor won’t say they’re in a wheel chair when they’re not. Increasingly there’s this lie that is being perpetrated. We’re been consumed by the bureaucracy which takes the fat and leaves nothing for anyone else.

They’re fighting for crumbs under the table.
And I’m grateful.  I can breath. My chest is only a little sore. I bought a lot less. I’m here in the sun. I”ve walked. I’m not dying myself. But I have no miracles. I pray and I can’t seem to convince God that my patient and my friends and family need to win the lottery.  I am insignificant.  A speck of irrelevance.
My God, My God.

I am thankful for the view. My little dog is looking out on the street. A young woman just walked by with perky breasts, tight summer clothes and barefoot.  I’ve been enjoying taking pictures of flowers. There is so much joy and pleasure to be had right here. I am thankful for this day. This is a Saturdayl Most days I’m just recouping for the onslaught of sickness and disease.  The horrors of addictions.  Livers coming out of the bodies like Sigourney Weaver’s aliens.  Rashes and unknown diseases. And contagion.
I know a famous specialist who told me she avoids people with disease as she is afraid of their germs.  She was glad to get through medical school and residency so she could avoid seeing patients. She writes books and others do her touching for her.  The trick in medicine is to spend the least amount of time in direct contact with illness.  And yet contagion hides for days before it declares itself.
My brother is told to avoid crowds.  The Chinese were wearing masks on planes .  The new handshake is touching knuckles. In church when they say the peace they no longer touch.
Insanity is infectious.  Like addiction.
I love the sun. I am so thankful for this reprieve.  I am so very thankful that I am able to sit here and have this table, this chair, this bible this light and this place to journal.
Journalling is like squishing the puss out of my brain. I bleed out of my ears. And then with it gone from my thoughts inside I can carry one. I can rally.
I cleaned my home.  I made my bed .  I shook out the rugs. I washed down the bathroom. I changed the sheets.  I cleaned the toilet.  I have oils burning and fans running the scents through the home.  The windows are open. I am thinking now of lying in the sun and hoping to rejuvenate some.
Let the self pity go. Let the resentment and fear go.  Pray for enemies.  Find peace of mind.  Welcome the coming of death.  It’s only years or days or hours that I have .  I liked that we walked today for hours and I remembered that last year I had such injuries and pain I couldn’t have done that. There are always blessings. It’s always perception.
Thank you God. Thank you Jesus.  Forgive me for my lack of faith. Forgive me for my whining and complaining. Forgive me for my inadequacy. Teach me yours ways. Help guide me in what it is I am to do. Show me the way.  Help me to be more helpful.  Help me be less afraid.  Let me sing praises and pray and and celebrate the wonders of the sacred. Let me see the dance of love in all creation.  Thank you God.