You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As a surgeon you have to have a controlled arrogance. If it's uncontrolled, you kill people, but you have to be pretty arrogant to saw through a person's chest, take out their heart and believe you can fix it. Then, when you succeed and the patient survives, you pray, because it's only by the grace of God that you get there.
My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.
When people are facing a severe illness or a major surgery, that may be one of the most significant opportunities for spiritual transformation that they will encounter.
I was raised a Catholic. But I am not religious. In my work, I am interested in real flesh and blood.
I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do - and not only for operating, but for everything.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
My mother taught me a lot of things, but they had big presuppositions built in - like her expectation that I'd be a missionary nurse in a religious order.
Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.
I briefly thought of becoming a priest but quickly saw that would be ridiculous.
I studied with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest.