[The following article is taken from the Bulgarian Patriarchal website, https://bg-patriarshia.bg/orthodox-thought/709. The article is authored by Archimandrite Basil Gondikakis, Abbot of the Iberian Holy Monastery, Mount Athos, dated 26Feb21, and translated by Alexander Smochevsky. Some of the concepts haven't translated fully or well, but the article is very well founded, such that the reader won't get lost in the words.]
You are doctors. The patient wants his health from you. Ask for life, ask for extension, ask for eternity. He doesn't tell you all this clearly because you can't give it to him. And so that you don't kick him out, so that he doesn't put you in an awkward position - begging you too much - that's why he doesn't tell you out loud. He tells you wordlessly. The greatest things that transcend sensation, expectation, and expression, the greatest things are said silently: at a glance, with the whole being, with silence. The sick come to you to be saved from suffering and death. In the end, he wants one thing: "not to die" (St. Ignatius the Godbearer).
If you, as doctors, know Someone Who can give this antidote against death, the medicine for immortality, you are obliged and must tell him, to direct him to Him, because that is all the patient wants from you. And nothing more.
And if he does not know it, if he thinks that you can only give him "aspirin", this should not hinder you and does not release you from the obligation to give him the Other, the active, the eternal.
The patient does not want you to teach him medicine. He does not want you to tell him how the stomach or the whole body works, or how any medicine works chemically or otherwise. Ask for health, ask for life.
It is handed over to you - physically and mentally. Although he does not understand that he is betrayed and "mentally", although he thinks that he is only a body and only gives it to you, but in a difficult moment he gives himself completely to you. This means that he also gives you his soul. You can tell him, with your silence or through your words in this hour (in which a unique space is revealed from his soul, from his whole being), you can also tell him about another organism, about another body - mental and spiritually, which he feels but does not see, as he has never seen his bodily heart or entrails.
If you are a real doctor, you need to know and be interested in the whole person, not just his body cover and his temporary stay on earth. And your word and silence must speak of the same thing - the victory over death and the proclamation of life.
Temperature brings health to the body, and pain brings health to the soul. Make sure the patient understands it. Discover his being to him. Act like real doctors. Thus hospitals become (and are!) Temples, just as monasteries - according to St. John Chrysostom - are healers.
If you extend the life of the other not by ten years, but even by ten centuries, it means that you are not a doctor, but a charlatan. Because one does not just want to prolong life. He wants to "not die." And there is a Physician Who gives life that is eternal.
In fact, such health is asked of by all who come to you, although they often expect from you (due to the bad tradition of our fallen nature and history) "aspirin". But you have studied the art of medicine, and you must give them what they cannot find themselves in the secular pharmacy. You have become physicians, and you must give what you have found in the "inn" (Luke 10:34), in the sanatorium of the Church.
The Christian physician is not a healer, but a servant, an ordinary helper of the One, Great, Only Physician - of the God-man Jesus Christ. Although small helpers, weak and inexperienced, but assistants to the Single Doctor. Employees of private offices, who give directions to the sanatorium of the Church, in which once a person enters, enters life, health and eternity - regardless of whether his body will die and his body will be temporarily buried. No, never be healers who struggle to prolong temporary life, who do not defeat death, but only postpone it.
Discover to man that his nature is able to be healthy, to be healed, to become eternal through the celebration of the Resurrection.
Inside the Church we expect and live the resurrection and eternity of the bodies. This is what the Risen Christ taught us. This is what He tells us and this is Himself. This tells us, and this is what our greatest and true brethren live - who have the same nature as us - the saints of the Church.
As long as the sick person gives you his whole being and you can see how he goes to death from your hands, without anyone asking you to do so, you can reveal the Truth to him, give him your whole being as an effective remedy. There is no other connection between healing and salvation than the communion within the Church of the Triune God. And if you are doctors saved and saved, adored and imitating God, giving yourself to him, you will give him the Doctor, Whom you hide in yourself; The Physician, Health, and Immortality that you are, following medicine within the Church and thus becoming members of the "divine nature." In this way you save the sick and save yourself at the same time, because "one body we are all" and one is the common life, which overcomes death from now on, in this and in the other life ... who, resorting to this Wharf, finds no salvation? Who is that cripple who faints in front of this Healer and is not healed? Creator of all things and Healer of the sick, Lord, before I am finally destroyed, save me ”(verse on Sunday evening, ch. 4).
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