Physician’s Vocation Program: Integrating prayer, self-reflection, service, and education
Physician鈥檚 Vocation Program: Integrating prayer, self-reflection, service, and education
The St. Ignatius Window at the Stritch School of Medicine. In the left panel, the medical school's namesake Samuel Cardinal Stritch is represented by his coat of arms. The center panel of the window connects St. Ignatius with the Jesuits, 黑料门University Chicago, and Stritch School of Medicine. The right panel represents buildings that have been central to Stritch's story through the years.
By John Hardt
On this particular Wednesday at the Stritch School of Medicine, the topic for learning is neither structures of the human body nor molecular cell biology and genetics. Rather, 12 medical students have come together to discuss Ignatian spirituality, the question of suffering, and how it is that they may try to understand their work as future physicians, belief in a God who is all-loving and all-powerful, and the reality of their patients’ suffering. This is the Physician’s Vocation Program at the Stritch School of Medicine.
In its 13th year, the program invites a self-selecting cohort of medical students into a four-year-long engagement of reading, conversation, and prayer to explore medicine as a Christian during their medical studies. Rooted in Ignatius of Loyola’s insight that God calls each of us individually as human beings, the program creates a context for students from a wide range of Christian traditions to explore the experience and meaning of that call in their lives as they study to become a physician.
The program’s format aligns with the curricular requirements of medical school. The first two years of training in medical education is classroom and textbook-focused as students study anatomy, microbiology, behavioral health, and diseased and healthy bodily systems. During this time, students in the Physician’s Vocation Program gather for 12 graduate-style seminars each year that include pre-reading and conversation on a range of themes at the intersection of faith and medicine. Based on a commitment to the idea that hospitality fosters friendship, each session begins with shared food and conversation.
First-year reading focuses on studying the principles of Ignatian spirituality and its intersections with the life of a medical student and that of a future physician. Year two more deeply explores the problem of suffering, the notion of calling or vocation in the Christian tradition, and questions of embodiment, mortality, and healing—all concepts central to the practice of medicine.
As students transition into hospital and clinic-based learning in various medical specialties in their third year, the Physician’s Vocation Program curriculum shifts to Ignatius’ insight on decision-making or “discernment.” This approach to discernment—how one makes decisions that align with one’s deepest desires and therefore God’s will for one’s life—is particularly helpful in a year where students are deciding what kind of doctor they would like to be.
Completion of elective courses and interviews for residency programs are key focal points for fourth-year medical students. Physician’s Vocation Program students in their fourth year take a two-week palliative care elective to offer them experience with chronic illness, terminal illness, and their role accompanying patients and families through a common experience of loss and sadness filled with meaning and, often times, hope. The elective serves to instill in students the virtue of compassion.
Consistent across the four years of the students’ experience, the program integrates prayer into each session while encouraging and discussing how best to build and maintain habits of daily prayer. This includes practice with the “Examen” prayer of Ignatius of Loyola, a backward-looking prayer that uses our capacity for hindsight to review one’s day. Its purpose is to build attentiveness to the presence of God in one’s day and to locate habits and patterns in one’s daily life that are supportive of becoming the person one seeks to be as a physician and a person of faith.
Throughout the program, we strive to see that God’s presence in our lives is often missed not because God is either far away or hidden, but because God’s presence is so close and all-enveloping. It is more like gravity in our lives insofar as we don’t tend to think about it and yet it shapes our lives in every moment of our living.
In the profession of medicine and the current world where demands on our attention are many and constant, the Physician’s Vocation Program serves as a training ground for attending to God’s love for us and his presence in our lives. In so doing, it works to seed the practice of medicine with physicians who have a deep sense of purpose, a joyful spirit, and a commitment to the practice of medicine as an act of service, compassion, and healing.
John Hardt, PhD
Vice Dean, Professional Formation, Associate Professor, Bioethics
John Hardt is the co-director of the Physician's Vocation Program and teaches on virtue, character, and calling in medicine.
By John Hardt
On this particular Wednesday at the Stritch School of Medicine, the topic for learning is neither structures of the human body nor molecular cell biology and genetics. Rather, 12 medical students have come together to discuss Ignatian spirituality, the question of suffering, and how it is that they may try to understand their work as future physicians, belief in a God who is all-loving and all-powerful, and the reality of their patients’ suffering. This is the Physician’s Vocation Program at the Stritch School of Medicine.
In its 13th year, the program invites a self-selecting cohort of medical students into a four-year-long engagement of reading, conversation, and prayer to explore medicine as a Christian during their medical studies. Rooted in Ignatius of Loyola’s insight that God calls each of us individually as human beings, the program creates a context for students from a wide range of Christian traditions to explore the experience and meaning of that call in their lives as they study to become a physician.
The program’s format aligns with the curricular requirements of medical school. The first two years of training in medical education is classroom and textbook-focused as students study anatomy, microbiology, behavioral health, and diseased and healthy bodily systems. During this time, students in the Physician’s Vocation Program gather for 12 graduate-style seminars each year that include pre-reading and conversation on a range of themes at the intersection of faith and medicine. Based on a commitment to the idea that hospitality fosters friendship, each session begins with shared food and conversation.
First-year reading focuses on studying the principles of Ignatian spirituality and its intersections with the life of a medical student and that of a future physician. Year two more deeply explores the problem of suffering, the notion of calling or vocation in the Christian tradition, and questions of embodiment, mortality, and healing—all concepts central to the practice of medicine.
As students transition into hospital and clinic-based learning in various medical specialties in their third year, the Physician’s Vocation Program curriculum shifts to Ignatius’ insight on decision-making or “discernment.” This approach to discernment—how one makes decisions that align with one’s deepest desires and therefore God’s will for one’s life—is particularly helpful in a year where students are deciding what kind of doctor they would like to be.
Completion of elective courses and interviews for residency programs are key focal points for fourth-year medical students. Physician’s Vocation Program students in their fourth year take a two-week palliative care elective to offer them experience with chronic illness, terminal illness, and their role accompanying patients and families through a common experience of loss and sadness filled with meaning and, often times, hope. The elective serves to instill in students the virtue of compassion.
Consistent across the four years of the students’ experience, the program integrates prayer into each session while encouraging and discussing how best to build and maintain habits of daily prayer. This includes practice with the “Examen” prayer of Ignatius of Loyola, a backward-looking prayer that uses our capacity for hindsight to review one’s day. Its purpose is to build attentiveness to the presence of God in one’s day and to locate habits and patterns in one’s daily life that are supportive of becoming the person one seeks to be as a physician and a person of faith.
Throughout the program, we strive to see that God’s presence in our lives is often missed not because God is either far away or hidden, but because God’s presence is so close and all-enveloping. It is more like gravity in our lives insofar as we don’t tend to think about it and yet it shapes our lives in every moment of our living.
In the profession of medicine and the current world where demands on our attention are many and constant, the Physician’s Vocation Program serves as a training ground for attending to God’s love for us and his presence in our lives. In so doing, it works to seed the practice of medicine with physicians who have a deep sense of purpose, a joyful spirit, and a commitment to the practice of medicine as an act of service, compassion, and healing.