OSCAR WILDE described a cynic as a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The pace of life today and the “infodemic” to which we are exposed can drive us, too, to focus on prices but disregard values.
The midweek doorstep clapping in the early days of lockdown reminded us of the value (and values) of our NHS. I spent a decade as a general practitioner, and another in old-age psychiatry, with further years in hospice care and geriatric rehabilitation. My life experience in NHS medicine involved exposure to the darker sides of human life: broken homes, broken families, broken marriages, broken bodies, broken minds, broken laws, broken systems, broken communities — and broken teams.
Team friction and conflict is a sad reality in our broken world. I stay in touch with an assortment of former GP team colleagues, and it has been a pleasure to show English, Welsh, and Scottish visitors the beauty of Northern Ireland and the magically transformed city of Belfast. These reunions are special, and always a pleasure.
But doctors, nurses, social workers, and admin staff often report friction, even in high-powered hospital teams, in which high-tech work success can come at huge personal cost to team members. Tragedies abound in medical life: NHS friends’ taking their own lives; medical errors; well-managed cases in which deaths result (while serious errors, by the grace of God, often result in no harm). Interpersonal friction can be a stain on recollections of employment, especially in an environment supposedly devoted to healing.
Life’s roulette wheel throws up many illnesses and accidents or traumas. A career in the NHS can feel a bit like being involved in warfare, and is similarly enmeshing — so that the great questions of existence cannot be evaded or blotted out with sex, alcohol, drugs, or consumerism.
In comparison with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the First World War, which killed European religion, Charles Darwin and On the Origin of Species created barely a ripple. Suffering and pain more commonly force a change of world-view and philosophy of life than intellectual factors do. And that is how a new chapter in my life began. Weary and wary of NHS life, as a GP in a grim Welsh town, a centre of deprivation and crime, I sought somewhere free of heroin and needles or syringes.
THE CalMac ferry slid up the fjord-like sea loch off the Mull of Kintyre, taking me to a new and unknown experience. The isle of Islay was a place of regeneration for me — different from, but very similar to, my upbringing in Portstewart. The stamp of Ireland and Irishness is written into the Islay landscape: the Gaelic names, monastic sites, churches from the Celtic era.
The modern dialect of English spoken there is a fusion of Donegal, Derry, Antrim, and Argyll — all horizons visible from Islay. Tourism, farming, and fisheries are important to the island economy, but the great powerhouse is whisky-distilling, from a recipe thought to have been brought by the Irish missionary monks, who also carried their language and religion to the west of Scotland.
My long-forgotten and deeply challenged faith in people, life, morals, and the NHS was rapidly revitalised during a time providing relief cover to surgeries on Islay. The dignity and calm of the people — both my clients and the practice staff — were a balm to wounds from earlier NHS work. But one experience, above all, stands out in my mind from among the consultations, treatments, and referrals.
A night call-out led to me arranging an air-ambulance transfer to Glasgow. Calling the central ambulance emergency line to log a request for air evacuation had become so commonplace that I had started to take for granted the organisation and good will of the massive NHS team on which it relied.
But, as I drove back from the island hospital, all this changed when the airstrip lights were suddenly switched on, illuminating the Hebridean bogland against a darkening sky devoid of other signs of human life. Then I saw on the horizon a tiny speck of light — almost star-like — which began to draw ever closer: an ambulance-plane from the Glasgow Airport-based air-evacuation service for the Highlands and Islands.
That memory has stayed with me, as a reminder of the myriad voices, fingers, and feet serving the UK public in the NHS: a light in the darkness, and a rescue package at times of illness. Remembering the ambulance plane in the Hebridean twilight calls to mind human beings set in creation and the amazing universe — just specks of leaf, or twigs drifting in an autumn flood on the river. Or are we something more? The writer of Psalm 8 asks a question along these lines: What are small humans that any greater force or person might know about them, set in the grandeur of stars and planets, the sun, and the moon?
That is how a different vista opened up in my life, at a belated New Year party in the Freemasons’ Hall in Port Ellen, on Islay. Being placed at the top table with the local Presbyterian minister was not my idea of fun. But the seafood and dinner were superb, the whisky flowed, and the conversation was easy.
The minister gave a short talk about the cohesion present in even the most broken parts of life. Nearing retirement, he considered the impact of two world wars on his Islay parishioners. For him, it had become obvious that children separated from a parent or parents — by death, or accident, or war — inevitably come to see their missing parent reflected in themselves, because there is an underlying purpose and a plan, plus a thread of value (sometimes hidden or invisible), which nevertheless interconnects everyone.
THE glory of creation on Islay also had a therapeutic effect on me: spectacular places such as the Oa peninsula, Gruinart lagoon, Beinn Bheigier, and Loch Gorm. Claggain Bay, above all, was a place of sanctuary: a beautiful wooded beach and stream area at the end of a ten-mile, C-class road. It was a joy to light a fire, brew some tea, watch the night come down, and be disturbed only by seals or deer, or the elusive sea trout avoiding my flies.
One place on Islay, though, had an even deeper impact: the old Celtic cross at Kidalton churchyard, erected by Irish missionary monks or their followers more than 1000 years ago. Islay sewed seeds which later sprouted, drawing me to consider how “One Solitary Life” fulfils the greatest messianic prophecy (Isaiah’s Suffering Servant), and to seek fresh pastures outside NHS employment, and pursue ordination as an evangelist.
Perhaps the pandemic and its aftermath is drawing all of us to a time of greater reflection, and reverence for creation; to live more simply, and to be thankful for the so-called “bare-bone basics” — and also, perhaps, to reflect on the fact that ideas have consequences. We are fundamentally spiritual creatures, and the materialist paradigm is a self-deluding fallacy. As C. S. Lewis observed, we cannot trust any of our thoughts — and not even the all-powerful materialism narrative — if they are only the results of what the bouncing-billiard-ball electronic impulses in our neurones are driving us to believe.
James Hardy is an evangelist and a retired GP.