Excerpt from My Grandfather's Blessings by Rachel Naomi Remen M.D., plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In a highly technological world we may forget our own goodness and place value instead on our skills and our expertise. But it is not our expertise that will restore the world. The future may depend less on our expertise than on our faithfulness to life.

Remembering how to bless each other is more important now than ever before. The solution to the destructiveness in this world is not more technical knowledge. Repairing the world may require us to find a deep connection to the life around us, to substitute the capacity to befriend life for our relentless pursuit of greater and greater expertise. It has been said that it has taken us thousands of years to recognize and defend the value of a single human life. What remains is to understand that the value of any human life is limited unless there is something in it that stands for the benefit of others and the benefit of life itself. A woman who lives in Pinson, Texas, sent me a quotation from Exodus that I think my grandfather would have loved: "Build altars in the places where I have reminded you who I am, and I will come and bless you there." The blessing we will receive when we have remembered how to bless life again may be nothing less than life itself.

I have learned a great deal about blessing and serving life from the people that I see in my office, perhaps because cancer forces people so deeply into their own vulnerability that they have touched the place of knowing that we hold such vulnerability in common. Once this is seen, there is no way one cannot respond. I have seen so many people emerge from their encounter with great loss more effortlessly compassionate and altruistic than before that I have come to wonder if blessing life is not a final step in some natural process of healing from suffering. A blessing is a place of refuge, a connecting back to the place in us where we are coherent and whole. A remembering of who we are.

One of my patients, a civil rights lawyer who almost died of cancer, told me several years afterward that this experience had enabled him to discover an unexpected power. "I find something in others that I have found in myself. Something struggling to break through obstacles and live whole," he told me. "I can see its struggle and speak its language. So I can strengthen it"--he paused thoughtfully--"as others have strengthened it in me. My wife tells me that I have finally opened my heart. Perhaps so, but that's not exactly it." He falls silent. "If it didn't sound so odd to say, I guess I can bless the life in other people and be blessed by them. I do it in my work, but it goes beyond my work. It seems just now like the most important thing I can do." A friend and colleague told me about the first hours after she discovered that her fifteen-year-old son had drowned. She had gone downstairs to get a cup of tea, and another woman, herself shaken by grief, had chided her, asking her how she could drink tea at a time like this. "Up until then, Rachel, I had been a person who was always afraid of doing things wrong, always hesitant and full of self-doubt over the smallest action. But when she spoke to me I suddenly knew that in this I could do nothing wrong: This had struck me to a place of such depth that everything I did or said or thought or felt in response was completely true. This was beyond rules, beyond judgments. This was all mine."

Her healing has taken time, more than eighteen years. She works now with groups of people who have cancer, helping them to move through their grief and losses in order to connect back to the place in them that is coherent and whole. Speaking of this she says, "For me, the loss of my son went from a singular event to something that is woven into the fabric of my being. It is always present to me, part of my work, part of my experience. Having experienced that deep a grief, that suffering, I am no longer afraid to go back there. I have been around it and with it and come through it and I know it very well. I have also somehow survived it. I think the people in my groups know this. They know that I am not afraid anymore. It gives us permission to go to that place of grief or suffering, to acknowledge our losses and their deep significance, if that is where we need to go. I think it brings a kind of safety to the room."

From My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge and Belonging, by Rachel Naomi Remen. © April 10, 2000 , Rachel Naomi Remen used by permission.