Love Of Christ

NO GULFSTREAM JET OR MEGA CHURCH, BUT HERE IS WHERE YOU TRULY SEE THE “LOVE OF CHRIST”

One of the highlights of my trip to India last month was visiting my friend and a legend, Dr. K. K. Mathew. He is a highly specialized cardiologist, medical scientist, and an award winning physician, who is still engaged in a medical practice and research even in his golden years. After a long career as a cardiologist with the Christian Medical Mission Hospitals of the Mar Thoma Church, he has retired, but to find himself in another full-time medical practice that provides services to a diverse population of underserved patients. As a physician, he earned his primary medical degree with distinction from the Government Medical College (Trivandrum) and later went on to earn his Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree in Cardiology from the highly reputable Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi.

Dr. Mathew is one of the very few physicians whom I have known with a tickling aesthetic sensibility for artistic expressions. He translates his sensory contemplations and appreciations of his surroundings and everyday life events into beautiful poetry with the power of words and visual and tactile imageries. So, his daily life involves switching from empirical judgements in medical sciences to aesthetic judgements and expressions of his beautiful surroundings, a coastal tropical paradise by the Arabian sea. Besides being a healer of the human body, he is also an award winning novelist and story-teller in Malayalam language and a celebrated English poet with several books to his credit.

During my visit to his home out of where he operates a medical practice, I had the great privilege of meeting his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Mathew (MD), who is a Gynecologist with a calming bedside manner in treating her patients. They both have converted some area of their beautiful house into a medical clinic to provide medical services pro bono to the most deserving, under privileged, and indigent patients in the ancient maritime trading center called Kayamkulam in the State of Kerala, which is a densely populated and a very ethnically diverse old town nearly 10 miles from my home where I grew up.

In visiting his practice, I saw firsthand how he and his wife offered their medical services. As you enter his home clinic, there is a waiting room for patients and he sits in the backroom with necessary medical devices next to the patient lounge and sees patients on a “first come, first served” basis. In the adjacent room is where his wife, Elizabeth, meets with her gynecological patients. What captured my attention was how they handled their medical billing even for those who are financially capable of paying. He has set up an “honor system” and placed a box for his patients to deposit their payments, if they are financially able. The patients can deposit any amount of money befitting their financial situation for their medical services. For a multitude of economically disadvantaged and indigent patients, they are truly god-sent.

Drs. Matthew and Elizabeth are highly specialized MDs who could have made millions, if they legitimately billed their patients for their highly specialized and outstanding services. Rather, they forego their otherwise lucrative financial rewards in humbly serving their God, Jesus Christ. Providing their highly specialized services did not ever seem to be an obligation or a “fearful obedience” to their God or did not overtly glorify their mission. But they demonstrated a genuine passion for healing their patients; a compassion for wiping their tears; and a dedication to be healers to their patients in their pain and suffering. Some of my family members told me that Dr. Mathew found time to call them early in the morning hours to follow up and inquire how they were doing even without their requests for such calls. I always wondered what motivates a physician like him to think selflessly about the welfare of his patients in the early morning hours to make a follow up call even when they are not even sick.

My awe and appreciation of Dr. Mathew come from nearly a couple of decades of anecdotes about his passion and dedication in treating his patients no matter what their economic or social status or religious backgrounds are. What I have learned about him from all these years can be summarized as follows: Dr. Mathew is a highly talented and consummate healer with extraordinary virtues, dedication, and a spirit similar to that of Father Damien. His affirmation and “reverence for life” is a parallel to that of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his philosophy of “Reverence for Life.” In many ways, Dr. Mathew embodies some of the same talents and passions of Dr. Schweitzer, a physician and writer, who became famous as a Christian missionary to Africa.

What captivated me was the anecdotal evidences of the many instances of miraculous cures that happened to his patients through his epiphanies that helped him diagnose diseases that were misdiagnosed by other doctors and cured due to Mathew’s divine insights. As a student of science and humanities who seeks aposteriori and epistemological understandings, I will leave those divine cures for individual case studies by the scientific enterprise. However, I would like to believe that there is a nominal world out there beyond the phenomenal realm that we experience and observe in our daily lives. This nominal world is experienced by many through faith and reasoning.

What I came away with from my visit of these two phenomenal physicians was an internal whisper from my psyche, “here is where you have seen the abundant love of Christ manifested and poured out to care for the least among us.” For them, they truly believe, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me (Matthew 25:41).”

(Dr. Matthew Isaac is an author and former Associate Vice Chancellor of Economic Development and Corporate Training, California)