Health care and the transcendent

This paper examines the values implicit in health care providers serving dying persons. It studies why providers should form a relationship with the dying person that is more human, less mechanistic, and less directed to that person as an economic unit or as a “case” of this or that disease. Much of the literature on the dying makes such suggestions but without providing a sound foundation for them. This paper uses a suggestion made by William F. May, who argued that health care providers' relationships with those they serve ought not to be thought of as purely contractual or purely philanthropic, but rather as covenantal (i. e., as a mutual exchange of giving). He believes that such a view makes sense only if we providers see our lives as being themselves gifts—acts of grace by the Transcendent. But it may be difficult to hold on to a covenantal relationship in this sense when there is no prior sense of having already received a gift from the Transcendent. In a culture in which religious belief is often not central to the lives of many people, an appeal to God (as a symbol for the Transcendent) may not be of much help. I suggest that healthcare providers must be able to found our covenant relationships in some other language and symbols. The latter part of this paper presents an attempt to found covenant relationships with the dying in the Transcendent, without using the symbol “God.”