One is the real, deep, religious feeling and strong, personal, motherly interest for each one of our patients. And you can see this motherly interest in girls of twenty-one—we have had Sisters of not more than that age who had it—and not see it in women of forty.
The second is a strong practical (intellectual, if you will) interest in the case, how it is going on. This is what makes the true Nurse. Otherwise the patients might as well be pieces of furniture, and we the housemaids, unless we see how interesting a thing Nursing is. This is what makes us urge you to begin to observe the very first case you see.
The third is the pleasures of administration, which, though a fine word, means only learning to manage a Ward well: to keep it fresh, clean, tidy; to keep up its good order, punctuality; to report your cases with absolute accuracy to the Surgeon or Physician, and first to report them to the Sister; and to do all that is contained in the one word, Ward-management: to keep wine-lists, diet-lists, washing-lists—that is Sister’s work—and to do all the things no less important which constitute Nurse’s work.
But it would take a whole book for me to count up these; and I am going back to the first thing that we were saying: without deep religious purpose how shallow a thing is Hospital life, which is, or ought to be, the most inspiring! For, as years go on, we shall have others to train; and find that the springs of religion are dried up within ourselves. The patients we shall always have with us while we are Nurses. And we shall find that we have no religious gift or influence with them, no word in season, whether for those who are to live, or for those who are to die, no, not even when they are in their last hours, and perhaps no one by but us to speak a word to point them to the Eternal Father and Saviour; not even for a poor little dying child who cries: “Nursey, tell me, oh, why is it so dark?” Then we may feel painfully about them what we do not at present feel about ourselves. We may wish, both for our patients and Probationers, that they had the restraints of the “fear” of the most Holy God, to enable them to resist the temptation. We may regret that our own Probationers seem so worldly and external. And we may perceive too late that the deficiency in their characters began in our own.
For, to all good women, life is a prayer; and though we pray in our own rooms, in the Wards and at Church, the end must not be confounded with the means. We are the more bound to watch strictly over ourselves; we have not less but more need of a high standard of duty and of life in our Nursing; we must teach ourselves humility and modesty by becoming more aware of our own weakness and narrowness, and liability to mistake as Nurses and as Christians. Mere worldly success to any nobler, higher mind is not worth having. Do you think Agnes Jones, or some who are now living amongst us, cared much about worldly success? They cared about efficiency, thoroughness. But that is a different thing.
We must condemn many of our own tempers when we calmly review them. We must lament over training opportunities which we have lost, must desire to become better women, better Nurses. That we all of us must feel. And then, and not till then, will life and work among the sick become a prayer.
For prayer is communion or co-operation with God: the expression of a life among his poor and sick and erring ones. But when we speak with God, our power of addressing Him, of holding communion with Him, and listening to His still small voice, depends upon our will being one and the same with His. Is He our God, as He was Christ’s? To Christ He was all, to us He seems sometimes nothing. Can we retire to rest after our busy, anxious day in the Wards, with the feeling: “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit,” and those of such and such anxious cases; remembering, too, that in the darkness, “Thou God seest me,” and seest them too? Can we rise in the morning, almost with a feeling of joy that we are spared another day to do Him service with His sick?—
Awake, my soul, and with the sun,
Thy daily stage of duty run.
Does the thought ever occur to us in the course of the day, that we will correct that particular fault of mind, or heart, or temper, whether slowness, or bustle, or want of accuracy or method, or harsh judgments, or want of loyalty to those under whom or among whom we are placed, or sharp talking, or tale-bearing or gossiping—oh, how common, and how old a fault, as old as Solomon! “He that repeateth a matter, separateth friends;” and how can people trust us unless they know that we are not tale-bearers, who will misrepresent or improperly repeat what is said to us? Shall we correct this, or any other fault, not with a view to our success in life, or to our own credit, but in order that we may be able to serve our Master better in the service of the sick? Or do we ever seek to carry on the battle against light behaviour, against self-indulgence, against evil tempers (the “world,” the “flesh,” and the “devil”), and the temptations that beset us; conscious that in ourselves we are weak, but that there is a strength greater than our own, “which is perfected in weakness”? Do we think of God as the Eternal, into whose hands our patients, whom we see dying in the Wards, must resign their souls—into whose hands we must resign our own when we depart hence, and ought to resign our own as entirely every morning and night of our lives here; with whom do live the spirits of the just made perfect, with whom do really live, ought really as much to live, our spirits here, and who, in the hour of death, in the hour of life, both for our patients and ourselves, must be our trust and hope? We would not always be thinking of death, for “we must live before we die,” and life, perhaps, is as difficult as death. Yet the thought of a time when we shall have passed out of the sight and memory of men may also help us to live; may assist us in shaking off the load of tempers, jealousies, prejudices, bitternesses, interests which weigh us down; may teach us to rise out of this busy, bustling Hospital world, into the clearer light of God’s Kingdom, of which, indeed, this Home is or might be a part, and certainly and especially this Hospital.
This is the spirit of prayer, the spirit of conversation or communion with God, which leads us in all our Nursing silently to think of Him, and refer it to Him. When we hear in the voice of conscience His voice speaking to us; when we are aware that He is the witness of everything we do, and say, and think, and also the source of every good thing in us; and when we feel in our hearts the struggle against some evil temper, then God is fighting with us against envy and jealousy, against selfishness and self-indulgence, against lightness, and frivolity, and vanity, for “our better self against our worse self.”