Thinking Anew:THE BOOK A Doctor's Waris a fascinating account of the wartime experiences of Dr Aidan MacCarthy from Castletownbere in west Cork. A former pupil at Clongowes Wood, he graduated from the Cork Medical School in 1938 and joined the Royal Air Force as a medical officer the following year.
He was posted to France but soon found himself on the Dunkirk beaches awaiting evacuation. He was later posted to the Far East where in 1942 he was taken prisoner by the then all-conquering Japanese. In this book he details the appalling treatment he and many others received at the hands of their captors. He was eventually moved to a camp in Nagasaki in Japan where he witnessed the devastation caused by the dropping of the nuclear bomb on that city.
Throughout these horrors and deprived of every human dignity and material comfort, he continued to work as a doctor. He describes one incident where he was attending a dying airman. He had no medicine to ease the man’s terrible pain. “All that I could do for him was to pray and to hold his hand and whisper words of encouragement. As I tried to comfort him I wondered if the dying man was able to find strength in faith as I was. I remembered the devoutness of my own upbringing; I remembered our village priest and myself as a child, serving before the altar, and once again I thanked God for the faith that sustained me under these appalling conditions.”
It is remarkable that this young doctor who at one level had nothing – everything that could be taken from him had been taken – at a much deeper level he had so much to share.
There is a clue to under-standing this phenomenon in tomorrow’s gospel. Jesus has no illusions about the difficulties facing his followers in this cruel world, given their vocation to lives of loving service. He knows that for them to maintain such a costly ministry they would require support of a special kind which he describes in these words: “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” It is important to get behind the language to the substance which is that the life Jesus offers is the life of the resurrection which defeats any fear or injustice, however menacing. This was the experience of Leonard Wilson who was Anglican bishop of Singapore when the Japanese invaded in 1942. Like Dr MacCarthy, he suffered terribly as a prisoner but still managed to minister to his fellow prisoners, often by celebrating the Eucharist using grains of rice and water.
He reflected on his ordeal some years later: “How easy it is to forget God and all His benefits. I had known Him in a deeper way than I could ever have imagined, but God is to be found in the resurrection as well as in the cross, and it is the resurrection that has the final word. God was revealed to me, not because I was a special person, but because I was willing in faith to accept what God gave. I know it is true not just because the Bible says so or because the church has told us, but because I have experienced it myself, and whether you are despondent or in joy, whether you are apathetic or full of enthusiasm, there is available for you at this moment the whole life of God with its victory over sin and pain and death. ”
The experiences of these two men bring to life words from long ago: “Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well and the pools are filled with water. They will go from strength to strength and unto the God of gods appeareth every one of them in Sion.” – Psalm 84.6 and 7.
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