Healing in Grace

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You Visited Me.  Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center

By Dr Robert Collins, MD            Ignatius Press    ignatius.com

A cancer doctor who lives by evidence and protocols tells a story that begins with an interruption he can’t explain: a question, heard like a voice in a lab, that challenged the idea that reality is only matter and chance. Dr. Robert Collins joins us to talk about his work in leukemia and lymphoma care, his journey from teenage skepticism to Christianity and Catholicism, and why he now sees hope as something sturdier than optimism. If you’ve ever searched for faith and medicine, prayer and healing, or what “whole person care” really means in a hospital, this conversation meets you right where you are. 

We dig into what medicine is actually for, beyond fixing organs and chasing numbers. Dr. Collins explains healing as restoring wholeness, which means treating a patient as a person with relationships, fear, responsibilities, and a spiritual life that shapes how they face illness. He shares how prayer functions in his daily routine and in clinical practice, from quick hallway prayers before entering a room to the rare moments when he prays with a patient, always rooted in presence rather than performance. 

Then we go to the hard ground: miracles and suffering. Dr. Collins offers a wider definition of miracle that includes the quiet work of grace, timely words, and the mysterious overlap of the spiritual and the material. We also wrestle with the question everyone asks sooner or later, why a good God allows suffering, without turning it into bullet points. A patient story of redemptive suffering and a son drawn back to faith shows how love can gather around a person at the end of life. 

Transcript

Welcome To Crossword

Michele McAloon 0:02

Hello, you're listening to Crossword where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. You can find out more about me at bookclues.com. Have a beautiful book, folks, in a beautiful interview about hope and healing and medicine and what's possible and what's impossible with prayer, nothing's impossible, and how we're truly not alone. I really hope you enjoy this interview. In many ways, I'm so humbled by it. Thank you for listening. God bless. We

Meeting Dr. Robert Collins

Michele McAloon 0:44

are so pleased to introduce Dr. Robert Collins. He has written a beautiful book, and it's called You Visited Me: Grace and Healing in the Modern Medical Center. And it's put out by Ignatius Prest. I read this book. I am as tough as a come. I'm a king lawyer. I'm an aviator. And I cried like I was watching a Hallmark movie. It was so good, but it's so full with hope. And it's it really is. It's just a book about hope. Dr. Collins, welcome and congratulations on your book. Thank you so much, Michelle. It's great to be on your program. Well, you are an oncologist specializing in leukemia and lymphoma. Tell us a little bit about your work, what you and what you do. I am a clinician, so a clinical oncologist who takes care of these patients with all sorts of blood cancers, doing all the sorts of treatments that we have for them. And for me, most of the patients have leukemia or lymphoma. I also have done a fair amount of research over the years, but clinical research. But mostly what I do now is administer a big program. So in addition to taking care of patients, I have developed and run a big program in patients with blood cancers and cell therapies here at this medical center, so an academic medical center. So that's my day-to-day. Okay, what is lymphoma, if you can explain that? Well, it's a cancer of the immune system. And these immune cells often hang out in the lymph nodes, these little, you know, glands that we have. And there's many of them, and it's essentially a cancer which has arisen in that area. So you have your book is really about your being a medical doctor and your conversion from one thing to something very else, your conversion to Christianity and how you've seen that. You talk about a book of experiences. Yeah. How did you come upon this? What was your initial experience to this pathway that you've taken?

Losing Faith Then Hearing A Voice

Michele McAloon 2:54

Well, you know, I was baptized. I was in the Baptist church and in our family. My mom was a sweet Baptist woman with a sweet, simple faith. And I was baptized when I was nine years old. But as a teenager, I lost all of my faith. Just, you know, became sort of a smart Alec teenager with good questions, but I wasn't sure that I was interested in any of the answers because I was so proud of how clever I was coming up with these good questions. My dad was a bit of a doubter too. He was a great man, but he just was skeptical about religion. And I think that sort of rubbed off on me. So by the time I'd finished my teenage years, I just had no faith at all. Just felt like it was just Santa Claus stuff and never thought about it. Just didn't feel like there was any need for God. And, you know, just it wasn't a part of my life at all. As I went off to medical school and did all the training there, loved the science, loved the medicine, really had almost no exposure to the humanities. It was the way this program was set up that I was in. I you'd get and out of high school and do your BA and MD in six years, so that means no room for any depth in the humanities. But, you know, life was nevertheless, it just felt good. I mean, I was doing well and I was in training programs doing well, and I'd gotten married. And, you know, we were out living in a cool city on the West Coast and just having a great time. And I was in a really good molecular biology research lab and just happy as could be, as I said, just but sort of skating on the surface and having one of these incredibly interesting scientific discussions with my mentor there. And it's just rolling along the way these get going sometimes. And in the midst of this conversation, I literally heard a voice just sort of off to the side. And we were the only ones in the lab, one him and one me. And the voice just said, Isn't this all a little too amazing to have just happened? And it was like I'd been hit. I mean, this wasn't the kind of question that I would ask. I was really interested in the how of things, but anything deeper than that, I wasn't interested in. And all I can say is I wasn't even sure what that question was asking at the time, but it was like I'd been hit. You know, everything went sort of muffled for a bit. And when I came to my mentor was still talking, but I wasn't listening anymore. I sensed that what the question was just saying to me was that you are on the surface. I mean, life seems good, but you are just skating along the surface, and there's great depth to your life and existence that you're missing. So it just woke me up and it got me thinking really sort of in an incident about what is it that I'm missing. And it led me to reading a lot in areas, such a sense that this probably had to do with philosophy or theology or something like that. So a lot of reading in areas that hadn't interested me before, and with time sort of read my my way into a theistic worldview and ultimately into Christianity. But it was about said experiences. It was much more than that experience in the lab and experiences of reading. I mean, it was experiences of, I really would have to say, God's love and his love coming to me through experiences in nature and music and just all this beauty that's out there. Love from my wife and from my kids. You were just talking about that before we came on, just how we love our kids and how the grandkids come along. But it's just this incredible feeling of love that you have the first time you see your first child. And then later on, the second one comes along. You can't imagine that you could ever love like that, but you do. And the next one, same thing. And so you're even then I wasn't really a believer, but I knew that I was getting some sense of something higher. This is sort of this sense of this divine love, which is infinite. And, you know, the moral law, things like that. And eventually you you come to appreciate that there's sort of two worldviews, and for most people who read in this sort of area, and it's either the materialistic, nothing honestly really matters. Everything just sort of came into existence as a big giant accident, and everything evolved as a big giant accident. And anything that we think has meaning, well, we're just thinking that because it's sort of an evolutionary adaptation. And that's one way of looking at the world. And and the other is that there's something behind it all. You can say call it a first mover, of course, but and in Christianity we believe that it's so much more than that. It's the first mover, it's the ground of our existence, but it's love itself. And it's something, someone who moves into our life and wants to draw us up into his life of love. I had found myself through these experiences just realizing that that's what I believed. I mean, you know, it's I think a lot of people who have the atheistic, materialistic worldview, which essentially is what I had by default back before God woke me up in the lab, that people have this way of looking at things, but they don't really believe in it. I mean, they don't really believe that all is meaningless, the love you have for your children is meaningless, you know, beautiful music is meaningless, that the moral law is meaningless. So eventually I just sort of understood that essentially I did not believe that worldview. I believed this this other worldview, this more theistic worldview, and with additional reading had sort of been touched by Christianity and eventually drawn into that, eventually into Catholicism. Let

Medicine As Healing The Whole Person

Michele McAloon 8:30

me ask you a question. What is medicine in the art of healing? Because even if you have a very materialistic worldview, there's got to be something more there that actually because when you talk in your book, you talk about patients that do die versus patients that live. A lot of those cases they're unexplained as to whether they why they live or where they die. I guess it's a two-part question, is what is medicine and what is the medical view of someone like you of immaterial, the immaterial part of the job or the profession? Yeah, well, I think medicine is about restoring to wholeness. And so the body is sort of broken apart in some way with some disease, and you come to understand what that is, and you do your work, understanding this the science and the medicine of it to try and pull that back to heal these relationships within the body that have been disturbed. So if you're having a heart attack, you know, you know what kind of a doctor you want. And as far as you're concerned, you just want, you'd be okay with someone who's all business and he's and he knows what he's doing, he gets in there and he's fixing your heart. But as he gets to know you more, well, let's say he fixes your kidneys. Let's say as he gets to know you more, he gets to understand that there's much more to your life. And you're not just a pair of kidneys, or you're not just an organ in the center of your chest. I mean, you are a complete human being with a full life, and you have children and husband and work and money worries and things that animate your life and all that has a lot to do with how you are going to approach this process of being healed. So a good physician will never treat you as just a pair of kidneys or an organ in the center of your chest. He will treat you as a whole human being and try to understand you in that way. And I think that that is sort of the lowest common denominator of a good doctor. And I think much of medicine these days is sort of a completely left-brained approach to patients. And it would just be this just give me the facts, just give me the scientific facts, algorithmic, figure out what's going on, we'll fix it. But completely ignoring that fuller sense of the patient as a whole human being. And you will not treat the patient well if you don't understand them as a full human being. There's many doctors, and I would say I've been really grateful to get to meet many doctors who are not just that left brain type of medicine, but are really looking at this other way of understanding the patient as well. I strive to be like that, and I'm inspired by physicians who are like that. But through this grace that I talk about in the book, and that's all I can say, it was just sort of came from outside of me and touched me and began to heal me and began to grow in me in that sort of life. Through that grace, I began to see even a deeper level of healing. And it's it's essentially, and in my book, there's a couple of quotes, but it's it's essentially like Pope Benedict is talking about healing is about the whole person and his relationship with God. It's only when that person is in the love of God that he is completely healed. And when we're talking about healing relationships, relationships within the body, with within the family, within the community, and that sort of thing, that's all the lowest common denominator stuff. But also the relationship with God himself. And that's full healing. And I've been blessed to be able to begin to see that. And I mean, I think as God begins to heal you, he begins to open your eyes so that you begin to see how he is moving in the world. And then you can also begin to sense that he's asking you to be involved in some way. So you stand back and you see what essentially are these stories and the kind of things that I've written about. The kind of stories that many of my other colleagues have too. I mean, I would just have to tell you the great news that there are a lot of deeply Christian doctors who are in this world who are not only great in the usual sense of being a doctor, but also understand this calling to medicine as a way to see God's work in the in the world and his patients, but also to sometimes participate in that. And we begin to sense a calling where God's asking us to play some role, maybe just say the right word at the right moment, but uh to help him move into a patient's life and begin to heal that patient in the fullest way, drawing that patient up into his life and his love. I tell you the way you explain some of the cases, like your your William, that is a Greek, you know, that talk to you a little bit about that, but the way you explain it, it you really do. You show it's that really that in the suffering there's just there's hope and there's depth and it brings everyone sort of together and it brings people in together. And I think that is it's it's a form of love upon love upon love that was ultimately showed in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And I want to talk about William, but I want to talk to, I want to ask you a question before.

Miracles Grace And Redemptive Suffering

Michele McAloon 13:41

Have you seen a medical miracle? How would you define a miracle? How would you interpret what a miracle is? I think I have seen things that I can't quite describe, but for the most part, not. I mean, my my life has not been just one amazing thing where a patient was in the morgue and he stood up and walked out onto the unit and said, I'm not dead yet. I mean, I just haven't seen that much like that. But and yet I feel like I see miracles all the time. Because if we stop and think about it, have I ever seen a miracle? Yes, I live in one. This cosmos that we live in used to be nothing. And then God snapped his fingers and said, Let there be light, and suddenly there was everything out of nothing. And then he sustains all of that continually. I mean, that's a miracle. And then our Christian faith tells us that Christ, you know, that God comes into the world. This spiritual essence comes into the world in material. That sounds like a miracle to me. And then he begins to move in our lives and begins to draw him up into his life through the sacraments and scripture and prayer that I cannot understand how that works. But that too is a miracle, this intermingling of the spiritual and the material. And then in medicine, we we do see it often. I mean, I think that's what those stories are mainly about. It's just these miracles of God's grace and healing, but in a very quiet way, you know, in a very subtle way. But if we see someone like William, who in prayer has discerned that he kind of needs to stop this medication, or has discerned in prayer that he needs to give his doctor a book that ends up being a pivotal book for his doctor, then that's a miracle too. I think this sort of wider view of what a miracle is helps us all understand that we all, wherever whether we're in the hospital or not, live within a miracle. I tell you, as you explain it, Dr. Collins, you just wonder, I feel sorry for people who don't see it that way. I mean, there's just such a layer of richness. I pray for them that we all see it that way because the layer of richness and meaning, and frankly, if beauty and what you're talking about, it it, you know what, it makes it makes everything worthwhile. It really does really does. Even the quote, bad things, you know? Even the bad things. I have a lot of people that ask me, if God is so great, why does he allow suffering? It's an honest question. You know, it's a hard question. But I think you have to be open to maybe there's more than just the suffering. Maybe there's you're being rolled up into something greater. And Adam ate the apple and he unleashed it all. But I don't know. I d I see God's providence in it. We don't want to suffer, but there is meaning to it. It is truly a mystery. And when you see it just all the time, like I do in my work, you just can't trivialize it. And I I think that anytime someone looks at the issue of suffering and sort of bullet points it, they're not treating it with the reverence that they should. And yet we do get a sense that there's something deeper there. For for some reason, this world that allows freedom has to allow suffering. And we would think that God should have just some supernatural fix for that. But it turns out that he has a supernatural use for it. And so something that I always try and think of, and I've told this in one of the stories I tell it to one of my patients, just remember that Jesus is on the cross, just like you are. And from eternity, in some way, uh, you know, our creator suffers with us. I believe that. And then through his suffering, he redeems us. Through his suffering, we're drawn up into his life. So I just I think you get a sense of this depth that's that's going on, but but again, only a glimpse, something that we can never really understand. I gotta tell you, ding ding-ding. He has it, he doesn't have a supernatural fix. He has a supernatural use of suffering. That is great. Yeah, I think that's from Simon Vay. Some from somewhere back in my memory banks. Yeah, that is great. I uh I mean, I deal with a lot of suffering through my annulments. I'm a canon lawyer, so I have to look at a lot of annulments. And yeah, suffering can't not be trivialized. You're right. Yeah, but you know what? It also can't be dismissed by saying that it's pointless either. No, no, right, right. And I think in a lot of these stories, you would just see the how this was playing out. I mean, uh, one of the stories is about a a guy, good Catholic guy that I got to know really well, and we were just really good friends. And but he was beginning to, you know, wear down and you could see the incoming, although it was a way off. But he used to be big and strong, and he just wasn't anymore. And I had a chance to go into his infusion room one day and just have a long, comfortable conversation with him, and the suffering came up as a topic, and I I basically never talk about theology of suffering with patients, because it's really all about just being present to them and just showing them that you care during all this. But, you know, somehow it seemed like it was the right thing to do was to discuss it. And we got talking about this redemptive quality of suffering in the the idea from Colossians 1.24, where Paul talks about it's through our participation in Christ's suffering, we somehow complete his suffering. Something very hard to understand, but it makes sense. And then John Paul II writes a lot about it in Sub Epici Dolores. Just this idea that whenever we are suffering in union with Christ's suffering, then somehow we're bringing his redemption to the corner of the world that we live in. And what I saw with my patient is that that ended up playing out. So he he ends up going downhill, he's he's not gonna make it. We've shifted to more of a comfort care sort of an approach. And in that original conversation when we had talked about suffering, I mean, partly how it had come up was he told me about one of his sons that he was particularly worried about his son's faith. And, you know, now this thing is evolving and eventually the patient dies. And um, but a honestly a beautiful holy death, surrounded by his family, surrounded by staff. Everyone just loved him. It was peace. He kept saying tender mercies over and over. And so at the funeral, his son apparently stands up, speaks. I wasn't able to be at it. I was at something with one of my kids over on the East Coast. But this son, who the guy he'd worried about so much, just said, through what I have witnessed with my father's death, all this love surrounding him, I found myself drawn back to the church. Well, yeah. Yeah. So just living, living out this concept of redemptive suffering. What's

Prayer At Work And With Patients

Michele McAloon 21:04

the role of prayer in your life as a doctor? Well, I would say mainly as connecting ourselves to the Lord. I s you know, I see prayer as listening, prayer as engagement. Prayer is the most important thing in my life in different ways of prayer. This morning so far, it's been some lectios, some mass, some rosary, and just, but all these ways of just it's one of his ways of allowing us to draw closer to him. And that's what it's all about, is living in him. I mean, we need to be a branch in the vine. That's what the whole thing is about. And prayer is partly how we become a branch in the vine. And when that's the case, his love and his life is flowing into us, but also through us. So that as we go into work, we can bring that into our work, whatever our. Work is. And for me, it's with the patient. So I trust that if the more of a prayerful life I have, then the more I can be that sort of a thing. Not me, but Christ in me, you know, bringing but just playing my role, whatever that role is supposed to be, helping bring that into the patient's life. I mean, there's others. I certainly pray for the patients. Sometimes we I pray with the patients. I often, just before I go into the room, we'll just remind myself that, you know, this is a big deal here. So it's not just a unit of work. This is a patient with a serious problem. So I stop and and say a quick little prayer for him. So I would say that. And then, you know, certainly seeing this play out in the patients' lives as well. I have many, many of my patients have these deep prayer lives. And and despite it all, they're just they're connected to God.

Holy Spirit Nudges And Writing The Book

Michele McAloon 22:48

Sometimes you say that the Holy Spirit has like kind of like hit you in the back of the head, right? Kind of giving you a shake. Wake up. Tell us a little bit about that. I mean, I think I think always. You know, that moment in the in the lab that I mentioned, a moment where I felt a calling to write this book, just sort of sitting in a chapel and thinking about reading and then thinking about the story of the woman at the well and just being struck how all she did was share her experiences. And by sharing her experiences, she was able to bring a lot of people to Jesus who encountered him on their own terms, basically. And as I had this insight, just a I can't explain it, but just a sort of feeling of affirmation, light, warmth. I think it was the Holy Spirit. Other times, though, just these sort of little nudges, like that patient I just mentioned that I went by to see. And that was with a nudge. I was getting ready to go upstairs and catch up on some emails, but I'm walking down the hall, the nudge just says, go in and see so and so. And other times, same sort of thing, go see John. I mean, one of the stories starts with that, that I'm so tired at the end of the day and ready to go home. It's late at night, but I just get this nudge and almost a voice, just go see John. And I went by and had a nice conversation with him, you know, that I thought I thought it was a deep conversation, but I had no idea that just one little phrase that I said was enough to help sustain him. And it was sort of in combination, he'd heard the same phrase from another person, and just sort of this resonance helped him understand that God was still around, still orchestrating this thing despite how sick he felt. So, and you know, my sweet wife, who features pretty nicely in the book. I really love her. Right, she does, she does. Her family life does feature. She's just gotten used to we're sitting there watching TV, and and I just say, okay, I I gotta nudge, I gotta go. So I'm gonna go down to the hospital and see so-and-so in the ICU. And she, you know, she gets it now. So I think there's that sort of thing that can happen as we become more and more open to the Lord's movements. One of the things that your book shows is one, is how hard doctors work. I mean, you work some pretty big hours, especially if you're a caring doctor and you get the nudge. You've not always said that you have been a perfect doctor. There's you've made some mistakes and you talk about that in the book because you're just no one's perfect at whatever they do.

When The Doctor Becomes The Dad

Michele McAloon 25:24

I mean, and then you had your own son, James. How is it like being a family member instead of being a doctor in that situation? As tough as it is for any other family member. I mean, I was he was a big, healthy athlete in college and had had a lot of back pain, but it had been attributed to some kind of minor injuries he'd had before. But it just became worse and worse. He ended up seeing a doctor who called me up on the phone and just said, I gotta tell you, your son has a spinal cord tumor. And to hear those words. And then shortly after to be looking at the films myself with another colleague, and I'm looking at this big, giant spinal cord tumor, and it's just, it's very different. You know, I can't I've seen many, many striking findings on X-rays over the years, and just sort of take it in, but it's very different when it's your own sons that's going on. That was a long story that required a lot of faith and a lot of prayer. Really an insight into prayer and healing that I'd had from a patient beforehand helped me with this. And this insight with the patient was it basically the healing that we see in the modern medical center is a combination of really good medical work and prayer. I mean, prayers, I think it's just going on. And in this other patient, I had seen, you know, we'd done a really clever maneuver to help him get better. But as I learned back talking to him, it just happened much faster than it should have. So it's like, you know, kind of, I mean, it it felt honestly miraculous. And and yet I knew that we had done this really clever medical maneuver. And yet I knew that he was, he had the prayers going, you know, thousands of people. And so just in an instant, again, one of these things, just a sudden insight that I internalized that healing is, you know, just good medicine in the standard sense, but there's a whole lot of prayer in it. And so with James, my wife and I had gotten the word out, so many people were praying for us, and again, literally around the world, thousands of people were praying for him. And they had essentially stopped whatever they were doing, their sort of self-centered activity, whatever it is, and they had stopped and turned their heart towards this young man. Many did not know him, and yet out of for a moment, they had disregarded themselves and regarded this young man. This disregard of yourself for the sake of the other is essentially the definition of love. And so we had seen this. I mean, this love was going on around the world. And so my wife and I are there in the waiting room, and he's off getting intubated and screws put into his head and to keep him straight and just all this scary stuff. I mean, we knew it was going on. And we're alone, we're holding hands, it's dark, sun hadn't come up yet. And you would think we would be just, you know, shivering. But we were both so at peace. And we both talked about it later, just how at peace we felt. This, and we knew it was this prayer. This is sort of blanket of prayer comforting us, surrounding us, and sustaining us as our son went through this. Thank God he did well and he continues to do well. In fact, he j he's the one who just had a grandbaby. Uh, he and his own. Congratulations, that's great. That's miracle. Yeah, it's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah, that's the miracle.

Faith Showing Up In Medicine

Michele McAloon 28:55

I was in the military and I've been in the military community, and one thing we've really seen over probably like the last decade is really the opening up to talk about faith and the possibility of faith and the engagement of faith allowed in the workplace, expressions of faith. Have you seen this happen in medicine? Has this opened up more? I feel like through society, the ability to talk about your faith has opened up more. Has this happened in the medical field? Yeah. And I agree with you. I I do it feels like something's going on. I mean, you read the news and the world is just falling apart. Right. You hear and you know about people who are just coming closer and closer to faith. And it's just sort of like we're all seeing that we have a choice, more and more. We can choose God or we can choose Elon Musk. More and more people. But I mean, a lot of people see this sort of stark choice and and are coming back to the church. And what I have found over the last few years just amazingly, I wasn't open to it at all before. I just wasn't open, so I didn't see it. But I've come to know so many deeply Christian doctors, Catholic, evangelical, but just really serious faith, very upfront about it. They're not hiding what it is that animates them. And they are animated by this. It um directs the way that they practice their medicine. Again, they're great doctors in the standard sense, but they're also seeing beautiful things play out, and they're playing a role sometimes in helping these play out. Yeah. And so I see that a lot. And I would say not just at my institution, but around the country. I mean, at a lot of leading institutions, I've come to know people who are known as leaders in their field, like international leaders who have these deep faith lives. So, you know, something's going on. God, God, he's just doing fine. I think God is doing fine. I think he promised I will be with you until the end of the ages. And no crazy, stupid human tricks you're gonna do. I am gonna still be here. And I really think that is what he is saying to us. Dr.

Final Reflections And Blessing

Michele McAloon 31:02

Collins, I cannot tell you what an honor it has been to speak to you. But also because this book has given myself personally a lot of thought about some of the things in my life and about hope and about prayer. And to my listening audience, even if you don't believe, read this book. It is ultimately it's about care and it's about hope. And it's about what is the best of us as both human beings and our relationship to the divine. Give it a chance. That's all I have to say because it is so worth it. It is so worth it. Dr. Collins, I really want to thank you for your time. Thank you so much, Michelle. It was really great getting to meet you and to be on your program. Thank you. Great. Thank you. God bless. God bless you too.