Culture, chaos, and refounding. How leaders can refound the Catholic health ministry

Culture provides us with what we so desperately need in human life--a set of felt meanings in an orderly pattern. A group creates a culture as a way to cope with life's challenges and teach members the correct way to feel, think, and behave. No group is ever without a culture. If culture has a built-in tendency to resist change, how does change take place at all? The process of change involves separation, chaos, and reentry--the letting go of the old and familiar and the embracing of the uncertain new. The way to use chaos constructively is for people to return to the sacred time of their founding in order to identify, relive, and reown the heart of their creation mythology, liberated from the accidental and historical accretions that hold back creativity. For healthcare workers today, this means reidentifying with Christ's actions such as healing the sick or giving sight to the blind. Through this reidentification, healthcare givers can be fired up to form a new cultural integration adapted to changing needs. The chaos that our healthcare ministry is experiencing today offers us unparalleled opportunities for refounding. By acknowledging the chaos of the healthcare system, we thus lock in on the healing and reconciliatory power of God, and from this comes the energy to journey through the refounding process--the process whereby we struggle to enter collaboratively into the paschal mystery with Christ for his mission of healing; thus energized, we work to challenge systems and to create responses to the most urgent needs confronting the health of the people we serve.