Patch Adams – A Review

“All of life is a coming home… all the restless hearts of the world are trying to find a way home.”  Here in the opening lines of the movie of his life, Patch Adams delivers not only his personal philosophy concerning the meaning of our days on earth, hinting toward his own healing and the lens through which he would one day view patients and wounded people around him, but also the very nature of the human heart.  As George MacDonald has said, “This is and has been the Father’s work from the beginning – to bring us into the home of His heart.”  From what I have come to understand of the soul of man and the heart of God, it is this desire to “come home,” and what a man or woman does with this desire, that determines perhaps more than any other factor the journey his or her life will take.  In watching the film, I realize that this is a bias I have in dealing with a person or a family, that ever since we lost our place with God through the Fall, we have been looking for it again and trying to find our way back into the sacred circle.

It’s instructive, too, that for Patch, his life had taken a turn into “a dark wood,” as he puts it, but that as frightening as it may have seemed and as devastating as it could have been, what he discovered in the psychiatric ward at the beginning of the movie was of immeasurable value for his life.  Something inside him did come home, in a sense.  Up to this point, he had run aground on the reefs of pain, isolation and despair.  He had entered into the clinic shipwrecked, purposeless and alone, but he left (through no direct help by the doctors, sadly) propelled with tidal force by a passion to serve others.  What’s astounding about the way the movie portrays this is that it’s right out of Jesus’ teachings of following Him, of “letting the dead bury the dead,” and of losing your life to keep it, of loving service.  Patch becomes, in the famous words of Henri Nouwen, a “wounded healer,” a quality necessary, I think, for anyone who wishes to extend healing to others.  Nouwen explains in his book by that title, “Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames?  Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind?”  It is here that Patch even receives a new name, biblically analogous to Paul the Apostle or Peter the Disciple or even John, the “Son of Thunder.”  In every case, with the new name comes calling and passion to serve.

The way in which Patch serves is also so much like Jesus, and so much like a true Marriage and Family Therapist.  Patch goes through the rigors of medical school studies so as to become a doctor, but he sees that in itself only a means to offer healing and improve the quality of life for patients.  He is not only uninterested in the reverence of the title and in “professional distance” and objectivity through labeling, but he sees it as damaging to the process of healing.  I love the scene when a doctor is coldly explaining to medical students surrounding a diabetic woman that her toe may have to be amputated and asks if anyone has any questions.  Patch interrupts the heartless critique with an innocent and warm question, “What is her name?”  He cared for her as a person, and honored her with the dignity of identity rather than reducing her to the level of a label or a disease.  His approach to the professional medical community is not openly hostile, but rather openly human, and he insists on remaining faithful to that vision.  His ruthless interest is always to serve others by engaging them to offer treatment.  Standing before the medical board toward the end of the film, they with the power to keep him from graduating, Patch explains that because of his desire to serve he has lost everything, “but I’ve also gained everything” by sharing with the patients’ lives.   “As God as my witness, no matter what your decision today, I will become the best damn doctor the world has ever seen.”  Although he wanted to become a doctor with all his heart, Patch knew he already was one at core.  That’s the case for me as well – I am called to serve, I am called to “bind up the brokenhearted” (Isaiah 61:1).  By walking in step with the Spirit of God as my Counselor, I hope to become trained in counseling so as to to share in the lives of people and offer them healing and restoration as a part of the process of becoming more alive… “that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).