Monday, June 6, 2011

Chaplaincy Context

        “Chaplain Joey!” is a phrase that follows me throughout my ministry each day.  It is called out by patients, family members, nurses, aides, doctors, receptionists, secretaries, cooks, food servers, and many more.  Each has expectations… each has needs… each wants someone to listen, and each have preconceived ideas about the services I can or can’t provide.  Throughout the course of each day I am regularly called on to minister to hospice patients, their families, and medical staff alike.  In the course of a single day this week, I ministered to six hospice patients (5 routine, 1 crisis/actively dying), two distraught spouses, five daughters of a hospice patient, a nurse with an an hospitalized daughter, a health aide who needed an automobile, and a secretary whose husband’s was in a tornado while she was talking to him a few minutes prior.
The variable nature of the context of my daily ministry is difficult to describe at best.  Such variableness of the context is largely due to the variableness of humanity, and each participant would be different from the next, because death is no respecter of race, sex, creed, faith, age, orientation, wealth or residential location.  Due to the public nature of hospice and the public funding of hospice care by Medicare, the context cannot be limited, even if it were possible.  Even if you could limit the certain context, you would find significant variables due to family traditions, personal experiences, education, personality types, current health, etc.  It is a fact of life that every man faces death at some point and each will face it as an individual.  Almost 100% of my ‘parishioners’ will die in the next six months, and of the very small percent who defies medical logic will only do so for weeks or months at best.  Further, when one faces his own death and the death of others, even within a particular culture, it will be faced differently.
Imagine with me a parish/church where individuals will walk, hop, swim, or slither into and out of my care.  My eyes scan the congregation – ‘What an odd assortment!’  There’s a giraffe, a goldfish, a beaver, an elephant, a flower, a penguin, an insect, a duck, a… Ok!  Ok!  Not really!  But they could hardly be more different than the duck is from the giraffe or the goldfish.  Male and female, rich and poor, young and old, educated and uneducated, republicans and democrats, foreign and domestic, homosexual and straight, religious and…  Religious, let me tell you!  There are Muslims, Buddhists, Pagans, Wiccans, and Christians!   And of those Christians, there are Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, Old Believers, Episcopalians, Baptists, and Pentecostals!  And of those Pentecostals, there are Oneness and Trinitarians, Traditional, Charismatic, and Third-Wavers, first and second works of grace, holiness and liberated; all of them speaking in tongues and shouting, “Hallelujah!”  Each one an individual cocooned in his/her unique context.
I find my patients in hospitals, nursing homes, senior housing, and private homes.  I find them in the city and down long, lonely country roads.  I have passed (within feet) both drug dealers and cows to find my patients.  I have provided pastoral care while the rain leaked upon my head and the bed of the dying, and I have ministered in multi-million-dollar homes with servants.  I have provided care to politicians, US Marines, and housewives.  Each one is a human in need of an act of God’s love… to be welcomed for a moment into a holy place of peace.
They are all so different, and the variable nature of hospice ministry begs the question, “How can I find a common context from which to work and provide illumination on being Jesus to the dying?”  This is especially difficult when I am often restrained from even speaking His name out loud.  In spite of such variableness, I rarely have difficulty finding a common context that is acceptable and beneficial to all (including myself).  Among caregivers and family, most (almost all that are gathered at the bedside of the dying) are motivated by the sentiment expressed in St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace!”  Let me love, extend pardon, have faith, offer hope, shine light, be consoling, be understanding, and share joy.
I recently knelt by the chair of a lady with end-stage Alzheimer’s disease.  Her limited language expressed confusion and fear over the recent transfer from home to nursing home.  I was the only constant in her tumultuous world as she tightly gripped my hand.  I ran my hand through her closely cropped hair before I fumbled with my IPod to play her favorite, old, sacred hymn.  In a brief moment of recognition, her frail voice joined the recorded words, “…then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee.  How great Thou art!  How great Thou art…”  She doesn’t recognize her family or friends, but she has not forgotten her life’s sustaining faith or the words of worship that she has lived with during her life.  Thirty minutes later she hugged me tightly as a single tear ran down her face.  She had no words to express what she was thinking, but for a small window of time we had gone to a holy place together.
I then sat with a non-Christian high priest in his coven (a small commune of about 25 individuals).  For two hours he expressed his fears, loves, and anger at the lost dreams that death was robbing from him.  I then met with the patient, another priest, and a Wiccan witch to plan his memorial service (in which all three of us are to have a part after his death).  We are to be his final ‘dream come true’… “a religious world at peace with one another.”  As I left, we hugged, and he said, “If more Christians had been like you, I would have been a Christian!”  While I had made no effort to convert him, my efforts to be an instrument of peace were an invitation to share in a holy place:  a holy place that draws me out of bed each morning to share the holy with another dying woman, man, or child…

Saturday, January 1, 2011

To Walk on the Water

WE WANT to walk on the water, Lord;
(Act of no actual service To any man —
But terribly grand For the self-esteem!)

Don't ask us to feed the multitudes;
Our hands might suddenly
Smell of fish,
And crumbs would catch
In our trouser cuffs.

MARJORIE LOU STUMP. (The Christian Century, Sept. 1966)