Monday, June 28, 2010

To sacrifice and make sacred

I have been musing on the word sacrifice since I received it as part of a worship service last Tuesday. The worship leader asked us to contemplate how the word that we picked out of a basket might be a potential route that God wanted us to ponder. Besides the fact that I don’t view God as exerting a particular will over my life, I have been wondering what a thorough thinking of the concept of sacrifice might yield for me.

I have always thought that sacrifice was to lose oneself or to give away something most dear. Looking it up in the dictionary, I find the word comes from a Middle English verb that means "to make sacred." The term is also used metaphorically to describe selfless good deeds for others or a short-term loss in return for a greater gain, such as in a game of chess.

If I, indeed, have to embody sacrifice, I prefer to think about making something sacred than subjugating myself. I think that this is an issue that I struggle with when faced with what I perceive as unfair situations or other forms of painful interactions. I have trouble thinking that I deserve to be treated poorly, or that by letting insult go unnoted, I am accepting that the painful situation is somehow justified.

In reading the first pages of “Legacy of the Heart,” I was intrigued by the concept that the pains of our childhood are healed by our recognition that we are hurting. Rather than saying “I am hurt because of …,” author Wayne Muller writes that it is more helpful to simply acknowledge that we hurt. If we can cut the attachment to the why of our hurt, we are set free from the cycle of suffering.

Today, I spoke to a woman who said that she had been abused as a child and violated as an adult. In order to ease her pain, she had turned to drugs. Now straight and clean, she wondered why life was so hard. Additionally, she understood what she had been running from. She said that she had tried to talk with her abusers but that it only seemed to become more painful. She said she had taken the abuse from her male relatives with the idea that she was saving her younger siblings from the same treatment.

She had sacrificed her innocence; she had made herself victim. As some of the abuse was from family members, she she did not want to deal with other family members about it. Feeling alone, she was fearful that if she was to talk with her family, they would attempt to take action against the victimizer and she thought that she would become even more vulnerable and that her troubles would intensify. She was trying to convince herself that her only option was to forgive and forget, although that was extremely difficult.

We spoke about counseling, which she said had not been helpful so far; we talked about a physical kind of counseling or therapy, noting that we store much of our pain in our bodies. We talked how she might honor and name the pain in her life, and wondered aloud whether embracing the pain, rather than fending it way, or attempting to move beyond it without recognition might yield some sort of peace.

I am wondering if we can truly honor our pain and suffering—not that we deserved it and not that it is a blessing in disguise, but that it is, that it happened and that it has shaped us—whether treasured and grieved, it might be sacrificed.

Transformed and made sacred, perhaps it might release its grip on our psyche so that we may be restored to well being.

Friday, June 25, 2010

The conch shell



The conch shell sitting on my grandson’s shelf catches my attention and reminds me of the one that I had when I was a child. I am surprised that I didn’t notice it before. I have been living in this room for some three weeks now and remembered my own shell just in this moment. I wonder about the timing.

I notice it just as I am searching for a metaphor, a thought that encapsulates the idea of faith and the notion that if we succumb to grief, it is actually a crisis of faith. C.S. Lewis in “A Grief Observed” muses about his own faith and wonders if it is a house of cards or a rope that seems to remain strong in our minds but becomes questionable and fragile when we find we need its support.

A young woman I visited last week was struggling with a similar question. Racked by an unexplained and undiagnosed pain, she worried most that she was losing her faith. She questioned why God would put her through this pain, and worried that she would cease to struggle to be a good person. I tried to comfort her with the though that our faith, not unlike our muscles, is made stronger by exercise and that questioning God or our faith can often facilitate and stronger connection to it.

I am reminded again of the conch shell that seemingly appeared at just the moment that I needed inspiration and I think about the emerging neuroscience that explores whether human beings are hard-wired for some kind of belief in a reality outside of ourselves. Humans, it seems, are hardwired to find meaning or explain that which cannot be explained.

I muse on the conch shell. Is our faith the outward manifestation of the shell, the temporary house that we pick up and carry for our protection?

Is the shell the symbol of the inner spiral that we travel, making our way down smooth cylindrical pathways, up and down in the dark, before finding our way into the light?

Does it represent the more transient reality of memory, the fleeting connection that we have to our past and to our family?

Or is this faith a mystical experience of inspiration? Is this hard wiring a reminder of the interconnection of wonder and awe as it manifests itself in the universe of being?

In this moment, all of these worlds collide and I am content, touching that which I cannot explain, and feeling connected to my sense of faith. My house of cards, my rope to salvation seems many threaded and strong.

Monday, June 21, 2010

synchronistic-music-making

Today's post and audio is available at

http://www.uduuf.org/ministersblog/synchronistic-music-making

Saturday, June 19, 2010

After hours

I worked the 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. shift tonight. I enjoyed the morning – and driving without morning commuter traffic.

The pace of the work in the hospital was kind of slow for a while. I helped another chaplain facilitate a group discussion on the psych ward. The seven people who participated, while obviously hovering on the edge of cogent reality and fantasy, had just as much insight and inherent wisdom as my IPR (Intrapersonal reflection) group.

This Intrapersonal Reflection, group work, as it is called, is actually more challenging than visiting the floors or even being witness to traumas. The “red” trauma tonight was a young man who hydroplaned his pickup, sheared off a mailbox while travelling 35 mph and ended up with a shard of glass embedded in his neck. He was lucky, he said, this time, not like in 2006 when he fell three stories off of a roof and spent one month in a coma and six months in the hospital. His mother was driving in from an hour away.

“Does your mother know that you are okay?” I asked him.

“I don’t have any cell reception,” he replied.

When I reported this interaction to the chaplain who was supervising me, he handed me the trauma phone. “It’s a hospital phone,” he said, “It has reception everywhere. Go back and talk with him again and get him to request that he use the phone to call his momma.”

I did as I was told and moments later this grateful son told his mother that he was okay.

This is the work of chaplaincy. This and listening to people talk.

Mostly they talk about how their family doesn’t understand them. They often start the conversation saying that they are having a spiritual crisis; generally that crisis is underpinned with a disconnect to family.

And people want to pray and be prayed for. This evening, I prayed for three people, yesterday it was two. I’m becoming comfortable with it and the last woman I saw tonight told me that she thought my prayer for her was beautiful. I’m not sure that I am talking to the same God that they have in their minds, although I believe that prayer is universal. And in the end, it is the human connection, the desire for love which is inherent in all of us, which we seek through the divine.

Tomorrow I will rest to prepare for an 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. shift on Sunday. The hospital is becoming a routine and while I still walk up and down hallways finding units and rooms, I am slowly finding my way.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Lost in the hallways

I am lost in the maze of hallways. Trying to find my way to the NICU unit because I heard a Code Blue announced over the loud speaker, I am standing at a crossroads wondering which way to turn. A woman approaches and tells me that the unit is in the opposite direction.

Everything in the hospital is unfamiliar and I have just learned that NICU stands for Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit and that a Code Blue is respiratory failure. It is not imperative that I get there, as the call will go out to the chaplain who is carrying the trauma pager for the day. My instruction in that moment is to take the next hour and a half and visit the units that I have been assigned and ask the nurses whether anyone wants to be seen by a chaplain. Cold calling, my supervisor says. I have already been to two and no one is in need of a chaplain.

The woman, who turns out to be a nurse although she isn’t dressed in the customary dark blue scrubs, asks me about the music case that is on my shoulder. “Is that a harp?” she asks me.

We talk for a few moments about how her daughter played a large pedal harp for eight years and then lost interest. Then she tells me that she has a patient that might really enjoy a bit of music if I have the time.

The invitation feels like a Godsend.

Her patient is a 14-year-old girl who is receiving dialysis.

“She doesn’t look 14,” she tells me in preparation. We enter the unit and approach the bed of a girl who looks about eight. She introduces me and I take out my Reverie Harp.

I sing what is becoming a standard, “The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the light is yellow.” She joins in and after it is done, she suggests that the sun is yellow. We sing again, changing the words up, singing about the colors of fruit and end up naming items around the room. “The bag is blue, the trash is green, and the gown is yellow.” We are playing. I sing the first part of the sentence; she fills in the color at the end. She tells me that she is going to camp. She has gone for the last four years. The morning is spent in dialysis, the afternoon is filled with archery, and arts and crafts, all the usual camp stuff.

I hand her the harp and she strums it, plucking each string and then touching it again, deadening it. She compliments herself on her song. After a bit, it is time for me to go; there is a didactic scheduled with a local priest who will explain what the Catholic ministries do in terms of administering sacraments and how to get in touch with them. I make my goodbyes and as I am walking past the nursing station at the door the nurses thank me and tell that they have never seen the girl enjoy something as much or been so engaged. They invite me to come back.

“She’s here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for three hours,” they say.

I ask my supervisor in our afternoon session, whether it is appropriate to develop regular patients. He assures me that it is fine. My group congratulates me on a successful encounter.

When I am leaving following afternoon report, I see a little girl in a wheelchair waiting by the front entrance. I had noticed her before, the small blue wheelchair catching my attention. As I walk by, I look at her and, to my delight, it is the same girl from dialysis. She introduces me to her mother and I sit and show her the instrument. The girl relates the story of the harp, “Her husband made it for her,” she tells me. The two of them discuss an uncle, now dead, who was a good woodworker. She seems 14 in that moment, and it is obvious that she has told her mother about our visit.

The encounter, all of the pieces of it, seems to contain a divine intention.

I cannot really imagine the life of that mother who needs to get her daughter to dialysis three times a week without the aid of a car. But I am becoming aware of the heroic lives that people lead, just below the surface.

I am also aware that when we find ourselves to be lost, we are often found.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Meaningful moments

We have begun shadowing the resident and staff chaplains as part of our daily schedule. Yesterday, I tagged along with Chaplain N. as she made visits to the palliative care patients. I had brought my Reverie Harp to the hospital; I was planning on calling on a person I had met at the Tampa UU Church who is scheduled to have open heart surgery this week.

I watched how N. washed her hands before and after every visit, sometimes with soap and water, sometimes with foam cleaner from dispensers that are both in the hall and in the patient rooms. I played for B, who is suffering from advanced cancer and was having a bad day. As I sang, N. stroked her hand. She seemed to relax into the soothing sound. As I the simply words, "the sky is blue, the grass is green and the light is yellow," I concentrated on soothing my voice, communicating through sound all the love and good wishes that I could in the moment.

N. closed her eyes and listened. After a bit, the palliative care nurses came into the room to do their assessment. They asked me how they could reach me and I gave them my pager number.

We moved on to the next order, a request from a man who was feeling depressed and had requested a Spanish-speaking chaplain. N. asks him if he wants to listen to some music. The man opts to talk. Our visit is interrupted by a team of two from the psychiatric department. Rather than tell them to come back, N. encourages the man to speak with the doctor, that they can help him and that she will return in the afternoon.

We continue from there. We visit a woman who is in restraints and is agitated. After a bit, when she understands that we will not untie her, she asks her to leave. Another palliative care patients declines an initial visit, saying we should come back when he is further down the line.

We go back to the pastoral care office so that she can file her notes on the visits. It helps with closure, she tells me, categorizing the visit.

Chaplaincy is a series of small interactions that occur throughout the day. Sometimes they are connected, sometime not. The point is to have them all be meaningful. Even if it's someone asking you to leave.

Monday, June 07, 2010

Chaplaincy: working in paradox

Beyond the 300 hours of clinical work that is expected this summer, there is classroom instruction, individual supervision, peer group work and writing assignments in the form of verbatims and weekly reflections.

The following in my first weekly reflection.


The CPE experience is a multi-layered paradox.

In one sense, it’s about providing spiritual care for a hospital patient that is unconditional and flexible care, geared toward the patient’s needs and desires. At the same time, CPE is a process of opening ourselves to our own learning and using our very individualized human experience as text. It is a training experience to become reflectively analytical and intuitively aware of our limitations, intentions, assumptions and motivation. It is an opportunity to live into our ministerial authority and pastoral role.

And for as much as this relationship is human focused, existing in a human-made environment filled with human-made invention, it is actually a relationship rooted in the spirit world. In all of the situations facing a chaplain and the people we serve, the ultimate question is “Where is God in all this?”

Finding God at a time of crisis and in the midst of suffering and pain, offers another layer of paradox. This paradox forms itself in the question of theodicy or how evil and suffering exist in the realm of a benevolent and omnipresent God.

Not surprisingly, while the situations facing the chaplain are often complex and intense, what is often called for is relatively simple: deep listening and knowing and trusting ourselves.

Of course, deep listening is not something that most average Americans are encouraged to do. Our culture revels in the quick comeback and the ability to respond quickly going so far as to cut someone off before they have finished their thought. We often only listen long enough to formulate our response; sometimes we don’t listen at all.

Our culture also seems to encourage quick analysis that has at its root the blame of others. Rather than being reflective about our own contribution to a situation, we stop our thinking by immediately concluding that everything has happened to us and that we had no role in determining the outcome.

However, the chaplain must be able to look at a situation critically; they must be able to understand their own bias and have a firm understanding of their own personal history. Despite our religious upbringing, it is that history that provides our basic theological framework. Additionally, the chaplain must be willing to meet people in weakness and not in mastery of the situation.

The last bit of paradox is that for as much as a chaplain may be firmly centered in self-knowledge, we are attempting to be in a deep relationship with someone who may not be aware of how their own story colors their impressions and their expectations for a religious leader or chaplain.

On first impression, it is in these currents and undercurrents of paradox that we will need to learn to maneuver. With the pastoral care department, its policies and procedures as the boat, and own hearts as a beacon and map, I imagine we’re in for an exciting voyage through a sea of being: theirs and ours.

Friday, June 04, 2010

Personal story

The alarm rings and I immediately turn on the light. Yesterday, I fell back asleep for an additional 1/2 hour and felt a bit rushed to be out the door at 7:00 a.m. I have a window of about six hours to get done what I want to get done: spending time with my extended family, daily writing, practicing my harp and getting a bit of exercise. I have scheduled my daily writing for the morning. It might not be the most opportune time to do it as there is limited time between getting up and out the door.

This morning, I need to add the creation of one, two or three learning goals that I will be working on for the summer.

Yesterday we broke into two small groups and shared our personal stories. I started by saying that this is the first time that I was stepping away from my newspaper work, a vocation that I fell into some 32 years ago. There was a timbre of emotion behind all parts of my story as if all of the elements of my growing up were painful and unresolved. We had 20 minutes to relate our story and it wasn't until I got the three minute warning that I included anything from my recent past.

The experience has me feeling a bit vulnerable, although what others shared was equally as revealing. Perhaps it is just that I wasn't in control, that I demonstrated that I haven't created neat little boxes to put these essences of personal development. These are the fodder of our perception in the world, these intimate details, these formative stories. From these deep places, we connect to each other.

And it is in this fertile soil that I will work with my reflection group. With a compassionate supervisor, the five of us will help each other discern when our pastoral care work touches our vulnerabilities and colors our judgment or our action. We will hold each other accountable to work deep in these places of personal story.

The head of the Pastoral Care Department, Rev. Dr. Bill Baugh, spoke with us yesterday and explained the who, what, when and why of pastoral care and ministerial formation. He said the most important thing that we would be doing is musing and wrestling. It's not about pinning someone to the mat, he said, it is about considering a variety of ways to look at a situation: challenging ourselves and our assumptions, trying to discern an additional way of understanding something.

This musing, this wrestling, offers the possibility of an "aha" type of moment. A moment where pieces of story take on different meaning, become a different metaphor.

With that in mind, my storytelling yesterday provided fertile ground, well-tilled loose soil for me to work. I understand now that I will have a garden this summer, not my beloved patch of ground in the Upper Delaware River Valley, but the inner ground of my being.

I am the garden; we are the garden. This is the ground we tend.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Action and Reflection

A chaplain's day begins and ends in the same way: with a group meeting where the events and the cases of the previous shift are handed off to the next. Yesterday, we hear about TGH David, a young man who was brutally beaten by a neighbor. The perpetrator is still at large, so that the real name of the patient is not recorded.

The young man, who is still a bit confused having received a big injury to his head, says that he does not want a police escort home or to change his locks. The Pastoral Team does not think he understands. I wonder how this young man could possibly get his locks changed as it is already 4:15 p.m. "Can't they just let him stay another day since he still in confused," the team wonders. One of the resident chaplains, who has been working with him over the last few days, says he will see what he can do before leaving for the day.

They discuss that there has been a breach in security with someone in the ER not following all of the procedures of patient confidentiality in giving out the TGH label. The resident says he will research what happened to see that it doesn't happen again. (Generally, it is the Pastoral Care Team member who makes that TGH designation, but procedure is changing to include other staff)

The talk is reasoned, the emphasis is on changing the outcome in the future. The bottom line is care for the patient and the staff.

I am told that this emphasis, the connection of head and heart, the development of empathy and emotionally mature behavior will become ingrained in me this summer and become a part of my personality going forward.

I hope it will be so.

Supervisor W. started his lecture on crisis ministry by telling us the classic story of the five Chinese brothers, quintuplets who each had a unique gift. After a disclaimer about racial sensitivity, he explained how the five brothers, the one who could swallow the sea, the one with the iron neck, the one with the stretchy legs, the one who could not burn, and the one who could hold his breath indefinitely, were able to escape the wrath of an angry village but impersonating each other and using their unique gifts after being unfairly accused of a crime.

All these gifts had a connection to the skills necessary for pastoral care: understanding that there are limits to our capacity (and the people we will serve) to hold the complexity of an unfolding crisis, keeping our head and body connected, keeping our feet on the ground and our head above water, the ability not to be consumed, and to understand that life is the spirit and the breath that connects us all.

At the root of this CPE is the concept of action and reflection. It calls on us to use our experience whatever it may be, successes, mistakes, heartaches, a less than adequate follow through of procedure, and reflect on it and make the necessary adjustments so that the outcome will be the best it can be.

It calls on us to remain always connected to what is going on. As I hear the news that the Gulf oil spill is nine miles from the Florida coast and that the Upper Delaware River tops the list of the rivers in America most endangered, action and reflection seem like tools that are useful beyond pastoral care.

As I ready for the day, I hope that during the morning report, we hear that TGH David had a restful night in the hospital. Otherwise, I have a feeling that we will hear about him again.

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Day One



The afternoon tour of Tampa General Hospital (TGH) lasted two and a half hours. By the end, I and my other eight classmates, the Summer CPE Intern Chaplains, understood that the hospital was huge and did everything there is to do medically in that facility and that we were an important part of the care team. Our minds boggled, we knew that we had maybe seen a 10th of the hospital. We joked that by the time we actually knew our way around, the 12-week training program would be over.

We learned that it is the chaplain's job to help identify the trauma patient's name, find out their next of kin, and call them. We learned that it is our job to arrange for the family to view the body if the person doesn't make it through.

We understood that we were going to be trained to support people who were in a crisis situation both spiritually and emotionally. Personally, we were there to learn how to connect our hearts with our minds and become more firmly rooted in our ministry. Professionally, we were there to provide support and to listen, to be an advocate for the present moment.

Our supervisor, Rev. Celillon Alteme, was warmly greeted every where he went, and as we were introduced as the newest Intern Chaplaincy team, the staff beamed at us and thanked us for the time that we would spend with them.

Our badges, emblazoned with the title Chaplain, open a multitude of wings and doors. And while it seems strange that that invitation is offered to our little of group of nine upon arrival, I can't help but think that hearts open whenever we are in the present moment, available to support each other spiritually and emotionally with deep listening.

Tuesday, June 01, 2010

First morning

I think about habits and spiritual practice as I mentally prepare for my first day of a 12-week Clinical Pastoral Education program. At 6:30 a.m., I will be ready to leave my children-in-law's house, jump on the highway and make my way to Tampa General Hospital. After taking husband Stephen to the airport early yesterday afternoon, I took the Route 295 Downtown West exit and found my way to the hospital and back.

My summer here will give me a taste of the world that I have studiously avoided by living my entire adult life in the Upper Delaware: a daily interstate highway commute, parking garages, large organizational entities, a landscape of big box stores and chain restaurants. And it will provide me with a hands-on education in a regional hospital and trauma center of how to pastor to temporary strangers and accompany them through days that they may experience as nightmares.

I'm told it's an intense experience and that I will be able to deal with it if I am careful about my own spiritual practice and mentally letting go of the hospital day's reality when coming home.

While I know that I will miss the details of my life in the Upper Delaware: watching my garden grow, the daily harvest ritual as Stephen and I prepare our summer dinners, the sweetest of the intimate Fellowship Sunday gatherings, the intellectual debate around covering the news at The River Reporter, I am happy for this time of establishing new habits and spiritual discipline, tools that will help me be able to traffic my way through this time, this world time that I might easily describe as a collision between consumerism and corporate hegemony (dominance) and the values of the earth.

There is a balance necessary, a combination of habit and spiritual practice, that might allow us to stay involved and not be swallowed up in disgust and despair. It is a way of being, of taking care, developing habit and spiritual practice, that this new schedule, that this CPE experience might afford me a chance to develop.

This thought, it is enough for now, as it is time to get ready and go.