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.