Dual Realities

I am feeling comfortable with my patient visits. On call on Friday, Saturday and Monday, with no morning classes, there was a lot of time for orders and a lot of time for other visits.

I like the role of chaplain. I enjoy the patients. I enjoy learning about their medical challenges, what keeps them going, what brings them down. I am developing my own style. I listen closely to people, initially echoing back what they are saying. Sometimes I paraphrase and check out if I have done it correctly. I move the conversation and thoughts along. I celebrate the small steps that they are making. I honor their pain and troubles. I point out dualities in their stories.

One woman told me yesterday, “I have always been the rock for my family, I have always supported them through their crisis, and now I can’t do that anymore. A little while later, she said, “I’m just thinking about all of the gifts that God has given me that I haven’t used, and I realize that I’m just so selfish.” I reminded her to the two thoughts and asked her how she reconciled them. She said that she didn’t know. I think I probably responded, “Isn’t that the way with most situations, everything is itself and its opposite. “I have no doubt that you have always been the rock of your family helping them through crisis, and that you have gifts that were given to you by God and that you have not taken full advantage of. Can you think of ways that you might want to take advantage of some of those gifts now?

People have been responding favorably. They seem to enjoy the probing questions. It’s so amazing to me that they would talk so earnestly with a stranger.

A man on Saturday was taking himself to task about this worry. He quoted scripture that said that he shouldn’t worry. I sympathized with him that he had a lot on his plate in terms of his medical condition, and noted that his situtation was made even more difficult because his worry was seen as a crisis of faith. We talked about how in God’s world we don’t have to be perfect and how scripture points us to a more Christlike existence that asks us to always be striving toward a goal to be forgiving and trusting in God, but not one that demands that we always achieve that goal. It’s the striving that’s important, we agree.

Many of the lessons explored in the patient’s rooms are ones that I need to take to heart. I don’t know if that because it’s a collaborative process, or whether, like that woman who was the rock, that I, too, am selfish at my core. “Aren’t we all,” I probably replied when she made the remark. In my understanding of the world, we are selfish and we are generous all in the same moment. It is the yin and yan of life, of human existence.

I think that’s one of the reasons I like this hospital work. It’s all pretty real here. People are stripped of their possessions, their clothes, their familiar surroundings. They, and we who walk with them, maneuver in the realm of the spirit, in the region of the heart, in the midst of high tech reality. It is the ultimate duality: it is complex and simple this healing of body and heart. The lessons and the healing are personal and universal.

I am learning about all that I don’t know. I am seeing that I know what I need to know. I am becoming differentiated from my emotions. I am learning about choice. I am seeing that we have to deal with what we have to deal with and that sometimes that dealing is surrendering to the situation, sometimes it’s diving in.

I am learning how different people are and how alike we are at the same time.

These are things that I share with the patients I visit. We fill each other’s days and for that, we are both grateful.