To Be a Witness

A huge part of chaplaincy work is witnessing people in the midst of the hardest moments of their lives. It is one of the most interesting, devastating, and humbling parts of the job for me. It also means that the illusion of safety and fairness that most adults live in so as to carry on in the world is largely refuted every time I come to work. I tend to take risks under the premise of “what are the odds that x, y, and z will actually occur?” Well, in the hospital setting, I am regularly confronted with the exception to those odds. I’m spending time witnessing a mother whose baby did drown in the bathtub or the spouse whose husband did commit suicide. It’s harder to maintain my self-imposed delusions that I live in a world where I can control the outcomes of circumstances related to the people and things I care about most. It is its own form of unraveling.

I am regularly overwhelmed by the tragedy of the human experience. I know my lens right now is specific to hospital work in a pandemic, but some really shitty things happen in the world. It can be so horrific to play my part as witness. There is no way to be a witness and remain disengaged, nor should I remove myself emotionally even if I could. The purpose of the witness is to hold space, document, reflect, and create a sense of solidarity in the horror of what is happening. And while the patient or the patient’s family is in fact living their own story and I am living mine, the intersection of my story with the stories of the suffering day in and day out creates a level of vulnerability and fatigue that has changed me in a real way. Not in a traumatic way or in a way that I think I would regret, but there is a way of navigating the world without really knowing and seeing the depth of what is possible in a moment of freak miscalculation or accident. I will never go back to that space of not knowing. And while that means I am operating without as many protective illusions about life and safety and fairness, it also means that I am holding gratitude and deep appreciation for what is. What I have, what I may lose, who I come home at the end of the day. As cheesy as it sounds, all I have is now. And I am infinitely blessed.

I’m still working out my theology of suffering. I know that the “everything happens for a reason” and “God’s plan includes this” kinds of frameworks do not work for me. I personally cannot navigate a world of suffering with the idea that God approves it all or that suffering is okay. I absolutely cannot. I do believe in a God of redemption and restoration. I believe in a God who does care for humanity collectively and personally. But shit happens and it happens lethally and unfairly. That is a hard thing to witness every single day. There is so much in this hospital system and in the realities of life that are not mine to hold or fix. But this much I know. I can be a witness and I personally can only do it through faith.

CPE - A Marathon of Unraveling

I had a friend ask recently how things were going for me at the hospital. For those of you who don’t know, I am almost done with a unite of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) that began right as everything shut down because of COVID-19. That means I started a full-time unpaid job at a hospital in the final weeks of my master’s program in the middle of a global pandemic. I’m weird. My kids’ first day home from school was my first day at work at the hospital. My graduate degree is done now (Yea!) and I’m closing in on my final weeks of CPE. It’s weird to think about what it will be like when all of this is done as the job I planned to return to for the summer at the Y probably won’t be up and running still. Eh, if anything COVID-19 has taught me is to just plan on today. I’ll think about that later.

Everyone I talked to before starting CPE who had done it themselves described it as “intense.”* I thought I was well-suited for the work because I’ve done a lot of personal work and therapy and have a disposition for connecting with strangers. Turns out, that’s all true. AND my work is ongoing. Like, some of it is just beginning. The difference between chaplaincy and other spiritual or counseling work is that the chaplain’s presence IS the intervention, which means the chaplain must connect to their own emotions and story in order to engage the person at their point of need (rather than meeting their needs). We do not provide guidance and information. We go into the valley where the patient is and engage the feelings of what that’s like. We do not escort people out of their valley nor do we skirt around the valleys we’d rather avoid. This means my story is regularly activated and I have to care for myself as I stay present with people in sometimes the hardest moments of their lives. I’ve seen some real shit, you guys. So. Many. Hard. Things. This means I cry at work. This means I’m sometimes triggered by interactions. There is no “fixing” things or experiences for others. I cannot and will not rob others of their work to do. It is their story. Our stories just cross paths for a moment. I am an enneagram 2 called to witness the human experience and not fix it. I’m called to engage the pain and tragedy of what it is to be a human being.

In this process, I have experienced a beautiful unraveling. I’m shedding narratives about myself that are no longer serving me and I’m realizing what I can and cannot do. It’s an experience in exploring my own spiritual authority and allowing my intuition to participate actively while keeping my personal curiosity in check. It’s an experience in examining all my relational and emotional patterns. It’s unblocking certain feelings and experiences I haven’t attended to or receiving feedback from my peers about things I don’t know about how I come across to others. It’s bringing myself to the table of engagement without making the moment about me. My story becomes in service to theirs. I’m discovering the types of encounters I really enjoy (post-partum moms with their babies) and the ones that require a shit ton of care after (turns out, code blues aren’t as sexy as I’d anticipated).

It’s coming into a patient’s life for just a moment in the hopes of providing transitional care and shoring up their support systems for their long-term work. In some ways, my scope of practice is small. Most patients I only see one time. But I like to think that just having someone hold space for your reality in the midst of a traumatic experience can help lessen the work leftover when the trauma has passed. It also means that my role can be as a conduit for someone to practice their faith the way they prefer, which can be totally different from the way I practice mine. So sometimes I get to be a part of someone connecting to their spiritual leader or to words and methods of prayer or meditation I’ve never experienced in my tradition or even my religion. It’s an incredible honor to be that link. I really love it when I get to do that. One time I got to stand in for a Catholic priest (visitation for them is limited to end of life circumstances) and rather than activating my semi-regularly present impostor’s syndrome, I felt ELATED by it. My Catholic grandparents were with me with my arm raised above my precious friend who requested a blessing.

I don’t know what’s next for me. I feel like I have so many emotional internet browser “tabs” open right now, so many things I need to work on within myself. And plenty of shifts to cover and Zoom meetings to attend. But in the midst of this tornado, I’m being reborn. I’m growing. I’m coming into my calling. I’m being integrated into a more mature, authoritative version of myself.

* In case you’re unfamiliar with the process, CPE is done in units of 12 weeks of work. If you’re lucky enough to get a residency (my long-term goal), you can do 4 units consecutively and get paid. I’ve almost completed an internship at Legacy Emanuel in Portland, which will give me one unit. I can’t do a ton with one unit, though many places hire someone with 2. CPE involves shift work, classes, supervision, reading/writing, group work, and mentoring. I’ve got mainly 12 hour overnight shifts where I’m the only chaplain there for an adult hospital, children’s hospital and the Oregon Burn Center. It’s over 550 beds. I go to all the codes, deaths, attend to requests for spiritual care, and round on all our trauma admits. I pray with people pre-surgery, assist patients and their families with naming feelings, sifting through their experience in the hospital and what brought them to us. I attend to families who have lost a family member. I help people fill out an Advance Directive (including things like a DNR). I’ve sat with a lot of people who were on the brink of death, including infants. I help people pick out funeral homes and figure out how to honor their dead in the midst of a pandemic. The work is varied. I never know what’s on the other side of that door. The 12 hour overnight shifts are covered by interns every night for the whole 12 weeks, so on the days we have class, one of us was always on the night before and one of us is always on the night after. It’s a fascinating experiment in what the human body and heart can handle.

Maundy Thursday - Huh

It seems fitting to me that this is the first year I have participated in my church’s Maundy Thursday service (of course, on Zoom). If you haven’t ever included this Holy Day in your spiritual practice, it is an commemoration of Jesus’ last day before his crucifixion. We take communion and we tell the story of his death. Then we regather on Easter morning to break the vigil we begin on Maundy Thursday to celebrate the resurrection of Christ.

I say it seems fitting because this year, death feels close. Thankfully, I am not ill. None of my loved ones are ill. And I know that makes me incredibly privileged during this time of COVID-19, where the virus seems all around us. But between the virus and my CPE work at the hospital, it seems I am daily being confronted with the reality of death.

It has become part of my spiritual practice to attend to the dead and dying and their loved ones. This is new work for me. I have not been around a lot of death, though I spent my childhood in community and we certainly lost many people over the years. Somehow, being in those hospital rooms, especially with such limited visitation right now, this feels different.

For one, I am witnessing it almost every day I come into work (this is not a reflection of the state of the virus, but I think a common experience in Spiritual Care practice). That’s a lot of death. And now today, I spent a bit of my evening singing and reading the story of the death of God.

There’s a true heaviness to this time and to the work of God in the world sometimes. It is not all light and breezy. And for me, it has become important practice to not wish the heaviness away (I don’t mean to never take a break, but rather to not play ‘hot potato’ with it). This work, this deep, deathly work is important to what it means to be a human being. It’s hard. There are a lot of feelings to experience: fear, sadness, grief, anxiety, anger, resentment, frustration, stress…I could name every feeling and it it probably applies in the roller coaster experience that is death.

One of my fellow CPE interns recently said, “There’s no more human thing to do than to die.” And I thought, “That would not have been something I would have subscribed to three months ago.” This is a specific season, a specific time - both in the world and in our lives.

And I guess I wanted to come on here tonight and just wish peace and love to everyone as we communally go through death both in the Holy Week that is Easter and in the experience of COVID-19, where so much is left feeling uncertain and unstable. I think in all the instability and loss, we can find God here. I think he can meet us here. He can be present with us in this.

I don’t subscribe to any idea that God brings suffering or inflicts it deliberately. What a cruel thing to believe. I believe in love. And you know what? Love meets us in suffering. That’s why loss hurts so much in the first place - it’s the evidence that we experienced love at all. Glennon Doyle calls it our receipt. Embrace the pain of loss and hold on tight. There is beauty and growth waiting for us in the pain. Not when all the pain goes away - right now, in the pain.

And if this isn’t the right message for you tonight, if you need something happier and more shiny, it’s okay to skip me this time. I totally understand how important it is to guard our consumption of material right now. But if you’re feeling the heaviness, I just want you to know, that’s what makes you human. And humans do hard things. You are loved. Easter Sunday is coming.