Notes from the Bedside: Tales of a Chaplain

"Morning Prayer": My typical '"setup" on any morning
(sans the iPod), experienced in a special way
at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur.

Back from another retreat at the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur: a home away from home for about twelve years now. I do most of my writing here, often with a coffee cup at hand and a few books. There isn't much else to do. So aside from writing, I spend some of my time rummaging through the "old stuff" just to see what's there. In my latest rummaging I came across something I wrote last year, which I thought might be worth sharing.


Monday turned out to be a day of surprise hugs and unexpected connections. 

I went to visit Bella in the morning. I had seen her a few times before and she never showed much response. She was elderly, nonverbal, contracted; sometimes she responded to my voice by looking at me, sometimes not. On Monday, when I walked into her room, I expected much of the same. I stood by her right side and took her hand, which she began to squeeze quite hard. I wasn't sure if this was a meaningful response or just contractions. But after a few minutes she let go of my hand and reached her arm out to me as if to embrace me. So I leaned down to let her embrace me—and, oh, how she held me tight and patted my back. I just stayed there, laying my head against her shoulder with my other arm draped across her chest. I felt like a small child in its mother's arms. 

It seemed important to let her hold me like that—to allow her to offer and express something deep within her, something that still lived beneath what had become her "incapacities": dementia, stroke, perhaps Parkinson's . . . For me it was an authentic moment of ministry because it was an authentic moment of human connection—without words but with the most articulate language we have: the language of our bodies.

I left Bella feeling joy and amazement. I thought of how deprived she and so many sick people must be of touch, contact. I thought of how few people would let themselves be held by a sick woman unable to speak, unable to get out of bed. Not that I credit myself. It was a moment of pure grace.

Later that day I walked by David's room. He was a fifty-year-old man with metastatic pancreatic cancer who would soon go to a nursing home to spend his final days. His brother and uncle were with him and were signing paperwork for the transfer. David was pacing around the room, wanting desperately to be taken outside for a cigarette: his "last one before he dies." The doctor finally wrote the order for him to go outside, and I volunteered to accompany him (no one else wanted to) along with his brother and uncle down to the miserable, enclosed "smoking shack" around the corner from the ER. When David heard I would take him (a staff person had to accompany him), he threw his arms around me and hugged me for a long time saying thank you, thank you, thank you, as if I had granted him his greatest wish (which perhaps I had). So down we went in the wind and the cold and the rain, and I stood by him in that wretched shack, inhaling smoke, while he began to cry about all he would miss in this world and about how he had "ruined [his] life."

I suppose I had once again surrendered to what the moment called for—to what God might have been calling for (perhaps not the second-hand smoke part): to be with these two people in a way that many would find impossible: unsanitary, disgusting, uncomfortable. That I could even do so was a sure sign of God's grace breaking into the most unexpected places.

The Well Runs Dry

 An angels's face is tricky to wear constantly.

—Tori Amos, lyrics from "Purple People"

I don't usually quote popular music when reflecting on ministry, but Ms. Amos' words have come to mind quite a bit these days: too many tragic calls to the ER; too many young people diagnosed with advanced cancer; too many sudden and stunning reversals of fortune; too many worst-days-ever for the people I've been called to care for.

Friends, family, and acquaintances often marvel at my capacity to last even one hour of one day working in a hospital. How do you not get depressed, they ask. I don't know. Call it grace, call it self-defense, call it desensitization. Most times I can manage to hold another's suffering and then let it go as I move on to another situation. Somehow I'm able to accept that (according to the Buddha, at least) life is suffering. I am of the nature to grow old. I am of the nature to have ill health. I am of the nature to die. Still. There are times when this surprising inner reserve and strength fail, and wearing the angel's face (an unspoken expectation of anyone in ministry, I think) becomes tricky indeed. The inner well is dry and I become painfully aware of my own human poverty. To smile takes effort.

At such times, I call to mind certain stories. I think of Elijah and the poor widow (1 Kings 17:8-16) or the feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:13-21). In both cases, someone is asked to provide nourishment, and in both cases, the resources on hand are woefully scarce. How can the widow manage to feed Elijah with barely enough food for herself and her son? How can the disciples feed a growing crowd when they have "nothing here but five loaves and two fish"?

From the human perspective, such requests are impossible to fill. You must be kidding me would be (and often is) my response. But as usual God is at work in his mysterious, inscrutable ways, taking the little we have and multiplying it to an abundance beyond our knowing or imagining. I try to remember this when I feel I have nothing left to give. I try to remember to invite God into my poverty, to allow him to increase in my decreased state. Sometimes I just have to accept what I feel and stop rejecting my inner poverty as a problem. Without it, there is no place for God; there is only the paltry finitude of the self.

Toward a Church That Stands Somewhere in the East

Untitled Poem

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

I heard this poem at a retreat I recently attended called Life as Pilgrimage: Walking with Intention and Grace. Fr. Michael Fish, one of the retreat leaders, was sharing his experience of walking El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain and reflecting on the spiritual journey as something we do "not just for ourselves but for the world." If we do not take this journey toward the "church somewhere in the East,"  the next generation suffers. Our children are left to wander in the emptiness and pain of their elders' unfulfilled yearnings. 

       I thought immediately of my father, who died at age 52 of lung cancer. He was a man of deep spiritual yearnings, but quashed them in pursuit of the American "Dream." One evening during the last year of his life, he told me that one of his deepest desires as a young man was to become a minister. (Dad had grown up Methodist and became a Catholic shortly before marrying my mother.) When I asked him why he never followed this call, he told me he couldn't imagine how to provide for a wife and family on what he assumed would be a pittance. He was, as many of us are, "seduced by safety," too afraid to risk "stepping beyond his field" onto the definite yet unfamiliar path God had laid down for him, a path he would only come to discern with each halting step. When he died, he was, for the most part, still inside the dishes and the glasses of his own house--though, unlike the man in the poem perhaps, I think he realized where he was and regretted never having stepped out. Perhaps his death was his first step toward that church that stands somewhere in the East: a place we know exists but have never seen and cannot describe . . .   

       After our father's death, my sister and I felt compelled to embark (without the other knowing) on urgent spiritual quests in search of the church our father forgot. My sister's pilgrimage led her to convert to Judaism and to obtain advanced degrees in Hebrew Studies and pastoral counseling. I went from pious Catholic teenager to confused college kid to increasingly confused young adult who returned to Catholicism by way of Buddhism. Now, many years later, I find myself working as a chaplain and ministering to cancer patients not unlike my father.

       I have often wondered if the path I am walking is really my father's and not my own. Am I fulfilling his dream of ministry? Am I completing his unfinished work? If he had found the church he had longed for (and forgot) in this life, would I still be walking toward this same church? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Life is as it is now. And I am walking this Life, less and less concerned with whose life it is. Perhaps it is God's Life walking in me.
       I sense that I am now in the vicinity of that church that stands somewhere in the East. When I began this journey, I had only myself and my own "salvation" in mind. But the further along I've come, the more I've discovered that I walk not just for myself but for my father and, as Fr. Michael said, the world. It is not a path of self-fulfillment, as I once thought, but a path of self-offering--self-gift. My life has become an oblation to God for others.