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.

How Buddhism Made Me a Better Catholic, Part I: A Nativity

I always tell my Western friends that it is best to keep your own tradition. Changing religion is not easy and sometimes causes confusion. You must value your tradition and honor your own religion.

-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

About ten or so years after my dad died, I attended a poetry reading/event sponsored by the Zen Hospice Project (ZHP) in San Francisco. The featured readers were Frank Ostaseski, ZHP founder, and Norman Fisher, poet and Zen priest. I came to know about Norman through a graduate program in creative writing I was attending, and I'm pretty sure that's how I ended up at Fort Mason that night with a couple of my classmates.

Nativity Scene: A Thangka--sacred Buddhist wall hanging--
given by H.H. the Dalai Lama to Fr. Laurence Freeman 
and the World Community for Christian Meditation in 
December, 1998. Image by Robert Jonas.

It proved to be an auspicious evening. By the end of the night, I had picked up an application to become a volunteer caregiver at ZHP, and within a few months, I was immersed in its intensive (and intense!) 40-hour training, then assigned to care for terminally ill residents at a nearby inpatient hospice unit. Thus began my journey back to the Church through the rich practices of the Zen Buddhist tradition and its approach to caring for the dying.

The story of my return is, as you might imagine, quite involved and lengthy, so I won't unravel it all here. But for now, I can tell you that . . .

. . .at the time I began my hospice volunteering, I was not exactly a fallen away Catholic. I was more of a disaffected one. I had been living in San Francisco for several years after graduating from college (where the Newman Center had provided a great community) and I hadn't yet found a parish in which I felt connected. Most of the churches I hopped in and out of seemed, well, dead: sparsely attended, especially by those my age. (And, to be honest, I wasn't really trying that hard.)

I was also still wrestling with the spiritual crisis sparked by my father's death and by all the life and lifestyles I had encountered in my college and young adult years. I became, perhaps, a bit like Pilate, not in his nasty, brutish aspect, but in his question: "What is truth?" I no longer believed many things, and yet my spirit was still searching and yearning for this seemingly elusive "truth."

And so I attended mass every so often and checked out the many "alternative spiritualities" that the Bay Area has to offer. (Nothing too weird, mind you; I've got a healthy dose of the traditionalist in me…) Mostly, I explored yoga and Zen Buddhism and had begun practicing meditation as it was taught at the San Francisco Zen Center. Both the yoga studio and the zendo were always packed to capacity, especially with my peers, and I began to wonder what was happening there that wasn't happening at mass.

I began to wonder what was happening in me.

To be continued.

An Atheist's Christmas Carol

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you now

--Lyrics from "The Atheist Christmas Carol"
By Vienna Teng

I think of a patient I met a several months ago. Byron (not his real name) was in his eighties and becoming sicker. He knew he was coming to the end of his life and seemed to accept it. He was an atheist but he welcomed my visits, and one morning, we had a lovely chat.
       Turns out Byron knew a lot about the bible and about Christian theology, especially some contemporary Catholic theologians such as Teilhard de Chardin. Byron had grown up in Texas--in the "bible belt"--and was turned off by the extreme fundamentalist beliefs of the people around him. Even now, he said, he had a niece back home who always prayed for him, that he might at last accept Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Byron loved his niece but didn't feel "seen" by her. He found it hard to reconcile so many (or any) of these beliefs with his own thinking, learning, and intelligence. None of it made sense to him, and I wondered if any of it would have made sense to me had I grown up in that kind of environment.
       I felt sad for Byron. He seemed so kind and open. I wondered if the God he was presented was too small for him, and if he thought his only choice was to reject a belief in God rather than reject such narrow beliefs about God.
     I don't know if this is what Byron thought. These are just my thoughts and perhaps they reflect my own experience: a sense of sometimes being too confined inside the doctrines and traditions of my chosen religion when what my heart and my imagination desire is to run free: to discover what lives inside me and to proclaim what I know about God without claiming to know God . . .