TL;DR: A conversation after preaching got me thinking about what actually gets me through the door of a hospital room. Providing dignity and compassionate spiritual care matter, but as an ordained minister, I understand chaplaincy as something more: one particular way I live out my calling to share the good news of Jesus Christ.
This past Sunday I had the pleasure of guest-speaking at a friend’s church. I was in town for a conference and stayed a day longer so as to guest-speak at the church.
You can read my full sermon via the link at the bottom, but for the purposes of this blog, I’d like to share again the close of my sermon. Because as sometimes happens in preaching, one of the more interesting conversations came afterward.
That conversation got me thinking more about what actually gets me through the door of a hospital room—and, more fundamentally, what I understand myself to be doing there in the first place.
What follows here in the text box is the close of the sermon:
As shared, I work as a part-time hospital chaplain…
Now as someone who is fairly introverted, how about the other chaplains in the room? But speaking for myself, walking into a room of strangers is not something I enjoy at all.
But I am helped by the fact that I somewhat look the part.
From when I began my chaplaincy training, even as recently as a month ago, I am sometimes mistaken for a doctor.
Now certainly that reflects some measure of privilege, but I will take whatever help I can get.
Because for me, walking into a room full of strangers, dealing with pain, suffering, and trauma is not my idea of a good time whatsoever.
And it’s even more so scary when the door is closed.
There’s something about an open door that makes the whole thing feel far more invited. When the door’s open, again I don’t know about y’all here, but when the door is open, you know, I can kinda walk by, peek inside, get a sense of what’s going on in the room.
And if I really need to, I can take another lap around the unit to work up some courage to go in.
And then I can walk in.
But when the door is closed, that is like an entirely different story.
Most of us here, and obviously our fellow chaplains, have spent some time in the hospital. And I don’t know about you, but I imagine that if hospital doors are anything like they are in Colorado here, they can be quite imposing, especially when they’re closed.
And my job requires me to walk up to one of those closed doors, knowing only the slightest bit about what might be happening on the other side of that door, and enter in the hope of offering some measure of spiritual support.
A few weeks ago I was paged to support a family after death.
It was about ten thirty at night, and I had just begun settling down into the sleep room. I changed clothes, I think I was sitting in bed, and all of a sudden the pager went off.
Beep, beep, beep.
Something like that, right?
I called the nurse and learned that someone had just passed.
Put my clothes back on, walked upstairs, and checked in at the nurse’s station. The nurse pointed me towards the room.
And sure enough, closed door.
Say some portion of the prayer of Saint Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
I rub some sanitizer on my hands, I knocked, and I slowly enter.
“Hello, my name is Loren. I’m a chaplain here. I’m sorry for your loss and I’m here to support you in any way I can and offer you some guidance as you navigate the next steps.”
Part of, for me, what makes that closed door so intimidating is the fear of being found out.
What if I don’t know what to say? What if I can’t provide what this family needs? What if I’m not as capable or qualified as my badge makes me appear?
Looking the part does me very little good once I cross the threshold.
A badge, title, or professional appearance cannot itself give comfort to a grieving family. The closed door strips away the appearance and exposes my own limitations too.
But I think it also reveals something else.
That I don’t enter that room alone.
I trust that Christ is already at work within me and that God is already present on the other side of that door.
I’m not carrying God into that room.
I’m entering a room where God is already at work.
And that knowledge and certainty alone gives me confidence to enter quite scary rooms.
Just this past Thursday, I walked into a room, thankfully in this case, it was the ED and the doors were clear, so I could see a sense of what was happening.
Yet I walked in not trusting my own appearance or my own capacities, but that I carried Christ with me and that Christ was already active within that room.
Certainly looking the part gets me to the door.
But it cannot carry me through the door.
What carries me through is not the confidence that I will never be found lacking.
What carries me through is the promise that Christ is already at work both within me and within that room.
And the trust that when my limitations are exposed, as they most certainly will be, Christ will still be at work both within me and within that room.
Providing dignity to patients who are not wearing pants.
After the sermon, I heard from another chaplain who mentioned that he too was quite introverted. What helped him—and the same advice he offered to other chaplains—was remembering that in entering hospital rooms, we are providing dignity to patients because we have to ask permission to enter.
He joked that most people in the hospital aren’t wearing pants—“we are!”
I shared how I’d heard something similar from another chaplain friend of mine, who herself took solace in the fact that she gave patients “the ability to kick me out of the room.”
I certainly appreciated this other chaplain’s feedback, and it was somewhat helpful. But the more I thought about it, the more I found it ultimately unsatisfying, for this reason: I’m a chaplain not simply because I want to provide people with dignity. Not that I don’t want to provide people with grace and dignity, of course. But what gets me through the door is not the hope that I might provide people with a modicum of respect, but that I might be able to share good news with people.
To be clear, I recognize my role is not to proselytize. I have no intentions of walking people through the Romans Road or the ABCs. That would be both inappropriate within that context and, in my opinion, untrue to what evangelism really is, at least as I have come to understand it through people like Andrew Root and his Evangelism in the Age of Despair book.
But more than that, I consider myself an ordained minister over and above my role as a chaplain.
To say it differently, I often say that I bleed the gospel of Jesus, not denominational brand colors, when people question or find curious my dalliances within many different denominations and contexts.
And this gets at something I sometimes find frustrating about the chaplain profession. Not too infrequently, I hear other chaplains lift up a sort of milquetoast, pluralistic, “all-roads” approach to spirituality. I’m not meaning to say they are wrong, but rather that this approach is wrong for me and for my calling and ordination as a minister of the gospel.
As Ben Crosby recently shared in a post he wrote about the creation of a liturgy for hospital chaplains and others involved in medical assistance in dying procedures, he too wondered whether the CPE-type approach has become too formative of the role of ministers and chaplains, rather than the other way around. He writes:
the idea that pastoral care both normatively and descriptively can be separated from moral or doctrinal judgements…is what I have called the ‘CPE-ification’ of pastoral care, in which a set of techniques developed in the context of multifaith hospital chaplaincy — techniques quite appropriate in their place — come to be seen as the entirety of Christian pastoral care.
But this ideal of judgement-less pastoral care is a very strange and attenuated understanding of pastoral care from a Christian perspective, because Christian pastoral care is aimed at bringing people to deeper intimacy with Christ, to a deeper knowledge of God’s love for them, and to a life marked by love of God and neighbor. That is, the goal of Christian pastoral care isn’t just to help people find peace and meaning, or something like that. Rather, it is to announce to them, in myriad different ways, the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection for their specific situations and to invite them into new life in him. Such a pastoral presence certainly should be loving, kind, and make use of helpful chaplaincy techniques, but pastoral care isn’t reducible to this.
Ben asks—or at least implies—a sort of interesting question in his full piece, and it’s one we should consider given that many chaplains are ordained: Are we ministers of Word and Sacrament first? Or are we first and foremost institutional chaplains?
For me, the answer is fairly clear.
I’m an evangelist first and foremost. My role as a chaplain is one of the ways I practice that task of bringing good news.
Let me finish with this.
Not long ago, I entered the room of a patient who was in significant distress and had been physically restrained in the hospital bed.
I willingly entered that room, not because I thought I could offer some measure of dignity—frankly, I’m not sure how much dignity one feels while strapped to a hospital bed—but because I wanted to remind this patient of the love and grace of God.
I wanted, in whatever way the moment allowed, to share with this person, God’s love and forgiveness.
In that visit, the patient was not particularly receptive to my presence. I prayed silently myself and left the room when the opportunity arose.
On another occasion, I entered the room of another patient who was also physically restrained. This time, I had been paged by staff because the patient had begun raising spiritual questions.
Again, I wasn’t sure how much dignity my knocking on the door could offer to someone strapped to a hospital bed. In this instance, it was a bit nerve-wracking based on what I had been told about such questions. But I knew why I was willing to enter—because I wanted to share the love and grace of God. And I trusted that God was already out in front of me, in that room.
During our conversation, the patient began talking about how difficult it was to forgive oneself.
To which I said, “Receiving God’s grace is sometimes the hardest part.”
In both instances, in good CPE fashion, I did not try to force an agenda. I did not walk into either room determined to manufacture a spiritual conversation or get someone to respond in a particular way.
But neither did I enter purely to provide dignity or a calm presence.
I entered in the hope that, in whatever way the moment allowed, I might share good news with someone in crisis.
