Retreat

I spend a long weekend, Thursday-Sunday, on my first ever individual retreat.

I am incredibly grateful for the warm hospitality of the Benedictine brothers at Holy Cross Monastery, and for their cozy guesthouse with its maze of nooks and crannies, arches and icons. In that place a two hour train ride from New York City but a world away, I was able to find silence, the kind of deep, profound silence that brings peace and healing. 

Before I went on the retreat I was nervous about what it might be like to spend that sort of time with no agenda other than the monastery’s daily cycle of prayer and meals. What I found was that the schedule anchored me while setting me free to spend the time however I needed to. Nobody had expectations of me, and while I hadn’t planned on a silent retreat, I wound up not speaking for just about the entire time. The monks were around and friendly if needed but I was on my own, to find my own way and do what I needed to do.

In that beautiful and quiet place I found rest for my body and soul, and a beginning of healing from the heartache from all the transitions in the past 7 months and from caring for the dying. In the middle of the last night before I left I was able to go to the chapel and kneel in front of the tabernacle, hands outstretched, palms open, and, sobbing, finally feel safe enough to let it all go.

I have returned from the retreat calmed, refreshed, and ready to take on the next set of challenges and the chaos of the Christmas season.  Thanks be to God!

The List

Last Sunday I absolutely hit the chaplaincy wall, the I-can’t-handle-this-can’t-spend-another-day-feeling-like-this wall. I had just found out that the husband of someone I went to seminary with, and wound up visiting at the hospital where I’m doing CPE, had died. I did not know him and I did not know her well, but it felt like the last straw. Weeping didn’t help. Calling friends didn’t help. I was just so tired and burnt out, angry at nobody, at God, at the universe, tired of people dying.

And then I did something I’d been thinking about doing for a while. I opened a TextEdit document and started making a list of the dead from this CPE unit. I was surprised at how well I remembered their names, and the order in which I met them. Then I hit return a few times and listed the names of those who are close to death on my unit. Then some more line returns and a list of those I’m concerned about; not people who are actively dying at this moment but those whose condition is in danger of deteriorating, those that I’m afraid aren’t going to have a happy ending.

There are a lot of names on the list. Typing them all in, thinking about each one in turn, how I had encountered them, what I knew of their stories, made me feel better. Somehow it makes it more manageable to have the list in front of me. It also helps reinforce the idea that I’m not crazy for struggling with grief over all the patients who have died while I was their chaplain, because there are a lot of them. I added two more this week – a baby who died in the NICU and a woman who died of cancer. It was almost a relief, after providing care for each of those families, to come home and type in the names. It’s a concrete way to acknowledge that these losses touch me too.

Sadly, as an oncology chaplain I expect there will be more names to add to the list as time goes by. At the end of my time in CPE (in May) I am going to put together some sort of ritual for myself, with some candles and incense and prayers, and burn a printed-out copy of the list as a way to bring some closure.

My day

Rounds. Fast, rapid, run through, no regard for the patients, just the bare bones details. “He’s got a gangrenous toe. She has metastatic breast cancer. That one, well that liver cancer is killing her but the family doesn’t seem to get it. Yeah, that guy, he’s a real pain. Shipping him off to a nursing home. Oh, his roommate, he’s not ours, belongs to the AIDS social worker. Next. Oh, her, she’s crazy. Yeah, daughter’s nuts too. He’s homeless. Yep, another druggie. That other one’s hospice.”

I sit and listen, scribble notes, decide who to see, try not to condone the staff’s craziness while still being supportive… I’m their chaplain too.

I find out… oh no, I’ve really gotten to know that patient… here we go again – lymphoma and AIDS. Dammit. I wonder how many times between now and May I’ll be the chaplain for yet another patient with lymphoma and AIDS. Or actually, it’s AIDS and lymphoma. Or HIV+ and lymphoma. The virus is first, causing the conditions that can trigger the cancer. Whether it’s AIDS, well, depends on lab values, opportunistic infections… well, anyway, I read way too much of the science these days. Anyway, How many times have I seen this happen already during this CPE unit? And this patient, well, this one reminds me of… well, never mind, it doesn’t matter. But I’m self-aware. I guess that’s good. Know your triggers, right?

Rounds are over. I go to see the patient with the new cancer diagnosis. They’re glad to see me, and we start talking, trying to sort out all the new details.

My beeper goes off.

Emergency. Terrified young doctor. “Please send a chaplain, I need someone to be here when the spouse gets here.” Sudden, unexpected death of a young person. Oh no, this was the code I was always afraid of… but I have to go.

The medical team is pacing around, waiting for the family. To my astonishment some of the young residents are crying. It’s horrible, sudden, unexpected. 

A meeting room, a husband on the floor, curled up, screaming. Who provides comfort when even the chaplain is shaken to the core?

The elderly Roman Catholic priest also heard the code, and arrives just at the right time. He has been doing this since before I was born. We divide tasks. I handle the medical team, he handles the family. Good. I’m not proud about this; I’m triggered, in over my head. We work for hours. I help the staff. I witness the priest’s work. I learn from a master. He later debriefs with me, explains his actions, seizes the teaching moments. I am grateful to this man, who so often takes the role of chaplain to the chaplains. 

Back to the office. Tears. Repeat the story to supervisor and a colleague. Leave the hospital for fresh air and a late lunch.

Back to where I started at the beginning of the day. I go over the list. Let’s see, who has a new diagnosis? Who is on or nearing hospice care? Who did the staff say is having trouble coping? Who’s all alone? I sort through my self-created triage system, because I don’t have time for all of the patients on the floor. I try to see patients. This one’s asleep. That one’s at a test. This one’s being examined by the doctor. Over and over again, something keeps me from doing new work. Grace I think. 

Finally, I end up in the room where I tried to start patient visits. I pull up a chair and we dig into conversation. We talk about how the patient feels about fighting lymphoma, what the staging means, what might happen. We talk about loose ends, getting things straight with God and other people. We talk about the patient’s experience of calling family, what they’ve been told, who freaked out, who’s okay. Some challenging words from the chaplain – about self-care, about not trying to take care of everyone else while you’re the one getting chemo. 

The sun slowly sinks outside the window (it gets dark so early these days) and once again I listen to stories. It makes sense. A great deal of my philosophy of pastoral care is based on listening to people’s stories and helping them articulate where the current situation fits in, and what matters to them in light of all of it. So, like so many times before, with so many patients in so many rooms, I listen to stories about home, family, love and heartbreak, faith and rejection, other places, other times. As darkness descends on the city I hear a tale of a place a much younger version of my patient found magical, a small town kid in a big city, awed by the sights and sounds of a completely new world. And, for a while at least, lymphoma slips into the background.

And I head home where there’s dinner waiting (there’s nothing that consoles a tired and sad CPE student like food they don’t have to think about.)

The day is so overwhelming that I zone through my subway stop, winding up 10 blocks too far north. Sigh. After some extra effort I’m finally home where there’s a husband and dog and blessed good food. Shoes off. Collar off. Now.

The lost year

Or the lost nine months or so. That’s what I worry that this year is going to be. I’m doing part time CPE. I’m doing parish work (about to start doing some youth ministry with my husband too) and I’m just barely hanging on. Details are falling between the cracks. I’m doing an okay job of being a friend, but not a particularly good job of being a daughter, aunt, granddaughter, or sister (all of which seem so much more complicated and fraught with potential trouble.) I’m doing an okay job as a wife most of the time. Sometimes not so much. Above all, I’m just tired, not sleepy, but just emotionally worn out and run down. And I have another 6 months of CPE planned. SIgh. Part of me knows that there is no way this will be “the lost year” because I can feel my approach to people, to situations, to ministry, to life changing bit by bit already. This work has done wonders for my identity as a pastor and an ordained person. But at what cost? I really don’t know, and that worries me.

My cruise ship summer

This past summer I took a temporary, seasonal job with a seafarer’s mission. It wasn’t a clergy position. It was an hourly job helping to operate two hospitality centers for the crew of cruise ships that dock here in the city. It certainly wasn’t what I wanted to be doing, and it didn’t pay much, but some money coming in was better than none. It was something to do while my husband and I figured out our next steps. I started out this job rather grudgingly, but somewhere along the way I discovered that it was yet another example of that cheesy-sounding but true phrase: nothing is ever wasted in God’s economy.

I picked up some random skills along the way. I re-learned a lot of Spanish (I’m the only non-Spanish speaker among my co-workers). I learned a bit of Tagalog. I learned how to operate a cash register, how to settle up accounts at the end of the day, and how to count money quickly yet accurately. I learned how to wire money all over the world, which phone cards give the best rates to which countries, and that short phrases containing the basic information are almost always the best way to answer a question from someone who is not a native English speaker. I was privileged to be welcomed as a guest for lunch on certain cruise ships. I could give you a tour of the ship considered the most luxurious ever built – including the crew and officers’ mess halls – and not get you lost more than once or twice. 

Tomorrow I will head to one of our local ports to play host yet again to the crew of a huge ocean liner – probably for one of the last times this year. Over the last six months I have come to love the people we serve, the young men (and occasionally women) from all over the world whose back-breaking labor puts cheap, all-inclusive vacations within reach of the average middle class American. The crew members have been, almost to a person, friendly, warm, funny, and generally a delight to work with. I have learned many of their names and stories, and they all know my name. My experiences with them have formed the foundation on which I built my ministry as a transitional deacon. Except for every once in a while, I don’t work with the cruise ship officers. The people that I come into contact with are the cabin stewards, the laundry staff, the guys who sort the laundry, the assistant buffet stewards and junior waiters. These folks have a very difficult life. They endure 10 months away from home at a time. They usually spend some part of that time paying off the broker who got them the job in the first place, plus their transportation to and from home to meet the ship at its home port. Except for an occasional half day of shore leave they work 7 days a week for those 10 months. When they come to see us during shore leave they spend most of their time calling home (or sometimes video-chatting to home via Skype, where they might get to watch a baby walk for the first time). They wire home all of their wages except what they need for basics, and they lose money on both the transaction fees and the exchange rates. Onboard ship they deal with long hours, lack of bargaining power, language barriers, and passengers who are incredibly stingy with their tips. They have too many roommates, not enough sleep, and the constant threat of being sent home in shame if they cause trouble.

I often wonder how many passengers take notice of these folks who wait on them 24 hours a day. Do they wonder who pressed their tux for the formal night, or are they just annoyed when it arrives back at their cabin 15 minutes late? Do they know that their waiter is trying incredibly hard to deal with their ridiculous demands because his base salary is only $50 a month unless they tip him? Would it ever occur to them that the crew member who helped them onto the tender boat bound for a snorkeling excursion is desperately worried about his family because a typhoon struck his village? Do they notice that aboard many ships you can witness a re-enactment of British or Dutch or American imperialism, with crew being drawn from the developing world nations the ship’s home country has the closest ties to? Do they see the segregation and class system aboard, and how people get pigeon-holed into certain jobs? On some ships I’m familiar with, West African are the cabin stewards, Indonesians are waiters, Eastern Europeans and South Americans are entertainers, bartenders, and cocktail waitresses, Thai and Vietnamese women do the drudge work in the spa, Indians are security personnel, and Philippinos fill in all the rest of the low level jobs, from touching up the exterior paint to re-stocking the buffets. Americans, Western Europeans, and New Zealanders get the high-ranking jobs – the officers, accounting staff, tour guides, etc. Do passengers take note of this disturbing shipboard reality?

This job has given me the chance to get to know these people in a way I never could as a passenger. I get to talk to them as one human being to another in a setting where they are not being watched by supervisors or the ubiquitous on-board security cameras. My time around them has helped to make me more aware of, and more sensitive to, the people like them that keep this shining but deeply flawed city running. I take much greater notice of the hardworking souls who deliver our food, clean up our garbage, move furniture, and sit at the front desks of swanky apartment buildings.

In seminary we never talked about what it means to be a deacon. After all, we were all there to become priests, right? To us, the diaconate was only temporary, a means to an end. Yes, once in a while someone tried to tell us it is the foundation of priestly ministry. I don’t think we really listened. It was my cruise ship crew members who taught me what it means to be a deacon. They told me to look for the people behind the things we take for granted. They taught me to find out those people’s stories. They taught me to go the extra mile to work around a language barrier. And they taught me to open my mouth and tell every other affluent person around me what I learned. 

I’ve never thought of myself as overly spoiled, and I certainly would never treat anyone the way I’ve witnessed cruise ship passengers treating crew members. I’ve always thought of myself as supporting those organizations, laws, and politicians that make things better for those in difficult situations. I’ve spent countless hours in many settings with the homeless, the elderly, and those with addictions and mental health problems. I ran a clothing ministry for the homeless, one of the few in Manhattan, while I was in seminary. But it was my work with the cruise ship crew that taught me that diaconal ministry isn’t just about doing things that you think are helpful. It’s about loving – not feeling pity for, but loving, and identifying with, those among whom you serve. The officers and passengers on cruise ships are generally of my race, socio-economic class, and education level. However, I have come to love and identify with the crew. Hopefully, that will change my future ministry for the better.

The Chaplain and the Atheists

You might think that one of the best things that can happen as a chaplain is to walk into a room where there is a patient or family members who share your beliefs. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes it’s nice, especially during a rough day, to meet an elderly African-American Baptist who wants a prayer to “lift her spirit.” I can do that. It’s reassuring to meet a devout Roman Catholic and say the Lord’s Prayer and perhaps the Hail Mary together. As a chaplain I’m often quite literally the only one of “my kind” (meaning a clergy member or religious person) present in the entire hospital. So it’s a bit of a break sometimes to run into those who speak my language, more or less.

What I’m learning, however, is that these encounters are almost too comfortable for me. They’re not necessarily where I do my best, or at least my most interesting work. It’s almost too easy in these settings to just do what’s expected of the chaplain, and to not push too hard on the difficult questions – where is God in this, are you angry about your cancer, are you afraid of what it will be like when you die, etc. This is something that I really need to work on.

However, I’ve come to love visiting the atheists, the agnostics, the “spiritual but not religious,” and those who were deeply hurt by or felt abandoned by organized religion. My experience has been that a good number of these folks are a little freaked out about having the chaplain in their room, but rarely do they actually kick me out. I stick around if they let me, and I slowly draw out their stories. I start with the easy things, like asking what brought them to the hospital, and see how the conversation goes, working gradually into scarier territory. I have no desire to convert these folks to my way of believing, but instead I really hope to offer them a chance to articulate where they are with their own spiritualities. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work they usually politely thank me for coming by, and I’m on my way. When it does work I get to hear whole life stories, details of the philosophies by which people live their lives, and usually, the tale of where religion went wrong for them. Often there is a young child, or perhaps young adult, inside these patients, still grieving the loss of a faith and a community they thought was everything until they were rejected or had to walk away.

One group of patients I spend a lot of time with is people with AIDS. At first I was stunned by how many people I visit in the hospital that have AIDS. The advent of antiretrovirals in the mid-1990s had, I thought, turned this into a chronic disease, at least here in the US. Yet I constantly see two kinds of patient with AIDS – those with new infections that avoided treatment for various reasons until they were desperately ill, and gay men who have been HIV+ for 18, 19, 20 years and have done really well but are starting to struggle with long term effects of the virus.

These gay men are especially fascinating to talk with. Often they’ve had to think long and hard about their own mortality, and they witnessed a lot of people die at an age when most people plan on just having fun. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack with some of these folks; there’s almost always the story of the kid from the midwest or south who felt victimized by conservative religion, sometimes there’s deep shame, regret, or guilt, and then there’s often the resiliency, the making sense of life moving on, and the reality of actually getting old. In these conversations there’s often this moment, this turning point in the conversation when they figure out that the strange woman in the collar is not particularly surprised or freaked out by anything they have to say.

For various reasons that I have analyzed to death over the course of this CPE unit, I find these conversations to be among the most meaningful and the most rewarding that I have with patients. They’re also some of the most exhausting. When I chart my visits I see some of the details my patients don’t tell me – technical details like viral loads and CD4 counts, past opportunistic infections and how many different antibiotics they’re on to prevent the next infection – and the reality of the details drains my energy.

I’ve put a lot of efforts into understanding my patients’ conditions – I tell my husband I have a horribly depressing google search history. I’m often looking up terms related to cancer or AIDS, learning about another new type of cancer or yet another bacteria that is deadly to people with compromised immune systems. Some people would probably find all this research morbid, but there’s a part of me that needs to understand. I need to understand the details, the medicine, the science. I can’t fix any of it, but somehow being able to read the charts and knowing what people are dealing with makes me feel a little less helpless. And somehow it becomes sort of a way of honoring people’s experiences. The mark of a healthy chaplain? Probably not. But that’s where I am right now.

Great acts of faith

There is a letter on the first page of my Clinical Pastoral Education policies and procedures manual welcoming new students to CPE. It doesn’t sugar coat difficulties we should expect in the course of CPE. One sentence that struck me, moved me to tears in fact, when I first read it went like this:

“You will be asked to demonstrate acts of great faith in the face of uncertainty.”

I’m not sure what I thought those acts of great faith would be during this particular unit. Amazing prayers? I am, after all, a second unit student. My prayers should be brilliant… right? Maybe the author was referring to rituals – emergency baptisms, commendations of the dying, those sorts of things. I haven’t really done those things per se, but there’s still time. Anything could happen.

In my reality in this unit these acts of faith have turned out to be much less spectacular, much more ordinary. The stuff of my daily rounds as chaplain has required more fortitude and faith than I could have imagined. It’s an act of faith to sit with the dying, talking and listening, being quiet and calm. It’s an act of faith to stay in a room and listen to a patient’s story and focus on them when every ounce of your being is telling you how much this patient sets you off and reminds you of everything you’re scared of. It’s an act of faith to walk with hope into yet another room where a battle against lymphoma or leukemia is raging, setting aside how many patients you’ve seen die of both in just a short period of time. It’s an act of faith to sit with pain and loss and grief and despair and anger, none of which you can fix or change or erase, and somehow believe that presence is really meaningful. It’s standing at the foot of the bed while two residents search relentlessly for veins on the arms, hands, feet, neck, and legs of an elderly cancer patient whose veins have all collapsed. It’s an act of faith to walk into a room to see a young woman who has lost a perfectly formed, beautiful baby girl at term.

This work isn’t about fantastic liturgy or knowing what to say or do. These days, all I can really do is show up, witness the stark reality of my patients’ situations, and not panic in the midst of it all. That’s about as good as it gets. And I am finally starting to learn that it’s enough. As my preaching professor would say, it’s a great sufficiency.

 

The Clergy Collar and the MTA

In the months since I’ve been ordained to the diaconate I’ve been trying to figure out my collar wearing policies. Once upon a time, back before I went to seminary, I had a mentor who was almost never seen without a collar. Back then I imagined I’d also make that choice when the time came. After I was ordained I had a lot of really difficult things happening in my life all at once, and I wasn’t all that thrilled about wearing a collar in public. At the time I just didn’t have the emotional and spiritual resources to be available to anyone, any time without warning.

As time goes by, however, I find my feelings about wearing the collar changing yet again. I suppose some of this is because they’ve had to change; after all, I’ve been wearing the collar every time I serve as a hospital chaplain. I was tempted in the beginning to forget about the collar because I felt like such a bad chaplain that I didn’t want anyone to know I was actually ordained. I resisted that temptation and I’ve started to become more comfortable wearing clericals in the hospital setting and in the world at large. One setting in which I seem to spend a lot of time in the collar is on public transit.

New Yorkers have a reputation for a been there, done that attitude. They are masters of the art of appearing completely unmoved by what’s going on around them. Incidents on the subways or buses that would make people from other places gape open-mouthed don’t inspire New Yorkers to so much as glance up from the New York Times (on paper or on their iPhones). New York is also an incredibly diverse place. You get so used to seeing all different kinds of people, dressed all different ways, that eventually it just all kind of blends together in a whirl of colors and languages. 

As I’ve traversed the city in clericals over the past five months, I’ve often wondered what, if any impression it makes on people to see someone dressed like that. I sometimes get stared at, but I really have no way to know what people actually think. Do they think it’s a good thing, bad thing, or just a really weird thing to run into clergy on the subway or the bus? Does it matter that I’m a woman? If I tell that rude taxi driver exactly what I think of him almost running me over in the intersection, will I offend anyone? Does anyone even care?

I don’t know the answers to most of these questions, but I got one answer loud and clear today. I learned that people do indeed notice what I wear. This afternoon I was sitting on a bus wearing clericals when a woman dropped into the seat next to me. I hadn’t even noticed her (too engrossed in my New York Times on my iPhone perhaps?) but she had clearly noticed me, because she asked me to pray with her. If you had asked me, oh, 5 years ago if I could imagine that one day I’d be riding on a New York City bus, my hand on a stranger’s shoulder, praying spontaneously, out loud for her, I would have told you it would never happen. 

But today, it did.

And I was amazed. And glad.

And it brings up a whole other issue with wearing the collar. Are we wearing it so other people see us, recognize us, and are somehow changed/moved/helped/inspired by the idea that there are “ordained” people among us (whatever that means)? Or, is it something else?

I never forget I’m wearing a collar. It’s plastic. It’s not the most comfortable thing I’ve ever worn. It’s not attractive or fashionable or anything else. It forces me to cover up way too much skin. We (clergy) might tell ourselves all kinds of things about why we wear clothing that makes us visible to the world in a unique way. But I wonder (thinking back to my temptation to curse out the rude taxi driver, for example) if the reality is that clergy are the kind of people that need a bit of extra help. Perhaps it is that we are the ones who need an extra kick to remind us how we’re supposed to behave and how to treat people. I don’t mean that because we’re clergy we’re required to be extra “good.” No, perhaps we’re the type of people who are just more stubborn, just more opinionated, just a little more difficult for God to get through to than the average. We can come up with all sorts of other theological rationales for our clothing choices, but for some of us (okay, for me at least) at the end of the day the collar reminds us of who we ultimately belong to and what we’re ultimately supposed to be about. And it keeps me from cursing out too many taxi drivers.

Refuge

 This place is engraved in my memory from a couple of visits during my first year in seminary. It’s darker and more hauntingly beautiful than my iPhone camera was able to capture. It also has a deep blue ceiling with stars. In more carefree times I had found it a bit dramatic and overwrought, with its huge statues and icons, its row upon row of flickering candles in the various chapels and nave. It had lived in my imagination as an interesting and quirky yet enchanting place, alluring but ultimately not really for me. 

 

And it would have stayed there, had it not been for my work as a chaplain. Yesterday I made the trek across Times Square, past the over-priced t-shirts and guy dressed as the Statue of Liberty, through the throngs of camera-toting tourists and vendors hawking bus tours and comedy shows and roasted peanuts to its facade on 46th St. I walked up the handful of steps outside the front door and stepped into… a refuge. I stepped into a whole other world, quiet and mysterious, with a hushed sense of prayer hovering in the air. Against the backdrop of days spent face to face with the reality of metastatic cancer, end-stage AIDS and fetal demise, this place no longer felt overwrought, emotional, superstitious. Instead the statues and icons and ubiquitous votives offered me some sort of comfort, some sense that it might not be all that weird to want to figuratively and literally sprawl face down on the floor and hand the whole mess over to God, to just let it all go, to let all of the patients’ stories flow like water out of my hands and away from me.

 

And as if to be sure I knew I belonged in this place, suddenly, music. A requiem. Faure’s Requiem to be exact. A piece I know and love, a piece I have sung, being practiced on the organ. How fitting for the chaplain who sees so many close to death. 

Life, Death, and the Gideons

We’ve all seen Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms. Until this past Tuesday, however, I’d never met a Gideon in person. They showed up at the hospital unannounced, shuttled to our door in a van full of Bibles and other Gideons. It seems that men from all over the country (I have since learned that Gideons are all men) had gotten together to hit a bunch of NYC hospitals and other organizations this week. They managed to track down a colleague and I despite the pastoral care department’s hard-to-find location in the maze of hospital corridors. We had no idea what to do with them, so we pleaded new intern cluelessness and paged the staff chaplain. Then we passed them off on the Roman Catholic priest and left to take care of an emergency involving a baby, thinking we’d been effective in avoiding further contact. Ha! Was I ever wrong!

 

Much to my great unhappiness, the staff chaplain had me help her babysit the Gideons. By babysit I mean follow them around while they asked staff and patients if they’d like a Bible or a New Testament with Psalms. I did everything short of flatly refusing to help. I said I had patients to see (I did) and when I took lunch I confess that I went somewhere that I knew to be less than speedy with lunch orders. As I walked around the hospital with them I’m sure I was a ridiculous sight – a woman in a collar trying not to get too close to the men with the cart full of Bibles, yet always lurking within earshot. It was a weird experience. They were certainly nice enough, and many staff members seemed to be genuinely please when they were stopped and offered a New Testament in the hallway. But they also made my skin crawl. And they made me really angry. After an hour or so of following them around, I said I really needed to see some patients (which was true.) They basically told me that whatever conversation I have with patients is fleeting, but the Bible is there 24 hours a day. They also told a colleague and I that by bringing in all of those Bibles they were “arming us with swords.” 

 

I was so angry at their one-size-fits-all approach, at their smug self-assurance, at the idea that they thought all my patients, or any patients need is the Bible. I don’t say this because I think I’m a good chaplain, or because I think chaplains can solve all problems. I say this because they honestly had no idea what was going on in any patient’s room, or on any unit for that matter, and I don’t really think they cared. I care very deeply about context and meeting the patient where they are. Based on their “what you really need is Jesus” approach, I don’t think it ever crossed the Gideon’s mind to think of those things. It didn’t matter if a patient was an Orthodox Jew, or had been seriously hurt by religion in the past. They had no sense of who had recently had a knee replaced or who was dying of leukemia, of who had just lost a baby, or of who was going through alcohol withdrawal.  It didn’t matter that they might make it harder for chaplains like me (who are committed to honoring patient’s beliefs) to gain entry into patients’ rooms. They just went around with their blunt Bible sword, hoping to “save the lost” as their website says. To make matters worse, there’s really very little budget for pastoral care at my or any hospital. If we want Bibles (and I truly do want to provide them for patients that desire them) we have to put up with the visits from the Gideons.