Never Ending

I wrote this last Saturday:

So . . . yesterday we took two three-hour exams and today we took one more. I wish I had received Mompriest's comment last night because suddenly, at 9:00 pm, I lost any capacity for sleep, and began to churn through all my perceived errors. Today I've been able to put all that to rest, probably because . . .

the Hebrew passage, delivered to us at noon,, is the story of Elijah bringing the widow's son back to life.

I sank into a fairly profound depression for several hours as I contemplated wrestling with that one for five days. (Have you ever tried to count how many stories there are in the Bible of dead sons coming back to life? More than just the main one.) I thought about switching to Greek (it's up to us), but all things conspired against that brilliant idea: memory (none), desire (none), and reality: the New Testament passage in question is one of proclamation and, let's face it, I am way more attuned to narrative.

And when that thought occurred to me, the next one was: does that say something about a call to chaplaincy as opposed to a church, or what? Perhaps I will get something completely unexpected out of this last exam, in the form of clues for next year.

(And I'd love to hear from the other RevGals on this one. My sermons have been criticized this year for being exploratory rather than insistent. The assessment is accurate, but the question remains: Is there a place for exploratory, musing, contemplative preaching in the church? The events of the last seventeen months have made emphatic proclamation an impossibility for me. And, on the positive side, have made the journey through people's stories all the more compelling.)

I think I have to go to sleep soon; I'm exhausted. I hope I can pull this off and put testing behind me FOREVER.

****************************

Now it's six days later and I'm finally back home. Writing the exam was fine; I am getting much more adept at putting my personal stuff aside when I have to accomplish an academic task.

I spent some time on the phone this morning with a friend who has an urgent need to know about coroners, funeral homes, cremations, and ashes. I remembered how much it had helped me fifteen months ago to talk to friends who had that kind of knowledge and were willing to share it openly and candidly.

I have to say, the conversation this morning affected me a good deal more than writing the paper had.

Of course, the widow in the Elijah story turned out not to need the information that I now have.


(Louis Hersent Painting)

Unexpected Connections

In the first months after Josh died, about the only place I went to church was the nearby Carmelite monastery. Their usual masses are at the crack of dawn, but on Tuesdays they celebrate at the much more reasonable time of 5:00 pm.

I haven't been there since summer because I've been in Seminary City, but I'm home tonight. I decided that the quiet of mass with the sisters would be a good place in which to prepare in silence for the next few days.

I walked in and sat down, looked across the chapel, saw someone I was sure I recognized ~ and spent most of the mass thinking about the last few hours I had spent with him. On September 3, 2008. When the service was over, I made my way through a few of the sisters who wanted to welcome me back and ask about seminary, and sat down beside the very tall (and now 93? 94?-year-old) man.

"Aren't you WF?" I asked. "I am," he said, looking surprised. "I'm Gannet Girl," I said. "You were with me when my son died last year." "Of course," he said. "How are you?" "I'm here," I responded. He nodded. "And how are your studies?" And so we talked a little about seminary and ordination exams and the call process and what might be next for me.

This is the Jesuit who was accompanying me on retreat when I got the news that Josh was gone. He was my original spiritual director's philosophy professor; I wish I had thought to tell him that I am doing an independent study on grace and freedom in Aquinas and Scotus and the Reformers as part of my way of coming to terms with Josh's death. He is one person I know who might actually appreciate that news.

He told me that he is spending just a few days at the Carmelite monastery for some prayer time of his own before going to another part of town for the holidays and then back to Michigan.

It seems quite remarkable that I would have run into him. I feel oddly as if I have come full circle, to the place and conversation I was engaged in right before I learned that Josh had died, right before everything about life as I knew it simply ended. Nearly sixteen months ago I spent a couple of hours in his office unloading the trauma of CPE, and there I was tonight telling him that I was contemplating a hospital chaplaincy residency.

It seems almost new-dimensional: as if some of the peace and possibility of the Incarnation has crept very very quietly into my life.

I Think These Would Have Been Good Questions

(See the previous two posts for an explanation).

How have your family, childhood, and adolescent experiences influenced your life of faith and call to ministry?

You've worked in two other fields. How do your previous experiences affect your understanding and practice of ministry? Is there anything you would like to share about work in the "secular world" which might be helpful to those of us who have spent our entire adult lives in ministry?

What's it been like to go to seminary as a second (OK, third) career student? What have been your favorite courses? Where have you learned the most? Have you had any internship or volunteer experiences you'd like to tell us about?

Could you explain what the term "spiritual direction" means and what your training as a spiritual director has involved?

What did you find enriching about CPE? Do you think it's a worthwhile training ground for future pastors?

What can you share with us about pastoral care in light of your experience since the death of your son? What have you learned about suicide? About parental loss?

What passages of Scripture have been especially meaningful in your life?

What interests you so much about interfaith dialogue? How do you imagine incorporating that priority into your ministry in the church?

I kind of like my questions . . . . If I were questioning me at this stage in the process, these are the sorts of things I'd like to know something about if I were limited to questions about call, life, experience, etc. and precluded from asking about theological matters.

Note to self for any similar future scenarios: Organize what you'd like to communicate about yourself very carefully in your mind so that you have access to it and can speak about it regardless of how the questions are framed.

A learning experience . . . .

Miscellaneous

The Lovely Daughter has the flu. She sounds miserable. Sometimes 2000 miles is a real distance.

I went down to Giant Famous Hospital this afternoon to have lunch with my summer CPE supervisor. I waited for her on the balcony overlooking a vast registration/waiting area and thought about the two populations of GFH. If you work there, there are always at least five things you could be doing during any minute of the day. If you are a patient or visitor, you wait. And wait and wait and wait.

Which reminds me: I am awaiting the results of medical testing done two weeks ago. I haven't taken the initiative to call because the labyrinthine phone system takes too long to navigate. It will take me less time to send a note, but I don't feel terribly motivated either way.

Tipper the Noble Dog had some medical work of her own down yesterday. Then the car had some medical work done. It was a very expensive day.

As I drove home this afternoon, I saw a bumper sticker that read: I'd rather be birding at Magee Marsh.

Yesh, so would I.

It's All a Matter of Perspective

Law and Gospel posted a couple of days ago about a friend's critique of her chaplaincy work. "You're a gas station attendant offering a quick fill-up," her friend tells her, as opposed to what she might be in parish ministry with the long-term relationships it produces.

When I did my chaplaincy internship this past summer, our supervisor often reflected upon the intimate conversations with which our patients would honor us. "They will tell you things they would never tell their pastor," she said. "The elder in charge of the capital campaign is probably not going to mention to her visiting pastor that she no longer believes in God, but she will discuss her quandry at some length with the chaplain who stops by late at night before her surgery."

On the other end of the spectrum, my pastoral care professor, while holding up chaplaincy work as an important and speicalized calling, often says that when asked to complete surveys asking for "the best preachers in America, " he always writes in "the local parish pastor." "It's the pastor who knows and cares for the congregation," he says, who is their best preacher, "not the guest preacher with the resume of homiletics awards." And, he emphasizes, a pastor visiting a parishoner in the hospital walks into the room with a completely different perspective than the chaplain making his daily rounds ~ the implication being that the patient will tell the parish pastor things he would never tell the roaming chaplain.

Both are right, of course. I did have some astonishingly wide-open and candid conversations with hospital patients, family members, physicians, and nurses last summer, some of them with people I saw once or twice for less than an hour, others with folks with whom I spent time daily over the course of several weeks as they awaited a transplant or sat with a sedated amd dying loved one or cared for patients in crisis. I also had some unsatisfying conversations, and was always left with the sense of having played only a brief role in a story, the outcome to which I would never be privy.

Parish ministry does bring with it the satisfaction of long-term relationships. And it is true that the parish preacher does have the advantage of a long view from which to preach: she knows her congregation, and she has a vision for its future; she knows its individual members, and she sees immediately when she looks out from the pulpit on Sunday morning who has just joyfully welcomed a new son-in-law into the family, and who has just buried a child. Preaching in the hospital is a bit different: my brief experience indicates that the congregation is considerably smaller, and might include a family member driven to a service for the first time in decades by a crisis unfolding several floors above and a surgeon who shows up whenever her schedule permits. (The advantage, I suppose, is that the topic is always the same: life is precious and scary, suffering is pervasive, bad things happen to every kind of person, and so, sometimes, do miracles.)

I am giving a lot of thought to hospital chaplaincy as my long term call. My reasons are numerous, but two of them jumped out at me as I thought about Law and Gospel's post. For one thing, many people in the hospital, whether patients or staff, have no clergy to visit with them. They have no ties to a religious institution; perhaps they have no "official" religious beliefs. I developed a number of relationships with individuals who fell into that category. Serious illness has a way of bringing questions about the meaning of life and death and pain to the fore, and people with no connection to a religious community in "the outside world" find their way quickly into conversation with people wearing ID badges indicating that they are comfortable with the exploration of those questions.

Secondly, chaplains are in posession of time. When Musical Friend's husband died in Giant Famous Hospital last spring, her Methodist minister was with her almost 24/7 for that horrific week-end, at one point leaving to preach his three Sunday morning sermons and then coming right back. But my observations tell me that her experience was the exception to the rule, particularly in a big-city teaching hospital. Many of our patients had traveled a considerable distance for their care, making it virtually impossible for their clergy to visit them. (The exception? The Nazarenes! I could go into a pre-op unit at 6:00 a.m and be almost guaranteed of finding at least one Nazarene, often one who had just driven 100 miles, sitting with his parishioner.) Others had pastoral visits on occasion and usually for short periods -- people employed by congregations, unless specifially for pastoral care, just don't have the time (or perhaps the inclination) to hang out in the hospital. A chaplain not only has the time -- he also has the time to follow up; having ruminated over a conversation for awhile, he can go back upstairs a few hours later to pick it up again, perhaps with some new insight gleaned from another situation he's encountered in the interim.

So -- I don't think hospital chaplaincy is gas station ministry. And if it is, it comes with premium gas and a stack of coupons.

Art and Contemplation

Hildegarde of Bingen - Visionary - At the Table

Marsha Monroe Pippinger

Here

Art, in the form of paintings and photographs amd collages, played a big role in my CPE experience this past summer. Famous Giant Hospital has a substantial art collection, which several of us utilized on a regular basis for assistance with the labyrinthine geography of the acres and acres of campus marked by indistinguishable pathways of light gray walls. "Take the elevator across from the pool painting," or "Go down the hallway with the French landscape photos," or, "It's right next to the portrait of the scary lady."

As the summer wore on and I no longer needed to rely on the artwork as signposts to get myself from one building to another, it evolved into a form of mini-respite which I often sought during the day. I made a point of looking for my favorite pieces in the various units and patient rooms, and paid special attention to the art whenever I found myself a new section of the hospital. I don't know whether many other people even notice what's on the walls, but I often paused for a minute or two, consciously taking in the various elements of a piece, letting them serve as balm for a mind agitated by surgeries and crises and deaths. Sometimes I could practically feel my brain cells relaxing into shapes more amenable to listening than to urgent activity, restoring my capacity for hearing what my patients and their family members had to say and for noticing when they could not say it.

In the past couple of weeks, ever since returning from Oregon and Mount Angel Abbey, I've been wandering around the internet looking for art -- icons, yes, but everything else, too. It's hard to find what I imagine someone in my situation would create ~ what I would create if I could ~ so I have begun to feel like a detective obsessed with discovering clues to the mystery. What do I want? Color saturation, harsh and uneven shapes and edges, surreal interpretations of old stories. Preferably stories of people absorbing that which is impossible to absorb, and learning to live without resolution. Please do not offer me classical lines or soothing hues. I once started to cry when I saw Michaelangelo's David in Florence, but I'm not at all sure that it would move me these days. All that strength and perfection, that sense of personal destiny in an ordered cosmological hierarchy - what could it possibly communicate to me now?

All this to say -- there is some art coming up. I'm on its trail, and I will report back on what I find.

Ashes to Ashes

"Easy for him to say, hard for you to do," said the funeral home director when we told him that our son had indicated a wish for his ashes to be scattered, and then tried to convince us, albeit with restraint, that an elaborate urn placed in one of the cemetery's glass cases in the new mausoleum was the way to go. My father has also said that he wants to be cremated and for his ashes to be scattered, and has been specific as to the locale. When that time comes, I will be better prepared for funeral industry resistance.

Oh, what to do with these bodies of ours when they are no longer animated by soul and spirit, by hope and sorrow? During my summer CPE at Gigantic Hospital, I observed bodies of every size, color, age, and condition, often praying over them as family members clung to each other, and sometimes praying over them in solitude because no one from the family had shown up, or because they had been unable to bear the solid certainty of loss any longer and had left the hospital swiftly and in silence. But I did not have to perform the subsequent tasks of the nurses, or make the next plans with the families.

In my own family, closed caskets have been the rule. There has been a general undercurrent of agreement to "remember them as they lived," and so I saw none of my grandparents, nor my aunt, mother, brother, or first stepmother after they died. My mother and brother were buried while I was still in the hospital recovering from the car accident; I'm not sure that I even knew of their deaths before they were in the ground. Only with my last stepmother, and only because I was holding her hand when she died, was I able to spend time in her presence afterward, absorbing her transition to someplace unknown to us.

In none of these situations did I have to make any decisions about what came next. At the hospital, people took their heartbreak and their mourning out the door with them. In my family of origin, my father has usually been the one to direct the events of the week after a death, and has countenanced little in the way of participation of others. Only with my grandmother, to whom I was especially close and who died a couple of years ago, was I able to insist upon something of my own vision of a memorial service, none of which applied to the care or disposition of her body.

I have tried to do things differently. Following the magnificent guidance provided by the wife of one of my patients this past summer, who with gentle authority and great love gathered her family of siblings and adult children and spouses for major decisions and for the final difficult hours of her husband's life, I brought three generations of us together to plan our son's memorial service, and ensured that the Quiet Husband and I involved our children in every decision about our son's remains. We were also graced by the presence of many friends who had recent stories to share over the kitchen table about bodies, funeral homes, cremations, cemeteries, and the scattering of ashes -- all in gentle, generous, and sometimes humorous conversations in which everyone seemed to intuit the wisdom that we each have different needs and expectations and desires with respect to what finally happens to the bodies of those we love.

To give the funeral home director his due, I believe that he was more interested in protecting us than in selling urns when he told us that scattering ashes would be difficult to do. (A few weeks later he was most helpful in answering all the related questions about practical issues.) Many people in our death-resistant culture accept the handling of its processes by the experts, believing that it may be easier to force its tangibility out of their minds than to acknowledge it for what it is. And while I personally am not so inclined, preferring always to see and hear and touch for myself, who can blame them? The confrontation with the physicality of death, with its insistence on the completeness and finality of the breach it creates, is difficult. But it is also the reality.

And so last week I waded into the Pacific, off a coast which our son had never reached in his short lifetime of great adventures, and scattered some of his ashes onto the gentle swells of water. It was in the end not so hard to do, for, in the words of Isak Dineson that one of of my friends used to share with us, "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."

As it turns out, she was not entirely accurate. There are some things for which there is no cure. But for those, the ocean offers its embrace and, sometimes, the sparkle of sunlight across its surface.

The Hereafter

I've been thinking a lot about a woman I met early in my CPE program this past summer. Privacy considerations preclude me from providing many details, but I can say that I was called for a withdrawal of care (life support), that the initial phone call gave me the impression that the family had made the decision, and that that impression was far from accurate.

The final decision involved most of my afternoon and much of the evening of the on-call chaplain, and included a consultation with a Catholic colleague who carried around a little book outlining the Catholic position on extraordinary life support measures and the cessation of same.

At one point the anguished woman asked me whether I believed in heaven. "I do," I said.

"What is it like?" she asked, with that intensity that you only encounter in these situations, an intensity that demands absolute honesty.

"I don't know," I said.

I am not consoled by a belief that we will meet our loved ones in heaven, that life there will somehow maximize the good things of life here. (It seems that C.S. Lewis and I are in agreement on this one -- he mentions cigars as a would-be desirable feature.) I am not by any means a Biblical inerrantist, but I tend to believe that when the Bible says we shall be changed, it means that we shall be changed in a way we cannot imagine as long as we are still here.

I was intrigued when I spent an afternoon summer before last walking in the cemetery behind the Glasgow Cathedral and picked up a guidebook, from which I learned that the great cemeteries founded in the second half of the 19th century (like the one in which I walk at home) were designed on the basis of a fairly new-at-that-time development of sentiment surrounding death. The park-like atmosphere was meant to foster opportunities to "visit with" the dead, and certainly many people continue to derive great comfort from the sense that they are doing just that.

And maybe they are.

I don't know.

Miscellaney

I keep thinking that it did not happen. Any minute now the front door will slam and he will call, "Hi, Mom!"

A friend whose husband died in a biking accident in the metroparks says that she thinks the same thing. "I imagine him standing in the doorway and saying, 'Hey, I've been lost in the Park for four years ~' "

I wonder how we can ever move out of this house. If he comes back, he won't be able to find us.

My friend says that when she sees changes around town ~ a new paint job, or a new building ~ she thinks. "He won't recognize where he is."

There is an article in today's paper about a woman who lost her 28-year-old daughter a year ago to a sudden wave that washed her out to sea from a spot near Manarola on the walk at the Cinque Terre. We walked that same walk as a family on our 2000 trip to Italy. The mother, who was ordained to ministry a couple of months after her daughter died, notes that the experts says it takes four to seven years to recover from the death of a child. I have watched my father for what in another week will be 48 years. Obviously the experts are clueless. I assume that by "recover" they mean reaching the state the mother's blog reveals today, a blend of hopeful joy in life and anguished sadness and distress in loss. Or maybe they don't mean anything at all.

At the root of Ignatian spirituality is the conviction that God is to be found in all things. Yesterday I began to wonder, for the first time and in the most tentative way, where God might be found in this. A beginning, I thought.

And in the afternoon I accepted my CPE supervisor's invitation to sit out on the beach with her at sunset and I talked nonstop for more than an hour. In May I thought that I was doing CPE this summer to meet a Presbytery requirement. And then in July I thought that I was doing it so that I would discover the work I would want to do for the rest of my life. And now in September I think that maybe I was doing it so that I would gain a friend who can look death directly in the eye, because I would need her only a few weeks later.

Last night I paged through the guestbook from the funeral home. People from California, from New York, from North Carolina, from Arkansas. Rabbis, priests, nuns, ministers. People I have met once or twice in person via the internet. People I have known my entire life. Our son's teachers and classmates from Montessori preschool through middle school, from high school, from college, colleagues from work.

One person said that night, "I thought you said that Montessori school was small. Is the entire school here?"

A phone call from France. "I am so sorry I cannot come; it is just so far...".

We asked that memorial contributions be sent to the summer camp he so loved as camper and counselor. Word has come to us that the camp directors are responding to every gift with a personal note.

Just the thought of God's grace at work is disorienting and exhausting. But perhaps it is there ~ in the friend who sits at the kitchen table sharing ash-scattering stories, in the people who drive or fly for hours to share a few minutes with us, in the evening light over the beach.

End of CPE (Two - Postponed)

CPE ended today and I have been in bed -- mostly asleep, and feeling lousy whenever I wake up -- for hours. I'm hoping it's just the letdown -- and not that I managed to pick up some hospital bug on the very last day. (I only foamwash my hands maybe 200 times a day.)

We had a wonderful little celebration, and finished up some paperwork, but otherwise my day was very busy, with two deaths and two people very near to death on my MICU, one of my five units. The people who arrive there are mostly as sick as people can possibly be. I realized in responding to a colleague's question that I have had, I think, two days at the hospital this summer without deaths -- and there have been several days where the number has exceeded one. One night there were four deaths in the space of a few hours on the palliative care unit. Four is not, actually, unusual for a night. (At night, one chaplain is responsible for the entire hospital.)

Sometimes when people die, I have spent parts of several days with them and their family. Sometimes I meet them as they breathe their last. I try, always, to offer words that mark the passage through death as one of utter grace, praying that the dying person be welcomed by the radiance of God, and that their loved ones be sustained by the knowledge that their presence and witness is a final and extraordinary gift. I would be surprised if any of those left behind remember my words, but I hope that they remember the moment as one that honored the life of their loved one.

It can be tiring.

And so for myself this evening, I think a little dinner and a very long and deep sleep are in order.

Olympic Observations

Sitting here awaiting another Michael Phelps race . . .

North Carolina was the perfect respite. Unfortunately the computer is once again refusing to recognize my ancient camera's greeting, so the pictures may be a few days down the road. Let's just say that every CPE week should feature time for sitting in mountain waterfalls.

Look at those cameras of those sports photographers! Gannet is solid green with envy. Oh shoot, now the 200 fly is at 10:18. I can stay awake, but maybe not online.

CPE evaluations are upon us. I cannot believe that this summer is just about behind us. I will not miss the overnights. But I will miss my encounters - with the stunningly beautiful Arab women, with the patient looking astonished by her sudden possession of a new heart, with the people battling pre-surgery fear and post-surgery pain, with the disoriented and confused and lonely folks who find themselves facing unbelievable medical challenges, with responses to physical challenge and family heartache fueled by dignity, by terror, by faith, by anguish. I will miss the openness to challenge, dedication to hard work, and resistance to sleep deprivation of my CPE colleagues. I will miss our supervisor's insistence on self-exploration, on inclusive language, on building a spiritual program that reaches out to embrace people of all walks toward or away from faith.

I have so loved this experience. But I am very grateful for waterfalls. And sleep.

Goin' to Carolina...

Behind me:

Eight verbatims, four book reflections, weekly general reflections, I don't know how many overnight on-calls, an 8-10 page final evaluation in first draft form, so much suffering and death with humor and triumph blended in, so little sleep and so much tension and the inevitable tears and laugher . . . one week of CPE to go . . . screech to a halt:

We have to go to North Carolina for a three-day week-end to retrieve The Lovely Daughter from her life as a camp counselor. The waterfalls and the mountains and the trails of Pisgah Forest are calling.

We have to take my little car because The Quiet Husband's bigger one is still recovering from its encounter with a deer two weeks ago. It will be a very long drive in a very little car. But at the end will be those waterfalls and mountains and trails and, best of all, The Lovely, Lovely Daughter.

Heart

I thought that it would be a shame to spend my summer doing CPE at Famous Gigantic Hospital without taking advantage of the opportunity to observe an open heart surgery.

So that's how I spent my morning, standing on a stool right next to one of the surgeons as they replaced a valve and did a bypass.

I could say a lot about what I learned from a scientific perspective, and what I added to my pastoral care perspective, and what I concluded from a theological perspective, and maybe someday I will. But for now I'll leave it at:

WAY COOL.

Summer CPE

Lisa asks why I don't stop by more often.

Soon, soon. Four weeks and one day.

(I have to count the day because I am on call today.)

It's difficult to convey how draining CPE is. Let me just list the requirements. This isn't a whine; this is just a list.

In the hospital for a regular 40 hour week.

On call once a week. Today is an easy one ~ a regular 8-4:30 workday. A weekday on-call follows such a regular workday, and goes from 4:30-noon the next day. You usually get to sleep a couple of times in two-hour spurts. Last Saturday night I didn't.

A variety of units on which to see patients. Mine include two ERs, a NICU, an ICU, and pre-and post heart surgery. On call, you have the entire hospital.

A level of acuity, as they call it, that ranks among the highest in the nation. That means that codes and deaths are daily routines.

Every possible kind of faith-related, despair-related, hope-related conversation.

And I haven't even mentioned the training or educational requirements for our little group of interns. Nearly daily meetings in which we explore what is going on for us. Weekly written reflections. Weekly verbatims (word by word scripts of encounters with patients, written for discussion and critique by supervisor or group). Four books to read and write about. Lecures. Rounds. I get to go to an open-heart surgery in a couple of weeks. (Yeah, I'm good with that. I watched my boys' c-section births in a mirror, and I've been to several other births - both methods. And from what I hear, the OR is so crowded that you mostly watch the monitors anyway.) Midterm and final evaluations, meaning a series of questions that boil down to several pages of: How are you doing with your goals? How is your experience? Articulate your theology. Little things like that.

As I said, it's just a list. No complaints, other than the unremitting exhaustion. It's an incredible experience, and I have wished many times this summer that seminary, which has often been a disappointing series of lectures and tests reflecting an unyielding devotion to teaching and learning methods long fallen by the wayside elsewhere, were more like this. Imagine engaging the texts of the Scripture and the commentaries of the last 3000 years with this kind of personal reflection and interactive dialogue! (They tell me second year will be better. I sure hope so. The first mostly demonstrated why we in the church have such problems communicating among ourselves and with others. We don't practice.)

Anyway ~ that's why I haven't been around much.

Just a few more weeks.

Something I Wonder About

Breakfast with a good friend this morning.

"So what," she asked, "is different for you than things were several years ago?"

"We were just talking about that at CPE yesterday," I said. "About what it's like to live in the context of a universe in which everything is permeated by God. Recognizing God's presence in everything."

"Well," she said, "I'm an atheist."

"Then you probably don't sense that God permeates everything?" I responded.

"No, not exactly," she laughed.

And then we spent an hour talking about death and end-of-life decisions and death and bodies and death and hospital care and death, because that's all I really talk about this summer. (I guess I'm really fun to be around.)

She talked about how difficult it was to be present for the death of a beloved family member. I talked about how I try to convey to tearful and anguished people that it's hard to think of a more important thing to do than to witness and be present to your loved ones as they move from this world to the other one.

The way I see it, the Holy Spirit was hanging out with us at the table on the sun-filled (and exceedingly warm) patio outside the bakery.

Not what my friend was experiencing at all. Except, in my view of things, she was.

Life is puzzling, I think.

Re-Calibrating

It has come to my attention . . .

that I need to find my way back? toward?

. . . something that has nothing whatever to do with ministry.

I love the work I'm doing. But it can be all-consuming. It doesn't just take me away from family, friends, home. It's everything I read, everyone I talk to, everywhere I go.

I knew I was in trouble when a neighborhood acquaintance, upon finding out that I am in seminary and spending the summer doing CPE, asked me, while weeding her garden as a break from caring for her ill husband, why there is suffering in the world. I was just trying to take a walk. And then it turned out that that was only the first of five conversations like that over a period when I was actually not at the hospital for all of 48 hours straight and was trying not to think about suffering, pain, loss, heaven, hell, sin, the universe, suffering, the gender of God, the purposes of God, the presence or absence of God, the grace of God, or suffering.

I'm not actually complaining. I'm just registering the need to recalibrate.

And so tonight we're going to fireworks, and tomorrow we might go for a little hike.

And the camera that has lain basically dormant for nearly a year is going back into my pocket.

And if anyone else wants to comment on how they manage all this, I'm listening.

The Voice in the Silence

(Our CPE program requires that we plan and lead two hopsital chapel services over the course of the summer. Most of the congregation consist of chaplains, but family members of patients and nurses, doctors, and other staff also show up on occasion. Here's my first effort at hospital preaching.)

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When this passage popped up a couple of weeks ago on a website I often use as a prayer resource, I immediately thought of our experiences here at Gigantic Hospital. On the whole, GH seems to move at a measured pace -- appropriate for an institution in which so many events marked by layer upon layer of complexity take place each day. There are detailed plans and protocols for every kind of development, with numerous team members from different areas and levels of expertise involved in decision-making -- all necessary to ensure the best possible care for the variety of people and conditions that show up on our doorstep.

And yet, metaphorically speaking, we are in a place of earthquake, wind, and fire. We are in a place where crucial things happen, where God, our God who is in all things, appears in situations, in questions, in decisions, which are not routine to most people. For the patients and their families, a hospital stay, whether for a few hours or for months at a time, is a detour from the usual road, a breach in the fabric of ordinary life, an abrupt jolt out of the familiar and expected. For the people who care for them, the plans and procedures and outcomes may be anticipated and carefully monitored, but the fact that they involve individual human beings, each with his or her own needs, means that even the most perfunctory of proceedings brings with it the potential for response across the spectrum of possibility.

The text before us offers some insight into the stillness with which we can encounter God even in the wake of momentous events. I love this story from the Hebrew Scriptures in which Elijah, prophet to ancient Israel, offers a potent demonstration of God's power. Calling the prophets of Baal, viewed as the chief competitor of Elijah's God, to a challenge, Elijah initiates a contest in which both he and they will present an offering to their respective gods and await the gods' setting fire to their offerings. The Baal prophets pile up their offering on their altar and entreat their gods to ignite the fire, but nothing happens. Their noisy and completely ineffective entreaties are drowned out by Elijah, who taunts and ridicules them for relying on gods who do not exist. And then Elijah, unable to resist heightening the drama, doesn't limit himself to stacking a heap of offerings upon an altar; he sloshes water all over the whole thing, completely saturating it -- and his God still sets it ablaze, soaked wood and all. Elijah then finishes off the prophets of Baal, and for all of his trouble -- what happens? He has to flee to the wilderness to hide from the vengeful Jezebel, who has vowed to destroy him. It is while he is hiding out in a cave in the wilderness that he encounters the angel of the Lord, who tells him to head for the mountain and await the passing of God.

Elijah has already encountered God in fire; his God is, after all, responsible for the fire which has landed him in this mess. He knows something about the God who appears in mighty things, but he also seems to know that this time, God is going to speak to him differently, more intimately and, perhaps, more powerfully than God has before. And so Elijah waits, inside his his cave. A wind passes by, so strong that it rearranges the geologic features of the mountain, tossing rocks and debris this way and that, but Elijah does not venture forth. An earthquake causes the ground to tremble, and opens treacherous crevices, but Elijah remains in his cave. Flames spring from the earth and smoke saturates the sky, but Elijah does not move.

And then he hears it: the sound of silence, through which he recognizes the still and small voice of the Lord. He covers his face and steps into the opening leading from the cave into the light, and God says to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"

For all that he has initiated, for all that he has withstood, Elijah knows that God, God who is surely in all things, can sometimes be heard most clearly in the quiet that follows the chaos. Here at GH, thanks to efforts to keep a lid on the external stimulii, the hum of machinery and the blinking and beeping of monitors tend fall into the background, but the internal upheavals -- the internal winds and earthquakes and fires -- are not so easily subdued. The procedures, the decisions, the tensions -- they threaten to overwhelm each of us from time to time, and we need to distinguish the still, small voice of God calling to us in the silent eye of the storm. We need to find openings in our days and nights to stand quietly and wait for the God who says, "What are you doing here?"

We can respond that we are listening for what God has to say through the words and expressions of our beloved friends and family members. We can respond that we are listening for what God has to say through our patients and colleagues. We can respond that we are listening to what God says through the things that happen and the things that don't. And most of all, we can be attentive to those openings leading into the light -- openings in which we, like Elijah, wait for the God who speaks with more stillness than we might think possible, so that when God says, "What are you doing here?" we can respond: "I am listening for you."

Pointing East

The someday-Christian-pastor is the part of me getting the most of a work-out in CPE.

But the whole-world-interfaith me and the spiritual-director-who-loves-to-help-people-with-prayer me get to play, too.

This morning a woman from the Mideast wanted to know, through the family member interpreting for her, which direction from her hospital room is east. Although I am gifted with no sense of geography whatever, I was able to respond with confidence by looking out from her window down onto the hill that leads to my house - on the east side of the city.

And so today I got to provide pastoral care for a Muslim woman from far, far away by helping her with her prayer. Spiritual direction in the literal sense of the word.

How cool is that!?

Of course, that does not obviate the fact that last night I lost my pager.

There is always something lurking out there just waiting to confirm one's level of incompetence.

CPE Impressions

A week of orientation and a more-or-less regular week behind us.

More or less ~ because one of our little cadre of CPE interns collapsed and died of a heart attack while on call last week-end. To say that people in our program and across the hospital are stunned and, in many cases, devastated, would be an inadequate observation.

And yet, of course, as we all know, life continues.

I am borderline ecstatic to be back in a diverse community. Last week one of the family members with whom I spoke was Buddhist, talking through a Japanese interpreter. A Jewish woman agreed that I might pray with her before her surgery ~ trying to be polite, I am sure ~ and then looked pleasantly surprised and expressed genuine gratitude when the words that came out of my mouth were, apparently, peace-inspiring rather than offensive. Christians describe every kind of belief and practice, or lack thereof, across the spectrum. I feel a profound sense of privilege to be present to so many people who are themselves in so many places of spiritual engagement.

I expressed my surprise yesterday at how quickly and completely people often open up to us, and it was pointed out to me that folks are often much more willing to speak candidly with a strangers than with say, their own pastors. Of course, I thought to myself. How else to eplain my intentional seeking of spiritual directors who differ from me in gender, religion, lifetime committments? Over time they cease being strangers, but I trust them with things I would be unlikely to share in my own community.

And on the subject of chaplaincy care and spiritual direction: I am SO glad that I was pushed into this. Yes, I tried to get out of it -- not because I was disinterested, but because time and money are in short supply and I knew that next year in my spiritual direction practicum I will be doing similar work -- meeting with a supervisor, writing verbatims, exploring my own reactions. I had no idea that hospital chaplaincy would afford me a completely different experience. (Duh.) People who seek spiritual direction are already engaged in a religious journey of some depth; they have to initiate the process, after all. In the hospital, however, I am the one taking the first step, and I am often meeting with people who may have never given much thought to the spiritual dimension of their lives, or think about it in ways other than my own, or have no interest in thinking about it at all. They each call for something different from me, and nudge me to develop skills distinct from those required for addressing the needs of people with whom I share an experience of faith.

I think this is going to be an incredible summer.

And now ~ I am going to the funeral service which is also a part of everything.

Summer Nights

I was on call the other night. Maybe two hours of sleep between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 am. Three people died. Three others came close. One had arrived by ambulance, one by helicopter. Other things happened, too. And each of the NICU babies grew a tiny bit stronger.

Tonight the Lovely Daughter and I took the dog on a walk around the block and then sat on the front porch for awhile and talked. I told her all kinds of stories about my family that she has never heard. She is a young woman now, able to hear the things that almost no one discusses. Tomorrow she heads off to North Carolina for her job as a camp counselor.

I should have thought about this a little more carefully a few months ago when I was encouraging her to spend one last summer playing in waterfalls. If my days (and some nights) are going to be filled with people who are dying or who are watching other people die, if I am going to hear over and over again It's God's will God takes people when God wants God never gives us more than we can handle God is in control, if I am going to offer prayers that result in tears breaking through, if I am going to be prowling the halls of a giant hospial at 4:00 am ~ then I am going to long endlessly for hot summer night conversations on the front porch with the young woman who was once my tiny girl.