A Chaplain's Work

The lifeblood of a Chaplain's work consists three things: Communication, Presence and Impression. This is a subtle and artful thing. I don't consider myself to be good at these, but I feel like they are things that I don't think about anymore. There is a flow to the hospital and it has little to do with social order or small talk. It is a strange configuration of bodies in the hospital, between the many interdisciplinary groups and the many many patients. It's often too much for me to handle, and a Chaplain is often in between these, both the teammate and the advocate. And so, how are are and come across is the essence of what we do. A favorite quote from a predecessor chaplain is "Don't just do something, stand there!" Truly a strong reflection on the role of the chaplain.

These essential manners are intangible, temporary, fleeting. The Chaplain is a demonstration of what the Bible means when it reminds us that life is but a vapor, a temporary breath. We arrive, we assess, we intervene, and we leave. With this is a model, what is the long term impact of the chaplain? We often don't even see the impact we make. We take what we see and we try and see it with the person who is in it. And so it is difficult to find what the long term sense of this work is.

Someone told me to consider how I want the world to look in 1, 5, 10 and 30 years. This is the scope of your life. I have decided that the short answer of all of this is Unity. I want to see unity increase and commonality decrease. The sameness of life is such a critical error. Diversity of viewpoint is the only way to step into the river of humanity. We settle for commonality and mistake it for unity. It is simply not the case. This principle of unity vs commonality is what has driven people apart through history, it is the tribal and deferential nature of humans in small groups. It is our duty to overcome it.

We have taken pains in our historical habit to commemorate this tension, and often towards the common. Why are their statues of people, anyway? We are living in the blink of an eye. Jason Steele put it best when he wrote "In 100 million years, the universe will descend into entropy and not even Shakespeare or Coca Cola will be remembered, so what chance do you have?" The spirit of chaplaincy is to live to be forgotten, to live into our core experience and so to embrace the ethereal other. We are called to be people who remember, and conversely live into this forever forward posture. We must sail to our destination, burn the ships and begin anew. One hospital room at a time.