For those of you who took a look at the paper I just posted and got overwhelmed, I'm going to repost it in sections over the next week or so, every other day, to make it more manageable to read and absorb in this format. (Thanks to friend Kevan Penvose who helped me get smart about this!). Regardless, I would love your feedback and comments on this. I think that there is a book in here someday soon and the dialogue would help me sharpen my thinking. Thanks for stopping by and being a part of the conversation!
The Problem
It was a cool autumn day in my senior level pastoral leadership class. We had begun a segment on pastoral case studies and our professor had handed us a new scenario just that morning. In the scenario a parishioner’s friend is hospitalized and miscarries at twenty-six weeks. The friend is in her twenties, is single, and a USAmerican, secular Muslim. The assumption was that we as pastors had responded to the call and were at her bedside, ostensibly welcome. The question: what would you do and say?
I had a visceral response to the scenario and a sort of instinctive vector for presence. I wanted to begin by listening, feeling the currents of the space. But then I wanted to tell the young woman stories of the God that does his best work in the midst of crosses, stories of healing, transformation, and the end of death. I wanted to read to her Isaiah 25:6-9 and talk with her about the God who promises to wipe tears from all faces, to take away shame and sorrow, and to swallow up death forever. I wanted to tell her about the God who raises the dead, about the God who has a word of life for her little one even in the midst of that tragic day. I wanted to stand with her at the foot of the cross and offer her the tension of our faithful hindsight; all of our crosses have a shadow…the shadow of the empty tomb.
What I learned that morning was that I was not a good chaplain. Perhaps this is a good thing to know, but after all I was sitting in a class called “Pastoral Leadership” and not “Chaplaincy 101.” Certainly these two realities are not always severely distinct, and I do not even want to suggest that they need be. However, what happened that morning was this: this class full of senior seminarians with thoughts of hospital hallways and ten weeks of summer Clinical Pastoral Education and Internships dusted off their best understandings of “pastoral leadership” which were in fact attitudes and practices that better reflected “chaplaincy 101.” So the discussion immediately moved to concepts such as “unconditional positive regard,” “the ministry of presence,” and things that are significantly similar to attitudes and practices that my wife has learned as a therapist. These things are not in and of themselves a bad thing. Both “unconditional positive regard” and a “ministry of presence” can be healing and transformative things. To be in the shadow of a cross is incredibly lonely. Human community and the basic communication, “You are not alone!” can mean the difference between getting through the day and abject despair.
But something was missing. I was taught in my own unit of CPE not to have a witness. The rationale for this had to do with the reality that patients and families in a hospital can be Buddhist, Sikh, atheist, Baptist, agnostic, or Roman Catholic, and I was taught that a posture of non-interference is best.
This attitude is of course what is at issue: it is the issue of posture. It is the supposition that I can be a Christian minister, ordained into the body of Christ and somehow not have a witness. It is the assumption that in these dire stations of life, the only story that counts is one of presence that is not grounded in the story that we tell, the story of Jesus Christ and him crucified and risen.
No comments:
Post a Comment