"I Can't Believe We're Actually Doing This" (again)

Since I began seminary last year, I have been having these "I-can't-believe-I'm-actually-doing-this" moments on a fairly regular basis. It happened when I was working at the homeless shelter last year, and when I was working as a hospital chaplain last summer, and it happened again this past Sunday as I stood before my internship congregation.

I was excited because my teaching pastor (the senior minister who is supervising me) Deb had given me the responsibility of writing and reciting a short chalice lighting for the start of the service. Deb welcomed everyone, I sounded the bell, Deb read a beautiful Rilke poem. And then I pulled from my pocket my painstakingly written . . . to-do list for the weekend. I had grabbed the wrong piece of paper from the table as I dashed out of the house that morning.

"This is it," I thought to myself. "Here you are, and there they are. Let's see what happens now."

So, rather than say to the congregation: "Fold laundry; buy salad stuff; change cover on couch . . .", I recited the chalice lighting text from memory -- which, as it turns out, was not all that difficult to do as it was very short and based upon a poem I had written just a few weeks ago.

And later I started thinking that this experience is what congregational life is really like. You work on something, you become a part of a community, you lovingly prepare something to share with others, you practice -- and then, when things go wrong (as they so often do), you improvise. And, almost always, things turn out alright.

What's most exciting to me as I have begun this two-year period of learning in an real-life congregation is the fact that it's actually happening. My seminary classmates and I have taken yet another leap into the unknown, trusting that, while the world may be dangerous, it is also a place that calls us to act in faith.

And, as much as we might prepare for something -- even agonize over it sometimes -- I have a feeling that it is this faith that, in the end, will be of most importance to us.

In his beautiful novel "The Fifth Mountain," Paulo Coelho writes, "Fear reaches only to the point where the unavoidable begins; from there on, it loses its meaning." I believe that each moment, as it presents itself to us, offers us that encounter with the unavoidable. I pray that we may face it faithfully and with whatever grace might be given to us.

(And, just in case you're wondering: Yes, the laundry did get folded, the salad stuff was purchased, and the couch cover was changed . . .)

Late Summer Light

Late summer light on the lake

reminds me of the thinness

between seasons, between

bodies in motion and at rest.

Lying on the ground, I feel

the stillness of the water,

the heat of the sun and the

great fullness of the earth.

Falling now more like particles

than waves, the light weighs

heavily on the yellow-tinged

leaves. With them, I breathe,

yearning to burst into flame.

Meadville Convocation 2011: Congregational Studies

I am very grateful to be back in Chicago, where I re-connected with classmates and faculty for a 2-1/2 day convocation to kick off our congregational studies sequence. What a joy to see these folks after an absence of more than 5 months! And what a pleasure it was to meet some of the first-year students and to interact again with the third-year students--really an outstanding assembly of caring, committed people.

One of the greatest pleasures of convocation was being able to share our clinical pastoral education experiences with each other, both formally and informally. Some had better experiences than others, but it was for all a summer of great transformation and deepening and broadening of our understanding of what it means to be a minister.

This year will be a challenging one, but I am excited about the possibilities that it holds for me and for my classmates. The world has already been changed by us in ways, large and small, and I believe that we will begin living even more fully into our potential during this year. If we love and nurture our congregations in the same way we do each other, all will be well.

CPE: I found God . . .

For our closing worship service, my CPE intern group led an exercise in which all the chaplains who were gathered reflected on where they had found the sacred in the hospital. People were encouraged to write and draw where they had found God in their work there. I loved all the responses people came up with. Mine was as follows:

I have found God
in the hands of
the nurse who rubbed
the back of a grieving
mother for hours in
the middle of a long
night in the ICU.

I remember that night as I sat and stood in the room with a large group of family members who were watching their beloved 18-year-old son/brother/cousin die and saying their goodbyes. The mother was inconsolable, and I'm pretty sure that almost nothing I said (which was very little to begin with) made it through to her. It seemed as if the only thing that kept her from dying of grief in that moment, the only thing that kept her anchored in the room was the nurse who stayed right there with her and, for maybe 2-3 hours, never let go of her.

After the young man died and the family had gone, I walked back across the hospital and chanted quietly, "Om, shanti, shanti, shanti . . ."

CPE: So Little and Yet So Much

When I was beginning my summer of clinical pastoral education (CPE), I was somewhat intimidated by those who had already been through CPE and said that it taught them how very little anyone can do in these acute care situations, how anything and everything we might do falls well short of what is needed, and how CPE dispels any notion that we as pastors might actually be able to make much of a difference to people who are suffering.

While I do agree that the CPE experience is humbling in many ways, I have come away feeling amazed at just how much we can do in these challenging situations and how much difference even the slightest bit of pastoral care can make. While I have not cured or healed a single person this summer, I do believe my presence has been meaningful to many of the people I have seen at my hospital.


Maybe it was less traumatic for me than it has been for others because I had fewer unrealistic notions about my abilities going into CPE. At age 50, I don't have a whole lot of youthful fantasies or delusions about what I can and cannot do, and I have never held myself in such high esteem that I thought I could single-handedly turn someone's sorrow into joy -- nor have I ever believed that I might make the lame walk or cause the blind see.


And, without a doubt, I was blessed to have a CPE supervisor who follows a collegial educational model, rather than believing that CPE students should be treated rather like soup ingredients that must be thoroughly chopped into small pieces before they can be of any use. While I did feel challenged, I did not feel belittled or disrespected at any time during the summer.


And, when all else is said and done, I am left with a number of crystalline moments that I am not likely to forget. Over the last 10 weeks I have been present at more than 20 deaths, a couple of dozen severe traumas, and more heart-wrenching moments of suffering and painful decisions than I can name.


What amazes me more than anything else is that people have welcomed me into these most intimate of moments in their lives, have allowed me to be part of this experience that they might share only with close family members or, in some cases, with no one else at all. What a great gift that is!


Pastoral care is exhausting and difficult work, but I believe that, as a result of this experience, I have begun to see how compassion works in situations that are difficult almost beyond imagining. And I am reminded of the difference between mere empathy and compassion. As Matthieu Ricard has written:


"A way to deal with this challenge effectively is to cultivate unconditional love and compassion toward the suffering person. This is much more than merely resonating emotionally with the suffering person. . . Compassion is nothing else than love applied to suffering. Such love and compassion can override the feelings of distress and powerlessness that empathy alone generates and lead to constructive states of mind such as compassionate courage.”


Compassionate courage is a great gift of pastoral care work. It may not look like much from the outside, but I believe it is one of the most powerful forces in the world. I pray that we all might be courageous bearers of compassion in the face of suffering, that we all might be witnesses and bringers of the love that will not let us go.

Outside the Women's Hospital

A woman who is holding a teddy bear sits in a wheelchair in front of the hospital waiting for her ride home. About 10 feet away from her sits another woman in a wheelchair, also waiting for a ride home, but this one is holding a newborn baby.

In our hospital, women who lose a child—either through stillbirth or infant death—are given a teddy bear. The bear is not in any way intended to take the place of the baby, but rather is something to hold, something to serve as a small comfort in a time of great pain. It is also a reminder that their loss is real.

The woman with the bear glances at the woman with the baby, and I see tears form in her tired-looking eyes. I step over to her and say, “My name’s Jim. I’m a hospital chaplain. May I wait with you?” She nods.

I kneel beside her and take her hand while, with her other hand, she still clutches her bear tightly. We weep together in silence for about five minutes until her husband appears with their car, in which I see a very new and very empty baby seat.

As I help her to the car, the woman squeezes my hand and says, “Thank you.” I turn to go back inside, and I notice the woman with the baby still waiting for her ride. But now she is crying, too. She says, “Did I hear you say you were a chaplain?” When I answer “yes,” she asks, “Would you say a blessing for my daughter?”

“Of course." I hold the woman’s hand and place my other hand on the sleeping baby’s beautifully round, soft, bald head.

“Spirit of life and love, we give thanks today for this child. May she be happy and healthy and a blessing to all who know her. We do not understand the great mystery from which each of us emerges and to which each of us returns. But we pray that, while we are here together, we might all be angels for each other, bringers of peace and grace and love. Bless this child, bless this family and bless all who know joy and all who know suffering. This we pray now and always. Amen.”

CPE: What To Do When Everything Is a Crisis

For my clinical pastoral education, I am serving as a chaplain in a hospital that is a major trauma center, which means that ours is a crisis-driven department of pastoral care. As chaplains, we prioritize our calls as follows: (1) deaths; (2) traumas; (3) codes (generally called when someone’s heart or breathing stops); (4) urgent support; and (5) routine support.

During nights and weekends, when there is only one chaplain to cover the entire hospital complex (some 800 beds), we rarely have time to do anything but respond to deaths, traumas and codes. At these times, literally everything with which we are dealing is a crisis.

And what are we charged with doing during crises? Several things:

1. Be the calmest person in the room. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say *seem to be* the calmest person in the room. Simply having an apparently non-anxious presence can be a real gift to people in the middle of a situation that is wholly and madly chaotic. Being such a calm presence is certainly easier said than done, of course—especially when there is so much screaming of orders on the part of the medical staff and wailing pain and grief on the part of patients and their families. Still, I have found that at least the pretense of a calm demeanor is actually possible in most cases, and it gets easier as one gains experience in these situations.

2. Serve and advocate on behalf of patients and their families. In our trauma bays, chaplains are the ones who draw the privacy curtains, trying to maintain some semblance of dignity for those who are laid out on the examination table, often bruised and bleeding, with their clothes cut from their bodies. And we are the ones who often remind medical staff that there are family members in the waiting room who need to know what is going on with their loved one. And we are the ones who fetch the doctor when the answers they have given to family members are confusing, misleading or incomplete. We are the ones who take the family from the emergency waiting area to the intensive care unit, who show them where the restrooms and cafeteria are, who ask them if there’s anyone else who needs to be called.

3. Pray when requested and as needed. I’ve had to learn how to pray with people as I never have before. As chaplains, we are asked to pray in nearly every imaginable situation in the hospital—at births, deaths, just before surgeries, at times of great despair and loneliness, at times of confusion and misunderstanding, at the times when life-and-death decisions are being made, and—every now and then—at times of joy. I have changed from being a person who almost never prays (unless you count the many times I’ve said, “Please, God!” sotto voce over the years) to being a person who is praying all the time—both at the hospital and when I’m away from the hospital.

So, during on-call shifts (and much of the rest of the time) we get to see a lot of blood, raw pain, unedited grief and, occasionally, astonishing moments of grace. These last moments often come about only after hanging in there through all the other stuff.

There’s a reason why these “crisis shifts” at major trauma centers are mostly staffed by intern and resident chaplains who are serving for fixed periods of time. The intensity of the experience can be a source of awe and can also be thoroughly exhausting. Over time, such work takes its toll, even if one is the best self-nurturer in the world. As for me, I am grateful for my CPE experience and for the work of the many people who minister to those who are in the midst of crisis.

CPE: Learning by Leaping

The other day, I had another one of those moments where I found myself thinking: "If you'd told me a few years ago that I would be doing this, I would have said, 'No way.'"

In this case, I was standing in a hospital room surrounded by a large Spanish-speaking family, holding in my arms a beautiful, dead infant girl, whom I was anointing and blessing. The child's mother lay across the hall in the surgical intensive care unit, very near death herself after a terrible car wreck that occurred as the family was on their way to the hospital to deliver the baby.

In that room, at that moment, there was immense, raw pain. The pain of hopes dashed, loved ones lost, dreams shattered. And there was love.

I had hoped that I might get through my summer of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), without having to deal with an infant death. But there I was, and there was the baby who died before she could be born, and there was the family, seeping pure grief from every pore.

With the help of an interpreter, I spoke with the family for a while. But, aside from the anointing and blessing, I had little to offer to these people other than my presence. I have no idea if my being there was any help or not, but I do know that I felt privileged to have been a witness to this moment of stunning sorrow.

As awful as this scene was, it was also a great gift to have been allowed to be with these people at this time. And there was no doubt in my mind that this moment was holy. At least for a little while, their great sadness was also mine, and together we lifted up what was lost, blessing all that might have been and all that has come to pass.

Singing the Names of God

To mark my 50th birthday, I made a pilgrimage to the Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville in Virginia to sing with Krishna Das, who is a leading voice in the world of devotional chanting. His call-and-response songs are based on traditional Hindu kirtan but often with new melodies and new instrumentation. KD accompanies himself on harmonium (a small reed organ with hand-pumped bellows), and his band includes a violinist, two hand drummers, electric bassist, and finger cymbalist.

The evening began with a video of the ashram’s founder, Swami Satchidananda (who died in 2002) talking about the nature of sound and how it relates to yoga and meditation. He put forth the idea that sound is the highest or most refined form of matter. And the sound that one reaches toward is a universal hum: Om, Amen, Amin are all expressions of this same hum. The most basic and the most difficult to attain essence comes down to this hum.

He also talked about the Ramayana, the great epic Hindu poem, and how Ram (an incarnation of the supreme being Vishnu) had to wait for a bridge to be built to go across the sea to rescue his partner Sita, while Hanuman, the monkey-man companion of Ram, simply chanted the name of Ram and flew across the water. Swami-ji asked: So which is more powerful: Ram or the name of Ram?

In the introduction to one of his songs (My Foolish Heart/Bhaja Govinda), Krishna Das told the story of the aging Sanskrit scholar who was told by the Indian saint Adi Shankaracharya, “Bhaja Govinda,” meaning “Sing the names of God.” In other words, this man did not have long to live and better get busy with what really matters, rather than mere rote learning.

In fact, we all better get busy singing the names of God. And what are the names of God in our own lives and in our own experience? In his popular book about end-of-life issues, Ira Byock talks about “The Four Things That Matter Most.” They are: “Please forgive me.” “I forgive you.” “Thank you.” and “I love you.”

I would like to suggest that when we give voice to those four things, we are “singing the names of God.”

When we forgive ourselves we are on the path of compassion. When we forgive others, we are moving that compassion outward and extending mercy. “Thank you” is a prayer and perhaps the best expression of gratitude. And to say “I love you” is to impart that which is most important—the love that will not let us go and that, when shared, is the love that holds each of us in it.

Compassion, mercy, gratitude, love. We need to give form and voice to them all of our days. And then our lives may become a part of the great song that connects all to all. May it be so!

Om. Amen. Amin.

What have I learned in my first year of divinity school?

To Prophesy and To Praise

As we wrap up our community studies class, we've been making connections between brokenness and worship. What do we do as ministers to address what is broken in the world while holding up that which is praiseworthy? Is there really any difference or distinction between what's broken and what's worthy of praise?

Mary Oliver, in a recent O interview with Maria Shriver, says something interesting about being a "praise poet":

Mary Oliver: I like to think of myself as a praise poet.
Maria Shriver: What does that mean?

MO: That I acknowledge my feeling and gratitude for life by praising the world and whoever made all these things . . . Wendell Berry is a wonderful poet, and he talks about this coming devastation a great deal. I just happen to think you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. So I try to do more of the "Have you noticed this wonderful thing? Do you remember this?"

MS: You try to praise.

MO: Yes, I try to praise.

So, on one hand, we have Wendell Berry as the prophet/poet who holds up a mirror in which we see the havoc unfolding on our planet. And, on the other hand, we have Mary Oliver as the praise poet who holds up a mirror in which we see the beauty that is manifest in the world. In some ways, of course, this dichotomy is false. Certainly, Berry has praised and still praises, and Oliver has pointed out brokenness in small and large ways.

But I want us to remember that, whether we are prophesying or praising, we are still holding up the same mirror. In it, you can see both the beautiful and the broken. In fact, you cannot see the beautiful without seeing the broken. And you cannot address the brokenness until you have started to appreciate the beauty of everything--whole, broken, remembered, suddenly realized, healed, rent and scattered.

All of it praiseworthy and all of it broken. All of it made holy by the sacred "and" that allows us to hold apparently disparate visions simultaneously.

The world is additive. Reductive logic works in small ways for small tasks, but it does not reflect the nature of the universe.


It's always "and." Again and always "and." The greatest songs of praise emerge from the cracks in the world. And the only chance we have for healing and wholeness is to remember that these songs must be sung.

Intensive Classes as Baptism by Complete Immersion

Since Meadville has migrated to its new educational model, weekly, residential, semester-long classes are a thing of the past--rather like afternoon tea at the parsonage. And in their place are these absolutely crazy things called intensive classes, in which a whole semester's worth of learning is crammed into one week (more or less).

For the typical intensive course at Meadville, you do most of your required reading ahead of time, then attend one week, 6-8 hours each day, of lectures, discussions and various other learning activities. And after that, you have a few weeks to a couple of months to write a paper (or several papers) or produce some other artifact that demonstrates what you have learned.

Just to make things a bit more interesting, you are also doing some intense socializing/bonding with your classmates during the intensive week--oh, and attending whatever other extracurricular activities the school cooks up.

These classes are better than traditional classes because, at least for one week, you have to be pretty much totally invested in the class you are taking. You're forced to eat, breathe and think the material--waking, sleeping and everything in between. This baptism by total immersion in the material ensures that you get soaked to the bone in whatever you are studying.

Traditional classes, by contrast, are more like baptism by aspersion. You do have to show up for a couple of hours every week while a few drops of wisdom are sprinkled about your scalp, but there's no guarantee that you'll remember the experience at all. And memory of the actual experience is key, I think. It's difficult for me to imagine that I will ever forget sitting in a room with my classmates all day, every day for a week and laughing, crying and moaning together as we try to get a handle on whatever it is we are studying/experiencing.

There is value added in the emotional intensity that gets attached to the otherwise somewhat dry intellectual matter. Mixing some sweat and tears with the dust of the intellect results in something sticky that stays with you longer than the kind of learning you experience in a more traditional class.

What's harder about intensive classes is that they are exhausting. They are exhausting for everyone, but especially, I think, for those of us who tend toward introversion and really need a certain amount of alone time in order to process and regain some energy. But such is the life we are called to--a life of daily full immersion.

And for seminarians, it seems entirely appropriate that each class involves a kind of intensity that is something like a religious experience.