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The Minister's Blog
I am feeling comfortable with my patient visits. On call on Friday, Saturday and Monday, with no morning classes, there was a lot of time for orders and a lot of time for other visits.
I was disappointed that D. had been discharged from the hospital. I wanted to give her “Legacy of the Heart,” a book by Wayne Muller about the spiritual advantages of a painful childhood. If anyone could use the soothing voice which tells us that we can use painful childhood experiences to grow more fully into ourselves, it was this 18-year-old.
My mother tells me that I cried for the first two years of my life. She says that all I wanted was to be held, and being a infant in the mid 1950s, when baby rearing protocol insisted on a feeding, changing and putting a baby down in the crib, I cried most of the time. At the age of two, I simply stopped.
I cry a lot still.
I cry in joy, I cry in sorrow. Sometimes I grieve.
Second chance, always
My day began and ended with families where the second chance for living was coming to an end.
There's is a awful lot of praying that happens in the Pastoral Care Department and in the work of the chaplains. Our morning and afternoon report begin with a prayer. Most pastoral visits either begin or end with a prayer.
I like prayer, and see it as praying to that small wise essence in ourselves. Another Unitarian Universalist chaplain colleagues describes praying for another as connecting his wise essence in himself, to the wise essence in the other. He prays across to the other person, as opposed to up to an outside entity.
I asked a patient the other day about his concept of redemption and forgiveness.
“I don’t go to church much,” he replied to me.
“I’m not asking about church,” I said. “I want to know whether you think that there is redemption and forgiveness in the world. Because what happens next in your life depends on whether you think you can be redeemed and forgiven.”
With nearly one half of my time in my Pastoral Care Education (CPE), I feel compelled to become more serious about using my time well. I am looking to hunker down, I write in my journal. I look up the word to be sure.
I have been musing on the word sacrifice since I received it as part of a worship service last Tuesday. The worship leader asked us to contemplate how the word that we picked out of a basket might be a potential route that God wanted us to ponder. Besides the fact that I don’t view God as exerting a particular will over my life, I have been wondering what a thorough thinking of the concept of sacrifice might yield for me.
The conch shell sitting on my grandson’s shelf catches my attention and reminds me of the one that I had when I was a child. I am surprised that I didn’t notice it before. I have been living in this room for some three weeks now and remembered my own shell just in this moment. I wonder about the timing.
My harp playing for patients in the hospital goes well. Yesterday, I sang for a woman who only speaks Spanish. Her daughter was with her and could translate.
I worked the 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. shift tonight. I enjoyed the morning – and driving without commuter traffic.
The pace of the work in the hospital was kind of slow for a while. I helped another chaplain facilitate a group discussion on the psych ward. The seven people who participated, while obviously hovering on the edge of cogent reality and fantasy, had just as much insights and inherent wisdom as my IPR (Intrapersonal reflection) group.
I am lost in the maze of hallways. Trying to find my way to the NICU unit because I heard a Code Blue announced over the loud speaker, I am standing at a crossroads wondering which way to turn. A woman approaches and tells me that the unit is in the opposite direction.
We have begun shadowing the resident and staff chaplains as part of our daily schedule. Yesterday, I tagged along with Chaplain N. as she made visits to the palliative care patients. I had brought my Reverie Harp to the hospital; I was planning on calling on a person I had met at the Tampa UU Church who is scheduled to have open heart surgery this week.
Beyond the 300 hours of clinical work that is expected this summer, there is classroom instruction, individual supervision, peer group work and writing assignments in the form of verbatims and weekly reflections.
The following in my first weekly reflection.
The CPE experience is a multi-layered paradox.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12:00 to 12:15 p.m. there is a chapel service in the hospital chapel. The inter-faith service is provided by the Pastoral Care Team and we each have been assigned a service. I am on for Thursday, June 17. Brock Leach, a Unitarian Universalist who is currently in year's residency offered the following homily this past Thursday.
Opening Words:
Small as is our whole system compared with the infinitude of creation,
Brief as is our life compared with the cycles of time,
We are so tethered to all by the beautiful dependencies of law,
The alarm rings and I immediately turn on the light. Yesterday, I fell back asleep for an additional 1/2 hour and felt a bit rushed to be out the door at 7:00 a.m. I have a window of about six hours to get done what I want to get done: spending time with my extended family, daily writing, practicing my harp and getting a bit of exercise. I have scheduled my daily writing for the morning. It might not be the most opportune time to do it as there is limited time between getting up and out the door.
A chaplain's day begins and ends in the same way: with a group meeting where the events and the cases of the previous shift are handed off to the next. Yesterday, we hear about TGH David, a young man who was brutally beaten by a neighbor. The perpetrator is still at large, so that the real name of the patient is not recorded.
The afternoon tour of Tampa General Hospital (TGH) lasted two and a half hours. By the end, I and my other eight classmates, the Summer CPE Intern Chaplains, understood that the hospital was huge and did everything there is to do medically in that facility and that we were an important part of the care team. Our minds boggled, we knew that we had maybe seen a 10th of the hospital. We joked that by the time we actually knew our way around, the 12-week training program would be over.
I think about habits and spiritual practice as I mentally prepare for my first day of a 12-week Clinical Pastoral Education program. At 6:30 a.m., I will be ready to leave my children-in-law's house, jump on the highway and make my way to Tampa General Hospital. After taking husband Stephen to the airport early yesterday afternoon, I took the Route 295 Downtown West exit and found my way to the hospital and back.
Snow on tree limbs
branch across
the space.
Nature’s language
roots us in our place.
Out of our grasp
and always within
our reach.
Ancient systems
speak of
loving peace.
Sometimes my writing goes easy, and sometimes it is a torturous affair. Writing a reflection about collaboration this afternoon for an independent study on eco-theology was an experience with the latter. Not only did my musing take what seemed like forever, I am convinced that when it was all said and done, I got caught up with the details and skimmed through what might have been the depth in the exploration.
I concluded that collaboration was staying balanced on ever shifting ground. It is a concoction that is forever changing.
The predicted snow has begun. I ask Stephen how much will fall, and he tells me that the accumulation for our area will be four to eight inches. It doesn’t seem like much in relation to the big hoopla about the storm’s immensity, although meteorologists are undoubtedly looking at the larger cumulative effects across the Eastern seaboard.
I live on this earth
with humility
for all that I cannot accomplish
in service to its magnificence.
In small pools of
winter runoff
I find places
of reflection
and energy to
mourn and rejoice
in this strange
state of life.
The natural gas news today is all about investment and money making as the third-largest European energy company has announced that it will spend $2.25 billion to gain new access to deep natural gas fields in Texas. “Total SA, like Exxon (who announced in December they were buying XTO Energy Company in a $41 billion deal), will take what it learns in the U.S. to natural gas fields across the globe.” (Business Week, 1/4/10)
One can only shutter to think of what that could conceivably mean.
Outside, there is the sound of thunder.
And while I always enjoy a good thunderstorm, I wonder about what cold air is hitting what warm air at 6:20 p.m. on December 31. My first thought, it about global warming; my second thought is that the nearby ski area is shooting off fireworks and it’s not thunder at all. Either thought is discouraging and interconnected to my basis premise that we need a new vision for 2010.
Suspending the menorah gently above the fire box in the wood furnace, the last remnants of the beeswax, which had provided light for eight nights, dripped into the fire below. A quick flame leaped up as each drop fell on the burning wood. Carefully handling the hot metal, I removed the last thin coating of wax with a paper towel. I ignored the timer signaling that the bottom layer of the lemon bars was ready to take from the oven, thinking that an extra couple of minutes would make no discernible difference.
Returning upstairs, I was surprised to find the crust much darker than what it is supposed to be. I understood what had happened when I saw that the oven temperature was set for 450, instead of the prerequisite 350 degrees. (The temperature gauge on my antique cookstove is on the side, and it is generally set for 350 degrees.) In hindsight, my misstep was not letting the bars go a few minutes longer, it was that I hadn’t checked the temperature setting. Having not changed it; I didn’t think to check whether it was set for what it always usually is.
I’m not sure if I like this new routine, but I have been starting my day reading emails with my morning cup of coffee. It used to be that I would ponder the day's realities by gazing out the bedroom window into the deep white pines across the side field. Now, my first thoughts are filled with national and local natural gas articles, the compilation handiwork of Upper Delaware Council Senior Resource Specialist Dave Soete.
I don’t know how it happened, but it has become winter.
Just a week ago, I was watching the sumac leaves turn from yellow to deep red and the golden leaf laddened Bradford pear trees on Bridge Street in Narrowsburg become less dense with each passing day. Now the ground is white, and more times than not when I look out the window, a small snowflake drifts downward.
I have a distant memory of having to create a Thanksgiving service, perhaps it was last year, and feeling as if I wasn't sure that I had anything that I felt actively grateful for. Of course, it was an extremely privileged point of view because just the fact that there is no one shooting at me or dropping bombs on my house is cause for gratitude.
We forget, most of the time, that we are among the privileged.
Even as we face devastating news, we are among the lucky.
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Laurie Stuart