Sweet Relief

Well, today was the last of my CPE seminars. I still have final evaluations and four weeks more of chaplaincy, but I will no longer have to do the extra educational work alongside the clinical work.

I felt a strong sense of relief, and now I just feel really tired. I'm going to call a Fool and then go up to pray with a young man in the burn unit and then head to bed.

I have learned so much through this program. I am now a laser-guided pastoral ninja. But I am also very, emphatically done.

Miraculous Healing and the Postmodern Pastoral Caregiver

I've had this experience before - maybe I'll do better this time.

Say you had the following experience, or one like it:

When you are little, growing up on a farm, your foot gets caught in farm machinery, and from that day forward it is clubbed, your toes curled entirely under you foot. You have to walk around with a huge orthopedic shoe.

By the time you are in your 20s, you are told that you will need surgery to have some nuts and bolts and plates put into your foot. This scares you. You go home and pray "Jesus, help me", and then are struck to the floor. It feels like your entire body is receiving an electric current. When it is finally over, you stand up, pacing around the room, trying to make sense of what has happened, upset and confused.

Then you realize you are pacing...on a brand new, healthy, foot.

Five days later you return to your orthopedic surgeon and show him the foot, say "thanks doc, but Jesus healed me, and I'm outta here", and then walk out the door.

For the purposes of this story, it doesn't matter whether it literally happened or not. You experienced it, and remember it, and it is central. It also isn't the only story of miraculous healing you have in your life, just an example.

Now, imagine that you are in the hospital, have been told that you have two cancers, one of which is terminal and inoperable. Imagine the pain this will cause when you do not experience any healing, but firmly believe that you could, if only...if only...something. After all, you have been healed in the past. The Bible says you will be healed in a multitude of places.

This is a patient I just talked to.

All joking about tent-revival hucksters aside, as far as I know, this patient is telling the truth, and I don't have time or resources to go back and verify her stories. So now I'm stuck, a person who has never experienced a dramatic miraculous healing myself, and whose love of biological sciences predisposes him to be skeptical of such stories, trying to provide pastoral care to a patient who can't figure out why she hasn't been healed yet and is, understandably, incredibly upset.

What I'm proud of is that I did just that. She was very thankful, and I could tell that I was very helpful to her. But its hard for me to just chalk these things up to mystery, and I can see how if this woman is not healed, her theology will turn against itself.

I can also see why my Unitarian Universalist colleague found talking to her so challenging.

So, seriously, any advice from you pastors who read this blog? Have you encountered something like this before? What did you do? I'm going to see her tomorrow morning, briefly on the way home, and will consult with my colleagues about further visitation, but man, this one's a knot and no mistake.

The Enneagram in Nine Haikus

depending on how this practice persists, I'll count this as one poem or nine...if you are familiar with the enneagram, you can guess which is which.

ever i balance
see all sides and empathize
fulcrum disappears!

everything in place
someone must divide and see
nothing in between

an open heart cracks
into many smaller hearts
each open always

mirror polishing
i can never see myself
except in success

a perfect lone rose
petals quivering with dew
falling like teardrops

behind battlements
heap upon heap of knowledge
and always i watch

let's each make a deal
if you run then i run; if you
fight then i fight too

what Tiggers do best
bouncy bouncy bouncy bounce -
what was the question?

go ahead, test me
this is me up in your face
i won't hesitate

Good Friday

Today I go back to the hospital, and one of the things I feel that I need to do is to have another conversation with a patient who has given up. I don't want to go into details, so as to maintain his anonymity, but essentially he is facing a difficult and debilitating treatment of what amounts to the slow rotting of parts of his body. If he lets the treatment occur, no clinicians have told me he's likely to die just yet. He'll lose mobility, have to endure pain, but will be able to return to his life.

Yesterday I decided I wasn't giving up until he talked to me. He hadn't talked to nurses except to refuse even basic care (blood sugar checks, wound care, etc.) and hadn't talked to doctors at all. He was just in the fetal position on the bed staring out the window. I pulled a couple chaplain tricks, and got him to talk to me - barely.

It isn't often that you see someone that desolate. Its haunting just to think about and remember even in my living room.

And it turns out that he is Christian, and today is Good Friday.

Normally we don't really do anything for Good Friday as such in the hospital except work to facilitate patients and staff who want to observe in some way. But I was thinking about this guy, and of some way I could reach him. Good Friday seems like the day to face a guy who is choosing to die.

As I thought about it, I came to a slightly deeper understanding of Good Friday. It wasn't so much that Jesus was deciding to die - is a temporary death even a death at all? Rather, I think that Jesus was choosing to suffer for the sake of resurrection. To suffer torture and the grave, but not to succumb to it.

So this is what I'm going to bring to this guy tomorrow. Its going to be really hard, and I'm way past the point where I think my words will be magic and have some huge impact on him. But maybe this guy sees death looming over him (Hell, given his situation, I'd feel it) and can't let himself see past it...because of the pain, or the humiliation that comes with losing mobility you once had, or the frankly icky nature of what he's suffering from.

I see one hope for this guy, really, and it has to lie past the pain and the death and the mess. It has to be some kind of resurrection, some kind of return to life that is healthier than it was before. I think he has that chance, and I don't see much else he has to hope for.

It doesn't make him Jesus for making the choice to live despite death any more than I'm Jesus for talking to him. It's my job, and my reasons for putting this much time in are selfish. I feel awful that this guy has given up. I don't want to watch him deteriorate, and watch the nurses get upset and take it personally because they care so much, and the doctors throw up their hands because he can't heal if they can't cut, and they can't cut if he doesn't let them.

So this guy has a choice either way - choose death, or choose life beyond a kind of death. I know I can't choose for him, or be in his head, but I want to clearly say what I see.

In the Hands of an Angry Pastor

Here's a post I drafted over a month ago. It looks pretty much done, so I thought I'd put it up...

One of the things that I'm learning in CPE is to work when I am angry. What I mean is, I have two tendencies - want to be aggressive when I'm angry, and in response to that, I've built another tendency, which is to become passive and do nothing. Neither of these is healthy nor tenable.

A couple days ago I got a chance to practice. I was in the middle of quite a tangle - an angry surgeon, an angry charge nurse, an angry unit manager, and a very frightened and angry patient. The situation was going nowhere; it was just getting worse. Everything was cycling around this particular patient, who was, in all honesty, quite a problem in her own right for a number of reasons; I could see that as it kept circling, it was escalating. It was like a textbook case from the conflict resolution curriculum I went through years ago through the American Friends Service Committee.

Except that everyone in the room but the patient had more authority than me. My first response was to be really frightened. I stood there for probably a minute or two, starting sentences and not finishing them, not really being listened to, not knowing what to do. The tipping point came when the surgeon lost the composure he had left and turned to me and called me out. He basically said, angry and sarcastic, "this is your job - if you don't solve it, then you don't love Jesus". He said a few other things and stormed out.

Man, that really pissed me off. So I started doing things. I started intervening. Everyone wanted out of this situation, but they were all caught in it. So I gave them ways out. When the surgeon came back to pick up his loud argument with the patient again, I said, among a few other things "This isn't helping either of you. You're a surgeon - you've got more important things to do. Go do them."

To my surprise, he did. He took the way out.

The whole 'incident' lasted around an hour or so before I could disentangle myself. I came back to the office and unloaded on my colleauges. We went out to lunch, and my blood was still boiling.

Later on that day, my supervisor asked for the story. Apparently the unit manager had come to him and said how well one of the chaplains had handled a situation on the floor she was managing. To my surprise, that was me. (At the time, I had the feeling I was just putting out fires and about one step from screaming at the patient myself).

In talking about this later (believe me, we talk about everything in CPE, over and over again) I realized that I perceived a choice - being angry, or being pastoral. When this was pointed out to me, I realized how tremendously stupid it was, and I also realized how overwhelming the message had been to me from my experience of my denomination and, frankly, of the Church in general.

The image of the pastor is Jesus delicately holding a wayward lamb, or Jesus hugging the children, or Jesus giving soft platitudes by the seaside. I have seen pastors be punished for showing anger, even when it is in healthy, constructive ways. Its ok to be angry at the Iraq war (for some of us) or angry about poverty or angry about abortion - but the message I've received very strongly is that you can only be angry about that outside, general, social stuff.

God help you if you are a pastor angry at your congregation, or your Session, or the Presbytery.

And I think of our 50% burnout rate among Protestant pastors. Which is similar to air traffic controllers or military snipers, by the way. And I think this is part of why. We don't allow pastors to be human beings. Human beings get pissed off. Sometimes they get pissed off and act out of it. And sometimes, as I'm learning, it is the anger, and maybe nothing else, that makes someone move, and claim power so that it can be used to maintain peace and right relations.

I know that this is also my issue - but I'm here working on it and sweating over it and getting all this uncomfortable (and sometimes encouraging) peer and supervisor feedback about it. But as a Church, what are we doing?