SOUL | EMOTION | HEARTBREAK | FORGIVENESS
Sermon: “Help is not Spiritual Care”
Five lessons from hospital chaplaincy…¹
Lessons Learned
In the 2005 Movie Kingdom of Heaven, the Crusader knight Balian comes to terms with his enemy, Sultan Saladin, for the surrender of Jerusalem in 1187. Balian had been through some epic battles during the Third Crusade. He learned about power, as practiced by Christian leaders, and he learned about his enemy's stunning generosity.
These are powerful learnings for him that turned his world upside down and set his feet on a new path that looks a lot more like the gospel than his old life, at least in the movie. As they walk away from each other, Balian turns and asks Saladin, “What is Jerusalem worth?” Saladin responds, “Nothing…. everything!”
Unlike Balian, I’m not standing here to surrender Madison to Saladin, but I am coming away from some powerful learnings myself over the last eight months that I want to share with you because I think they might be useful as you think about your own discipleship.
I just completed a second course in chaplaincy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. My instructor was a rabbi from Israel, and two of my classmates were rabbis. The other four student chaplains, including me, come from several faith traditions and work out of Lawerence and Memorial Hospital in New London. We started this class just before the Hamas raid into Israel last October 7, and as you might imagine, it has been a roller coaster ride for all of us.
Something Counterintuitive
Our learning started with this profound quote by Quaker Parker J. Palmer:
“The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.” ²
Did you hear that? Helping is not a good thing… seeing, hearing, companioning is.
Living into the fullness of that quote has been really hard for me. How on Earth do you approach a soul who doesn’t want to be advised, fixed, or saved? I’ve spent my entire life in problem-solving professions, from Boy Scouts to Submariner to Consultant to Deacon. Every day of my life, I have advised, fixed, and saved. And now, I am supposed to step away from that in order to be a Chaplain. I’m just supposed to witness souls so that the soul itself can do the healing.
Our wise teacher, Yael, had three touchstones that helped us embody the way of witnessing:
- “To be a good chaplain, you have to be at peace with feeling and being useless.”
- “Ours is the toughest profession. We don’t get to move anything. There’s a [bad]³ situation the patient is in; we are called to step in the [mud]³ with them and not to run away; we are “stepper-inners.”
- “Help is not spiritual care. Spiritual care is “reverse dodgeball,” asking to get hit more!”
Well, here’s a few things I walked away with:
The Urge to Fix
First, I acknowledged that the urge to fix is strong with me, and that is not what Chaplaincy is about. My “worst” visits were ones where I was trying to fix the patient’s problem. As I became more intentional about opening my heart to whatever was there, I found I began to have extraordinary visits, where the patient and I just entered the flow and where the patient’s soul was witnessed right where it was. Further, I came to be able to accept that this might seem “useless” as far as the medical professions were concerned and to be ok with that.
Honestly, all of this makes me wonder if the urge to fix is also not what being a Deacon is all about, or even a Christian, for that matter. For some time now, I’ve been thinking that being a Deacon is more about being than doing. The heart of sending people out into the world might not really be to fix things, but actually to get Christians to experience the transformative power of just being with a suffering one who is not like you… to enter into one another’s stories. What makes that transformative is not that we get to use our special wisdom, expertise, or prayers in the encounter, but just that we bring ourselves and connect with another suffering soul.
Recently, our Vestry practiced the art of being with one another by doing one-on-one interviews. These are meetings, about one hour long, where two people learn about each other. What do they do? Where does their anger come from? What keeps them up at night? What is breaking their hearts? In these encounters, we are seeing the soul of our partner, just as they are. Personally, I find myself energized every time I finish one. I feel seen and heard… and that just fills me with contentment.
My Emotions are My Baggage
The second thing I’ve learned as a chaplain is when my emotions get triggered, the cause is always me, not the patient. I came out of one visit thinking I should act on something I heard; I took it to my supervisor since it seemed urgent. She asked, “Why do you feel this need? What happened to you in childhood that you need to do this?” I knew right away that the urge was really my own baggage. It became a key insight into my character.
I am beginning to wonder if this truth is also true outside of the patient’s room. What would my life be like if, every time I experience a sharp emotion, the very first place I would look is on the inside of me rather than at the other person? I wonder what the world would be like if that was a practice we all shared.
Authentic Questions
The third thing I learned is how to be a shark! Being a shark just means asking the hard and authentic question that penetrates the patient’s carefully curated defenses, as well as my own, to get to the heart of their suffering. “Are you afraid of dying?” “Where are these tears from?” “What happened to you as a child that made you so angry?” “If God was standing in front of you now, what would God say to you?”
Sometimes, the answers are heartbreaking. For some, they involve stories they have never told another human being. This is sacred work. All of that is about a soul finally breaking free from its constraints to be seen and heard. All that is required from me is a safe space, whole-body listening, and holding a very vulnerable heart in my hands. This is what it looks like to stand in the mud with someone. Most often, this form of healing has nothing to do with the illness that brought them into the hospital; that illness is just the foil for connection. Rather, it is about the heartbreak they have suffered all their lives.
Can you imagine yourself doing that as a follower of Jesus? Holding someone’s heart in your hands so that another’s soul might be liberated? Do you think you could heal someone like that? And I wonder if Christian salvation has more to do with THIS kind of healing than with sin.
The Wisest Thing I Know
The fourth thing I learned is that the soul is a thing distinguishable from the ego and constrained by a body. I’ve come to believe there is a fully formed soul in every person that is mature, shining like a beacon, and with its own healing resources we can only guess about. This learning has helped me with neurodivergent patients and patients who are nonverbal or unconscious. Rather than seeing them as ones I can’t reach, I see them with fully-formed souls that can be seen and witnessed. I think a growing edge for me here is to look harder at other ways of communication; music, pictures, etc. But for now, silent prayer is not a wasted effort. There’s a Mary Oliver quote I have kept close to my heart this year;
“Ten times a day something happens to me like this — some strengthening throb of amazement — some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” ⁴
A More Present Forgiveness
There’s one other learning I want to mention, and that has to do with forgiveness. I wonder if forgiveness could be experienced in a different way. I wonder if it might not have something to do with setting aside, maybe temporarily, whatever is keeping me from attending to the suffering one who is right in front of me. I found that my rabbi friends were experiencing deep suffering from the war, but I allowed my thoughts about violence and conflict to stand in the way of authentically connecting with them for a time. Now, I wonder if I might have done things differently.
This seems like the way that hope has changed for me. I once saw hope as a day, far in the future, that would be better than today. Now, I see hope as a very present emotion… that at any moment, I might encounter God. And that way of seeing hope has not disappointed me.
I wonder if forgiveness is something like that. I have thought about forgiveness as wiping someone’s slate clean permanently and completely, and that seems almost impossible to me sometimes. I wonder if I can see forgiveness as a more in-the-moment action like hope… can I set aside for a while, and without judgment, everything that keeps me from attending to the suffering one right in front of me and just focus on that suffering? Not to fix their suffering… not to advise it… not to save it, but to stand in the mud with them and see it.
To see through it into the soul that stands behind the suffering so the suffering one’s soul, being seen just as it is, can bring its own healing resources to bear. Is there anything in all the world that prevents me from doing that? Maybe forgiveness is, at least in part, that kind of setting-aside-in-the-moment for the sake of seeing a human soul. Maybe I don’t have to worry about the future so much; maybe I can practice forgiveness in the present like I practice hope in the present, in the here and now.
So, there are five learnings I’ve had about chaplaincy. And what does any of that have to do with the Trinity? Nothing and everything.
¹ This sermon was delivered at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Madison, CT, on Trinity Sunday, May 26, 2024
² Palmer, Parker J. (2019, January 29). The Gift of Presence, the Perils of Advice. The On Being Project. https://onbeing.org/blog/the-gift-of-presence-the-perils-of-advice/
³ “Bad” and “Mud” were not the terms used; let the reader understand.
⁴ Oliver, Mary. “Low tide: what the sea gives to the human soul.” The Amicus Journal, vol. 18, no. 4, winter 1997, pp. 32+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20746741/AONE?u=kcls_main&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=b4f94e56. Accessed 20 June 2024
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The Rev. Ron Steed is an Episcopal Deacon in Southeast Connecticut and a chaplain at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. He writes haiku and lyrical prose that he hopes will help others put the head and heart in right-relation.
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