Pastoral (chaplaincy) care as a sacred presence in order to re-find meaning

Kerry Egan, in her book on living provides the following description for her work as a chaplain:

"Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us. Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis, where we have lost our sense of what is right and wrong, possible and impossible, real and not real. Never underestimate how frightening, angering, confusing, devastating it is to be in that place. Making meaning of what is meaningless is hard work. Soul-searching is painful. This process of making or finding meaning at the end of life is what the chaplain facilitates. The chaplain doesn't do the work. The patient does. The chaplain isn't wrestling with the events of a life that doesn't match up with everything you were taught was true, but she won't turn away in fear, either. She won't try to give you pat answers to get you to stop talking about pain, or shut you down with platitudes that make her feel better but do nothing to resolve the confusion and yearning you feel. A chaplain is not the one laboring to make meaning, but she's been with other people who have. She knows what tends to be helpful and what doesn't. She might ask questions you would never have considered, or that help you remember other times you survived something hard and other ways you made sense of what seemed senseless. She can reframe the story, and can offer a different interpretation to consider, accept, or reject. She can remind you of the larger story of your life, or the wisdom of your faith tradition. She can hold open a space of prayer or meditation or reflection when you don't have the energy or strength to keep the walls from collapsing. She will not leave you. And maybe most important: She knows the work can be done. She knows you can do it and not crumble into dust. 

. . . . 

But the fact remains that before a chaplain gets to that place with a patient - the place where the patient can share into a deep hole of meaninglessness, or even leap right into it and wrestle down in the lonely existential muck until a ladder of sorts begins to appear - and somehow, somehow, in ways I still can't fully explain, a ladder always does appear - before all that, the chaplain has to create a sacred space, and to do that, she has to offer her loving presence first."               - Kerry Egan, On living, pages 18-20

Some of my work with Campus Edge is like this - a creating of sacred space to re-find meaning. Yet, too often I feel like I am trying to check off a list of things that need to be done instead of being present with others, expectant that God is working in that moment. The challenge is that many of the moments in my work are not momentous, and it is harder to remember that in the ordinary moments God is not any less present and working.

A desire I have for the coming time is that I would grow in expectancy and being myself fully present and listening, and it is something I can pray about and ponder as I go for walks with the little this coming season. On top of that, I hope that as I learn to be more present when I am with my daughter - because her delight in the world is contagious - I will learn to be more present with others, along with increasing my awareness of how God is already working in other people's lives.

A Pastoral Prayer for our daughter

Last Sunday I had the joy and honour of baptizing our daughter.

Photo courtesy of Ginny from River Terrace Church

At the end I got to pray the following prayer for her:

O Lord, uphold Lydia by your Holy Spirit.
Give her the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord,
the spirit of joy in your presence,
both now and forever. Amen.

It is a prayer that I pray not only as a pastor but also as a parent.

But isn't that dangerous?

When talking with some friends about actions to do in response to the events in Charlottesville this past weekend, I mentioned that I'd like to participate in more rallies - at least partially because it was something I could do where I could take Lydia with me.

After mentioning that I'd take Lydia to a protest/rally, the response I received was "but isn't that dangerous?" And my thoughts were no, not really. This is Lansing, after all, and I've been to a few demonstrations/rallies here. But I expect people would say the same thing about Charlottesville, and multiple people were seriously harmed there, so participating in a (counter)protest does involve some risk.And yet.
 
Every time I want to go somewhere I put myself (and Lydia) into our car. Statistically speaking, this is by far the most dangerous activity that we can participate in. But I still do it - almost daily - because I want and need to get around. And so I calculate that the danger is worth the risk.
How much more should the potential danger of participating in an event that speaks against hatred of others be worth the risk? Especially when Lydia's charming smile also speaks volumes about joy and acceptance.

But i do still want my old life back

I wrote this about a month ago, so my sentiments have changed somewhat. The challenge now is to figure out how to spend good time with her while also spending enough quality time working. 

As much as I love our little girl and am deeply thankful for the joy she brings into our lives, I do still kind of want my old life back. I have found it hard that so much of my life - time, plans, activities - has revolved around her. I am thankful to say that it has become a little less hard with time. I've gotten a bit more used to our daughter, I'm getting a decent amount of sleep, and she is taking less time to breastfeed: so my time is spent doing more than breastfeeding and helping her or me sleep. I am also learning how wonderful and good it is - for Matthijs, our daughter, and me - when I sometimes hand over care of her to Matthijs. I am thus slowly regaining some freedom and the sense that I have a bit more control over my life, which has been very helpful in making me feel less overwhelmed with being a mom.

At the same time, it's been good to hear others who also express the challenges of motherhood. A wonderful book I've been reading, Spirituality in the Mother Zone by Trudelle Thomas, expresses the complicated reality of becoming a mom, including how hard it is to be honest about it:

"While it's acceptable to talk about the intense love of new motherhood, mothers are often reluctant to mention the 'darker' emotions that are often just as powerful. They may complain, even joke, about outward difficulties like hours of labor, sore episiotomy stitches, and sleepless nights, but few will speak candidly of the confusion, rage, and grief that may come with the territory of new motherhood and last far longer.

No religious initiation is any more intense than the deprivations new mothers face: interrupted sleep; seeing your once orderly home strewn with receiving blankets and dirty dishes; the vigilance of trying to understand a baby's unfamiliar cries; often not being able to eat, dress, shower, or even use the bathroom at will [for me it was not being able to go to sleep when I wanted or needed]; suddenly having to learn all the practical skills of breastfeeding, dressing, bathing, and attending to the medical needs of a helpless human being.

Even amidst the joys, it is a painful time of surrendering to a new way of life, of being stripped of the familiar." (page 33)

As much as I still sometimes chafe about how this small human has control of my life, the stripping of my life that she talks about has also at times been good for me, as it put things in perspective. For example, the times when I am not responsible for her make me more motivated to do the things I can't do when I'm with her - in this way her presence and absence is teaching me more about giving up myself, including the self that wants to procrastinate and wait until I'm in the right mood to do something.

As for wanting my old life back, I'm getting used to life with Lydia so that sentiment is decreasing, although I do still miss the freedom to plan and do things when I want to - and I miss being able to bike. Thankfully the bike problem is being resolved, as I've finally brought it in to the bike shop to get fixed.

But i didn't do anything

One of the most striking moments of my pregnancy was hearing at the twenty week ultrasound that our daughter was healthy and well formed. While these are the words that one does hope and even expect to hear, it felt a bit surreal. I hadn't really done anything, so how could all be well? Sure, I had taken my vitamins, eaten fairly healthy and not had alcohol, but that was it. So many people long for children and greet pregnancy with deep joy and thankfulness for the gift from God growing in the womb. I, on the other hand, had mixed feelings about how this small person growing inside me would change our lives. My prayers surrounding the baby were not about her and her health but about us: prayers that I might not offend others by my lack of enthusiasm about babies, prayers that we as parents would have the strength and wisdom to welcome this small child and a prayer that I might greet her eventual arrival with joy (thankfully, God answered most of these prayers).

Those words that our daughter was healthy and well helped me understand grace a little bit better. Because even though I know in my head that I have done nothing to make me deserve salvation, there haven't been that many moments in my life where I've felt that awe of 'how can this be true when I don't deserve it?' Salvation and grace have been something I've grown up with and accepted with deep thankfulness but have rarely been startled by. Somehow this moment of being taken back by our daughter's well-being - how, without us doing anything, this small person was healthy and growing well inside me - allowed me to be surprised by how much God had done form me (and was continuing to work in my life) despite how little I have done and can do.

This small person God gave us

I'm not sure how I feel about being a Mom. I do know, though, that I love the small person God has given us to take care of. And for that I'm thankful.

We've been gifted with a cheerful little girl, and it's a great joy to watch her smile at me and others and begin to interact with the world around her.

Learning to be an academic

An article on Inside Higher Education, "The Confessions - and Confusions - of a First-Generation Scholar," helped me reflect on my own academic journey.

I would categorize the family I grew up in to be very much in the "not academic" category. We were down-to-earth blue collar folks, a family who worked hard simply to make ends meet. We had few books in the house, and the fact that I wanted to read all the time was seen as strange. Most of those I went to school with were also children of blue-collar types, and I learned to hide my high grades from classmates because it would only ruin my already disastrous social standing.

Going to college and then Seminary introduced me to families + situations that were vastly different, and there was a phase when I was jealous of other people's families because I seemed not to have fit so well into mine. I am thankful that phase has long since passed, and even though I sometimes wish I could carry on a coherent conversation with Matthijs about classical music, I am deeply grateful for my family, especially the love of laughter and life skills that they taught me (and continue to teach me, such as buying a house and taking care of a baby).

I have sometimes beaten myself up that I haven't already finished my PhD: it shouldn't be taking so long since I'm smart enough and lots of other people finish earlier. I don't think it ever occurred to me to see a correlation between my non-academic family and my current academic progress (or why, at forty, I am not currently a tenured professor somewhere). Yet, this article argues that there is a correlation, which then also helps me extend a bit more grace to myself and my (lack of) accomplishments in this area.

One section that especially stood out to me is Herb Childress's description of his own academic progress:

"I graduated with my undergraduate degree in 1989, at the age of 31. Had I come from a college family, I’d have finished my Ph.D. by the time I was 31. Had I come from an academic family, I’d have had half a chance of being tenured at 31."

It is those words that gave me the sense that perhaps my failure to complete my PhD before now was not simply about incompetence on my part. Perhaps more played a role, including the possibility that I had brought with me to the academy the sense that I did not belong - a sense that would only have been compounded by being a female in a predominantly male field and studying at a foreign university. 

Childress's words regarding how first generation scholars often do not fit well either in their home community or their academic community also resonated with me:

Every first-generation scholar becomes the butt of jokes about not knowing how to do some task like replace a toilet gasket or stack firewood, how to make a good pie crust or a tortilla, because our labor doesn’t really look like labor.. . .

As with any immigrant community, naturalized scholars are never quite welcome in their new homeland, either. We study the habits, master the vocabulary, serve on yet another committee. .  . We take nothing for granted; we always think our cover will be blown, our ruse revealed, our passport revoked. My first-generation colleagues tell me that they can never allow themselves to be seen as “that farm girl,” the former truck driver or warehouseman, pretending to be scholars like little children wearing their parents’ shoes. We master the camouflage that keeps us hidden and safe. We smooth out our jarring regional accents, stop telling jokes, take up skiing rather than snowmobiling. We are double agents."

The words also make me realize that it is perhaps not so strange that I've found a fit within campus ministry. Not only do those words above describe the unease of first generation academics, they also can be applied to some of the unease that Christians feel when they go into the academic community - or when academics become part of local Christian churches.