Joyous return!
Hello, everyone!
I have returned from one of the most intense summers of my life as a CPE intern at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, WA. Holy criminy, chaplains. I don't know how you do it folks, day and day out. I loved you all before, but my respect levels just shot through the roof.
Here's a few scattered responses.
Positive:
1. I learned that I can't fake it in ministry. I spent the first few weeks trying to be a "good" chaplain - more conservative theologically, more apt to use traditional language, more into polite Christian skirts and jackets. I was doing my darnedest to play the part of a nice Christian lady. Well. I'm here to tell you that that went nowhere. My visits were awkward, and I left work feeling icky, like I'd been lying all day. My supervisor gently told me that I was, in a sense, lying all day, and that the world might not end if I actually walked into rooms as myself, messy theology and all. Lo and behold, he was right. I had some great visits with people who didn't want to talk religion at all - I honored their spirituality of motorcycles and mountains. I also was able to find "common language" with people whose theological position was greatly different than mine: interestingly, drawing a lot of source material and language from the Psalms. Metaphors work for lots of people!
2. I helped someone have a baby (I helped someone be born). Boy, does that miracle never stop feeling like eighteen Christmases at once.
Negative:
1. Drive-by ministry is not for me. I am truly terrible at letting go. I like long-term relationships. I want to be in a parish where I baptize someone and then stick around to see them graduate from high school.
2. Ministry where sketchy amounts of power are just handed to random people freak me out. The fact that there wasn't any room for conversation about the fact that our task was essentially invasive: cold calling, marching into a room where someone is physically immobilized, is frightening. Anyone with experience of bodily assault and/or sexual assault knows that the loss of privacy, of ownerships of what happens to one's own body, is traumatic. Every day was a struggle to claim what I felt was opressive power over people in order to get my job done.
3. I also couldn't quite get a grip on IPR. It was...suppposed to be about each other? It was...supposed to be about patients? It was...very odd. Our group ended up having one conflict a few weeks in, essentially a conflict between me and my supervisor, in which I was challenging some of the power dynamics within the group. That day I had also initiated a "feelings check-in" for people, just as an idea because we seemed to be having a hard time getting going being honest with one another. Well, we were honest that day, and it turned into a fight, which left us all a little jumpy for the rest of the summer. It felt artificial (and I wasn't alone in this), like some big Skinner box, or a Milgram experiment. I don't cope very well with that kind of artificiality (which is also why I have a little bit of trouble with the discernment process as a whole - but I digress). I think this goes back to the desire for long-term relationships. I like how my friends at General talk about how they have to learn to live with one another, in a very close space, worshipping and eating together most days. It means that relationships must be forged in community over time, and that is an important skill. It's one that I appreciate about faith communities in general, and in particular within the Episcopal Church.
