March 17, 2014
I have been assigned to serve as a hospital chaplain this year as part of my supervised ministry course. One of the more powerful experiences I’ve had this semester came this past Ash Wednesday when I was able to offer ashes to a patient I had been visiting for several weeks. It occurred to me as I traced the ashes on this man’s forehead, that this was the first time as a minister that I’d really walked with someone continuously through more than one season of the Church calendar.
It may not seem like much if you’ve been in ministry for a while, but these little milestones can be significant for someone like myself. I am still in the process of forming my own sense of identity as a pastoral minister. It is a powerful experience to see some of that identity come alive in something as simple as the passage of time.
Yet time, in its own way, does the job. Not on its own, of course. I believe that not a single hour of my life has escaped the touch of the Holy Spirit. When I look back on when I first started at the hospital, the difference is striking. I nervously knocked on half-open doors, and I must confess that when doors were closed shut, I was often too nervous to knock at all. (At least, not until walking past a couple of times.) In the beginning I would walk into a patients room and suddenly lose touch – panic – over how I was supposed to “be.” What is a pastoral minister supposed to be like? What do people want? What do they expect? For the first few weeks I had this veil of artificiality. My nervousness and my own misguided understanding of what people expected of me often got in the way.
Thankfully, time, the cycle of the seasons, and the hand of the Holy Spirit have helped me to remove the veil. What I was left with when the veil was gone surprised me. Could this really be the persona the Holy Spirit wants me to take on a pastoral minister? Really? This is a preferable pastoral identity?
Indeed, my pastoral identity, more and more, has turned out to just be myself and the desire I carry to truly connect with those who crave connection with another human being. This becomes especially important when someone has been literally under the microscope, and the only questions they have been asked are data-oriented. (Not at all a knock on hospital staff doing their job nobly. Just a state of affairs.)
Through the connection made between patient and minister – and this part is inevitable – God shows up. I don’t always sense it right away, but I frequently look back at certain visits and realize how God was present at points in the conversation, or even in silence. A patient and I may have talked more about her azaleas than matters of faith in the direct sense, but the time spent is no less spiritual.
It’s a funny thing that can happen when two people become comfortable enough to be authentic with one another. The veils disappear, and God, in his compassion and his desire to be present to us … Is.