To listen another soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service that any human being ever performs for another.

THESE WORDS FROM QUAKER DOUGLAS STEERE I first came upon 20 years ago, stuck to me like honey. Over the years I’ve been “listened into” disclosure and discovery. I am finding now I am seeking to listen others into the same.

This August I spent three days alone on my friend Peter’s honeybee farm in Slovakia. And I read Steere’s, On Listening to Another (Harper and Row, 1964) in its entirety to better appreciate the quotation as it relates to my work as a chaplain.

There’s a simplicity in the commitment and care of my Slovak friend’s beekeeping. The way he tends his hives and harvests honey that he sells in plain jars at a modest price. Before flying home, at a market in Prague, I saw very expensive fancy jars containing less honest honey. As I find my way as a chaplain, I’m finding the simple jar of listening and accompaniment is enough to hold honest honey.

Finding My Way

About two years ago, I began volunteering as an Auxiliary Chaplain at the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry. This auxiliary role allowed me a diversity of experience engaging residents from general in-take, residents soon to be released, residents on the mental health unit, as well as residents on the hospital unit. Had I entered chaplaincy in the prison a more typical way, I’d have been assigned a 40-minute slot with the expectation I would preach in the chapel. Had this been my experience, I’m unsure I’d be doing this work today.

Concurrent with the prison, last spring I began a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) or chaplaincy training at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona. My purpose was to gain exposure to the clinical paradigm of Chaplaincy in an institutional medical context. My efforts included performing pastoral assessments, charting notes, engaging, when possible, in interdisciplinary conversation with medical staff. Additionally, I wrote half a dozen case studies in which I would reflect on a particular pastoral visit, examine my pastoral identity, transference/counter-transference, and larger theological implications. This unit of CPE at the VA was good learning.

The last two years I’ve gained as much clarity about what is not mine to do, as what is mine to do as a chaplain.

Not Mine To Do

A chaplain shows up not to change a person’s faith, but to sustain their humanity. Naomi Paget distinguishes the differences between evangelism and chaplaincy in terms of goal, agenda, setting and approach (The Work of the Chaplain, Judson Press 2006). The goal is not conversion or to share a specific religious message calling a person to faith. Rather the goal is accompaniment, offering presence and support regardless of a person’s beliefs. The agenda is not driven by a proactive message or theological mandate to spread the gospel. The agenda includes no hidden motives but is pluralistic service seeking to meet persons where they are honoring their traditions or lack thereof. The setting for the work is not just faith-based spaces such as churches and chapels. The setting is secular and institutional in hospitals and prisons. The approach, rather than being directive is concerned with listening and practicing spiritual hospitality.

When entering a prison or hospital, I don’t shy from asking the theological question: Where is God? I see my work as a chaplain relating to the 6th-century Coptic artwork known as the “Icon of Friendship”). I’ve sought to engage veterans and inmates as a human friend carrying the icon of Jesus. I think of a Coptic icon (below) from the 500’s titled, Christ and His Friend (St. Menas).

Talking recently to a fellow artist, he mentioned having to include assessments in his teaching studio art. “It changes the game,” he said. At the Phoenix VA I’ve found to engage in pastoral care with a Veteran with a preoccupation of performing an assessment “changes the game.” It threatens something precious. I’m clear that preoccupation with assessment and proselytizing is not mine to do.

Mine To Do

Yoke the Artist and the Chaplain
I understand being an artist to be my primary vocation. Increasingly I am finding the work of the chaplain fits me. One of my ongoing discernments is the relationship between the artist and the chaplain and how to yoke the prophetic and the pastoral. Regarding the clinical paradigm for chaplaincy, I’m more inclined to say, I “listen under” and exercise “spiritual discernment,” than say I function as a “clinical diagnostician.” Nevertheless, it would be too simple to say the artist and the clinician are an either/or. In my formation as a chaplain, integrating the tools of the artist with those of the tools of the chaplain in my ‘self,’ is work that belongs to me.

Soft Eyes
To be an artist, one has to see the world with soft eyes. To be a chaplain requires soft eyes as well.

A way to push back at the devil, Steere suggests, is caring attentiveness. Simone Weil (French mystic and philosopher, 1909-1943) famously wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity and championed the idea of negative effort—the practice of emptying one’s own ego and agenda to be fully presence for another person. Iris Murdoch (Irish-British author, 1919-1999, deeply influenced by Weil’s journals) expanded on this. She believed the primary moral task is to cast a just and loving attention on the specific, real human being right in front of you. David Brooks (contemporary writer) weaves their philosophies together and argues that learning how to look at, listen to, and see someone (without selfish projection) is the tool for overcoming our present social fragmentation and loneliness.

The Pastoral Bond
It seems the precondition to a “pastoral bond” is the capacity for a chaplain to “be with” as opposed to “do for.” When a pastoral bond is established, I feel compelled to go to the distance. This was tested journeying with a hospice inmate and convicted child molester. I offered him “last rites,” then performed the interment (burial) service at a crudely dug grave at a prison cemetery in the desert – the “final line of mercy” according to the Sr. Chaplain at the prison. Before going home, I returned to the hospital unit and read the words I’d shared at the grave verbatim to two of the inmate’s friends unable to attend. The liturgy included words from both of them. My burial service also included:

“… We stand in the desert in the place of tombs. For the early Church, “Tombs were the lock-down realm,” observes fellow Chaplain Chris Hoke. “The tombs in Jesus’s day were frightening places where post-trial bodies were stuffed away, thrown out far away from the living.”

What’s kept me at chaplaincy work is the conviction that if Jesus went to hell on Holy Saturday, I can enter a maximum-security prison. Moreover, I can seek to listen and accompany knowing no matter how brutal or bleak, the space is spooked by God. Steere writes: “…is it blasphemous to suggest that over the shoulder of the human listener, there is never absent the silent presence of the Eternal Listener, the living God?” These are the words that immediately follow the opening quotation about listening another into a condition of disclosure and discovery.

Bearing Witness
Bearing witness means to reckon with suffering. This necessitates looking directly at pain, grief, injustice– both my own, and others. And yet as the poet Jack Gilbert writes, “to make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.” Bearing witness also means reckoning with joy. It means noticing, and celebrating moments of resilience, tenderness, beauty and solidarity. Grounded in Holy Saturday, I need the capacity to hold both suffering and joy (Friday and Sunday).

Another tenet of bearing witness, related to my chaplaincy is, Not Knowing. According to Bernie Glassman this means “releasing fixed ideas, judgments, and biases to approach situations with an open mind” (more here). I find I rarely look up a veteran or inmate in the data system prior to a pastoral interaction. I give persons the freedom to disclose, or not. Practicing consciously not knowing increases my capacity for spaciousness. Not Knowing, I can better listen to “the silent presence of the Eternal Listener, the living God.”

To do the work faithfully, what’s mine to do as a chaplain includes making art, having soft eyes, honoring the pastoral bond and bearing witness.

A Jar for Holding Honey

It occurs to me that whatever the container for chaplaincy (prison, hospital, hospice, re-entry), the purpose of the jar is to hold honey. I end this reflection on finding my way as a chaplain with a poem I wrote a decade ago in which I sought to bear witness to honeybees and honey. In doing so, I notice (and perhaps the reader as well) creative connections between following the work then (a prose poem) and following the work now (chaplaincy).

The Hive

10,000 years ago we find the earliest evidence of humans consuming honey. They have little packets of honey at Arby’s and Wendy’s that you don’t have to pay for. Jack Daniels just started making a honey whiskey. I’m told my grandfather made mead and drank it only on Sunday. A single bee’s life work amounts to a quarter tablespoon of finished honey. I once bought, on sale, eight boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios. An old monk I lived alongside put various kinds of honey in his Easter basket; after Lent I’d see him hunched over his jars, dipping, licking, dripping honey on his beard and cassock. Fermented honey was the first way humans intoxicated themselves and likely came about by accident. It would take only some rain falling in a honey jar in warm weather. As a boy I once dabbed honey on my bloodied knees and elbows when I fell off my bike. During the Balkan War of 1913, the Bulgarian army, having run short of medical supplies, dressed wounds with honey. The monk told me they found traces of honey on the shroud of Turin. The honeybee is said to be the only creature that escaped Eden before Adam’s fall. After a single mating, a drone dies. I want to make my own mead, adapting my grandfather’s recipe, and drink it on Sundays with my honey-pie. In Hittite myth, Adam and Eve are accompanied by bees as they flee Eden. Drones don’t have stingers, but most folks are scared of them anyway. I’ve never been stung by a bee. Growing up, my favorite Bible story was Samson finding honey in a lion carcass. Reduced vigor of bees means earthly fertility could be ruined. Dead bees could be resurrected, according to ancient Roman writers, if their ashes were mixed with sweet wine and exposed to sunlight.

 

“The Hive” was first published in the 2014 literary collection, Winged: New Writing on Bees, edited by Melissa Reeser Poulin and Jill McKenna Reed