Learning how to be a Chaplin?

Yes, there are those who think that the dedicated souls who minister to the spiritual needs of hospital patients are chaplins.

But those of us who attended the excellent training weekend at the Liverpool Bahá’í Centre for Bahá’ís aspiring to serve as healthcare chaplains now know for sure that chaplains are far from being “right Charlies”.

I’m going to die

One of our outside speakers, a Chaplain Manager for a National Health Service Trust, said one of her chaplaincy team had been called to an orthopaedic ward, where an elderly lady was deeply distressed because she thought she was going to die. The nurses didn’t know what to do to calm the patient down and they called the chaplaincy department.

A chaplain to the rescue

Through conversations with ward staff and the patient, the chaplain learned that the patient’s consultant and a registrar had been discussing her across the bed. The consultant had told the registrar that the patient had a heart murmur.

The consultant, who was one of the old school of paternalistic “doctor knows best” doctors, seemed to have made the all too common assumption that because the patient was elderly she was also deaf and demented. So, instead of talking to the patient he had talked about her to the registrar, who was too junior to counteract the consultant, and had said that the patient had a heart murmur.

Actually, the patient had all her marbles and could hear perfectly well. She had heard what the consultant had said about her heart murmur and drawn the conclusion that she was about to die.

The nurses told the chaplain that this particular lady had probably had her heart murmur for most of her life and that it was very unlikely to be the cause of her death.

The chaplain was able to reassure the old lady and to calm things down.

What would you do?

We were asked to reflect on the situation and to say what we would have done. We all agreed that the consultant needed to learn something about the basics of human relationships and communication. However, that was not top priority. First of all we would need to establish the facts and seek the patient’s consent to speak to various people about her situation. Then we could spend time with the patient and help her to talk through her concerns.

The chaplains were able to help the patient overcome her distress and to get things on the ward back onto an even keel.

So what else did we learn?

It was a weekend rich in experience, reflection and learning. Pete Hulme, a Bahá’í who has just retired as a clinical psychologist having worked for over 20 years in the National Health Service, did the bulk of the training. He gave us insights into the daily realities of that confusing organization, the National Health Service (the largest employer in Europe), insights that were reinforced by Revd Nigel Goodfellow, Revd Judie Horrocks, and Revd Kathy Collins, all chaplaincy team leaders in NHS and hospice settings.

Chaplaincy as human relationship

More importantly, we learned a great deal about chaplaincy as a practice of spiritual care, based on human relationships. Understanding this is of the greatest importance for for all chaplains and particularly for those involved in the care of those with mental health problems and of the dying.

We were asked to consider this statement about the dying by Sheila Cassidy (Sharing the Darkness: The Spirituality of Caring, 1992):

The dying are essentially people on a journey. They are uprooted people, dispossessed, marginalised, traveling fearfully into the unknown. Sometimes the movement is barely perceptible, like the moving floors at Heathrow, but sometimes the tracks hurtle through the night, throwing their bewildered occupants from side to side with all the terror of the line to Auschwitz. Above all, the dying are alone and they are afraid. So the spirituality of those who care for the dying must be the spirituality of the companionship of the friend who walks alongside, helping, sharing and sometimes just sitting, empty-handed, when he would rather run away. It is the spirituality of presence, of being alongside, watchful, available, of being there.

So chaplaincy is not just about administering the Last Rites or being “religious”. It is much more about being fully and authentically human in circumstances that are challenging at the best of times, sometimes extreme.

The spirituality of presence

Nigel told us about the time he was called to see a patient. Ward staff didn’t know why he’d asked for the chaplain - the patient was not the “type” to want a chaplain and, in any case, hadn’t really known why he wanted a chaplain. When Nigel looked in through window in the door of the cubicle where the patient was sitting on the bed he almost decided to run away. The patient was a very touch-looking man with shaved head and with tatoos all over his naked torso.

Despite his desire to run, Nigel went into the cubicle and introduced himself as the chaplain. The patient asked him to sit beside him on the bed and to hold his hand. Nigel sat on the bed and took the man’s hand. And then, much to Nigel’s surprise, the tough guy burst into tears and cried and cried.

When his tears had run out, he told Nigel that he’d been a merchant seaman most of his working life. He’d cultivated a self-image of hard-man invulnarability and hadn’t allowed anyone close to him. But when he’d had to go into hospital, he’d been barrier-nursed, deprived of human contact and scared.

Because of his hard-man self-image he found he couldn’t tell the nurses how frightened he was and how much he needed to talk to someone. Finally it had got to a point where he couldn’t bear the isolation any more and the only person he could think of that he could talk to was the chaplain.

In this case the chaplain wasn’t asked to do anything remotely “religious”, but he was challenged to overcome his fear of the seaman’s challenging appearance to express “the spirituality of the companionship of the friend who walks alongside, helping, sharing and sometimes just sitting, empty-handed, when he would rather run away. It is the spirituality of presence, of being alongside, watchful, available, of being there.”

Remarkable people, chaplains

Most of the healthcare chaplains I’ve met are remarkable people. They don’t wear their being remarkable on their sleeve. Far from it. At first sight they are “ordinary” men and women who do what many see as a relatively unimportant job in the NHS. But to listen to them speak of their work is to hear profoundly moving stories of people motivated by their faith to “sit in the fire” with people whose physical suffering has prompted them to ask searching questions about the meaning of their lives, questions that they may have never asked before.

This seems to me to be a kind of heroism, often uncelebrated by society and large and certainly not celebrated by their employers. The work of a chaplain as a spiritual care-giver is an expression of faith that is as important to many people as the work of doctors, nurses, psychologists, occupational therapists, and of all the other myriad professions that serve in the NHS.

Bahá’ís as chaplains

The riches of the Bahá’í texts and teachings and the love and unity of the Bahá’í community provide us with wonderful resources for spiritual care-giving. But it behoves Bahá’ís who aspire to serve as chaplains to be humble in the face of the needs of the patients alongside whom they will sit and of the experience and wisdom of long-serving chaplains, such as those with whom we had the privilege of spending a few hours over the weekend.

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