Grit to gift
Strange how grit
should turn to gift,
and yet,
it is so.
Some resurrections
are slow:
not easily won
but worked
from difficult stone.
Can it be I come to love
the taste of bitterness? --
the sharp, sweet smell
of the real,
against which
piety fails.
--Katherine Charnley
I have just finished eleven weeks of work as a chaplain in a trauma hospital, and it was not enough.
It is strange to say this about a job that required me to work upwards of sixty hours per week, stranger still when that job required me to work for twenty-four hours straight once each week. It borders on insanity to say this about a job that demanded the emotional equivalent of marathon endurance as I moved from a death to a trauma to an emergency baptism to a new cancer diagnosis, all within a few hours. To miss this job when it came hand-in-hand with the heavy emotional work of self-reflection -- forcing me to face the parts of myself I'd sooner ignore -- is truly madness. But there it is: eleven weeks of chaplaincy in a level I trauma hospital were not enough for me.
I took a second unit of clinical pastoral education (CPE) this summer in order to test myself, to see if I might (or might not) really be called to chaplaincy as a part of my pastoral vocation. During the eleven short weeks of the intensive CPE internship, the hospital threw nearly every possible crisis my way, as I knew it would. It is impossible to describe everything I saw and did: some of it is too tender to repeat to those unprepared to hear it, and every call was filled with the intimacy and delicacy of sacred space. In brief, I was called to serve as part of the trauma team on call, where I saw the bloody and grief-filled aftermath of accidents and crimes; to support families as they chose to remove life support from their loved ones; to help the ill and dying say goodbye to those they loved; to baptize and name critically ill babies; to walk the long journey of stem cell transplants with leukemia patients; to bear witness to the stories of those with sickle cell anemia; to embrace many people as they wept; to offer blessing after blessing after blessing in a hospital where the balance of life and death seems deeply unfair much more often than it seems just.
Yet amid all of this, I consider myself abundantly blessed.
Katherine Charnley's poem "Grit to gift" helped to orient me for the past weeks. The blessing of hospital chaplaincy is not easily won at all. I can remember a particularly difficult afternoon on call when I returned to the office feeling like the hospital was so rough and unfair that it was the emotional equivalent of sandpaper, removing the top layer of my skin. Yet to offer care in such a place as a hospital is to be deeply in touch with the real, to encounter God's baffling presence at the heart of grief and suffering. For now, I find that I encounter God and the Holy with more immediacy and power as a hospital chaplain than I do anywhere else. The hospital is my sanctuary, "the sharp, sweet smell/of the real/against which/piety fails," even when the only odors in the air are blood and antiseptic and grief.
As the difficulty of the grit continues to transform into gift, I am able to say that I would repeat these eleven weeks of chaplaincy in a trauma hospital in a heartbeat -- and mean it with my whole self.
