Friday, August 14, 2009

Reflections on being pastoral, treading holy ground

While going through my notes from my Clinical Pastoral Training, I found these forgotten entries in my journal...

CPE Journal – December 2, 2005... First time visiting patients.

Walking into patients’ rooms at the hospital, I feel as if I am walking on holy ground. The reverence with which I approach the name, the room number, the condition, the age weighs heavily on me.

The walls, too, are heavy, carrying their concerns about family, children, job, home, pets, friends, illness, hope, despair, pain, anger, guilt, exhaustion.

As a new chaplain, I wonder where to start, what to say, how to pray.

Patients ask...Why is this happening? What could I have done differently? Where have I been? Where am I going? How will I get from there to here?

When people become ill, life as we know it ceases to exist - for some, momentarily, for others, permanently. When illness strikes, we can no longer push away the inevitable – the cancer, the dementia, the pneumonia, the lesion, the infection.

Everything but the pain of illness and life has stopped to make room in this room.

Words come gently, slowly – like a waltz that dips and sways, moving to and fro with hands clasped, hearts engaged, eyes locked in heartache and hope. There’s a sparkle – a light – behind those tears.

In some patients, I see stubborn will fighting back in their tightly compressed lips. In others, I observe resignation in the way shoulders slump. I see heads bow and nod in either agreement or disagreement.

And in some, I see hope and ask, "Where does your hope come from?"
"I am but a sparrow," one patient chirped. "He will take care of me – always has – always will."

"How do you cope?" I ask another.

"I pray. I say my rosary. I cry. I blow my top."

I hear strength. "Where does that strength come from?"

"I’ve had so many kids and grandkids – they keep me going," a patient heralds.

Another commends, "I am being cared for so well. The nurses and doctors – I trust them."

Inside these hospital walls resides the pressure of illness, the hard work of searching for hope and the fear of the unknown. There is spiritual tension between patient and chaplain as to where they will go in pastoral conversation.

Perhaps this strange and unfamiliar land – this uncharted territory of being a chaplain is where one finds the greatest meaning in relationship with oneself, with loved ones, with friends and with God.

Perhaps here in the isolation of illness one is walking on the most holy ground.

Being pastoral is letting go of your intent and going with the patient’s need.

Being pastoral is being with the person in the moment: accept the status, be patient with unanswered questions, bear the burden of the loneliness of the situation, acknowledge and embrace the direction even though it seems an aimless one, remain with hope and faith.

How have you been pastoral today?
 
2009 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her columns have won first-place in National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women Communications Contests. In the 2009 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took three first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on Facebook.

Find out who needs God – a book review

For those who are looking for or who have turned away from God…
The issues and content in the book Who Needs God by Harold Kushner are rooted in the author’s personal frustration. He tells his readers that he wrote this book because he had to.

Kushner, a rabbi, says that people look away from God to find identity and meaning in work, family and retirement. His frustration comes from having spent nearly 30 years attempting to show his congregants "how much more fulfilled they would be if they made room for [God and] their religious tradition in their lives…."

With frustration in tow, the author sets out to marry his to two loves: his love for religious tradition and love for his congregation. In doing so, Kushner sets out to subtly and serendipitously answer the rhetorical question that the title of this work poses – Who Needs God.

Kushner takes all nine chapters to argue everyone's need for God. He contends that our souls crave spiritual nourishment. Without it, he says, we become spiritually "stunted and underdeveloped."

To receive spiritual fulfillment, Kushner contends, we need to enter into a kind of communion. This communion is often not accessible because "the world is so noisy and full of distractions, we are so dazzled by our power and success or religion in the late twentieth century is often badly packaged or presented by people we cannot trust or admire."

Throughout the book, he consistently and systematically takes to task our post-modern insatiable appetites for more power and more things in light of God’s covenantal relationship.

Creating a tension between sacred tradition and lack thereof, Kushner points his finger at modernization as the culprit to our inability to realize our need for God.

In Who Needs God the author presents an important debate about this need for God, a debate that often appears to be non-existent in today's world.

Who talks about this need? Where do you go to learn more about it? How do you even know if you need God?

This book evokes larger questions about how we approach this need for God in congregations.Is the absence of talk about needing God contributing to the declining rolls in mainline Protestant churches?

Kushner writes, "In a century which encourages us to use computers and makes it so hard for us to write or read poetry, it is so easy to put out the sacred fires which have been tended to for a hundred generations."
 
2009 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her columns have won first-place in National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women Communications Contests. In the 2009 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took three first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on FaceBook.

HTML – carrots and all – brings out geek in me

My husband warned me not to write about this. He said it is the most boring subject, ever.

"Don’t do it," he cautioned. "It’s a real yawner."

"Well, people who know about html will really appreciate it," I countered.

"And how many people know hmlt?"

"You mean html?"

"Yeah, hplm, whatever!"

I am silent, and then heave a deep sigh.

"You just don’t understand," I argued. "It's just so interesting. I love working with it." I struggled to contain my enthusiasm as I settled at my desk and proceeded to write about the most "boring" subject, ever.

I must tell you that, in my well-thumbed attempts to be a part of the twenty-first century, I have found this new language to be enthralling and terrifying at the same time. It's a web language called html.

I can't say whether it's the mathematical nature of html, with its perfectly balanced equations of numbers, letters and symbols, or its complex simplicity that holds my attention.

All I know is that I love html almost as much as I love Duct Tape and jump at the chance to code.

When encountering html, it can be intimidating. At first glance, it looks like a whole lot of gibberish – line after line of rambling codes and spaces all the way down your computer monitor.

Not to mention a type of carrot that in no way resembles the carrots in your grandmother’s garden.

Add to this, forward slashes and phrases in between that look like this: href=http://www.my_story_your_story.blogspot.com.aspx" class=homelink.

There are nonsensical-looking table equations, such as table cellspacing="0" style="font-weight:bold;".

Html coding looks excessively difficult to understand with funny words like href, aspx, http, span, cellspacing and homelink.

I am not your typical computer geek. Everything about me spews old school. My reminiscent "days gone by" sensibilities, my propensity to document the way it used to be, my hopelessly romantic search for simple details that go unnoticed.

In fact, I resisted learning html for years. When I was offered training, I let others learn it for me. After all, if I needed something posted to the web, my co-workers could do it.

However, there came a time when I had to learn it for myself.

I am very proud to report that I have graduated to studying coding without the help of tutorials. Like a modern-day miner in search of gold in crystal-clear mountain streams, I confidently scan line after line of coding, panning patterns for nuggets to reproduce styles, correct mistakes and fix broken links.

In sharing this with you, I must admit this has been an out-of-body experience. I pinch myself, realizing that it is I – Paula "not-a-computer-geek" Damon, born shortly after the end of WWII, raised during the Cold War, cut my teeth on black and white television, saw the first moon landing live on TV in 1969 – encouraging you to enter the world of HTML. Who would have thought?

"It will never fly," my husband piped from the next room.

2009 © Copyright Paula Damon. A resident of Southeast South Dakota, Paula Damon is a national award-winning columnist. Her columns have won first-place in National Federation of Press Women, South Dakota Press Women and Iowa Press Women Communications Contests. In the 2009 South Dakota Press Women Communications Contest, Paula's columns took three first-place awards. To contact Paula, email pauladamon@iw.net, follow her blog at http://my-story-your-story.blogspot.com/ and find her on Facebook.