Reflections from a hospital chaplain

ABSTRACT

Jennifer Reek works at a hospital in the American Southwest. The hospital serves varied cultures: Native American, Hispanic, white, and various combinations of those, with an intriguing mix of religious and spiritual practice. The following reflections, on her experiences as a hospital chaplain over the past several years, are at the invitation of her former thesis advisor and now friend of many years, David Jasper. They are an adaptation of weekly reflections submitted over a year and a half of Clinical Pastoral Education training.

KEYWORDS:

• Chaplain
• St Francis of Assisi
• grief
• death

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Plath, Crossing the Water, 42.

² The 11^th Step: ‘Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.’ See, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous, 85–88.

³ Plath, Crossing the Water, 42.

⁴ Though often attributed to Francis, the earliest reference occurred in a French spiritual magazine in 1912. See https://www.franciscan-archive.org/franciscana/peace.html.

⁵ Sweeney, The Complete Francis of Assisi, 232–3.

⁶ Ibid., 248.

⁷ Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages, 173.

⁸ See Reek, Poetics of Church.

⁹ See, for example, Tylenda, A Pilgrim’s Journey, 126: When interrogated by Dominicans about Ignatius and his companions preaching, ‘Ignatius gently corrected the subprior in saying that they did not preach, that is, they did not give any formal discourses but rather spoke familiarly with those who came to listen. Theirs was more of a chat than a sermon.’

¹⁰ See, for example, O’Donohue, 13: ‘In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is anam cara. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara is the word for “soul friend”. In the early Celtic church, a person who acted as a teacher, companion, or spiritual guide was called an anam cara.’

¹¹ Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, 81–82.

¹² This blessing was in a pamphlet provided by the Spiritual Care Department at St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto when I was a chaplain intern there in 2007.

¹³ Paintner, Birthing the Holy, 45–46.

¹⁴ Dykstra, ‘The Intimate Stranger’,124.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 129.

¹⁷ Ibid., 131.

¹⁸ Ibid., 136.

¹⁹ Paintner, Birthing the Holy, 45.

²⁰ Reek, ‘Standing on the Threshold’, 48.

²¹ Paintner, Birthing the Holy, 46.

²² Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counselling, s.v. ‘Feminist Therapy’.

²³ I would like to thank my friend and former thesis advisor, David Jasper, for the invitation to write these reflections. My work with him at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Literature, Theology, and the Arts encouraged a way of reading and writing that is a listening without imposition, without desire to control or possess. This was a gift, one that influences my ministry as a chaplain. Because of my scholarly work, I am better able as a chaplain to be with and listen to those I accompany without imposing myself.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Reek

Jennifer Reek is a chaplain, writer and editor. She is the author of A Poetics of Church: Reading and Writing Sacred Spaces of Poetic Dwelling (Routledge, 2018), a work developed from her PhD research at the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts, University of Glasgow. Her academic and creative work have appeared in publications such as Literature and Theology, Amethyst Review: New Writing Engaging with the Sacred, Ethel, and The Banyan Review.