My personal model of chaplaincy

PRESENCE is the most important concept of quality chaplaincy.  But presence is initiated and further augmented by connection, faith, and timing.

My personal model of chaplaincy involves a deep interdependency between presence and connection, one assisting the other.  A little of one enables a little more of the other.

When I arrive at a critical incident or meet someone for the first time who has been triaged toward me, the suffering is often obvious.  “Showing up and shutting up” is the easy bit, and it’s 80 percent of the overall task.  

It’s what I personally love about chaplaincy: I don’t bring a lot other than myself as an empty container willing to be filled with the other person and their situational need.

The little amount of vocal involvement I’ll bring—because I’m there to listen and hold space mainly—is offering something to connect with the other person or people.  (Other than that, little things said to encourage.)  

This is the advantage of having a lot of lived experience and life experience.  

Inevitably, there is a moment early on where I’m able to develop a semblance of affinity with the other person.  A thing, a person, an experience, or situation in their life that connects with a thing, a person, an experience, or situation in my experience.

Establishing symbiotic connection with the person
I’m helping augments the presence I’m working with.  

All I’m inputting is a sense of connection that says, “I’m similar to you,” i.e., “Even though I’m not you, I can relate with you.”  Often people are looking for this connection with another human being—whether they know it or not—especially someone who is there to help them.  

Coming with an open heart of personal vulnerability,
the connection created generates trust
because of the safety between us.

I couple this presence-connection dynamic with exemplary listening and attending skills.  In this is empathy at its core: whilst it’s impossible physically, this is about being IN a person spiritually.

I’m looking for opportunities to serve the other person as I imagine Jesus would.  Anything.  A cup of cold water at the right time, how to hold a straw to the mouth, where to place an item within reach, when to withhold speech, when to smile or weep, when to touch or be touched (spiritually or physically), when to say something, particularly something encouraging—which must come from authenticity to have power. 

I also use the power of apology to build trust.  I’m the kind of person who has the ‘spiritual gift’ of making mistakes.  I’m fallible.  The mistakes are not the issue.  People readily forgive mistakes and errors.  Especially where there’s no intentionality.  The key is to own the wrong.  I find being a committed and skilled biblical peacemaker helps my relationships and ministry hugely.

What underpins my approach to chaplaincy
are also faith and timing.  

By faith in the moment I empty myself to be filled up by another person, the person I’m helping.  It’s faith because I actively leave my own life to enter another person’s life.  Frequently I’m cognisant that all my own personal worries and cares must be abandoned.  I’m also trusting in God’s timing that a deeper connection between us will aid their support, but by faith I diligently watch for where God is in the conversation and I join God there.  

If God hasn’t directed a particular leading and the moment of connection finishes, the moment of connection finishes.  All desire to achieve ‘a goal’ must be surrendered at the foot of the cross.  Goals neither dignify the human before us nor ourselves.  There is a trustworthy integrity in this.  There is no ‘manipulation’ done ‘in God’s name’.  Good chaplaincy trusts God for the leading every step of the way—by faith in His timing.

Presence, connection, faith, and timing, all ordained by the Spirit of God.  

Extreme Ownership Resilience

Having sojourned nearly 60 years of life—the last 20-odd in many ways the toughest—I have developed a way of living or should I say coping that I think serves anyone.

In wellness terms, we often talk about not just surviving but thriving.  In real terms, as is the nature of life, we are not always thriving, no matter what inner work we’ve done.  I still have the odd day where I’m just surviving, and sometimes that feels a struggle—fortunately, it’s only a day here, a day there.  I hope you find that validating.  I have certainly had seasons of life where I battled most days for weeks and months.

What emerged for me out of a season of being a single father (2003-2007) was the concept that I could do it all—I could manage everything thrust my way because at times I was the only adult/parent around.  Not all these circumstances felt good or fair, indeed many were incredibly hard.

This merges with the idea of extreme ownership.  Retired Navy SEAL, Jocko Willink, authored the concept of leadership responsibility, high personal expectations of one’s own performance, and individual accountability.  

The concept of extreme ownership is transformative:
it assumes we have some agency in every circumstance of life,
that we can make anything better by simply accepting
that taking ownership for our place in it is the key.

Faith plays a crucial part—indeed, it IS faith:
Having trust enough to acquire and maintain
an attitude of ownership—doing our best.

Biblically, it’s “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters,
when you face trials of many kinds…” (James 1:2)

The rest of the James passage reveals the purpose in suffering.

This is the secret weapon of both success and joy, and I find it aligns with the biblical witness of wisdom as well as great secular models.  Simply put, as us AAs put it, it works if you work it.

For me personally, no external thing can crush me if I don’t allow it.  An important juxtaposition is being vulnerable enough to BE crushed for a time.

Life is crushing at times.  It’s okay, even important, to BE crushed.  But we don’t stay there.  Extreme ownership dictates that we have immense personal agency to respond well when we simply OWN where we’re at, where we choose joy, accepting things may be dire, but there’s no reason they ought to stay that way.

We thereby choose to make the best of what we have, to open our minds to innovate out of our predicament, always honouring those about us, believing through the power of hope that things will get better.

For me, this is true resilience, the capacity to take stock at our lowest, knowing we have the power of response.

Broken by Suffering or Broken Open?

As a writer, I’m continually on a quest to discover wisdom my mind’s heart has always yearned for.  How to describe the juncture and journey of suffering, for one instance.  I have attempted it numerous times, but I’ve fallen short compared with the following:

The following wisdom I feel compelled to share with you (with some of my own thoughts below the quotation marks):

Political and cultural commentator, David Brooks says: “We all have moments of suffering, but we can either be broken by those moments or we can be broken open by them. Some people are broken. They build a fragile shell and they curl in. They are afraid to be touched. They just shell, over the part of themselves that is hurting. Those people usually lash out in anger and resentment. There is a saying that pain that is not transformed gets transmitted.1 (Attribution here below to Father Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return)

“But other people get broken open. They get more and more vulnerable and more open. They live their life at a deeper level. The theologian Paul Tillich said that moments of suffering interrupt your life and remind you that you are not the person you thought you were. They carve through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul and reveal a cavity below and then carve through that and reveal another cavity below. You just see deeper into yourself than you ever knew existed, and you realize when you see into those depths that only spiritual and emotional food will fill those voids. So you begin to live life at a deeper level.”2

~~~

The amazing simplicity of life is this: those who take consistent, day-after-day responsibility for their being ‘broken open’ — those who resist being broken or staying in the broken place — these are the ones who get better.

In Rohr’s words, they transform their pain.  They refuse to transmit it.  They execute self-empowerment for growth by refusing to blame others.  Even though they know they’re not entirely responsible for their pain, they take full responsibility for their ‘response’ to it.  They prove ‘able’ to respond and are therefore response-able.

Those who heal allow themselves to be broken open, to be transformed, to lose that part of themselves they can no longer keep, that part of themselves that is vanquished.

Using Paul Tillich’s metaphor, even while it hurts, they dine on the emotional and spiritual food that nourishes their present and future.  In this, they express the faith of letting go of that which can only poison them; that constraining knowledge that something reprehensible has been done to them.  

They somehow understand that there is no other recourse but to work with what is, accept it, and move deeper into it, against the flow of the logical proclivity to react hard against it through bitterness and resentment.

They devour hope and their appetite is insatiable.  They consume hope for the ‘return’ of a deeper peace than they’ve ever had.  Back to the future, they survive and even thrive in the liminal space of a suffering that pushes them more open and more vulnerable, where they’re forced to learn the resilience of risk — audaciously, they stay there and in their suffering is the agency that could not have come otherwise.

If they’re fortunate enough, part of this feast is the Lord Jesus Christ, who Himself suffered, who proved a model of and for suffering, who was prophesied as such, e.g., in Isaiah 45-55, and who even calls Christians to a life of being driven deeper into a precious sanctification through an embracing of their suffering; for the glory that awaits those who are broken open in His glorious name.

This secret code is only learned by those who practice it, who are immersed in the baptism of fire, who are not scorched by suffering’s flames but survive and thrive.  Yes, I’d agree that it sounds bizarre, but the incarnation comes alive in us by the Holy Spirit as we partake in the suffering the Incarnate One took on.

Be broken open, not just broken.

Remain open by faith,
and God will see you through it.

1. Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (New York: Crossroad, 2004), p. 37.

2. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1955), p. 56; also pp. 52–63, 161–62. See also Brooks, Road to Character, pp. 94, 206.

Resilience isn’t a race

I get some of my best ideas to write on whilst I’m mowing my lawn.  Today, it occurred to me that resilience isn’t a race—no matter how much we want to be resilient, growth’s a slow process and recognising signs that we’ve grown can seem elusive.

Resilience can be one of the most discouraging of concepts
because we compare with standards that seem unattainable.

But there is encouragement in all this, especially when we consider resilience through a Christian lens.  The encouragement is this: 

The greatest peace and best base for resilience
is accepting WHERE we’re at right now. 

Throughout my life I’ve sensed
God continually reminding me,
“Relax, your striving for perfection is futile;
not only do I not expect perfection from you,
I’ve made it impossible to attain in this life.
So don’t stress and put undue pressure on yourself.”

As I heard many years ago, we have nothing left to prove, and nothing more to gain.  To have our salvation is all we need in the context of eternity both here and now and life ever after.

It’s wonderful to know that we can PRACTICE resilience by simply accepting our present moment, not needing to be anyone else than ourselves.  This is a gift of peace that can only be practiced.

There is wisdom in the simplicity of SITTING with ourselves, at times bereft of understanding for what we’re feeling, but in the same breath, able to smile contently, or simply shed a tear, and every emotion between or otherwise.

Faith meets resilience.  Faith, the practice of resilience.  Faith agreeing that things are not what we would have them to be, but with the strength to continue onward in hope that things might change eventually whilst contentedly accepting the situation as it is.

Beware a Broken Heart

Broken hearts are inevitable in this life.  At some point, our heart is bound to be broken.

Unless you’re the kind of person who is not susceptible to having your dreams dashed (though most of us are) you will have faced the ignominy of being thrust into shock, numbness, disappointment, rage, and depression for what was taken from you.

The nature of life is it gives and takes away.  Biblical character Job (1:21) said, “You give and take away, blessed be your name, God.”  It is hard for all of us to respond like this.

It’s understandable that we feel brokenhearted in loss.  

It’s the full gamut of grief at times.

Be aware, however, of the impact on us and on others in being brokenhearted.  It can cause us to become cynical, bitter, resentful, even hurtful in reaction.  That’s the anger taking over, the anger suppressing the truer sorrow we’re really feeling.  

Anger fills the void of a sadness bypassed because we won’t or can’t go there.

If we go to sorrow and stay there, there we will heal, and there we won’t hurt—ourselves or others.  We’ve all heard the truism, “hurt people hurt people,” and that’s the point of this.

Why allow a bad thing that’s happened to us
sabotage what good things are coming?

Life hurts at times.  Abundance enters a life that refuses to be defined by heartbreak.  

Grieve the loss, be sad, cry tears, be honest with trustworthy others, receive support, but also be ready for bitterness, understand it’s anger for concealed, unrequited sadness in the perceived injustice.

Our stories are not over in heartbreak.  We have the agency of a response we can choose.

Feel the sadness enough in the evening
that the joy comes in the morning (Psalm 30:5).

Destined for Disappointment, Augmented by Agency

Life carries its share of disappointments.  These can range from minor frustrations to significant devastations, depending on what they are, and what they cost us.

When we exhibit a growth mindset, we run beyond disappointment, even devastation, to adapt, all augmented by agency.

Agency is the growth mindset characteristic of choosing one’s own power to respond positively to change that’s foisted onto us.

We are all destined for disappointment, and as I’ve been reminded often, even those who appear to succeed ‘all the time’ ultimately come to face what we all face. 

Everyone faces the growth mindset/fixed mindset paradox.  Just like everyone with a growth mindset will be tempted to become stuck in a fixed mindset.

One thing never changes.  We most reveal our true character by the overall trajectory of our response.  We are allowed to stumble.  We will err.  To err is human.  Growth mindsets always drive a strong rebound . . . ultimately.

We are destined to be shocked and disappointed.  That should not be a surprise.  But we are augmented with agency when we choose to apply our ability to respond.  We all have the ability to respond well.  Agency’s a choice. 

We may not like it; we don’t have to like what’s happened.  Whether we like it or not is irrelevant.  The situations of our lives are what they are.  Dealing with circumstances that cannot be changed is the stuff of wisdom, and wisdom determines our destiny.

Taking responsibility for what we can do
with the disappointments foisted upon us is wisdom.

Endurance pays handsome hard-won wisdom

Whenever I think about the richest of life, I am always taken back to my darkest times, that informed me of the depths that this life has to offer.

Oftentimes we don’t know what we
don’t know, and much of life is like this.

As we look back, we come to face this glorious truth, etched with gratitude:

We don’t know until we have suffered,
having buckled under that suffering,
having surrendered to the sadness of it,
having been defeated by it,
somehow as we got through,
we learned the deeper, richer,
sustaining hope that prevails
over all destinies of despair.

~~~

Endurance pays in the tangible
gratitude of peace, a hard-won wisdom.

How is it that we can sit with those who are in their darkest lament if we have not been there ourselves, if our empathy hasn’t been piqued by sufferings too harrowing to imagine?

It’s only afterwards that we recognise that such disciplines are for our good and not for our harm, and they offer us a future beyond what we could of ourselves procure.

Isn’t it a stunning reality, then, when we are struck with gratitude for the things we have endured?  We never forget that when we were stuck in our miry clay, we had but one option, but to trudge through it, one arduously laboured step at a time.

Is it not afterwards that we recognise that,
for us, ‘but for the grace of God go I’?

We are all encumbered by that which should crush us.  It’s our humble tenacity to keep plodding onward that gets us to where we’re destined.  We only see this through the wisdom of hindsight.  It’s faith that we apply that gets us to this cherished goal.  With a courage of sustained endurance.  Our turn to step only the steps we can take—ours to take, not another’s.

This is something we can only experience firsthand through an empathy that grows from within ourselves first, and then for others as we are cast forth into a ministry of giving back what we have first received.

It is a great and very gorgeous thing to suffer enduring every bitterness and complaint—but we only see this looking behind us.

It is only possible to do such suffering if we go to sadness first and resist all temptation to enter into non-productive anger, though anger is definitely the human part of it!  

Our sadness, our tears, our lamenting
surrender will heal us—and it has!

It is nearly maddening to imagine that the things that I speak of are truth.  They are hard to hear and even harder to read, but it is the truth, however difficult it is to reconcile.

It is a good thing for others to see a person suffer and to do it without revenge rising up, without bitterness and resentment taking over.  Such a vision captivates us as inspiring; it draws us close to the one who has no answer.  Their strength speaks volumes in their weakness.

Many of us want to live inspirational lives, but no such life comes without costs we’re all so unwilling to bear.  But bear these we must if we are to rise above the deathly stench of a reality too brutal to contemplate.

Rise we must, but too often we rise without giving thanks for the provision that we have been given—the grace that went with us.  It is a gift, most especially of God, when we rise, as one enduring, humble, grateful, one found faithful.