The role of a chaplain is to join the patient’s emotion, to create space for their suffering.
Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we cry. Sometimes we pray. Sometimes we shake our fist at a God who would cause, or perhaps let this happen.
And through it all I find myself asking, where’s God when it hurts? Where’s God in this midst of pain and suffering?
God shows up when the chaplain shows up. I don’t mean that in some “holier-than-though-commodoficiation-of-the-divine” sort of way. But simply that God is encountered in our relational energy. When I avoid a patient’s pain and suffering, God is absent. When I am emotionally distant, I project an emotionally distant God. But when I enter their darkness and join whatever they are feeling, God is in our midst, present even in the dark.
God suffers with us, but only when we empathize with the suffering of the people around us.
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Words: Jim Kast-Keat
Image: Jim Kast-Keat
Music: Podington Bear
