From “Walk with Me: A Journey through the Landscape of Trauma” by Ellen Corcella
People perceive chaplains as having a difficult, if not impossible, job. Friends in my church community sometimes remark, “I don’t know how you do it.” It is well known that chaplains show up when death lurks in the corner. But we are “rewarded,” if you want to call it that when we have an opportunity to witness to hope.
Hope is that glimmer of life that cannot be expressed in medical lingo, measured by tests, or professed as improvement by medical teams. Doctors measure a patient’s humanity by heart rate, blood pressure, oxygenation, and breaths per minute or by labs that measure white blood cells, hemoglobin, platelets, glucose, creatinine, bilirubin, and albumin and by questions about pain level, bowel functions, nutrition intake, and mobility. Medical personnel are taught to perceive human beings via the sum of their physical chemistry and organ function. Focused upon effectively conveying medical diagnoses and prognoses, the risks and benefits of surgery, the side effects of treatment, even the best trained medical communicators do not delve into “hope” as a source of life in the spirit and soul.
As a chaplain, I offer a dose of medicine that makes visible a person’s sense of the divine. I do get to say, “I see your hope. God is dwelling in you.” Chaplains get to take a person’s spark of hope and turn it into a flame burning in love. The sick, injured, ill, and traumatized need witness to their suffering, and they need witness to the survival, not of the body, but of the sacred spirit. In the days after their trauma, my chaplain’s journey with others is to help move from physical suffering to feel “the persistence of love in the midst of suffering.”