From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf

I continue today my series highlighting the wisdom found on my bookshelf at work. As most reading this would know, my “work” since September 2018 has been that of a palliative care interfaith chaplain (or spiritual health provider) in a hospital just north of the Twin Cities.

In this eighth installment I share an excerpt from Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World by Serene Jones. (NOTE: To start at the beginning of this series, click here.)

This idea of “finding meaning” is key. Why? Because within the context of palliative care, the work of spiritual care is primarily to do with meaning-making. Specifically, it’s to do with accompanying people in their going deep within to explore, manifest, and at times create new frameworks and pathways of meaning in response to experiences that have called into question or even shattered their previous ways of meaning-making. “Soul companioning” is a term sometimes used to describe this special type of accompanying.

In my practice of spiritual care within the palliative care context, I view this accompanying as a journey. My role in this journey is not so much to provide “the right answers” but rather a “light” by which the patient can begin to discover their own answers and/or responses; perhaps even cultivate new ways of responding honestly to – and dealing meaningfully with – whatever it is they’re being confronted and challenged by.

This “light” is shone by and through my grounded, non-anxious presence and by my deep listening and questioning – all of which reflects an intuitive form of engagement that encourages my patients to discover and/or kindle their own guiding light by which they discern and/or forge their own pathways of meaning. For me, as an “Interfaith Palliative Care chaplain,” this is the work of spiritual care. (And as I note here, I see in the image at right of the character of Nathan Appleby in the TV series The Living and the Dead, a powerfully symbolic representation of this work.)

In short, I’ve come to understand that spiritual care, especially when practiced in the field of palliative care, is the work of light-bearers and well-grounded sojourners; it’s work that requires the capacity to both facilitate and engage in deep conversation; to identify patterns and connections; to “see” the unseen and “read between the lines;” to recognize and navigate complex family dynamics and situations; and to discern and differentiate what is important for my colleagues to know about any given patient’s story.

With all of this in mind and heart, here is a powerful and very relevant excerpt from Serene Jones’s Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World.

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People often ask me, as a theologian, if I believe in God. It is an odd question to ask an ordained minister who heads Union Theological Seminary, a famous, almost two-hundred-year-old school in New York City devoted to educating religious leaders to help people with their ultimate questions. A theologian like me has to believe in God – and even have a pretty clear vision and definition of God, right?

Well, it depends. If by God you mean an entity that hovers somewhere above us, watching all we do and constantly judging if we are doing right or wrong, then no. If you mean God as a being, like we are beings, or as any kind of an object, or even an essence, as we understand those terms, then also no. But if you mean believing the universe is ultimately loved by a divine reality that is greater and more wonderful than we can begin to imagine, and that in this reality we find our ultimate destiny, the purpose of our existence, then yes.

. . . [For me] God is a mysterious, creative, sustaining life force. . . . I believe infinitely and with certainty that [this divine] mystery we cannot know is loving; indeed, it is Love, and that in this Love we find our true existence. . . . All life flows into being out of [this] one source, Divine Love, and [all life] is forever deeply related and responsive to that love. That love defines, holds, and promises to be present to the lives that God calls into being. That eternally present love is, most simply stated, my definition of grace.

[As a Christian I believe] that in Jesus, Divine Love was fully present in a way that ordinary human beings rarely, if ever, experience and embody. He was completely full of God. Some traditional theologians would call me blasphemous for putting it this way. I call it part of the mystery. I try – and always fail – every day to live like Jesus, to follow him; every day Jesus makes Divine Love in the world present to me; and I know Jesus’s story brings me closer to God than any story I have ever been told or any experience I have ever had. Indeed, I see the world through that story’s eyes.

It is also true that, for me, stories about Abraham. Moses, Muhammad, Buddha, and others often echo these same Jesus-truths I hold. In fact, these other stories sometimes do a better job of making clear aspects of Ultimate Love than the Jesus story. And I’m confident that Jesus would not mind me saying this one bit, for the point of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is to manifest love’s fullness, not to make sure no one else ever talks about it or reveals this truth.

. . . God is [here] all the time. The challenge for us is to open our eyes, ears, hands, minds, and hearts to receive the truth of God’s real, persistent presence, God’s grace. When we open ourselves to it, we are changed by it. The way we perceive the world shifts, like a radically refocused camera lens, and we experience life differently. You see everything around you as suffused with God’s love. You see God’s grace everywhere, saturating all existence. This process of awakening to what is already true, but you haven’t previously seen it, is called conversion – a word that literally means “to see anew.” . . . This awakening continues until the end of our days, ever clearer, never complete, always mysterious.

– Serene Jones
Excerpted from Call It Grace:
Finding Meaning in a Fractured World
Penguin Books, 2019
pp. xvi-xix

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf – Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII
• Arthur Kleinman on the “Soul of Care”
• Chaplaincy: A Ministry of Welcome
• Interfaith Chaplaincy: Meeting People Where They're At
• Spirituality and the Healthcare Setting
• World Hospice and Palliative Care Day
• Resilience and Hope
• George Yancy on the “Unspoken Reality of Death”
• “Call Upon Those You Love”
• Yahia Lababidi: “Poetry Is How We Pray Now”
• The Calm Before the Storm
• Out and About – Spring 2020
• A Pandemic Year
• Out and About – Autumn 2021
• Difficult Choices
• On the 2nd Anniversary of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Words of Gratitude and Hope