For the last few weeks I've had lots to blog about and no time to do it so this will be a catch up ramble for which I haven't yet thought of a headline.
Christmas seems so long ago that there is no point in talking about it except to say that the sermon I was miraculously invited to preach at the midnight service seemed to be well received and, having invited people to come and light candles during a post sermon reflection period, I was almost knocked over in the rush to do so. I suppose the thing that worried me most was that, having written a sermon that was more like painting a picture than getting a message across, it felt quite manipulative and as I spoke I wondered if I wasn't in some way wrongly exploiting the emotion of the occasion. Having discussed this sense of being almost a fraud with my vicar and spiritual director I now think this is par for the course and that if I didn't feel a fraud there might be something wrong. The idea of being ordained on 30 September this year is seriously scary -- no that's wrong: it's daunting in a way I can't begin to describe....
I spent New Year at Lee Abbey working on parole board papers and a Christology assignment, going for walks when the weather permitted and feeling somewhat claustrophobic although the talks and teaching were all I'd hoped. One real high point was the night walk early on New Year's Day (we set off just after midnight) which finished on the beach at high tide with a full moon showing the waves crashing over the rocks and up the sand.
Since coming back to London I've been spending three days a week on the third and last placement of my training, at St Christopher's Hospice in Sydenham. As well as being the first hospice in the UK -- 40 years old this year -- St Christopher's is our local hospice and it really is an extraordinary privilege and experience to be welcomed into the "Spiritual Care Department" (not known as the chaplaincy for a couple of years now) and encouraged to develop my own relationships with patients, on the assumption that I am competent to do so. Because of the completely multidisciplinary approach to care and my temporary membership of SCD I am even allowed to write in the ward notes. One of the most difficult things to come to terms with in this kind of ministry (this is my "chaplaincy" placement) is that we take our time from the patients, so that for the first time I can remember I'm not supposed to be thinking "where am I supposed to be next?": "how am I going to close this conversation so as to be on time?" but simply attending fully to the cues the person I am talking to is giving and trying to respond by silence or words, staying or going without thinking about where I "should" be next.
So in the last week I've seen people for whom five minutes general chat, often about the weather, which has been mercifully interesting recently, has been enough. I've pushed beds around the garden (the garden specially and beautifully designed to enable just that to happen) and I've had a few very long conversations bringing in the unanswerable questions about "why God has done this to me" and whether "something I did means that I'm being punished". I'm beginning to learn not to panic when faced with these, but of course I don't have any adequate answers -- how could I have? I can say that I don't believe that God punishes people by giving them MS or cancer (or that he punishes them at all) and I can see, ever so gently, if they want to talk about the reasons they think they might be being punished. But even writing it down like this seems to distort the acute reality and pain of the people I'm thinking about. This placement is probably the most useful piece of training for pastoral work I'll ever do and, amongst other things, is forcing me to apply my very limited theology to the real world as nothing else has.
It's also been quite hard -- and this sounds ridiculous in the context of a hospice -- to come to terms with people dying. When I go in after a few days absence I check the patient list to see who's on it and who isn't. Some people come in for respite care and go home after week or so but of course some die. And some reach a point where even an interest in the weather is beyond them -- one elderly gentleman I sat with last week and teased about his regular gin and tonic from the drinks trolley that comes round before supper each day has simply not woken up at all this week. It shouldn't be a shock, but it is.
A particularly good thing about the placement is the level of support I'm offered not only by my supervisor but by the whole Spiritual Care Department and also by some of the nurses, physiotherapists etc. There is a real sense of working together to make each patient feel individual and special and this seems to spill over into the way staff approach each other. It isn't always true of course -- sometimes people are rushed, distracted, tired -- but everyone seems aware of everyone else in a way that is truly unusual.
My final reflection in what has turned out to be a post mainly about St Christopher's is about the difficulty of imagining myself in the situation of a hospice patient, knowing that I was dying. St Christopher's is quite possibly the best place in the world for someone whose symptoms or situation mean that they can't die at home; the care it offers by way of patient centredness, traditional medicine, complementary treatments, social care, craft activities and not least the attention it pays to families is second to none. Inevitably, my contacts with it before were with people who had experienced it as family members and not as patients and who could not speak highly enough of the facilities, staff and the way they were made to feel that they were understood and that nothing was too much trouble. But there is a sense in which when you are a patient all this wonderful care can seem peripheral to the main issue, which may be impending death or may be the frustration of increasing disability and dependence. It can be tempting to talk about how good the nurses are, or even to point out how lucky someone is to be there. Definitely a temptation to resist unless the thought is offered by the patient, like someone I met yesterday who said that this was the nearest to heaven he could imagine being after months isolated at home.
I said that this would be a long and rambling post and it certainly reflects what is uppermost in my mind at the moment. One comfort from writing it is the realisation that for once the reflection I'm required to produce on most placements and assignments is not going to be difficult -- the problem will come in keeping it within the prescribed word length!
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