“To Be-With” - Reflections on Hospital Chaplaincy
“It’s okay…. I’m here for you…you can let it all out.” These were the only words I could summon as I held hands with a grieving daughter and walked her through the long hallways of St. Vincent’s Hospital after the funeral home had taken her mom’s body.
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” These were my only words to a man who sat and sobbed with me after finding out that he would have a second amputation on his leg.
Words were my medium of care for patients and families during my time in CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education). But what lay behind the words was far more important: presence, attention, care, and compassion. Over the course of 11 weeks as a hospital chaplain, I developed numerous internal and external habits for ministry. I learned to absorb people’s pain, grief, and anger, allowing them to pass through my heart into God’s heart.
By far, the greatest and most fruitful learning process for me was the experience of true presence. No single word in English can capture in my mind what a profound act it is to “be-with” someone. Both words of that phrase spoke to me during the summer. I valued what it means to BE with someone. While other medical professionals came swiftly in and out of patients’ rooms with different tasks and agendas—blood pressure, medication, food, etc.—my only task was to BE with the patient. They were my agenda. I also learned what it means to be WITH another: not to exist side-by-side as two separate silos of existence, but to have our own individual fields of attention, empathy, and care merge into a single sphere of joint presence. This is the mystery of true presence…to “be-with.”
Only within this sphere of presence, like a cathedral within time, could I offer words that could touch the soul— and not by the content of my words alone, but by my manner of speaking, looking, and listening. It was as if I intentionally lowered all of my desires to care for the patient before me to the artist’s palette of my heart, and attempted to paint compassion with my voice.
Wake Forest Baptist Health
Chaplaincy is also a marvelous exercise in faith. It is faith that allows me to believe the value of my presence with patients when, to all appearances, it seems to make no difference in their situation or outlook. Belief that the seeds of compassion that are planted will bear fruit, either in this life or the next, allows us to sow those seeds freely, without need for successful outcomes or positive feedback. Instead, whatever service we offer to others and to the Lord is fruitful simply because we were faithful to the duties entrusted to us.
My final reflection is that the impression I left on patients and families, regardless of the words exchanged, was in itself an attempt to care for them. In the middle of health scares, uncertain futures, poor outlooks, and stressful encounters, a moment of warmth and comfort was precisely what patients and families needed, and this was the gift that God allowed me to bring to these situations. I was reminded of the last line of one of my favorite songs, which captures perfectly the desire I tried to carry out during chaplaincy: “In the end, all I hope for is to be a bit of warmth for you, when there’s not a lot of warmth left to go around.”
Presence, compassion, and warmth. These were the gifts that CPE gave to me and taught me by experience. Those 11 weeks will remain a sacred time in my memory, when God wore the face of the sick and the sorrowful and opened my eyes to see Him in them.
Mr. Matthew Trovato, OSFS
Oblate Seminarian