A Message From the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

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Dear Colleagues,

We are in week thirteen in our new COVID-19 realities here in Boston, and I’m tired. I’m also aware that thirteen weeks is mere minutes in comparison to the hundreds of years Black communities and their ancestors have been coping with entrenched systemic racism in the United States.

I see and feel the exhaustion, rage, and anger racism and inequality fosters and am watching it in the news and on the streets as people of all racial backgrounds — again — demand change.  Yet, in spite of the challenges we face I see possibilities in this critical moment in history. 

Protest chaplains, police chaplains, and others who don’t call themselves chaplains are in the midst of this, doing the work of listening, grieving, soul-care, and healing. Chaplains have a history here. Chaplains in Boston led religious protests during the civil rights movement.

They organized the Boston clergy who went to Selma in 1965 including Protestant, Catholic and Jewish chaplains from MIT, Northeastern, Harvard-Radcliffe and other local colleges and universities. Chaplains also worked with the police during these years.

On March 21, 1965, a journalist wrote in the Boston Globe, “More recently the college chaplains have become campus heroes by their involvement in physically dangerous trips to the South. Men of the cloth, many of them far ahead of the laity in aroused social consciousness, have marched in Williamston, N.C., in St. Augustine, Fla., in sullen Birmingham—and in the epochal Washington demonstration in 1964.”

“How do you respond as a chaplain when someone says something racist?”

We know chaplains today include women, people who are gender non-binary, and those who are lay people in addition to men “of the cloth.” Chaplains still support protestors and the police. We also know the term and concept of chaplaincy has an overwhelmingly white, Protestant Christian history – like the nation itself. Some people who want to become chaplains in healthcare, the military, the Veterans Administration, and other institutions with specific degree requirements are not able to because of the costs of training and other racially informed structured inequalities.

These realities have troubled me for years and leave me with more questions than answers:

• How do the demographics – racial and otherwise – of chaplains compare to the people they serve? 
• How are we addressing inequalities in who has access to spiritual care? 
• How are we partnering with diversity, equity, and inclusion offices to address systemic issues in our institutions and striving to make our own staff more diverse?
• How do we address structured inequalities in who has access to training for chaplaincy and build programs that have measurable results? 
• How do we recognize those doing the work of chaplaincy without the title because of structured inequalities?
• How do you respond as a chaplain when someone says something racist? There is an important conversation taking place about this question in our private Facebook group.

We were thinking about the COVID-19 crisis when we released the ebook on grief and now we recognizing other needs. That’s why we are updating it to address anger, early death in Black and Brown communities as a different kind of pandemic, ambiguous grief, and the economic grief more present every day. We remain committed to welcoming everyone into the Lab, being driven to research-informed work, and respecting differences. 

What are you doing – as you serve the dying, the anxious, the protestors or the police in this moment? We invite you to  share your voice as together we amplify our message of change. Please share with us your questions, your answers and your vision for a better future. 

As always, in the struggle,

Wendy