BBC News: The chaplains toiling on the frontlines

From Barbara Plett Usher at BBC News:

(Hali Diecidue does not identify with a specific gender and uses the pronouns “they/them”) 

They volunteered to join a Covid-19 unit set up to look after the centre’s elderly chronic care patients. “I didn’t think (the unit) would want me,” they said. “You need the doctors, you need the ventilators… but the welcome that I got was amazing.” As a senior staff chaplain, Hali Diecidue had expertise in end-of-life care, but that didn’t prepare them for what happened when they put on a hazmat suit.

 Diecidue already belonged to an organization that was uniquely placed to deal with the emergency demand for improvising on ways to accompany people in their most difficult hours.  It’s called the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab and was set up in 2018 to explore changes in American religious life, in particular the growing number of people who have no religious affiliation or connection, yet still seek spiritual care.

 The founder, Wendy Cadge, says the group was able to respond rapidly to COVID demands, sharing ideas on “creative workarounds” such as tele-chaplaincy, because it had an established network of more than 3000 chaplains across the country and around the world.  The pandemic shone a new spotlight on spiritual care workers, she says, but “these headlines about chaplains running towards death, they weren’t actually running: they’ve been there all along. People…just suddenly saw that they really needed their help.”

Read more here.