The Manual Labor of Chaplaincy
A Chaplain’s Body
Being a chaplain is hard work. And I mean hard work the way that manual labor is hard work. But I don’t mean manual labor in the usual sense of repetitive, mindless work that is done by people who can’t do anything else. I mean the way a stone mason uses a well-honed sense of gravity in his own body when deciding how to place a stone in a wall. I mean the way a carpenter can judge the quality of a saw blade by its sound when cutting different species of lumber. I mean the way a ditch digger has learned to optimize use of breath and posture so that the least amount of effort gets the greatest amount of work done, hour after hour.
A chaplain is working with a family in the ICU as their mother, sister, wife, fights for her life, surrounded by some of the most sophisticated forms of technology ever invented. But how often does that chaplain reflect on the technology she herself possesses – her breath, her use of her senses, the way her body translates gravity into presence. I’m thinking about the impact of a long, slow exhalation on the atmosphere in a room when a code is going on. The impact of the sound of a chaplain’s footsteps in the hallway when a patient has been lying in bed, wide awake since 2 am. The quality of a touch when a child is crying as they are wheeled out of their room for surgery.
We hint at such things in our verbatims when we write about our mood and emotions before entering a patient’s room. And we write about our thoughts, whether about the patient or a concern elsewhere, before entering a room. But we rarely write about our breath rate, or the degree of tension in our shoulders, or anything we have done to sharpen our hearing before entering that room. All these things, and more, are what I mean when I talk about use of our bodies.
Our bodies as benefit
There are three ways in which a focus on the body can be of help to a chaplain: the development of resilience, the cultivation of presence, and the ability to rapidly assess non-verbal cues about patients, family and staff members.
By resilience I mean the capacity to remain fully engaged throughout the relentless encounters with those who are suffering. In a Zen priest, this is trained by fostering a natural rhythm of breathing with short inhalations and long exhalations. For this to become possible, there has to be a permanent relaxation of all muscles that are needed at any given moment.
Another way to generate this degree of relaxation is to cultivate an awareness of gravity at work throughout the body. An area where you cannot feel gravity is an area of neuromuscular tension yet to be released. When a sufficient degree of this kind of release has been achieved, the impact on others is called, not so surprisingly, gravitas or presence.
This emphasis on breathing and relaxation in the body of a chaplain has the added benefit of creating an acute sensitivity to the breathing and state of tension in someone else. A chaplain can use his breath to join the breath of a sorrowful patient. A chaplain can drop her weight into her lower abdomen in a way that starts to ease the anger of a father with his child in the ER.
In other words, the body of a chaplain can become a therapeutic instrument as refined as any of the blinking electronics.
Gordon Greene is Abbot of Chosei Zen in Madison, Wisconsin and Clinical Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.