FEATURED PROFILE: Zac Willette
When you ask someone what words come to mind when you think of a chaplain, it is unlikely that “leader” will be one of them … unless you were talking with Zac Willette. A conversation with Zac highlights the multi-dimensionality that can define today’s chaplain.
Like so many, Zac’s chaplaincy was shaped by experiences that began long before he formally became a chaplain. He was born into a large and dynamic family with parents who were committed to fostering.
At any given time, Zac was one of seven children and he learned some important lessons early.
He learned about the sorrow that life entails, as well as the joy, but most of all the connection between the two. He learned that anyone, whether a cousin by birth or a refugee from Vietnam, could be his brother or sister.
Watch this lively interview with Zac M. Willette, MDiv BCC:
“I learned I couldn’t fix grief, but I could accompany it.”
Zac learned about the lingering effects of grief as he came to understand that his parents had lost two set of twins and suffered a miscarriage, all before he was born. “I learned I couldn’t fix grief, but I could accompany it.”
Suffering, hope, grief and accompaniment are lessons that cultivated in him an attunement to the experiences of others and fostered a desire to use what he had to help them. Growing up with their Catholic church two blocks away, he actively considered the priesthood. But, after graduating from Vanderbilt University, he set out to explore places and circumstances beyond his experience.
Time of Service and Exploration
From working with the National Coalition for the Homeless in DC and with the Tohono O’odham Nation in Sells, AZ to being a canoe guide for people with disabilities, helping found a public bicultural college prep school, leading state and local initiatives on education policy and being an English instructor and photographer in Bolivia, it was a time of service and exploration.
It even included half a year at a research station in the shadow of a volcano in Antarctica.
At 27, Zac came out of the closet as gay and with this, in Zac’s own words, he “found the rush of energy that comes from being honest and that clarity begets clarity.”
This meant that along with the clarity that he wasn’t called to be a priest, he discerned “a God-given hunger for a theological vocabulary that might help people.” In 2009, he graduated from Boston College’s School of Theology & Ministry with a Master’s in Divinity.
During his time at BC, he had two experiences that began to shape his future. The first was serving as an intern chaplain, providing emotional and spiritual care to patients and families on a hospital’s neurology and pediatric intensive care units.
Like in his work as a canoe guide, he saw that the role of chaplain was as facilitator. “My job was to meet the patients and families where they were, learn from them where they were headed and accompany them on the way. It was such a privilege.”
As he went on to become a Board Certified Chaplain and to serve as staff chaplain in ever larger, more demanding settings, the role of facilitator shaped his approach to care both for patients and for staff.
The second experience that has shaped his life was serving as a course assistant in a joint program between Harvard University Divinity School and the Kennedy School of Government. In this role, he encountered Professor Marshall Ganz and internalized Ganz’s definition of leadership:
“Leadership is accepting responsibility for engaging others towards a shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.”
In this simple statement with complex implications, Zac sees the connection between chaplaincy as facilitation and leadership. “Chaplains are uniquely prepared for this kind of facilitative leadership. For me, it is what I aspire to,” he says.
In the work of chaplaincy, Zac found he was able to bring the attunement to suffering and hope, grief and accompaniment that were among the gifts of his early life together with his commitment to help others and the facilitative skills learned of experience.
The weaving together of these strands played out in his work, first as Resident Chaplain then as Staff Chaplain serving the PICU and 60-bed ER at Rush University Hospital, as well as moonlighting in the Trauma Unit of Stroger Cook County Hospital, both in Chicago. It was also during this time that Zac became closely involved in the work of advance care planning.
Among his efforts were designing and delivering in-depth training for all CPE students on the art and science of advance directives.
Stepping Into Leadership Roles
In 2015, Zac stepped into the role of chaplain as leader when he joined MissionPoint Health Partners (now Ascension Care Management) in Nashville, Tennessee as Vice President, Mission Integration.
In this role, he served as the first-ever mission leader for this population health subsidiary of Ascension, innovating and inaugurating, among other things, initiatives like a multi-state approach to Physician’s Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) and advance care planning.
It is a measure of his success as an innovative chaplain leader that in 2016, Zac became the first-ever System Director for Spiritual Care at Ascension Healthcare, at the time the largest nonprofit health system in the US and the world’s largest Catholic health system (150,000 associates, 2,600 sites of care).
His responsibilities included facilitating system-wide initiatives to advance, integrate, and expand spiritual care across the continuum of care for patients, their loved ones, and staff.
He was responsible for initiating at-a-distance-care, research fellowships, system-wide job descriptions, and their first-ever spiritual care awards – including one for non-chaplains who advocate for spiritual care.
“We want to depathologize death. It is a natural part of life for all of us…”
Since 2018, Zac has added another new dimension to his portfolio of identities: entrepreneur. He is the Founder and President of Allay Care Services, a new non-profit incubated by Ascension. At Allay, he leads a team of people working to reduce stress at the end of life – for patients, their loved ones, and the medical team alike.
Allay helps people think through, talk about with their loved ones, and document their wishes both for how they want to live at the end of their lives and the details that begin with death. “We want to depathologize death. It is a natural part of life for all of us.
If we believe that life is beautiful, we need to honor its beauty, meaning and dignity in death as well. Medicine tends to see death as a failure rather than as a life’s last dance.”
With the passion of an entrepreneur and the skills of chaplain and leader, Zac is committed to moving the conversation about end of life out of the doctor’s office and into a discussion, rooted in the person’s values, that involves loved ones whether next door or on the other side of the world.
Because the conversation is rooted in the individual’s own values, he sees it as improving both the individual’s life and how they choose to live it now, as well as their dying process.
In addition, because the process engages loved ones, there are fewer surprises later and a greater opportunity for the concerns of those loved ones to be addressed up front. He shares the story of a man dead set against ever being kept alive artificially.
In the Allay-facilitated discussion, he was shocked to learn it was important to his child living abroad to be able to be with physically him when he died. As a result, he flipped his wishes and made it clear he should be kept alive until they could travel to be with him one last time.
This nuance changed the experience of advance care planning for him and for his children, but may also change how they will be able to deal with his death.
A young boy who grew up feeling joy and sorrow side-by-side has now taken those lessons and crafted a life that models a 21st century form of chaplaincy. As a leader and now entrepreneur, Zac is clear that he is still first and foremost a chaplain.
When people are “close enough to ready,” he and the team at Allay are helping their clients “shake hands with the fact one day they will die. In so doing, we are not only helping clients have their wishes honored but helping them live more fully today.
We’re also paving the way to healthy grief for the survivors, ensuring that they don’t get caught up in the busy-ness, regrets, misunderstandings and fear that too often take them away from healthy grief. They will know what to do to honor the person, and the person’s wishes, so that ultimately it feels like an act of love, not just loss.”
“Suffering happens whenever pain is greater than meaning…”
For a person dedicated to reducing suffering, perhaps the most telling is Zac’s definition of it. “Suffering happens whenever pain is greater than meaning. I’ve been with people in immense pain who also had immense meaning, and they weren’t suffering. And I’ve been with people with relatively small pain who had next to no meaning, and they were suffering greatly.
Pain that can’t be prevented or fixed is part of life, just as death is. But chaplains – in all our roles, in all the places we find ourselves – are called to help people and even organizations have less suffering by encountering more meaning. I think that’s not done by ‘fixing’. It’s done by accompanying.”
Isn’t that what being a 21st Century chaplain is all about?
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