The NY Times has a story on hospital chaplaincy. This gives a brief synopsis of the line of work I do. Enjoy!
In the Trenches | The Hospital Chaplain
Offering Comfort to the Sick and Blessings to Their Healers
At 1 p.m. on a weekday, the
emergency department at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Upper
Manhattan is in full cry, with bays crowded, patients on stretchers
lining the hallways, and paramedics bringing in more sick people. Time
for the Rev. Margaret A. Muncie to work the floor.
Not shy, this pastor with the clerical collar, the Ann Taylor blazer
and the cheerful insistence of one whose own mother called her a
steamroller. Among the first women ordained an Episcopal priest and a
self-described “Caucasian minority,” she’s an odd bird among the
ethnically diverse staff and especially the patients, most of them
black or Latino. But she keeps pecking her head behind curtains,
parting gatherings of worried family members, impervious to startled
looks of suspicion.
“Hi, I’m Peggy Muncie, a hospital chaplain,” she says. “Would you like a visit?”
She’s not there to thump. Deftly, she asks people how they’re
feeling, then lets them vent their pain and fear, their anxiety and
frustration. She nods, a little pushy with her probing. She flags a
nurse. “Can you direct a doctor toward that patient?” she whispers.
And always, at the end of a visit: “Would it be all right if I
prayed with you?” The health care chaplain will touch a forehead, hold
a hand and quietly pray worries to the Divine, speaking with
inflections that, as needed, may be Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Hindu,
Jewish, Muslim. For the Baptist woman in Bed 7 whose anxieties are
making her chest pain worse, the chaplain prays for calm to allow the
medicine to work. Gradually, the patient’s breathing slows.
“My job is to be present to patients without judgment,” Chaplain
Muncie says as she pumps a hand sanitizer, “and to help them find out
what is meaningful to guide them through the stress of illness.”
Most health care facilities around the country work with clergy
members. But their involvement varies widely. Some hospitals merely
have a list of on-call pastors; others retain professionally trained,
board-certified health care chaplains, like Ms. Muncie, who is the only
full-time cleric at St. Luke’s. (The hospital also has a rabbi and an
imam part-time, and a supervisory program for theological students.)
These varying levels of commitment have less to do with differing
philosophies about spirituality and healing than with the bottom line.
Insurance carriers do not reimburse for a chaplain’s salary.
“We’re a non-revenue-producing service, and in the economics of
modern health care, that’s not a good place to be,” said the Rev.
George F. Handzo, a vice president at the HealthCare Chaplaincy, a New
York City organization that trains and places many chaplains.
“But there is a lot of indirect contribution to the mission of a
hospital,” he added, “as well as to its margin: customer satisfaction,
customer retention and goodwill in the community. From a revenue
standpoint, that’s crucial.”
The chaplain is also expected to minister to the hospital staff. As
Chaplain Muncie, 59, makes her way throughout St. Luke’s with a
painstaking limp, she chats easily with doctors and nurses. She has sat
with an intern who sobbed uncontrollably after pronouncing her first
death and prayed with a ward clerk whose mother was in intensive care.
Every year, the chaplain performs a “Blessing of the Hands.” She
wheels a cart adorned with a tablecloth, flowers, a bowl and an MP3
player. Surgeons, nurses, aides crowd around as she dips their hands in
water, blessing their healing work.
Although intercessory praying for the sick has existed since the
time of ancient shamans, the chaplain’s role now reflects the impact of
modern technology on medicine. In her nearly five years at St. Luke’s,
Ms. Muncie has helped mediate “do not resuscitate” decisions, organ
donations and bioethics disputes. After a visit, she she puts the
details in a patient’s chart.
Now she’s off to the intensive care unit, where many patients are
intubated or comatose. Undeterred, Chaplain Muncie goes room by room,
soul-searching. From one bed, eyes watch drowsily but intently; from
another, a gurgle: “Ahhh,” then, faintly, “mennnn.”
“They say the last sense to leave is a person’s hearing,” she says.
“Well, I was a cheerleader and I can belt it out as loud as anyone.”
Spotting the chaplain, a woman jumps up from a bedside and embraces
her. “Her husband is semicomatose,” Ms. Muncie explains later. “She is
going to be a widow soon and she knows it. She trusts me now, so I can
begin to ask the difficult questions: ‘Have you started to plan for
your future?’ ”
One of Chaplain Muncie’s signature responsibilities is to stand with
a patient’s family in the bleak early hours of death. The St. Luke’s
chaplains are paged when a child or a staff member dies; if a death is
traumatic; or in the event of a calamity like a fire. But though raw,
savage grief has no vocabulary, Chaplain Muncie must give it voice, in
a multitude of languages.
Recently, a woman from Mexico who spoke no English had to be told
that her eldest son, 16, had been stabbed, and died just after surgery.
As Chaplain Muncie helped deliver the news, she realized that the
shocked woman was Pentecostal. So the chaplain held her, praying in the
name of Jesus that Jesus would take her son to Heaven, that Jesus would
give her strength to bear this.
A few weeks ago, the chaplain had to prepare a Jewish family for a
morgue viewing of their father. “I know that in Judaism, you don’t say
that the deceased goes to heaven,” she says now. “You talk about memory
and legacy. This family was having a hard time getting closure. So I
said: ‘What would your father be saying to help you get through this?
What memory will you hold of him?’ And their mood changed.”
Her core belief about healing, says Chaplain Muncie, is animated by
Psalm 121: “My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” —
spirit and body; faith and medicine. In 1996, doctors found a benign tumor in her brain the size of a tennis ball. The day after it was removed, she had a stroke. Her right side became paralyzed.
“I was frightened and mad,” she says, over a hasty salad. “But
mostly I worried about my husband and daughters: What about them?”
So many people prayed for her. She was not allowed to abandon hope, not through the years of pain and physical therapy
that reduced the paralysis to a lurching limp, thanks to a device she
was recently fitted for — “an electronic doohickey, my own little
miracle.”
She hitches up a pants-leg to show off the gadget, a
neurostimulator. “I walk faster now,” she says. “I’m the kick-butt
chaplain.” The experience deeply informs her ministry. “In Scripture it
says, ‘Get up from your bed and walk, your faith has made you well,’ ”
she continues.
“ ‘Well’ doesn’t mean perfect. But wholeness and healing can happen,
even when there is still brokenness on the outside,” she adds, tears
spilling. “I’m more whole now than 12 years ago. But I still walk a
little funny.”
After lunch she visits the acute-care floor, sitting at the bedside of an 87-year-old glaucoma patient.
“The hospital can be a busy, lonely place,” Chaplain Muncie says. “Who is there to walk this journey with you?”
The patient doesn’t hold back. Brittle-thin, blind, she lives in
public housing with her grandson, 19. But he’s in serious trouble with
the law. If she doesn’t kick him out in three days, she says, she’ll be
evicted. The grandmother is heartsick about ejecting her grandson, yet
terrified by looming homelessness.
The chaplain promises to alert a social worker. Immediately.
The patient pleads: “Would you call my grandson and ask him to visit? He hasn’t been by.”
The chaplain agrees. She gently mentions the parable of the Prodigal
Son, of letting a profligate young man go so that he may one day
return, mature and penitent.
Hands clasped, the women pray.
Chaplain Muncie stands to leave. “Oh, you lifted my spirit!” the patient calls out. “Will you visit me again?”
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