Toward a Non-Violent ChaplaincyByGreg DuBow, Resident Chaplain ALGHgoodluckandgodspeed@gmail.com
In this article I aim to construct a non-violent mode of healthcare chaplaincywithin the context of trauma. As a student intern at a Level I trauma center, Iremember working with a family whose child was killed suddenly and in aparticularly violent way. Pulling back the curtain to the trauma bay, I was notprepared for what I saw. The young boy’s eyes were glassy and his body wasbent at angles for which I had no frame of reference in my mind. This child hadbeen destroyed by an automobile and the driver had fled the scene leaving theboy, who had died instantly, the arms of his mother with whom he had beencrossing the street. He had been cleaned as best he could and his family had yetto take the long walk from the family consult room to the bed where their childnow lay.The family was surrounded by strangers, all of us cramped into a small sterilefamily waiting room. The boy’s father had just arrived at the hospital, oscillatingbetween disbelief that his son was dead and blaming his wife for what hadoccurred. I was one of the strangers who was with them that dark morning aswas a chaplain employed by the first responders present at the accident site,
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garbed in all black with a white clerical collar. Choking on his tears, the child’sfather screamed at him, “Go ahead and tell me that God is real now!”Everyone was quiet, waiting to see how he would respond, “He is.” The chaplainresponded calmly, “You may not feel him right now, but he is.” His tone was evenand measured, as if he were oblivious to the grieving father’s anger, like a parentexplaining that one day when he was older he would understand.When I began my research I was narrowly defining trauma as a medical eventduring which a patient is threatened with potential loss of life or limb. While thisremains apt, it does not reflect the alienation from self, others, and existentialmeaning that victims of trauma experience. I have begun to think of trauma as:violent uprooting which takes away all normal props, breaks up our world,snatches us forever from places that are saturated in memories crucial to our identity, plunges us permanently into an alien environment, and can make us feelthat our very existence has been jeopardized. (Armstrong, 2000)Through my work I’ve learned that chaplaincy care in response to a traumaticevent must primarily focus on and engage the patient’s interpreted sense of meaning. Victims of trauma and their families are a vulnerable population(Tedeschi, Calhoun, 1995) and because of this we need a heightenedcommitment to treating them ethically. Facilitating meaning-making in responseto traumatic events with patients and their families is necessarily engaging thedialectical relationship between the patient’s embodied self and their engagement with non-being. To operate outside of this framework of knowledgewithout having accounted for it may result in harm being done to the patient and
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their family. The family with whom I was working with was living out a nightmare.Amongst the flashes of guilt, sorrow, and rage it was clear that their situation hadnot yet become a part of the fabric of their world. Failure to cognitively integrate atraumatic death into one’s worldview is a common response to traumatic deathby the bereaved. (Jacobs, 1993) Even if the family were to come to thetheological conclusion that to them God feels absent but is nonethelessomnipresent, it is the responsibility of chaplaincy care providers to engage withthe present moment as well as hope for the future. I knew viscerally that the waythe other chaplain had responded to the child’s father was inappropriate in thosefirst crucial hours. That chaplain offered words to them, out of a spirit of compassion, which were
deus ex machina
. In other circumstances the chaplain’sassertion may have been an appropriate challenge of faith or comforting words,but in the holy sanctuary of this family’s grief and pain it was a violent assertionwhich obstructed their flourishing.According to the Association of Professional Chaplains Code of Ethics,“the individual person possesses dignity and worth.” (APC, 2000)Honoring dignity and worth are qualities held as inherent within my ownUnitarian Universalist tradition and putting belief into practice with mypatients requires a dialectical mode of chaplaincy care which I haveobserved several experienced chaplains utilize – even if they would notname their methodology as such. A dialectical mode of chaplaincyrelies upon walking with patients and their families as they engage thevoid and ‘violent uprooting’. Essentially, it is a dialogical exploration of
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Toward a Non-Violent Chaplaincy
An exploration of practicing non-violent chaplaincy in response to traumatic events.
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