Chaplain Mark LaRocca-Pitts on "agape" care

Love Is All We Need

It can be rather difficult to get a firm hold on what we chaplains do. Do we provide pastoral care or is it spiritual care? Is the language we use based primarily on psychology or theology? Or, do we simply confine our expertise to the realm of religious care and speak only in terms of faith? Is it all of the above, some of the above, or none? Heated debates as well as organizational fractures have occurred in our profession over these questions. In a follow up article, I will address part of this debate, but in this article I want to cut through our collective dissonance and put forth a simple and direct definition that seems to have been lost in the shuffle: the care that chaplains provide is love.

Now, some might object to this on the grounds that defining love is as difficult to define as spiritual care. Others might reject love as our defining characteristic because anyone or everyone in healthcare may understand their work as one of love. Finally, there might be those who resist defining our work as love because it makes them uncomfortable. As for me, I hesitate to highlight love as the essence of our work because we might appear trite in the eyes of such spiritual care “scientific” gurus as Benson, Larson, Koenig, Puchalski, etc.[1]

Though these objections have some merit, I cannot escape the fact that nearly all chaplains come from a religious, spiritual, and/or philosophical tradition in which love and/or compassion is an ideal. Whether we call our care pastoral, spiritual, soul, religious or humanistic, the wellspring from which all our care arises is love. As representatives of our various traditions who work within a healthcare setting, we are to love all people regardless of ethnicity, disease-process, gender, age, religion, etc. To use seminary Greek, one is to have an agape love that transcends an eros or philia love. Our love is therapeutic in that it engages patients where they are and journeys with them toward hope and healing as needs, contexts, and capacities change. Our love is also clinical in that it occurs within the context of a care involving assessment, interventions, outcomes and communication with other clinical members. This agape care we chaplains practice—that is both therapeutic and clinical—is neither common nor trite, but is nurtured, nuanced and developed through personal spiritual discipline and professionally supervised training.

It may sound hackneyed to say “all we need is love,” but this love that we provide and for which we are trained as professional chaplains sets our care apart from the care provided by other clinical professionals. Indeed, others love, but it is chaplains who are accountable to and for love and who have developed love into a therapeutic and clinical art. And, if you question the operational benefit of defining our care as love, then in the next difficult clinical situation ask yourself the following: “If I am here to provide pastoral or spiritual care, then I will … but, if I am here to love them, then I will ….” For me, I have found that the former question only results in further questions, while the latter one centers me and empowers me to be fully present with the patient in a supportive, therapeutic and clinical role.

In the next article, I will consider how defining our care as “agape care” affects the debate concerning pastoral care versus spiritual care.

[1] I want to thank the virtual community of chaplains at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pastoralcare/ who provided valuable feedback when I raised this question on the list for discussion. If you are a chaplain and are interested in joining this list, send a request to pastoralcare-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

Do you have thoughts about advocacy you’d like to share with your colleagues? Send an e-mail to info@PlainViews.org.