Pastor Bob Ritchie on a patient’s view of a chaplain

"What do you call this?"

While doing a unit of CPE, we were asked to write about pastoral care for our midterm. I wrote about a patient's view of life and the chaplain who visited him.

Looking back, we should have enjoyed it more. We could have been children longer, but our parents wanted us to mature. I guess we begged for it, too. There seemed to be a tension to it, but eventually the mature part won.

And then maturity leveled off. Until it did, life seemed to be about growing, and growing seemed to be about vocation, and vocation seemed to be about money, or happiness, or success.

Eventually it all got muddled and a lot of time was used up. Happiness came as long as we lived the present. Like snow, life covered up anything unattractive; salve, not solution.

Then when I landed here in this hospital suffering from a stroke, I hit the bed like a wall; running at it full speed, and collapsed. I felt I had nothing to show for all of my maturity. I couldn’t understand what I had missed. I had done it all; my parents and my wife said I did.

She visits; they don’t, having died years ago. She reassures me, and talks about what is going on in our big house, and how the neighbors are fixing theirs up. Bill, our next-door neighbor, got a hole in one on Sunday morning. News from the neighborhood – something even yesterday I would have thought cool – but today I think of Africa, and of starving water buffalos and people with them – not in that order, but stronger than golf.

Then in comes this guy, “Who are you?” I ask.

“A chaplain,” he answers.

“What do you do?”

“Listen,” he says.

I hesitate. “Listen to what?”

“You,” he answers.

“I have people who come to me for that,” I said, “A wife, neighbors and children.”

“What do you talk about?” He asks.

“Holes in one.”

And he says, “He doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t what?” I ask.

“Talk about holes in one,” he answers.

And I say, “Why?”

And he says, “What?”

“Holes in one,” and I repeat, “Why?”

“Because there is more,” he responds.

And I say, “I remember,” and I do. “Back before all of the maturity began. When I paid attention to God and the world, and knew what I wanted to hold onto, even when I had nothing but God and life, good health and youth.”

“That’s it,” he said. He had been listening. I thought he had left, but he hadn’t.

“That’s what I talk about,” he said, “Well, rather, you do. Do you have more?”

And without hesitation I replied, “Much.”

And he said, “Let it happen.”

And I did, it poured out like water. I thought I had been dying, but this was life at its fullest, not experienced so maturely since childhood.

“What do you call this?” I asked.

“Caregiving,” he answered.

“To me?”

“To both of us,” he said, “It is spiritual growth.”

It was then I could see that maturity is about more than the things we can touch.

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