A willingness to enter the pain

Lessons from four months of hospital chaplaincy

I just finished up my hospital chaplaincy internship this week. I have decided not continue training to become a chaplain for reasons I’ll tell you at the end. Nonetheless, it was worth the time and effort. Writer and musician Derek Sivers (someone who did FIRE) wrote:

"If you're in doubt about something that's not in your life, try it. Things are so different in practice versus in theory. The only way to know is to experience it yourself. ... Err on the side of yes. Try it. If it was a mistake, at least you’ll know first-hand, instead of always wondering.

If you're in doubt about something that's in your life already, get rid of it. Not just things, this goes for identities, habits, goals, relationships, technology, and anything else. Default to not having it, then see how you do without. ... Err on the side of no. Get rid of it. Start with a clean slate. If it was a mistake, you'll get it back with a renewed enthusiasm."

And that’s the privilege of financial independence: you have the privilege of finding out. My friend Vicki Robin wrote in Your Money or Your Life, most people who gain financial independence don’t actually stop working, they just do it with more integrity and creativity.¹ They get four freedoms:

1. The freedom to do the kind of work you choose whether or not you have the credentials and whether or not you get paid for it.

2. The freedom to speak the truth and never bend your principles for the sake of job security.

3. The freedom to structure your time in a way that best works for you.

4. The freedom to continue using the skills you already have and are comfortable with or to push yourself to learn new ones.

I know a lot of people who work at prestigious jobs and say “This isn’t really me.” In fact, the higher up the organizational chart they go, the more they make, the more they feel estranged from what they were meant to do. But the issue is that they don’t really know what job is really them, so they go along with it because it provides a “high standard of living” and respect and approval.

We have to reevaluate what a “high standard of living” means.

How many times have you had to do something at work that you didn’t feel good about: you felt like it was the wrong choice or even it was a bit unethical? How many times have you felt prevented by your employer from doing something really amazing because it wasn’t a priority to them or they didn’t get it? How many times have you felt conflicted about going to work because a friend or family member needed you? Or simply it was a gorgeous day and you wanted to spend it outside enjoying your life? Even if we are doing what we are meant to do, we contort to the demands of work in ways that aren’t natural or true to ourselves. In other words, our work lacks integrity - not only truth but a sense of wholeness with how we really want to live.

That does not sound like a good standard of living to me. We should have higher expectations for the decades we have on this earth.

The body is pre-digital and pre-globalization: it does not respond to the imperatives of capitalism or the mandates of artificial deadlines. To me this is one of the most radical and countercultural aspects of embodiment and integration: it requires that we slow down. And listen deeply to what our body is trying to tell us. This is simply not possible inside of the status quo. - Brian Stout, Building Belonging

Continuing revelation

There's this underlying assumption that if you hit FIRE and you don’t have to worry about money anymore, your life is going to be amazing. It’s similar to the marketing promises of the wellness industry: if you get this, you’ll be happy. I was talking to FIRE podcaster and author Jordan Grumet yesterday, and he suggested that financial independence should come with a warning label. Needing money prevents you from an internal orientation. After FIRE you have no choice except to face yourself. All the bullshit of your life is gone and you’ve run out of excuses to look within. After all, you don’t need money anymore! Both your darkness and your life’s work is revealed. Integrity and wholeness means all of you.

Not everyone is willing to face that. But as the Gospel of Thomas says:

As a Quaker, I believe in continuing revelation, the belief that the truth is constantly revealed. You can’t simply follow the rules or creed of what you’ve been taught, the job of a spiritual alive person is to listen to the promptings of the Spirit (Buddha’s version is to become awake). And that’s the gift and burden of FIRE. In the last nine years of FF, I’ve worked on stuff I care about. But because I’m free to change, I have to change. No one who knew me ten years ago when I worked in sustainability thought I would start an underground grad school. Including me. No one who knew me when I ran an underground grad school thought I would become a spiritual director. Including me.²

In five years I’ll be doing something I can’t imagine now. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Financial independence should come with a warning label.

Learning what’s valuable

When I started hospital chaplaincy, several doctor friends told me that hospital chaplains were some of the most impressive, most evolved people they had ever met.

I found out why. Chaplaincy training was rough. Super rough. Our supervisor taught us the hospital chaplain is willing to enter the pain. That’s the job, different than everyone else’s at the hospital: nurses, doctors, or therapists. And entering the pain is what we learned in class. What we practiced in patient rooms. The pain of, as I wrote in September when I started: old age, sickness and death. Here’s a trailer of a recent documentary following chaplains at Mount Sinai hospital which gives a taste of what chaplains do.

Some of the pains I heard from patients:

• the fear of possibly not waking up from surgery.

• the grief of a woman having to go to assisted living after surgery, and no longer living at home with her husband of 40 years.

• the worry of a dying man about who will care for and give medication to his sick wife.

• the shame of a woman getting a terminal cancer diagnosis of whether God will accept her, after all the things she’s done. Whether her son will descend into the darkness of drugs and prostitution when she dies.

• the regrets of a man, my age, of pains never healed, of people never forgiven, of a life never lived. (this was a rough one)

The job of a chaplain is not to take away the pain, but to be willing to enter it. Not try to fix, correct, or even to console. But to do nothing but listen, fully awake, to offer compassion, which the true meaning can be found in Latin: to suffer with. To stand there and say, with all sincerity, “I am here with you.”

“The first duty of love is to listen” - Paul Tillich

Our clinical pastoral education (CPE) was to see all the ways we try to avoid the pain. We would write up case studies of our encounters with patients. Our supervisor and classmates would hold up the mirror to show us where we didn’t to sit with the suffering. By writing recalled dialogues and being examined on our interactions with patients, we would see where we didn’t want to “I-am-here-with-you” with the pain: our desire to problem solve, solutionize, flee, dissociate, reassure, or placate.³

The trick was to realize that everyone is just a mirror. When we saw our strategies of avoiding the pain of our patients, we saw all our own strategies to avoid the pain in ourselves. For there is no Other. As I wrote before, the hole in your heart is the same hole in mine because there is only One Hole. I could see all the times I problem-solved, disassociated, fled, and placated because I didn’t want to feel my own pain. So many times I blamed others for my pain. And it was always mine all along.

I wasn’t really willing to be there for myself.

The job of the chaplain is to suffer with. Compassion, the ability to suffer with, is what so many people in this world need. Very uncomfortable stuff. And in capitalism, so undervalued.⁴ And in our individualistic society, what’s missing.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a covenant between equals.  Compassion is always, at its most authentic, a shift from the cramped world of preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship, of true kinship. — Father Greg Boyle

I am here with you

Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr coined a phrase for spirituality: “oneing.” The spiritual life is an never-ending path to:

… unity with God, unity with your neighbor, unity with everything. Jesus taught, “I am one with you and you are one with your neighbor and we are all one with God.” That’s the gospel! — Father Richard Rohr

The pathway of human development is that we spend the first half of our lives creating an ego: our sense of individuality and separateness. Our society is a very first-half-of-life culture.

But the second half of our lives we move back towards our original face, a deeper intimacy, belonging, and union with everything. And everything is just another word for God.

Integrity. Wholeness. Rohr speaks to what the mystics of all the ages know, that "we are already in union with God, all we have to do is stop resisting it, holding onto our small separate selves.”

The great monastic Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.” As the Buddhists of the Chan tradition would say: you are already enlightened, you just don’t know it. Enlightenment and unity, one and the same, our original state.

But the human path is believing that God (i.e. everything) is still separate and “out there.” Our ego over-emphasizes our individuality and separateness from God and others. Again, our society is a first half of life culture. But we have the opportunity to grow. My hero Lynne Twist believes that unity and sufficiency is a state of being that is completely available to the human family. There is enough for everyone. I wrote previously, there is enough of what everyone truly needs, for everyone.

Do you believe this?

But our society and our institutions and, indeed our money, are rooted in a you-or-me understanding of the world. But it will take us, as individuals, to shift our own beliefs, our own “life sentences” into a you-and-me understanding of the world. It’s us, rooted in our egoic separateness that prevents sufficiency for everyone. This is Twist’s life work, and to an extent, the basis of all the projects I do.⁵

I am one with you. You are one with your neighbor. We are all one with God. You-and-me, together. That is the work of our lives.

What we have to be is what we are.

Avoiding ourselves

Despite how powerful it has been, I’ve decided to stop CPE training. It’s been emotional exhausting and it would take another year of chaplaincy training and getting a masters in divinity or theology to get accredited.

I’ve also realized that I prefer being a spiritual director. Offering spiritual direction is similar to hospital chaplaincy. I listen to people and create a sanctuary in time to meet God-in-the-moment. Because spiritual direction is monthly, I can build long-term relationships with my clients, ones with continuity and affection. The chaplaincy is a short-term relationship; a chaplain often meets a patient only once to provide spiritual care, in an acute situation.

The deeper issue is I’m not fully ready for the acute situations, to enter the pain, mine or my patients. After a spiritual direction appointment, I almost always feel energized. Being with people as they tune into their spiritual experience is my own spiritual experience. At the hospital, I’m not able to fully say “I am with you.” There’s some part of me that wants to stay separate, from others and from myself. I found myself worn from the intensity of the entering the pain of patients all the time. I would come home from chaplaincy wiped out, only wanting to watch TV and go to bed. Numbing out, scrolling the Internet. It was too much.

It is the work of a lifetime to become who you really are.⁶ And I can’t pretend that I’m at a high state of spiritual evolution than I am.  What we have to be is what we are. Teilhard de Chardin said, trust in the slow work of God. As the Taoists say, when spring comes, the grass grows by itself. The work of being there, not numbing out to the joy and the pain is the great work of our lives.⁷ I hope I’m on it.

But the reward speaks for itself. If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.

A high standard of living indeed.

“I was born when all I once feared I could love.” - Rabia of Basra

An invitation to try spiritual direction

I’ve struggled getting clients for spiritual direction. Most people don’t know what spiritual direction is. You can see my attempt to describe it here.

Carl Jung once said that he didn’t have a patient over the age of 35 whose problems weren’t actually spiritual ones. He was talking about the deeper ineffable parts in us beneath our thinking, psychological mind (“God is closer to me than I am to myself.” — Augustine). As anyone who has had a mystical experience, or been on a psychedelic journey, or fallen in love, or lost someone important to them knows this. My supervisor Heidi Franklin says that when people hide from their spirituality, there’s something that they’re avoiding about themselves.

Maybe that’s the best definition of spiritual direction: a willingness to seek intimacy with our self and God (one and the same). To bring forth what is within you. To receive it all, including the pain. The prize: integrity. Wholeness. Continuing revelation. As TS Eliot put it:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

In spiritual direction, we seek God-in-the-moment, between two waves of the sea, in you, always there, half-heard, in the stillness.

If you’d like to try spiritual direction, I’m happy to offer a free session if you reach out. Attending to you as you deepen into your spiritual experience is my own spiritual experience.

I hope you contact me.

1. Mr. Money Mustache describes post-FF as finding “good difficulty”, because the mistaken belief of FF as a life of comfort, enjoyment, and convenience just leads you to lying on your couch “hooked up to a catheter and a bedpan, with a friend or robot bringing food to you.” LOL

2. Other stuff like The Appreciation Effect or the Jubilee Fund too.

3. One of the most challenging things for my fellow students who were Christian: wanting to pray for patients. But prayer was just a solution to offer when we no longer wanted to suffer with.

4. I was telling my neighbor Gretchen about this at the dog park last week. I noted to her that the chaplain’s salary, around $50k, less than the nurses, the doctors, and administrators. She noted that when we grow up in capitalism, we learn through salary what is valuable in society and what our worth is. The further you are away from bodies and emotions, the more money you make.

5. See note 2, along with School of Financial Freedom and being a spiritual director.

6. Joseph Campbell - “It is the privilege of a lifetime to be who you really are.”

7. You think you can have one without the other?