Everybody Has a Story Before You Enter the Room

One of the easiest mistakes in chaplaincy is believing the encounter begins when the chaplain walks through the door. But it doesn't. It begins long before that, sometimes years before that.

By the time I enter a patient's room, a story has already been unfolding. There have been marriages and divorces, children and grandchildren, careers, disappointments, arguments, reconciliations, churches attended and churches abandoned. There are things the person is proud of and things they wish they could do over. There may be faith. There may be anger at God. Often, there is some complicated mixture of both.

The book on their life has mostly been written. I am simply arriving somewhere in the final chapters.

And that shapes the way I think about and approach spiritual care.

A diagnosis can make it tempting to reduce someone to what is happening to them now. The medical chart does it by necessity, really. There is a disease and all that comes with it--a prognosis, a medication list, a treatment history. Hospice adds another set of information. Family members may tell us what has happened during the last several difficult months.

All of that is important, but it tells me nothing about who is lying in the bed.

I have met people whose lives would have surprised you if you knew them only as patients. Veterans who had carried memories of war for half a century. People who had built businesses, raised families, buried children, survived terrible mistakes, found faith late in life, lost faith somewhere along the way, or quietly carried regrets they had never spoken aloud. Think Hunk McCann in Secondhand Lions.

Sometimes I get those stories in the first couple of visits. Other times they took months. Many of these stories emerged because we weren't talking about anything particularly "spiritual."

People don't necessarily separate their lives into the categories professionals create for them, and that's an important consideration in chaplaincy. A conversation about an old truck can become a conversation about a father. A photograph on the nightstand can lead to a marriage that lasted sixty years. A joke can expose loneliness. A complaint about the food can eventually become a conversation about losing control of nearly everything else.

If I enter the room determined to have a particular kind of conversation, I may miss the one the person is actually trying to have.

Good spiritual care requires curiosity, but not intrusive curiosity. Certainly not the kind of curiosity that treats someone's suffering as interesting material for the professional sitting beside them.

It is the simple willingness to recognize that the person in front of me has lived an entire life I know almost nothing about.

That realization should produce humility and respect.

I may have education. I may have training. I may understand grief theories, communication techniques, theology, crisis intervention, and the dynamics surrounding death and dying. Those things can make me a better chaplain.

But they do not make me the expert on the person sitting across from me.

My job is to listen well enough to begin understanding while they tell their story.

That doesn't mean I never speak. Chaplaincy isn't passive silence, and meaningful spiritual care sometimes requires saying something difficult, asking a direct question, offering Scripture, praying, challenging an assumption, or simply telling someone what I genuinely believe.

But what I say should emerge from the encounter with this person—not from a script I carried into the room.

That's a good principle that extends far beyond chaplaincy.

We encounter people every day at a particular moment in stories we cannot see. The impatient cashier, the difficult coworker, the withdrawn teenager, the elderly man who wants to talk longer than we have time for, the person sitting alone in a waiting room—each arrived at that moment through a story.

And we don't know that story. Perhaps we don't even need to.

But remembering that there is a story can change the way we treat the person standing in front of us. It certainly changed the way I practiced chaplaincy. I listen more; I talk less.

It became one of the ideas behind The Chaplain's Chair: Conversations at the Edge of Life. The stories in the novel are fictional, but the truth underneath them is something I learned from real people over many years:

Nobody enters the room without a story.