​As chaplains, we have made the commitment to grow into someone who can allow the pain of another human to completely penetrate our beings and who can join them lovingly, as congruently as possible, in the fullness of whatever is moving through them. The spacious, loving, and uncontrived quality of presence we aim to cultivate is the soil for any fruits of healing that may be possible. 

But how do we get there? How can we become that? Maybe there is no one evolved form of ourselves that we achieve and maintain, but rather we become capable to hold more with another by continually softening into the dynamic, fluid, and loving nature possible within us all.

Why is that journey of development so excruciatingly personal, unforeseeably disruptive to my sense of self, and unfathomably liberating all at the same time?

So then what is it that gets in the way of me being that chaplain? Shouldn’t love be easy? Why should there be any “work” to do to be able to connect authentically and graciously with the people we long to serve? One theory is that we have all developed an adaptive tendency to maintain the experience of separation. That is, believing I am over here and you are over there, and we are separate, and the center of “me” is different from the center of “you”. This tendency allows us to function in the world as it is likely derived from the evolutionary need to survive in order to propel life force through our differentiated organisms and through time. Living with this assumption of being a separate self is so familiar to us all and so reinforced by the external world that we naturally assume it to be reality – so fervently so that to even approach it from this theoretical perspective is somehow odd and often evokes skepticism. (that skepticism/resistance IS the characteristic expression of living within this assumed sense of a separate self that we are naming now because if there was no experience of separation, then there would be no need to resist anything – one could simply identify as the continuous flowing nature of life as it manifests). While we can get close to patients and provide a healing presence while still maintaining a rigid sense of identity, there comes a point where the chaplain’s subtle implicit need to maintain their separateness prevents the felt experience of the patient from rippling through the chaplain in full amplitude. It is often at that point where we miss out on providing the patient with connection to true divinity as it lives in us. For beneath the self that we assume ourselves to be lies the pure flowering of healing light, recognized in the essence of the cosmos and the breeze and all of life in between. It is this force that we have made a commitment to offer. 

We would all like to believe that we are already able to offer this. But what can we do to really deepen this ability? How can we ease the boundaries of “self” which keep us safe from having to fully taste the aches of the fellow human before us? How can we let go of who we think we need to be – which necessitates a need to “protect” some assumed center of self (which, when you look toward, completely falls away. Please don’t take my word for it. Try it. Try to find the center of yourself. Not with your thoughts but with an honest inquiry of awareness. Do you find anything solid?) – so that we can offer an open, needless, and accepting presence? 

In my experience, resting in the uncontrived nature, we might call it, allows for spontaneous and appropriate action, more attuned than any plan could be. It allows for an embodied receptivity and understanding of the dynamic patient and the surrounding environment. It engages human faculties deeper than just the thinking mind. It awakens the sensing body and wisdom heart. There’s no place for a recycled script if I am committed to being present and connected to the dancing viscerality of what the patient, and life, are expressing here and now. This becomes obvious upon the recognition of reality’s essential quality of change; no two patients, no two visits, no two tears, no two moments, no matter how familiar, are the same. If I want to be truly present then I too must be willing to find myself anew. Familiar in form – this body, this voice, this name, these clothes – yet perpetually fresh in the mind’s composition. 

Picture the sea. Swells driving rise to breaking waves on the ocean’s edge. A wave grows, breaks, and spends itself completely toward the land. Expelled, empty of the force that made water a wave, the fractaled components, boundaryless, splay for not an instance at rest before being inspired back into the formless and undifferentiated state of vastly oceanic. Never was a single water molecule not also the wave, and the wave not the ocean. Then, without the space to wonder where the water goes, the next wave lands and rolls and offers itself into emptiness. It lets go of all that it could know itself to be, exhaling to completion. From the human perspective, the waves’ act takes faith in an unbreakable link to the force of the ocean. It can only let go all the way because there is trust that it will return to its base and that the next wave will come. From the waves’ perspective, there is no other act. This is the nature of the wave and of all things. It is the expression of a force much greater than itself. It is a brief, aquatic, gravitational flowering of the sea, the tides, the moon, and beyond. Trace this force back to its root and you meet the core inquiry of theology. Regardless of what you believe, the freedom we seek and are committed to share with the world lies in strengthening our connection to the primordial stir of all of life so that we may let go of our boundaries and let our hearts be truly moved so that we may respond from a supple heart that has been truly touched. Can we be like the waves, appearing again and again in the same place, presenting as practically identical to the one that was alive just a moment ago, yet completely fresh and dynamic in substance?

​-What is your ocean? What is the force that gives rise to your love? What do you need to do to trust that you cannot be separated from it? When you have faith in your unbreakable connection to the ocean that your soul sprouts from, you too have the freedom to let go again and again and again, and rise anew each time, connected to life’s immediacy. It is this place that the echoing cries of the humans before us are asking us to meet them in.