Greetings people. I've been bed-bound for the last 5 days, completely incapable of lifting the toilet seat, preparing lunch, or washing my hair. Talk about revelation. When kickboxing was over Monday night I noticed my legs tingling when I'd shift gears on my drive home. I went so far as opening my driver side door once I arrived but when I put one foot onto the black concrete, my back locked up on me. Despite being on heavy duty drugs right now, I'm writing because I don't want to forget what I've learned between Monday night and this moment.
Many of you know that pain is something I've been theoretically fascinated by/with for some time. My final paper in Hermeneutics with Dr. Marion Grau had to do with reading and interpreting pain. I read about emotional and physical pain on a regular basis, and I like to ask people currently experiencing pain about their world-view. I've always had this hunch that pain and pleasure--sensory data on the radical periphery for most of us--reveal something fundamental and primary about the human subject in particular and the world in general. This recent collision with pain of my own has me thinking even more deeply about the topic. In a nutshell: I'm allowing the discomfort and all its accompanying factors to teach me.
There is something distinctly separate between a) the human body and b) the thing that interprets the sensations/experience of the body though they originate from the same source. They do not always correspond, nor carry out the wish of the other. Everything I experienced on Monday night was of my own doing. I pushed it too hard in my kickboxing class. As a result my back spasmed and locked up for consequent days. Something watched this sequence of events and interpreted it as "wrong" and "needing correction." I can say with sheer honesty if someone had a gun up to my head on Monday night when my first spasm hit, I would have asked that person to pull the trigger as a way out of my back pain. No bullshit; it was that bad. It feels like an internal war--and I don't make small of the word "war" for any occasion. It's a war where one part of the self turns violently inward while the other part tries desperately to heal the violence being done inside. When I first tried to go to the bathroom on my own I instantly spasmed for 30 seconds and I swore that time I was going to relax into it instead of screaming (like I'd done the prior 10x). Without realizing it, I screamed, though I caught myself doing it and stopped. It didn't make much of a difference in my pain level to be honest, but I did prove to myself that I could mindful in the midst of acute pain. What is that part of the mind/body/self that can operate independently of or codependently with painful sensory phenomena in the mind/body/self?
One other thing I'm developing during this time of woundedness is a sense of how difficult, humiliating and HUMAN-izing it can be to constantly ask for help. The first two days I had to pee standing up and often things wouldn't go as I planned and I'd find myself needing someone to take a washcloth with water and soap to my urine-covered legs. Not sexy. On Tuesday my friend LeAnn had to take at least an hour and a half out of her work day to get my medications from Kaiser and to heat up a bowl of noodles so I didn't get sick taking meds on an empty stomach. Not dope. The list could go on forever: water bottle filling, changing clothes, applying deodorant, restacking pillows between my knees, bringing food and preparing food, putting reading material by the bed-side, clearing potential trip-up factors from the floor, etc. Experiencing this level of powerlessness re-minds me: we belong to each other. That's the lesson. This is what the periphery has shown me in great detail.
Whoever came up with the notion of rampant individualism as the key to freedom never experienced temporary or chronic paralysis. The ONLY reason I'm not starved, unshowered, completely immobilized and covered in my own shit right now is because there are loving people in my life who consider it their responsibility to care for me in tangible, concrete ways. I hope I never forget their kindness or how fucking hard this experience has been. If I can carry the wisdom of this time forward, I will be a better Chaplain, lover, and friend. May it be so.
Most special thanks to James and LeAnn.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
6th Anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq
Did you know that half the people killed in the U.S. waged war in Iraq are civilians?
Not in my name. I hope not in yours either. Resist family, resist.
Not in my name. I hope not in yours either. Resist family, resist.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
A Professional Reflection on Chaplaincy, Confidentiality and Justice
One of the things about Chaplaincy that I've come to appreciate and feel incredibly ambivalent about is the amount of access I have to the life-stories of my patients. Patients tell me things that they confess having kept secret all their lives. It is a privilege, perhaps an unearned one, to sit in a place of sacred receptivity, to be a site of intimate telling and unburdening for people. What I'm struggling to understand is how I should respond to the information I am given. I have a responsibility to keep the confidentiality of my visits except when treatment teams need to be given information for health care reasons. Most of the time the details of my pastoral visits are kept quiet; they linger in the recesses of my mind and I take them in prayer to a Source much greater than myself. But lately my conscience is being kicked by patterns I'm detecting--patterns I'm particularly able to observe because of the access I have.
Doctors diagnose physical ailments. Psycho-social teams tend to the psychological and social support systems in place (or lacking) in the lives of patients. But Chaplains get to hear about everything, particularly about the things that are causing guilt. G-d knows religion has been about propagating guilt in a major way, especially in certain theological circles, so it's no surprise that patients would project this "guilt seeking" sentiment onto Chaplains and engage the relationship from there. I hear confessions everyday. I hear people's meaning-making methods multiple times a day. I get to hear how people make sense of their illnesses, how people interpret the traumas that have happened to them. More often than not, people see their sickness, psychosis or trauma as punishment or karma, or they take full responsibility for what's happening to them without consideration of the larger systems that might have contributed to their current struggle. In this work, as a result of being a Chaplain in the VA, I have begun to a) detest strongly the role of secrecy and guilt-provoking in conservative religion & 2) think about what role I can play in unlocking those shame-based halls of psychological and spiritual abuse in my lifetime as a Chaplain/Minister.
Let me be specific...
There's a particular clinic that I work on 3x a week. I have been listening to the life stories of these guys for 7 months. They all have a disease of the blood. More than any other unit or clinic I rotate on, these patients have family problems. In fact, all of them, with one exception, are estranged from their children. The one exception is estranged from his mother. Now tell me that problems within the blood line aren't at all related to problems of blood flow. Is that mere coincidence? Or how about the fact that over 75% of the patients I see in the "Psych Ward" confess to having "homosexual experiences" during their time in the Military. Are these just "bad apples" or is psychosis something that results when we tell people their biological proclivities and pleasure-seeking capacities are sinful and unnatural in the eyes of God?
It's not always ethical to make these connections. These insights/observations are often unwelcome in the health care world because they aren't "empirically proven." Further, drawing conclusions like this can often place the locus of responsibility for health impairment on the patient. That is the last thing I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do is open conversations about "sickness" up so that the locus of responsibility for health widens. I'm also offering this reflection up to document my struggle with what needs to be kept quiet (for confidentiality and integrity's sake) and what needs to be exposed for the sake of life/justice itself. How can I look upon these conditions/realities and the suffering they cause, knowing they will continue if silence remains so pervasive, and keep my mouth shut? It's not an easy line to tow and I always learn so much when I pose questions to those who have gone before or who are struggling to tow the same lines. Having said that, I'd like to hear what my other Chaplain sisters and brothers have to say--Wade, Laura, LeAnn, Anna? What is our responsibility with the information we receive, as chaplains, prophets and pastors, to our patients and to the world?
Doctors diagnose physical ailments. Psycho-social teams tend to the psychological and social support systems in place (or lacking) in the lives of patients. But Chaplains get to hear about everything, particularly about the things that are causing guilt. G-d knows religion has been about propagating guilt in a major way, especially in certain theological circles, so it's no surprise that patients would project this "guilt seeking" sentiment onto Chaplains and engage the relationship from there. I hear confessions everyday. I hear people's meaning-making methods multiple times a day. I get to hear how people make sense of their illnesses, how people interpret the traumas that have happened to them. More often than not, people see their sickness, psychosis or trauma as punishment or karma, or they take full responsibility for what's happening to them without consideration of the larger systems that might have contributed to their current struggle. In this work, as a result of being a Chaplain in the VA, I have begun to a) detest strongly the role of secrecy and guilt-provoking in conservative religion & 2) think about what role I can play in unlocking those shame-based halls of psychological and spiritual abuse in my lifetime as a Chaplain/Minister.
Let me be specific...
There's a particular clinic that I work on 3x a week. I have been listening to the life stories of these guys for 7 months. They all have a disease of the blood. More than any other unit or clinic I rotate on, these patients have family problems. In fact, all of them, with one exception, are estranged from their children. The one exception is estranged from his mother. Now tell me that problems within the blood line aren't at all related to problems of blood flow. Is that mere coincidence? Or how about the fact that over 75% of the patients I see in the "Psych Ward" confess to having "homosexual experiences" during their time in the Military. Are these just "bad apples" or is psychosis something that results when we tell people their biological proclivities and pleasure-seeking capacities are sinful and unnatural in the eyes of God?
It's not always ethical to make these connections. These insights/observations are often unwelcome in the health care world because they aren't "empirically proven." Further, drawing conclusions like this can often place the locus of responsibility for health impairment on the patient. That is the last thing I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do is open conversations about "sickness" up so that the locus of responsibility for health widens. I'm also offering this reflection up to document my struggle with what needs to be kept quiet (for confidentiality and integrity's sake) and what needs to be exposed for the sake of life/justice itself. How can I look upon these conditions/realities and the suffering they cause, knowing they will continue if silence remains so pervasive, and keep my mouth shut? It's not an easy line to tow and I always learn so much when I pose questions to those who have gone before or who are struggling to tow the same lines. Having said that, I'd like to hear what my other Chaplain sisters and brothers have to say--Wade, Laura, LeAnn, Anna? What is our responsibility with the information we receive, as chaplains, prophets and pastors, to our patients and to the world?
Monday, March 2, 2009
Forever Funeral
In what was left of 1994 and then into 1995
during the days before mom cleaned his closet out,
I'd pull my dad's blue and gold robe from the hanger,
put it around my little adolescent torso,
snuggle into his smell, find all the pictures of our family
and the cards people sent when he died and play
Neil Young's Philadelphia while crying my green eyes blue.
Now, when I feel like I'm the only one who remembers him,
I listen to the same song and bring him back to earth for
four minutes and sixteen seconds. He had stubby, wide fingers
and navy blue brought out his features. He wore Calvin Klein
Obsession cologne and smoked a pipe. He loved C.G. Jung
and told hilarious, dirty jokes. I was only thirteen,
but I'm not crazy. My dad lived once.
during the days before mom cleaned his closet out,
I'd pull my dad's blue and gold robe from the hanger,
put it around my little adolescent torso,
snuggle into his smell, find all the pictures of our family
and the cards people sent when he died and play
Neil Young's Philadelphia while crying my green eyes blue.
Now, when I feel like I'm the only one who remembers him,
I listen to the same song and bring him back to earth for
four minutes and sixteen seconds. He had stubby, wide fingers
and navy blue brought out his features. He wore Calvin Klein
Obsession cologne and smoked a pipe. He loved C.G. Jung
and told hilarious, dirty jokes. I was only thirteen,
but I'm not crazy. My dad lived once.
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