@chris_kenning with @courierjournal discussed a day in the life of Norton Healthcare chaplain Adam Ruiz as he works with those affected by COVID-19. https://t.co/BzQWtoE5hi pic.twitter.com/VzfTsRqu0C
— Norton Healthcare (@Norton_Health) September 3, 2020
For the last decade of his ministry, my father — the Rev. Bert Mattingly — was the Southern Baptist chaplain at the Texas Children’s Hospital. He assisted at several other facilities in the Texas Medical Center in downtown Houston, working with chaplains representing a number of other churches and traditions.
I went to work with him several times. During one visit, we passed a small sitting room and my father said this was his private “crash” spot where he would go when he was overwhelmed and needed to pull himself together. Each of the chaplains had a safe place like this and only the chaplains receptionist knew these locations. (This was before cellphones were omnipresent.)
I also remember lots of prayers and the big questions. A hospital chaplain prays all the time, especially in a facility full of families with children facing cancer or leukemia.
There’s no way around the fact that most of a chaplain’s prayers are linked to big, eternal questions that never go away. Questions like this: Why is this happening to my child? Where is God in all of this pain? Does God understand that I’m scared? What do I do with my guilt and my anger? Is heaven real?
I thought about my father (and a beloved uncle who was a hospital chaplain for half a century) as we recorded this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). That’s easy to understand, since we were talking about a massive USA Today Network feature — from The Louisville Courier-Journal — that ran with this title: “ ‘Hurry, he’s dying’: A chaplain’s journal chronicles a pandemic’s private wounds.”
This is a remarkable feature story, in terms of human drama and suffering. It was built on the kind of source reporters dream about, in terms of a body of written material packed with dates, times, places and human interactions — a chaplain’s personal journal of the coronavirus crisis.
Yes, this is a stunning story. The writing is first rate. However, it’s strangely silent when it comes to the content of this chaplain’s ministry — in terms of the big questions and the prayers that follow This Norton Healthcare chaplain has no specific faith tradition, church or approach to theology. Readers never even learn if Adam Ruiz is ordained and, if so, by whom. My research online found a clue that he might be part of the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Here is a crucial chunk of the intro material in this feature:
Like colleagues across the country, Ruiz’s already tough job providing spiritual care amid loss had grown exponentially more difficult. Illness and death multiplied. Fear and uncertainty gripped front-line doctors and nurses. Visitor restrictions meant suffocating isolation for patients and families. Grief was interrupted, funerals denied. A mountain of need sprang up overnight.
Ruiz’s unassuming shuffle in hospital hallways, his calm eyes behind wire-frame glasses and easy demeanor, belied his own strains that few but his wife could see. Both to cope emotionally and knowing “we were entering something extraordinary,” he began keeping a journal the day before the first case arrived.
Ruiz pecked out dozens of pages, one finger at a time, over six months of what were often 12-hour days. He chronicled hospital strains, prayers, doubts, coronavirus counts; quiet conversations, stress and heroics of health care workers; knife-sharp miseries and sacred moments that otherwise went unseen.
He comforted a woman forced to sit alone with her stillborn child. He used FaceTime to show the last rites of a coronavirus victim to his family. He watched people struggle with mask shortages, argue divisive politics and battle crippling anxiety.
What does God have to do with all of this?
We are, of course, talking about a theological term that is frequently discussed here at GetReligion — “theodicy.” For more information on that, here is an “On Religion” column that I wrote about this specific topic: “That ancient question that will not go away: Where is God in the coronavirus crisis?” In that piece, I noted:
One website defines this term as “a branch of theology … that attempts to reconcile the existence of evil in the world with the assumption of a benevolent God.”
In his book “God in the Dock,” the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis of Oxford University argued that “modern man” now assumes, when evil occurs, that God is on trial. This process “may even end in God’s acquittal,” he noted. “But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God is in the Dock.”
This story includes lots of material about pain and suffering. The chaplain quietly marches through a medical war zone, doing everything that he can to help. I kept waiting for the theological shoe to drop, so to speak, but it never does.
It’s interesting that Ruiz speaks Spanish and many of the patients mentioned in the story have Spanish-heritage names. I assume that some of them are Catholics — which would present unique challenges for a Protestant chaplain, in a facility containing so many people who are near death.
With that in mind, read this unforgettable passage:
it was when he was called from the ICU to Room 9 in the hospital’s labor and delivery area that Ruiz felt how far the pandemic’s impact was reaching beyond COVID-19 patients themselves. Inside he found a mother laying in a bed. Nearby, the stillborn baby she’d delivered earlier was in a medical crib just feet away.
She was alone, she told him. Her husband was stuck in quarantine in another state. Her mother was high risk and couldn’t come. The pandemic’s isolation had made an already traumatic experience far more difficult.
Ruiz asked the baby’s name, and she started to cry.
Later, he wrote in his journal:
She doesn’t know what to tell her other children. She asks me to help her decide what to do with the baby. “You decide for me,” she says. “I can’t think.”
Then she says, “Can you pray? Like a funeral type prayer?”
Alone and scared with nothing and no one familiar to lean into and lean on, she asks me and the nurse to be her proxy family; to help her bless her baby to heaven. And so we pray. … We pray, and I leave, and I know I haven’t really done much to comfort this mother. I write this not out of guilt or feeling of failure. I write it because it is the reality.
Was the woman a Catholic who was requesting the Last Rites, yet knowing the chaplain was not a priest? What was her faith tradition? What prayers did Ruiz offer? Why not let readers know the contents of one or more of these prayers?
There are other chaplains in this facility, but they never speak. They never share their own insights, pains and questions.
At one point, a “priest” is present to assist with a dying patient, but readers never learn if this is priest is Episcopal, Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. There are no quotations from these rites, either.
I thought this next passage hinted at larger issues — for this one generic chaplain, but others as well. However, I am not sure about that:
To help, [Ruiz], along with other hospital staff, created a staff room with calming music. He brought chocolate or brisket barbecue to a team caring for COVID-19 patients. He listened and gave out spiritual reassurance. He created a group text of stressed chaplains. He emailed a worried colleague: Covid is big. We’re bigger. … Stay together with me. We will be okay.
But he also worried he and other Norton chaplains would soon be overwhelmed, writing on March 19 that Today was hard. I called ____ afterwards and told her we needed more help because I felt the work we had to do was going to be more than what we (chaplains) could handle. …
Ruiz knew some New York City hospitals were overwhelmed by patients struggling to breathe, forced to use refrigerated trucks to handle all the dead bodies. He knew the pandemic was pulling him to a place he didn’t want to go, he said.
Note: “a place he didn’t want to go.” For a moment, I thought that might be a door to deeper content. Was this “place” a matter of his emotions, his physical endurance, his own fears of mortality, private theological questions about God’s role in all of this suffering?
Again let me stress: This is an amazing article about a man caught in a drama and the existential challenges he faces while doing his work. His service to the women, men and children in this hospital is portrayed in vivid detail — at the human level.
The spiritual challenges are implied. There are hints at the big questions, hints at the spiritual challenges here, the eternal issues. But there are no prayers that point to the answers learned by pastors and priests over the centuries. There are no sacraments or rites of worship, no quotations for scripture.
The story is strangely silent, when it comes to — well — religious issues. Does the content of a chaplain’s faith matter under these circumstances? Is there any content there to report?
Just asking.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it on to others.
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