Hospice chaplains: From Christian to counselor

When I was hired to work as a chaplain for a hospice in Denver, I joined a team of 17 chaplains.  16 of them were Christians, and one was a Rabbi.  Me?  A Buddhist.  At first I wondered if I was being hired to fill some sort of "diversity quota" for the hospice, but I don't think so.  They liked me because I listened, and I wasn't afraid of  the tough questions.

Just two years ago, the New York Times published an article about the secular work that hospice chaplains are now doing.  A huge shift has occurred in chaplaincy--from conversion to counseling, and from conducting prescribed ritual to a holding a more general spiritual presence.  I wonder: is it a coincidence that this shift has been concomitant with a dramatic rise in the need for chaplains?  According to this article, the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for DIsease Control found that patients accepting chaplain's care in hospice stood at 72 percent in 2008, while only 52 percent of patients accepted this care in 2002.

Of course the deeper question to ask is, What do people want from a chaplain at the end of life?  

What would you want?

Chaplains play interesting roles.  Many people assume that chaplains are Christian, and they react based on their assumptions.  We see reactions from, "Oh, a Christian.  I'm not interested in that Jesus crap" to the other extreme of, "Oh, please help my mother to accept Jesus into her heart before she passes."

Chaplains have to ride the edge of these extremes, never knowing which they might get.  For the most part, however, people fall somewhere between them.  They are learning that chaplains are not present to perform particular services, but rather to ask the questions, "What services do YOU want?  What do you want this process to look like?"  This, of course, may included prescribed ritual, but a chaplain would not assume this before learning it directly from the patient and family.

In my next article I will explore some of these services, and look more deeply into the roots of chaplaincy and how that has contributed to our assumptions that chaplains are always Christian.  Later I will look at our culture's need to make a paradigmatic leap from the traditional medical model into a more spiritual/psychosocial model at the end of life.