a meditation on vulnerability.

On Christmas Day, about a month ago, during the service that the church I serve hosts for anyone who needs a place to go, I invited young people to come forward and sing with me. We sat on the steps of the chancel—that’s essentially the stage, for those of us who don’t speak church-architecture—and I played my ukulele and we sang “Away in a Manger.” If you know me well, you know that I do NOT like to sing in public, specifically, where others can hear me. On top of my anxiety, planted in me in childhood, there is the stereotype that all Black preachers and ministers have the voice of an angel. Not your girl. While I love to use my voice to make music and to chant, I do not have a strong or trained voice, so there’s nothing I enjoy about it.

Still, I believe in vulnerability as a means of relationship. I believe that there is power and permission and beauty in the place when I choose to reach toward others, in particular with my tender parts. I believe that if I am asking others to take a risk, I should be willing to do the same as a model and teacher of what is possible. (Thank you, bell hooks.) So I chose to sing that morning, and I sang into the mic for the whole congregation to hear me, and I asked the kids to sing with me. Some of them did.

*

In the wake of the murder of Michael Brown, I remember I sat down with my friend Rachael to talk about politics and yoga and art, three of our favorite things. I’m sure I made some kind of tea and put out snacks, and we gathered at a table in my Rogers Park apartment to wrestle with what our work was as people, and as members of a community. I was furious, just incensed, that the people around me—yogis mostly, but not exclusively—weren’t burning with the same fire I was about the perpetual and mounting injustice, violence, and destruction of white supremacy being visited on Black bodies. I remember wearing a skirt, talking in a loud voice, and being sweaty with anger.

“jess, if you are waiting for everyone else to be as angry as you are, you’re going to be waiting for a long time,” she said.

I opened my mouth, and then shut it. This hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t know what I was thinking: maybe I was thinking that people just weren’t touching their anger? Maybe I could show them why anger was a justified and appropriate response to the murder of an unarmed Black boy, and the subsequent failure of our culture and justice system to hold the person who killed him accountable? I don’t know. I look back on that moment now as one of the times when I was unable to hold more than one feeling at a time. I didn’t know it, but all I could hold was anger, at the center of which was a deep pain and a sharp, barbed fear. None of us is safe in this world, I knew. So why was I, why were any of us, being asked to pretend otherwise, or feel it was right to do so? Why weren’t we all burning shit down?

I still believe in burning shit down. This is an unpopular hot take, and I think particularly in the Christian tradition, but our systems need to be destroyed. G-d created from a formless void, from a squishy, caustic, indeterminate mess, and sometimes that’s where we need to begin in order to make anything even slightly resembling a balanced creation. But I am grateful for the fact that I have learned how to hold more than one feeling at a time.

In the wake of a second shooting in Minneapolis— while law-abiding citizens protested the unlawful occupation of their city by Federal secret police acting in the legacy of colonial and antebellum slave-catchers, one of these agents shot and killed a 37-year-old white man and ICU nurse named Adam Pretti—I am angry. I feel angry that one of these agents of unlawful action and detention is a pastor professing the same tradition as me and I feel FURIOUS that anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ would believe that this is how Jesus would see the people that Jesus loves treated by Jesus’ followers.

I feel repentant that, having learned about the work that clergy did on the ground in Minneapolis this past week, I didn’t move the pieces of my life to get there and bear witness with and among them. I feel distressed that I feel so on the back foot regarding organization in my own congregation, that a community I serve with so much resource and energy says it wants to know more and do more, and is also moving s l o w l y. I feel guilty and confused, because I also feel afraid of putting my body on the line right now. I feel afraid of being deported, because I know that it doesn’t matter that I have a brilliant education, it doesn’t matter that I pay my taxes, it doesn’t matter that I was born here or that I have a passport, it doesn’t matter that I am unarmed, it doesn’t matter that I’m married to a man, it doesn’t matter that in the streets of protest I wear a collar and a stole, that I am still a queer Black woman and that my existence makes me vulnerable. This is a different kind of vulnerability than singing in public. I don’t fear being judged for my mediocre voice and blow-average strumming; I fear being killed by the state.

*

Last week I preached a sermon about how important the breath is in worship. I used the lectionary scripture for this week, so listening to it today or this week will feel normal, for those lectionary geeks who care. But I likened the call that Jesus offered to those who became Their disciples to a breath that came softly but certainly from the body of Jesus, and wrapped around them, telling them, Come, follow me. In a sobering and inspiring sermon at my home church this morning, I heard Steph Grossano name the same call as a call to action, telling those disciples of Jesus working under Roman occupation, Now is the time, let’s go. It is a massive and significant moment when your faith compels you to put your body on the line in pursuit of protection of love, justice, and peace. The discomfort I feel is that happening in me every day. The discomfort you feel is it happening in you, too. This moment is not about a box you check, or which house of worship you dwell in on which day. This moment is the time for a shared vulnerability that makes us stronger than the empire that is dying, and will not go down without a fight.

In pursuit of this work, I am doing the thing I know to do, which is care for my body. The world around me sets my nervous system on edge, so I breathe. I surrender to the liturgy of Primary Series (this is one of the most beautiful demo/online classes, but not for beginners or faint of heart). I try to eat well, and I try to refrain from judgment when I can’t eat well. Last night, I made a nourishing soup, and today, I am making sourdough. The pale good beneath my hands invites me to practice hope when it is SO EASY to surrender to apathy. The patience of bulk fermentation says put your fertile resources in the right places, work the ingredients, and then wait. I text my loved ones, I check on my neighbors, and I stay informed by independent resources that I trust. I pray strength, fortitude, and refuge for those who are fighting in places for the safety and care of those at risk, and I pray visceral, projectile, full-body, fuck-yes metanoia for those broken, hurting, and woefully incorrect forces that are functioning as agents of violence and destruction.

Also, I sing. Because it makes my exhale longer than my inhale. And because it reminds me to stay soft.

Open Letter to Queer & Trans Sibs and Besties On the Occasion of Pride Sunday

[I preached this sermon on Sunday, June 1 at Pilgrim Congregational Church UCC in Lexington, Massachusetts on the occasion of their Pride Sunday. It was my first Pride Sunday in a pulpit, and incredibly special. I was thinking of you when I wrote it.]

Dear Babes,

Happy Pride, Y’all! Pride Sunday makes me feel like a kid in a candy store: I wanna wrap myself in rainbows and feathers and I wanna put on my most daring eye makeup and dance down the streets with you, celebrating the movement of joy, resilience, and fierceness that, we always remember, started as many of the best things in America do, as an uprising against oppression, and in the case of the Stonewall Uprising, against the NYC police. 

Can I be honest? Sometimes I’m skeptical of Pride celebrations in churches. It’s okay if you are, too. It makes sense to me to look at Pride celebrations in houses of God with some side eye. Organized religion does not have a reputation for caring for queer & trans people or our ancestors with kindness. The churches I grew up in were NOT open and affirming. There was no day on which the queer & trans community was celebrated, no Pride season, a season of resilience and healing and celebration of how we as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, intersex, and ace folx exemplify and are living out the kin-dom of God. Many of y’all share my reality and upbringing: any way of life other than straight and/or cisgender was at best tolerated with the chestnut of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and at worst, was condemned from the pulpit as sin that would send us to hell. Fortunately, I found my way into a church that helped me grow. I remember my first Pride experience at my home church when my pastor preached. She began by announcing  that her sermon that day was for the queer and trans folks under the sound of her voice, and that the straight and cis folks weren’t her target audience. Straight and cis folks were still welcome, but they weren’t being given the privilege that they experience regularly. At that point, I hadn’t come out yet, to myself or anyone else, and I remember feeling indignant and left out. What do you mean I’m not the target audience for her sermon, what am I even doing here then? But I thought about it, and the truth is that the queer & trans community, just like other communities on the margins of our white, cisgender, able-bodied, patriarchal society, is decentered all the time. So on Pride Sunday, a place where we can come to celebrate our identity and worship our God, it’s right that queer and trans folks take center stage.

 I want to tell you about my own experience coming out as bisexual, to myself, and to the people that I love. I want to laugh and cry with you about how long it took me to love and accept myself as bisexual, and how I still struggle sometimes to exorcise the self-hatred that I was given, both by larger culture and by the church. But these are stories for a different day. Today, my beautiful, beloved, fierce and resilient queer, trans, and gender non-conforming siblings, is about you.

When we come out, we have to come out over and over and over again, don’t we? We come out to ourselves, and we come out to people that we’re in relationship with, and because the culture around us assumes all people are straight and cis, we come out to everyone we choose to, who looks at us and assumes that we’re straight and/or cisgender. Which is why I’m sharing with you the story of Jesus coming out.

Someone will hear me say this and think I mean that Jesus came out as a gay man. That’s not what I mean. Don’t get me wrong: I’d be really interested to see what it would look like for Jesus to have any kind of sexuality at all, but that part of Jesus’ life has been scrubbed from the narrative. Only those people who knew Jesus, who walked the earth with Jesus, and were with Jesus to hear Them speak about Their relationships and sexuality will know. What I’m referring to is the moment in Jesus’ ministry when They come out as the being Who we know Them to be, the Only Begotten One of God. Can we just talk for a minute about what a baller move it is for Jesus to come out the way They do in scripture here? Jesus has just been baptized and then has wandered in the desert for forty days wrestling with evil in the form of ego and self-aggrandizement. Jesus had to wander in the wilderness for a month to come out to Themself. Jesus had to wrestle with Their vision of Themself, and to begin to believe that Jesus could actually live into the ministry that God was calling for. We know about the way Jesus was tempted during this time, but we don’t have any account of the self-doubt, suspicion, or even grief Jesus might have experienced. I remember when I came out to myself, feeling giddy and delighted, and having an explanation for so many choices I’d made and feelings I’d had in my past. I remember being sad that it took me so long, and feeling grief about what I might not experience as someone who came out in middle age. It was, actually, very much like experiencing the call to ministry on my life.

 After finishing this vision quest, Jesus returns home with a deeper understanding of themselves and their ministry.  They roll up into their synagogue, pick up the sacred text, read from one of the great prophets, and then have the audacity to look teachers and leaders dead in their faces and say, I am the one you’ve been waiting for. I am who the prophets were writing about. I am the answer to your prayers.

Come on, y’all! As the kids would say, Jesus ate, and left no crumbs. 

When I came out as bi, and when I was accepting God’s call to ministry, I read this passage over and over. It gave me such comfort and inspiration, to think about Jesus as coming out. If Jesus could live into the fullness of Themself, so could I: I could live as a follower of Christ, a happily married monogamous person, a minister of the Way of Jesus, and a vivid, unashamed bisexual woman. I feel less lonely when I consider Jesus as a model for coming out. Jesus knows what it is to have the self-loathing or fear of others projected onto Them. Jesus knows how to undermine identity polarities in a meaningful way, and Jesus knows how to trouble societal constructs and conventions. As a servant of Christ who is a bisexual woman, I threaten the idea that sexuality exists in poles; as a minister of Christ who is genderfluid, in my ministry I invite a spacious, genderfluid reading of our savior and our faith, I trouble the idea that our faith conventions are fixed, and I point at the truth of gender as a concept, not a dogma of spirituality. I know, Sibs, that I am but a facet of the beauty in the queer and trans community. We are different, and in our difference we are glorious. And Jesus has as much access to our diversity and beauty as we do, because Jesus knew in Their life, and knows in Their resurrection that They exist beyond the gender, sexuality, and cultural constructs of their time, and of our time.

 It is a hard time to be us in this world, siblings. It is a hard time to be queer, trans, nonconforming. We have done a remarkable job of caring for and loving ourselves when queerphobic, transphobic cultures, policies, and ideologies have made it hard. Some of us are fleeing the united states because it is safer to live elsewhere than in our home country. Some of us are still closeted because we can’t leave—we can’t afford to, we don’t have the access, and we aren’t willing to risk our lives. And I’m not judging. Coming out is deeply personal, and we do it when we can, how we can, and if we want to. We don’t all have to do it like Jesus did. I’m just reiterating what you already know, queer besties. It’s really hard out here.

As I’ve been thinking of you, and preparing for this day, I’ve been hearing the words of James Baldwin in my head and heart. I know, I know, I can’t stop talking about James Baldwin: I can’t help it. The Holy Spirit offers me Baldwin’s language as sacred and as meaningful as a psalm, or as holy as the words of Christ Themself. In a letter to his nephew published in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin teaches his nephew that it is the culture around him that is the problem. He is Black, beautiful, perfect, and the damaging stronghold of white supremacy in America is the problem. I read his words, and I hear echoes of the same reflections of cis-heteronormativity. I’m not surprised: Baldwin was both Black and gay. He knew. Baldwin writes to his nephew, “Please try to remember that what [white people] believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear… There is no reason for you to try to become like white people, and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent  assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are… still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it they cannot be released from it.” 

A neon rainbow on a dark background. Photo by Ana Cruz courtesy of Unsplash.

I think this is a teaching for us, too, besties. I hear Jesus Christ in these words. Yes: if you’re wondering if Baldwin, and if Jesus, are telling us to love the oppressor, to turn the other cheek, to be compassionate for those who are confused, unwilling, unable, or afraid to love us, the answer is yes. It’s hard to swallow, and there aren’t many models of folks who can do it well, and still keep their self-respect and their self-confidence, who can remain honest, gracious, compassionate, moisturized, and unbothered. Jesus is the best example I know, and even Jesus got it wrong sometimes. But I believe you can do it, you know why? Because you are beautiful and powerful and made of the same stardust and the same divine breath that Christ is. 

So, besties, as Uncle Jimmy said to his nephew, you, don’t be afraid. You are beautiful. You are loved. You have a profound understanding of liberation that others cannot know. Live. Live full, live right, live just, live out loud, live together, live in community, live compassionately, live generously. Live in the love of our Christ, the Anointed One who dances with us under the rainbow of promise and love. 

Reproductive Chaplaincy

I read a great article in the LA Times, which despite my other subscriptions, is my favorite newspaper. It was a brief piece by Mary McNamara, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television and culture critic, about what would actually be the best Mother’s Day gift: reproductive rights.

“Not surprisingly, those new laws have resulted in pregnant and miscarrying women being turned away from emergency rooms and clinics, where doctors and nurses are too afraid of being penalized for potentially assisting in or failing to report anything remotely resembling an abortion to do their actual jobs.
”According to a recent Yale study, there are approximately 5 million pregnancies each year, at least 1 million of which will end in miscarriage. One. Million. Coming to an emergency room near you.”

— Mary McNamara

When our government unmasked itself as a fascist, authoritarian oligarchy and lived more deeply into what so many have said it was, one of the strategies I began to employ was careful selection and digestion of news. I spend more time on Substack than I used to; I read specific journalists who are covering reproductive justice, because that’s my work; and I try to spend more time on news outlets reporting in ways I value: independent journalism. But even so, the big guys like the LA Times and NYT get into my eyeballs and brain plenty, and it isn’t hard to see the ways in which the destruction of reproductive rights, funds, and access are destroying families and communities across the country.

I’ve lost count of the number of stories I’ve seen of women—Black and (let’s be honest, more often) white, lawmakers and civvies—who have been in front of microphones and cameras telling stories of how hard it is to get the care they need to end a pregnancy in a safe way. There are so many stories of women in Georgia, Texas, Idaho, who have been close to death because the laws in their states have made it impossible to get care, because the laws have scared their doctors and nurses so sufficiently that they can’t get treatment in order to deal with physically and emotionally painful and dangerous situations. An ectopic pregnancy. A pregnancy that has already ended in utero, that cannot be delivered. An infection after an unremarkable miscarriage. These are just the three that I could think of off the top of my head. There are so many reasons why a birthing person might need an abortion, the most important one being because they want one. But this is how we treat birthing people. There are many stories out there, which means there are many more that aren’t being told.

McNamara writes briefly about her own experience with miscarriage and she names that she required a procedure that can be used to end a pregnancy. It was “quite painful and emotionally traumatic enough,” she writes. “I cannot imagine enduring it without fast and appropriate medical treatment or under threat of being prosecuted.” I’ve heard so many stories like this. I always, always think, did anyone in the hospital call the chaplain?

It’s a drum I never. stop. beating. But I keep beating it because birthing people are experiencing this kind of grief and struggle more and more, and they’re being abandoned in it more and more. I write this three months out of what I thought would be my dream job, a hospital reproductive chaplain at a major hospital in Massachusetts. Well, it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, and part of the reason why is because despite how many colleagues and advocates I had who knew that birthing people—women with healthy pregnancies, folx who’d had complications, people who’d delivered early, premature babies and their parents, all of ‘em—could benefit from a friendly and present person unafraid to ask difficult questions in scary spaces, more of the people I worked with saw no value in my work, and made my life harder by making my job harder. I worked so hard trying to convince my colleagues we were on the same team and working with the same mission in mind, and ultimately, I just got tired of banging my head against the brick wall that was people who didn’t want to work with me. It’s not good for someone like me to keep pushpushPUSHING on a wall trying to make a door. It brings out the worst in me.

Having left the place where I’d hoped I’d get to do work that was nourishing to my soul felt weird. Because I discovered that for every pound of family I helped, there’d be five pounds of political and bureaucratic bullshit to carry, I feel much lighter having left. Still, the way I serve the reproductive justice community is evolving, and I miss the access I had to birthing people, even if there were a bunch of roadblocks in the way.

It occurs to me that many folks, based on their own religious trauma, might think that to bring a chaplain into the sphere of someone in need of an abortion, or grieving a miscarriage, is just going to bring in some dude who’s judging them for whatever circumstance they find themselves in. So let me say this:

hi. i’m jessica, i’m your reproductive chaplain. my faith in god supports your right to have an abortion. my relationship with spirit supports your desire for your reproductive destiny, and the actions you take to live into that destiny. I Believe in your capacity to know yourself, and to live into who you are and were made to be, and i’ll use whatever pronouns you want, and affirm whoever you tell me you are. i love you. i’m not judging you. i want you to have what you need to live a life that feels sustainable and right, and i believe that god wants that for you. i trust your ability to make reproductive decisions that are righteous and holy. no decision you make is wrong. no decision you make is sinful. god is with you in this, as in all, things.

American fascism is here, and it’s not going quietly. I think many people in this country are living into who they’ve always been, because it’s profitable, and because they think it will keep them safe. It will get worse before it gets better, this isn’t bottom, by a long shot. But I know who and what I believe in: I believe in the teachings of Jesus—community, justice, humility, liberation from oppression, and interconnectedness. I believe that every person has the right to bodily autonomy, and that right comes from a Holiness and Sacredness that is bigger than the systems and the institutions tell you It is. I do not need to separate my love of Jesus from my practice of reproductive justice, and because I hold them both so dearly, I can love people brilliantly and righteously. Shit out here is bleak, but I believe in a resurrection and a transformation that shatters systems and ideologies and even the basic stuff we cling to. And I’m here for it.

One more note: it feels important to name myself this way, not just so that we both know who I say I am, but also because I’m out here. I’m doing the work of loving and caring for and protecting and supporting people, reproductive people, and if you or someone you know needs spiritual and emotional support, I can be doing that work with you, too. And I’m not alone: there are lots of us out here in pews and pulpits and streets and by the riverside, doing the work of reproductive spiritual care. Join us, find us, let’s do it.

True Confessions of a Chaplain

“Thank you so much for what you do,” said the massage therapist as they worked a knot out of my shoulder. This was a surprise from the reaction I usually get from strangers—the person who cuts my hair, the Lyft driver, the congregant who’s just listened to my sermon. Often it’s a generic, “OOOoohh!” and a pregnant pause as they look expectantly for me to explain exactly what a hospital chaplain is. There’s the occasional, “That’s like a priest, right?” But the ten second pitch I give lying on someone’s table is different from the actual work that I do. If you’ve had spiritual care in a hospital, if someone you love has gotten a new organ, or been close to death, or has died, or has wanted a blessing, then maybe you know what this is, you know what I do, and you know what chaplaincy can do. Most of the time it’s a mystery. I’ve been wanting to demystify it for a while.

I’m not your pastor

While it’s true that a chaplain can also be and work as an ordained minister, a priest, a rabbi, imam, or a pastor, I’m not, and many of us don’t. So the expectations you’d have of a pastor, we aren’t necessarily interested in filling: we’re not going to tell you if you’re going to hell or not. (I never expected this from my pastor, and still don’t but it comes up more than you’d think. The theological diversity of the question of hell notwithstanding, it’s not our job to pass judgement, despite how much death we see.) We’re not going to rescue the soul of a dying person from whatever happens after you die. We’re able to do things like listen to you, ask you hard questions, and make insightful observations, but our job is not to posit that your theology match our own. Most of the time, we might be companioning outside our tradition, which leads me to

Not all of us are christian

Despite the word chaplain coming from the Christian tradition, not every chaplain you meet in every place (hospital or otherwise) is a Christian. Many of us are not. Many of us are also trained to provide care outside our tradition. We can create ritual and officiate sacrament with you that will offer you the opportunity to make meaning out of a profound threshold moment of your life. You can receive meaningful support as a Christian from a chaplain who is Muslim, and you can receive meaningful support as a Jewish person from a chaplain who is Unaffiliated. While we care about the box you check that identifies your religious tradition, it isn’t a measurement we use to discern what you need. We assess with you what you need; what’s important to us is what you’re going through, and how we can come alongside you in it. What’s important to us is your humanity and your spirituality, your suffering and your need, and how we can help you meet it.

I don’t care if you’re saved

This one is my favorite. Countless chaplain colleagues tell me they have fielded questions from retired pastors (usually men) asking, “How many people have you saved?” from their bed. The point of our presence and our work is not to “save” you from anyone or anything. As I wrote earlier, I’m only interested in what you believe about life and death, or about anything, insofar as it serves you. The moment that your own faith begins to create suffering for you, I get deeply curious about why and how, and what we can do to make senses of it. I am not going to use your loved one’s death as an excuse to inquire about your salvation, nor am I going to use a hospital wedding or baptism as an opportunity to advance an isolating, heteronormative view of personhood or relationship. Frankly, if you’d rather talk to me about who I’ve saved, than about how you feel lying in your hospital bed, then I’m likely to think that there’s something you’re not able to touch about your own illness, fear, or suffering. I know you’re suffering.

if you feel bad with me, it’s probably on the way to feeling better

I remember leaving a room wherein a patient was crying. A social worker, who was no fan of mine, said to no one, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “When I left her, she was fine.” This person didn’t know that I’d done my job because she couldn’t understand the value of a spiritual care provider. It’s true, that sometimes the work of a chaplain means that you have a person to be with you who is unafraid of exploring hard feelings: we’re not afraid of your tears, we don’t try to avoid your suffering, and so far as you’re not being abusive or offensive, we can even tolerate your anger. The job of the chaplain isn’t, always, to make you feel better, or at least, I don’t interpret my job that way. My job is to be with you in the reality of life on its own terms. You were driving under the influence and caused an accident that cost someone their life? Okay, I’m not going to judge you, and I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be okay. Instead, I’ll be with you, and I’ll let whatever you’re feeling about it come up, and we’ll hold it together. Your spouse is dying? That sucks, and if you’re not ready to talk about it, okay. But if your spouse wants to talk about it, I’m going to talk about it with her, and then I’m going to let you have your own process around it. Chaplains are people who hold disparate things at the same time a lot. We get good at staying present with feelings and circumstances that most others don’t want to feel. Anyone who has let themself feel painful feelings as a part of healing will tell you the only way out is through.

we are clinicians who train in spiritual and emotional care

It takes more than just slapping the name “chaplain” on the chest of a minister to make someone who’s capable and qualified for this work. Chaplains go through rigorous training, have advanced degrees in religious study and pastoral care, use assessment models, write and present research projects regarding ways in which spiritual care impacts health care across disciplines, we serve on boards and committees that enhance our community as medical professionals, and we are certified by any one of several professional bodies in the United States. We’re not (just) good-hearted folks who walk in off the street wanting to do good. We are members of clinical care teams, and our care benefits patients, staff, and families, not just those of whom are religious. We know because we’ve done the research to prove it.

We do more than just pray

I’ve been introduced before as “someone who has come to pray with you,” and while that’s not untrue on its face, it’s a fraction of the work I’m trained to do or able to do. I am trained to hold individual and community space for people who are grieving, celebrating, or contemplating; I am trained to assess someone’s spiritual suffering, which (I hope this is clear by now) is often larger than any one faith or wisdom tradition); I am trained to engage interventions that will allow them to touch and explore that suffering, and in so doing, to engage in metabolizing it, to discover and land in a new place, and to communicate that clearly to themselves or others when necessary; I am trained to use various models of development, personality, and group theory to understand why patients and families behave the way they do in extraordinary health care circumstances, and to help them ground in the midst of this; I am trained to run toward the suffering of others, and not try to fix it. I am trained to tolerate some of the most beautiful and most painful realities of the human experience, and not to look away. I’m happy to pray with you if that’s what you want, and it will bring you some peace. We can also talk about the playoffs. We don’t have to talk at all. If you want, you can tell me that thing you said to your sister that you wish you could take back now. I won’t tell you she deserved it, and I won’t tell you not to feel guilty. I’ll just be with you.

You can be yourself with me

Because I’m trained to provide spiritual care across traditions, and because I’m not interested in advancing any religious or theological outcome, you can be whoever you are. My job is to love you by being with you, listening to you, and reflecting as clearly back to you as I’m capable of. My job is not to want to make you be different than you are. Yes, this is easier some days than others: I don’t like it when men my father’s age make sexist jokes or when they pay me too much attention. (Pls don’t worry, if I ever felt unsafe, I would set a quick boundary.) But this isn’t really for those men; this is for the trans patient who’s braced against having their dead name used, or for the young adult with religious trauma who dares me to tell her anything even a little like what the church told her. I’m sorry about the places and the ways you’ve been harmed, and the people who hurt you. I’m sorry you feel so vulnerable and at the mercy of such a massive, impersonal system. I see you. I’m here with you.

I hope this will be an ongoing list. Maybe, as time goes, as the work goes, we’ll see what other truths I want to make sure get known. For now, I hope I don’t see you in my halls or on my consult list. But if I do, I promise to take good care of you, if you’ll let me.

workday

Yesterday I met a patient named Maribelle* who had to terminate her pregnancy; or rather, her pregnancy had ended. She miscarried, but she had to take a pill, mifepristone, I assume, to help her complete the miscarriage. She was the same age as me, which I only learned after the visit, and which stunned me, because her demeanor was that of a young woman. I was sure she was under 30, but no, she was well into middle age. She wore a bulky sweater, a puffy vest, and a hat and leggings. We did not speak the same language, and we used an interpreter to help us communicate. The interpreter was on the ball, she conveyed tone, and was witty and sensitive. I noticed Maribelle was wearing a necklace with a medallion of the Virgin Mary on it hanging below her sternum. She was talking about her faith, and I commented on the necklace. Is that the Virgin on your necklace?

“I’m not sure, I just put this on this morning because I thought it was cute,” she remarked, looking at the necklace, as if seeing it for the first time.

It is cute, I said, I just wondered if you felt like you needed Mary close to you today.

She made a face, and answered, “I only need God, I don’t worship Mary.”

I’ve heard this before. The first time was in my own family: Jesus is the son of God, and Mary is some pregnant teen who was nothing special. Catholics worship Mary, my mother whispered to me, judgment gathering in the corners of her mouth, but you just remember you worship Jesus. I’m skeptical about why so many Christians are so quick to dismiss Mary, to downplay her power, her capacity, her import. But I recognize it as a signal of various Protestant and Evangelical theologies.

I understand, I replied to Maribelle. I also think that Mary is a nice model, I said to her.

The interpreter repeated me in Yvonne’s language, and they two spoke to each other for a moment. Yvonne made another face, this one more open and curious than the last, as if she’d heard something that she hadn’t considered, but was going to. The interpreter spoke to me. “I said what you said, Mary is a nice model, and she said ‘what is Mary a model of?’ and I said, ‘she's the mother of Christ.’”

Exactly. It’s no accident to take the mother of Jesus with you into the hospital on the day that you learn your unborn baby is no longer alive. This mother knows better than anyone else about the death of a child.

These kinds of visits are never easy, and they’re never the same. Sometimes I expect that I know how someone is going to respond or feel when they learn their body has miscarried—which is a poor term to describe what really happens, which is that their body has realized that something is unhealthy, off, or unsafe with the pregnancy, and has ended it for the safety of everyone involved. It’s not a flaw or a failing; it’s a strategy our bodies have evolved to keep us alive. But language is often coarse when it comes to these kinds of things, so “miscarriage” is the best we have so far. I’ve met folx who are grateful that they miscarried, because they didn’t want to be pregnant, and folx who have spent tens of thousands trying to conceive and this is the second, or third, or fourth time that this has happened. I’ve met folx who are content to let it go down however it will, and folx who want to move heaven an earth if it means saving the almost-life growing inside them.

Maribelle was… surrendered? She kept saying that God would have his way, that this was God’s will. I’m not sure if I believe a statement like that on the face of it, that what God wants is for someone who is carrying a pregnancy and has chosen this, to lose it. I believe that God wants us to have lives that are sustainable and rich and full of love for ourselves and others, as reflections of God. I believe that God gives us the capacity to make choices that are in keeping with sustainability and community. I believe that is with us, loving us and accepting us, in all moments of our lives. But what I believe is of no consequence in this moment; in this moment, my work is to come alongside Maribelle, and if she believes this is God’s will, I try to hold that, and make space for any feelings she has to come up.

When we are done, I invite a nurse back into the room, and I walk slowly toward the elevators, breathing and thinking about where we are. Massachusetts. She lives here. No one on the L&D team is afraid to prescribe her mifepristone, to help her body do what it is already doing, that is, ending a pregnancy that would have developed into a child with illness and developmental defect. The baby’s heartbeat stopped because her body knew what was viable and what was not. The midwives and the nurses were all grateful to be collaborating on care with this woman. She lives here. She doesn’t have to wrestle with a prescriber from a different state who doesn’t speak her language. She doesn't have to manage her abortion at home without any family or friends to support her. The social worker, Miranda, is able to get her a ride back to the hospital for the rest of the procedure, and home again. She’s able to be monitored in a hospital with providers who aren’t afraid to touch her or care for her, for fear they’ll be prosecuted. Even as she is far away from home, sad, and scared, and trying to accept reality on its own terms, she is more resourced than many women in this country right now. 

There are various women that I call on when I walk the halls caring for birthing people, people experiencing fertility issues, people grieving loss. I call on Julian, who reminds me of Divine presence in loss and suffering. I call on Margaret , who would not allow her children to be taken back into slavery, and would still their heartbeat by her own hand before she would give them to the slow death of the master. I call on those who protect the women laboring, the women struggling to stay alive, the women who are scared to be themselves, the women who are scared to bring new life into this world. I call on Mary, who spoke prophecy over the incubating body of her child when she visited her friend.

The fire of my devotion to the Reproductive Justice movement still burns as brightly as it ever did. It might burn a bit less cleanly, based on how much harder it has become for reproducing people to have the privacy, access, and opportunity they need to make the good and right choices for themselves and their families. I get fewer opportunities than I might have hoped for to speak plainly with people about choosing to be a parent, choosing how and when and on what terms, and discerning how their faith supports them. But there are some days when I feel grateful for the facets of my ministry: the fact that I work in a state that has protected abortion as medical care; the fact that I work in a hospital that has resources for patients who don’t speak English; the fact that when I come alongside these patients, they are not being met by a faith leader who will judge them. They are only met by someone who will show them love, who will support them, and who will be present however they need.

*None of the names you read when I write about my work are real ones. Just FYI.