Perhaps There Were Two Services of Ordination?

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…” (Jeremiah 1:5a)

“Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

“And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family,           you did it to me.’”(Matthew 25: 34-36, 40)

God calls each of us across the lifespan through hundreds of thousands of movements and experiences, joys and struggles, in the places and, most importantly, in the people that mark our lives.

None can hear and respond to God’s calling without being changes and inspired, challenges and formed, confronted and encouraged.

Such is the media through which the Holy Spirit speaks, the holy mingling of God’s grace with the stuff of our everyday living; the alchemy God’s Calling, the mystery of our truest knowing our own deepest gladness meeting the greatest hungers of our world.

In putting together my service of ordination, I prayed to keep my heart open to the leading of the Holy Spirit. And, I kept central in my thought my work among the longing, anxious, grieving hearts who come to the hospital, where I am Chaplain specializing in mental health and perinatal bereavement, to find health, hope and healing for their living.   

The service, celebrated on All Saints Day, was dedicated to the glory of God’s Calling in all our lives, and to my parents, William and Frances Symonds, raised among the Saints Eternal over three decades. By God’s good grace, the service somehow wove together a the President of a Lutheran (ELCA) congregation—the most holy man I know; my Jesuit Spiritual Director of 15 years; dear noble friends, a Buddhist Bhikkhuni and Bhante; a reformation hearted Mormon Bishop friend and coworker; Presbyterians of every sort and station; all leaning upon the good and solid bones of traditional Reformed worship and the great and classic hymns of the Church.

As I was driving to my beautiful and blessed service of ordination my mobile rang. Could I come see a woman whose baby died a while back?  On that same drive, a text message from a friend, could I recommend a therapist for a family member? The following day, a phone call from an old friend I haven’t seen in years who I had invited to the service, could I recommend an inpatient treatment facility?

Then on Tuesday, there was a beautiful email from a friend that had traveled with his wife from Chicago to attend my ordination service. Attached was a script of a one-man play wrote, and performed on Monday, about the real-life journey in faith and prayer, healing and friendship of the past 28 months of his beloved wife’s journey with stage-4 cancer. The play celebrates the fact that she is now cancer free; it celebrates in his gratitude to God and the rich tapestry of blessed prayers from friends representing more religions than the Parliament of Word Religions that he credits for her healing. The conclusion of the play, my friend wrote, was inspired by my blessed and beautiful service.

We are all members of God’s family. I am left wondering, if there were not two beautiful and blessed celebrations of my ordination last week: one in the Church which ordained me to Ministry of Word and Sacrament, Teaching Elder and one in the world where the mystery of my truest knowing and my own deepest gladness kept meeting up with the greatest hungers of our world.

Edge of Glory

I spent last Friday at a ministry conference at the University of Chicago. It’s an annual event sponsored by the Divinity School. Lady GaGa fans will recognize this right away, this Chaplain was a bit slower off the mark, the title of the conference was Edge of Glory. For the postlude to the noon worship service the Sr. Organist for the University Organ, played… Lady GaGa’s “Edge of Glory.”

The conference was a mix of some very scary statistics from Duke's Mark
Chaves, Professor of Sociology and Religion about the shifting demographic trends in American religious affiliation away from institutional denominationlism, along with some truly awe-inspiring and innovative ministries which are responding to those scary shifts in the religious landscape; including the Rev Rick Hudgens, from Evanston, Il's Reba Place, Pastor Phil Jackson and Spiritual Transformation Through Hip Hop, Rev Nanet Sawyer from Chicago's Grace Commons and the Rev, Dr Shanta Premawardhana, President of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education in Chicago..

I’d gone hoping to get some new information or insight which might improve my evidence based practice of ministry with our patients and their families and our Associates in the hospital where I work.

And, I know that I my time there was well spent and that my reflection on my work as a Chaplain in your midst has deepened. This, alone, will improve my practice. But, what I realized by the afternoon workshop I attended, led my an internationally known leader in the area of interdenominational and inter-faith cooperation in ministry, is that, perhaps, next year’s conference ought to feature the truly awe-inspiring and innovative ministry of anyone who works healthcare—Chaplain, nurse, doctor, counselor, tech, administrator, maintenance person, housekeeping person, medical imaging or lab tech… Any one of us.

For, the thing that unites persons who find sustenance and hope in an organized religious faith and those who would tell you that they are “spiritual but not religious” and those who claim atheist or agnostic or secular humanist or whatever is that when they walk through our doors they come as suffering sharers of our common humanity. They come to us our suffering brothers and sisters.

No matter what our role or discipline among the members of the multidiciplinary healthcare team, we are all committed to serve in our healthcare system with genuine respect, a joyful spirit and passionate caring. And, no matter what our role or discipline we share the common purpose of offering healing and wholeness and hope to any who come here. The word patient has its origin in the Greek, pathos, suffering. We share a common commitment to meet our patients, our suffering brothers and sisters, at the deepest point of our humanity—compassion. To understand this is to understand the central truth of the commonality of our human journey—the thing which unites those of diverse faith and no faith. The compassion you live in your daily life, and especially in your work, is service with ultimate genuine respect, spirit-filled joy, and with the deepest passion of caring. To work here with compassion, is to, literally, from the Latin, suffer with another. It is to feel for your patients, if we are to take seriously the ancient Hebrew scripture which unites the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam— the same great swell of love and concern with a mother feels for her newborn baby.

So perhaps, standing on the Edge of Glory belting out the chorus to a Lady GaGa song is not such a bad idea in this place that gathers our sisters and brothers, sufferers of every sort, from this world of truly scary statistics:

I'm on the edge of glory, and I'm hanging on a moment of truth
Out on the edge of glory, and I'm hanging on a moment with you
I'm on the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge,
I'm on the edge of glory, and I'm hanging on a moment with you
I'm on the edge with you.
I'm on the edge with you
I'm on the edge with you
(You, you, you...)

 Let us come to prayer this week. Let us come with all that we are, all that we have, and in everything that we do. Let us bring our compassionate hearts before the throne of Glory, praying that we might bring them to anyone who comes to us in this place, this place on the edge of glory; praying that we might offer them to anyone hanging on in a moment, a moment of truth—of diagnosis or prognosis, of accident or circumstance, of worry or concern. Let our prayerful, compassion-filled hearts join this week with our suffering sisters and brothers singing: “I am standing on the edge of glory with you, hanging on, hanging on. I’m on the edge with you. I’m on the edge with you. I’m on the edge with you….”Amen.

Rob Blagojevich and Preaching Good News to the Poor

I’m angry tonight: “I’m sorry, I know you want treatment but you don’t have funding and the wait lists for those beds is 3 to 4 months. And, I know you are homeless, but the shelters are over filled and have no beds. Yes, frustrating, scary, overwhelming,” I can see it in their eyes. I can see it much more often now. Sometimes several times a day.


Meanwhile, the Trib reports:“Blagojevich left the house this morning dressed in a turquoise knit shirt, tan shorts and blue running shoes. He held Annie's hand and carried her backpack as they walked down the front steps of his Ravenswood Manor home…”

I wonder sometimes: What is the good news for these poor ones who eyes are looking deeply into mine, longing for some frail shred of hope? Where is the risen Lord in the midst of their suffering? How and where will they meet Jesus along the road of their despair? I am grateful though, tonight, as well, for if I hadn’t known the grace of glimpsing Jesus in the sorrow that is my own, or stumbled upon him upon occasion along my own darkest road, I could never find the courage to meet their pleading gazes, nor could I hold it in some frail act of hope for them when knowing mine is all that they can  bear.

What do You Expect In a Psychiatric Hospital

May is Mental Health Month; the American Psychological Association is hosting a Blog Day that I thought I’d tag on to as I’ve been a Chaplain in Behavioral Health Services for a long time and promoting an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to good mental health is an important part of what I do:


The first time I thought I might become a Chaplain in a psychiatric hospital it was 1978, I was 21 years old; a college senior. In all honesty, this was an absurd idea, but there I was at the William S. Hall Psychiatric Institute, a part of the South Carolina State Hospital, in Columbia South Carolina, bag in hand, ready to be the first woman in an undergraduate unit of Clinical Pastoral Education offered by the hospital. I lived on the grounds with female interns in other disciplines, in an old, old building upon which one could still discern the shadows of letters, long removed, over the entrance: State Insane Asylum.


I remember my Supervisor asking us on our first day what we expected a psychiatric hospital to be like and what we expected from our training quarter. I remember telling him that the experience was so foreign to me that I had no expectations. (My mind has always drawn a total blank when I am overly anxious.) In the past thirty-two years (much of it spent in this same ministry) I have had more opportunity for training in pastoral care and ministry and psychology and theology and biblical study. I have had great experiences in continued Clinical Pastoral Education, continued to grow in therapy and spiritual direction and clinical supervision. In all of these, by some grace, I have increased my capacity to hold my own anxiety, and I believe, at long last, I can form some semblance of an answer to my first Supervisor’s question:


In 1978, my father had just died after a ten-year-long battle with degenerative heart disease and my mother was only just ramping-up into the acute and chronic phases of enough  Axis I and II diagnoses to teach a class in diagnostics. I was only just beginning to explore the graces and gifts which would sustain and save me—a faint inkling of God and some blind, stupidity of faith to grudgingly follow; and gifts enough of intellect and abstraction to seek to fashion within some lopsided vessel of containment, which, when cracked, I would haul weakly to more tender and experienced hands for care. I was expecting to find in a place of absurd ideas, amid other suffering souls a ministry of care, that same strength in the absurdity of faith that called Abraham to the sacrifice of Isaac, when to lose him would have been to lose faith and strength and all. And, I expected to drink there from that same well of courage and endurance which sustained Jacob through a night long wrestling match with his divine attacker—broken, healed, blessed and prevailed before he could continue on is way.


I expect, in the psychiatric hospital where I work and in the care in which I engage today, to find people just like me who are hurting. I expect to pray for grace and mercy as I listen to their stories of suffering and of loss, to their tales of violent attacks and merciless engagements. I expect to hold with them, in some misshapen vessel of containment we manage to fashion between ourselves, the absurdity of frail faith, when doing so, for them, risks losing more than I ever pray to comprehend. And, I expect that there, despite the lisp and cracks, is the well of courage and endurance from which we draw some drops of sustenance of courage and endurance, broken, healing, and blessed as they are, so they can continue on their way.