Our church's Adult Forum on vocation continued today, after a hiatus for the annual meeting. Today we heard from someone who found her way to lay hospital chaplaincy after several decades in the classical music field. Many things she described resonated, like that experience in most businesses tends to involve moving farther and farther away from the front lines where the work is done, and where she felt the joy of making a difference. Joy seems an odd thing to find in hospital chaplaincy, where so many are experiencing different degrees of pain and fear and loss, but she helped us understand the joy of being able to be with the great range of people in a hospital (patients, family, staff), often in silence, and of offering them the chance to be together, often in silence. Some of her more dogmatically religious colleagues say they "bring God into the room" but she finds God - she spoke of the shekhinah, the divine feminine in Jewish tradition - is always already there, at the head of every patient's bed. Powerful.
