My Naked Soul

A few years ago, I attended a party with my husband, Britt. I didn’t know anyone, and so I expected the common ice-breaker question of what I did for a living would come up. At previous parties, I hated to answer because how I draw my paycheck is a conversation stopper.

“I’m a minister. . . a chaplain at a hospital. I work with kids who are chronically or terminally ill.”

“Oh,” and “I don’t know how you can do that” were the usual responses, followed by an abrupt subject change. Or the person left altogether. Either the thought of talking about death or the fear that I might be a James Dobson ditto-droid sent them screaming for an exit.

But this party would be different. I had recently decided to leave full-time hospital ministry and concentrate on writing a spiritual memoir – “my little project.” Armed with a new career comeback, I waited for an opening. While eating appetizers, an attractive, middle-aged woman sat beside me. We commented on the spiciness of the hummus and the dry crunch of the pita bread. Since neither of us got up, we continued our chat. She was a stay at home mom and I got to try out my new line.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “I’m working on a spiritual memoir.”

“Oh,” she said. “Isn’t everyone?”

Shot down again.

The arrogance of my “little” project knocked me over. At later gatherings I returned to my old answer and welcomed sitting alone. Who was I to write a spiritual memoir?

As a chaplain, I helped people reframe their experience. Not to focus on something positive but to find God in their loss, tragedy, grief, suffering, recovered good health, and joy. For a memoir to be “spiritual” it shouldn’t be a recounting of my history or the events that shaped my life. A spiritual memoir needed to chronicle God’s activity in my story, and how I became a different person because of it. God is the protagonist here. Not me.

Twenty years ago if a reliable soothsayer with ruby cheeks, pointy finger nails, and emerald robes told me I would run for public office and later lead the free world, I would have bought that over what really happened in my life. Then, God was for the religious right and not for me. Up until my own wrestling with the divine, I believed that all Christians endured some kind of eager sinner/Stepford Wives/Daddy Jesus supplantation complete with religious personality overhaul.

It happened that way to my friend Jill. During our high school years, in San Angelo, Texas – a town too large to escape but too small to get noticed -- Jill wore shin-high, leather cowboy boots with her jeans tucked inside, and a cowboy hat of pale, rigid straw. But her redneck wardrobe and slow drawl hid her skillful, attentive reading of Shakespeare and her love for left-wing politics. She went off to college in an urban center and thrived.  Nearing graduation, she experienced an acute and paralyzing bout of depression.  Weeks into her suffering, I phoned her and she told me she had met a group of people who wanted to take her out to dinner.  She almost sounded upbeat.  I didn't think anything of it because every poor college student hopes for a free meal, but by the next morning, the unthinkable had happened; she had dropped out of college and joined their Christian cult. I didn’t see her again despite my repeated attempts to contact her. She was on orders from the leadership to give up her old “hell-bound” friendships.   When we did happen to meet by chance in a restaurant, she was bland and the joy she pressed lacked heart and passion. Gone was the high energy Jill I loved.

Unlike Jill, my journey with God demanded I not flee the darkness, but immerse myself in it. Recognizing the sacred in the mundane can change our lives, but it is the divine in the profane I chase after.

As a chaplain I am often an observer of sacred events. I find myself enmeshed in a drama, witnessing in others or experiencing first-hand, profound healing of the spirit. A friend of mine calls these happenings “God-things,” but my seminary professor, Lewis Donelson, described them as “moments of the Kingdom” -- time slows to a sluggish, surreal beat while we experience God’s full love in this earthly realm. Eternity touches our finiteness and like heated atoms, we are transformed by the collision. This out-of-earth time, heavenly phased, assures me of God’s saving activity in all of our lives - giving us hope, strength and the courage to love even in our bleakest encounters with life’s vagaries.