(This essay is a slightly edited version of my theology of chaplaincy paper from the first of my four units of CPE in a one-year, four-unit CPE residency. It felt like something worth holding onto and sharing with you all. There aren’t many of you, but I am grateful for all of you. AH)
My denomination (The Presbyterian Church[USA]) publishes a resource to help children understand some basic tenets of the Reformed Christian faith. In Belonging to God: A First Catechism, the first three questions and answers are: Q: Who am I? A: I am a child of God. Q: What does it mean to be a child of God? A: That I belong to God, who loves me. Q: What makes you a child of God? A: Grace—God’s free gift of love that I do not deserve and cannot earn.
We want share with each new generation our conviction that our relation to God, to self, to other human beings, and to all of Creation is defined by Love. ALL of us are made in God’s image, and we are ALL God’s beloved children. No exceptions. So, to know and love one’s neighbors, to know and love one’s self, to live in grateful interdependence with one another and the earth is to love God and to live in relationship with God.
As we grow older, our implicit, childlike trust must mature into the deeper trust of adults who read the Word and the world with a more critical eye. And when the words children hear fail to match the actions they see, they can feel betrayed and jaded. Because they can perceive what’s fair and what isn’t, they can identify injustice before they even know what the word means. (Just watch a child react to the death of Old Yeller or Bambi’s mother.)
The chaos of injustice evokes questions for, doubts about, and conflict with God. Because it’s all about relationship (i.e. about cycles of beginnings, endings, and new beginnings), one’s image of God must grow and evolve. If it doesn’t, it devolves into certainty, and real faith (aka trust) dies on the vine. Only through denial can my image of God remain as it was as a child. And if my image of God does remain what it was when I first began to learn about and imagine God, that image will likely fossilize into some vapid Pollyanna or Santa Claus, or into some vindictive and violent scorekeeper. And if that’s the only god I can imagine, it becomes easy (and maybe even beneficial—to everyone) for me to abandon God altogether. That shallow, selfish faith almost inevitably loses all sense of the interconnectedness of all Creation. Disconnected suffering says things like, “Everything happens for a reason.” And such a response not only sidesteps relationship, it denies the holiness of our shared humanity. While it may masquerade as an affirmation of God’s sovereignty, it’s really nothing more than a way of saying, “It sucks to be you.”
I have often encouraged people to imagine God as the holy interconnectedness between and among all created things. In that understanding, God is the gravity that plants our feet firmly on the earth. God is the joy and the grief of relationships beginning and ending. God is the energy that becomes laughter or tears. While it may be more accurate to say that God is experienced in these things, I do encounter God’s presence and substance in the dynamic interplay of matter and spirit among all that lives, moves, and has being in the Creation. When I deny, diminish, or forsake that relationship—for whatever reason—as a human being, I lose my sense of connectedness to the holiness from which we all have come and to which, I trust, we all return. Without that interconnectedness, I become little more than an arbitrary individual whose associations are transitory and self-serving, because, in the end, neither suffering nor joy really matter. As The Teacher in Ecclesiastes says, “All is vanity.”
I understand wholeness as a thoroughly biblical/spiritual concept that includes the Hebrew concept of Shalom. While Shalom is often translated “peace,” it may be better rendered as “wholeness.” We experience shalom/wholeness by living in communities of welcome, belonging, encouragement, challenge, forgiveness, and healing where the God-imaged loveliness of each one of us is recognized and celebrated, and where we are nurtured through both the gracious attentions we receive and the work we are given and expected to do with and for our neighbors.
One characteristic of a person who lives within that sacred wholeness is joy. Theologically speaking, joy transcends happiness. Joy is the holy ground of trust, even in the midst of suffering. Sure, joy can be a child’s delight when a parent comes home. Joy is also Jesus saying from the cross, “Father, forgive them…” Joy is St. Francis kissing the leper. Joy is Mahatma Gandhi choosing poverty and non-violence over wealth and power. Joy is Etty Hillesum refusing offers of sanctuary in order to care for fellow Jews being sent to Auschwitz, all the while knowing that her refusals would mean her own internment and death in that infamous camp. Joy is the people of Minneapolis in the winter of 2026 peacefully singing, marching, and bleeding their opposition to the federal government’s racist and violent overreach in their communities.
Biblical joy is expressed in one’s lived conviction that, regardless of illness or injury, connection with God, neighbor, and self is always available, even if not always apparent, and even if denied or refused.
As a Christian pastor and now chaplain, I would like to think that I traffic in joy of holy and whole-making connection. And re-connection. And belonging. And purpose. And gratitude. Parents who have just heard that their teenaged daughter will not survive her injuries do not want happiness. I neither can nor want to try to make them happy. I can only shed all pretense and platitude and stand in the darkness with them as a sign of, to quote spiritual teacher James Finley, “the presence of God [which] protects us from nothing, even as it inexplicably sustains us” in all things. So, I can cry with those parents. I can remember with them. If they choose, I can accompany them on an honor walk and stand with them as they let go of their beloved child’s body so her still-living organs might restore connections being threatened by illness or injury in others.
My work as a hospital chaplain includes opening myself to the spiritual, psychological, emotional, and physical dimensions of human suffering and standing in the crucible of human brokenness. There I offer myself as one human through whom the Holy One reveals grief and loss as liminal spaces where relationship and hope are as real as the pain and agony of the moment. I allow myself to become a fellow-traveler along the journey toward new beginnings that none of us can imagine until time reveals them.
When the pain of physical, psychological, emotional, or moral injury has cut too deep, there may be nothing I can do for an individual or a family. The same is true for those for whom the very concept of spirituality is foreign, offensive, or simply feeble-minded. While I may feel helpless in the face of that reality, there are, in fact, moments when I feel that way myself. So, regardless of one’s faith tradition, or lack thereof, showing others and ourselves grace may be as Christ-like an act as is possible for any human being to do.
I’ve learned to think of faith as the relentless Nonetheless that allows me to continue making the effort to live in loving connection to all people. My Nonetheless faith allows me to continue trusting that, in every relationship with other people and with the Creation, and in spite of all ostensible “evidence to the contrary,” God is present, real, and drawing all things together in love.
May it be so.
Jabbok in the Foothills 