Faith In The Face Of Suffering

Hi. Hello. My name is Joon. Online, I go by J.S.

Before I start, as is Korean tradition, I would love to take a selfie with all of you. I will be doing video, and I will, of course, have my peace sign ready to go.

Thank you for indulging me. With that selfie, you are now bound. You are family. If you come to my house for Korean barbecue, please leave your shoes at the door.

I’m a hospital chaplain. I’ve been a chaplain for nine years. That is nine years of tending to death, dying, illness and injury, hundreds, if not thousands, of deathbeds.

I want to share with you today something that happened to me at month 13, and that is when I lost my faith.

I did come back around, but in its wake, I was not the same.

I was seeing so much death and dying that this bizarre and strange thing began happening to me. I began to see and hear the dead.

For a little context, if you’re not sure what a chaplain is, I wish they would tell me.

The technical definition of a chaplain is a non-anxious, nonjudgmental, comforting presence. Grief support, I guess.

The nontechnical definition is: This is the most I will talk all week. I just listen, mostly. I listen.

I work at a Level 1 Trauma Center. It’s a 1,000-plus-bed hospital, and I respond to every death, every Code Blue and every Level 1 trauma, including gunshot wounds, stabbings, fire, falls, car accidents, strokes, drownings and electrocutions.

When I meet my patients and their families, very often I am meeting them in the worst moment of their lives.

So what ended up happening to me?

I was seeing so much death and dying that around month 12, I got in my car late at night after work, and I heard a voice behind me.

“Chaplain.”

It was one of my patients who had died.

I turned around, and of course he wasn’t there. But I began to hear the dead all the time. All of my patients who died.

I would hear them late at night in my car. I would hear them in my home at night. I would hear them down the hallway.

Then I’d be talking with a friend, family member or coworker, someone across the dinner table, and I would get this lightning bolt across my vision. Suddenly, I would picture them flipped over in a car, intubated or with their faces blue in a morgue.

As I was talking to my family or friend, what I would imagine was climbing them as if they were a tree, to the top of their heads, and staying there, refusing to come down, as if I could keep the tree of their life from getting cut down.

Then I became obsessed with time. I would keep looking at clocks, and every second that passed was like a loud church bell in my head.

Then I’d have these nightmares of my patients sitting upright in their beds, getting closer and closer, close enough to breathe my air apart.

I would wake up with my hands over my face. Then I would lean over my wife, very still, to see if she was still breathing.

Thankfully, she never caught me staring at her in her sleep.

So at month 13, I went to my supervisor for our weekly one-on-one supervision.

Jenny, one of the great role models of my life.

I told her what was happening, and I told her this cryptic statement: “I am without anchor.”

Jenny took out a piece of paper, and she drew me a box. Then she crossed out the sides.

She said, “This is your faith right now. Your worldview, your perspective. It’s being broken. However it turns out, it will be different.”

Then she drew another box, and it looked like this misshapen trapezoid. She told me that this is what my faith, my worldview, my belief system might turn into.

And I told her, for real, “But I like my box. I’ve had it my whole life. This is where I put all my stuff. I don’t even like trapezoids.”

She said, “Huh?”

I said, “Nothing. Nothing.”

Then she told me, “I have to tell you a bad secret.”

I wanted to tell her, “No, you keep your secrets.”

She said, “Every chaplain who has ever come through here gets their box exploded.”

My box, my faith, my blueprint. We all have one.

It’s a formula or a belief about how we believe the world ought to operate. Sometimes that’s described by a divine order.

Mine was this very basic formula. It was like load-bearing supports. Generally, it can work. Your belief system generally works until crisis or trauma or tragedy enters in.

My box, my formula, my blueprint was one wall: If I can make good choices.

The next wall: I will get ideal outcomes.

Leading to safety and stability.

Good choices. Ideal outcomes. Safety and stability.

I know, even as I say that, that it is a very naive, optimistic view of upward mobility. It’s not that I expected a perfect one-to-one ratio return on investment.

I knew that life doesn’t always work out. But I did not expect to see, at the bedside of suffering, my ideas and my patients’ ideas of meaningful choices, outcomes, plans and safety obliterated over and over.

I didn’t expect to see the degree of suffering. It’s not that pain existed, but the degree of pain that could overwhelm and overtake my patients.

I was seeing spouses die the same week they were married. Babies born to die. The transplant didn’t take.

“We tried everything, but I’m sorry to tell you.”

“We tried everything, but he’s gone.”

“She’s dead.”

“He died.”

“She’s gone.”

“We tried everything, but…”

I repeatedly woke up into a world of seemingly unanswered prayer and no miracles, or maybe what Jordan Peele calls a bad miracle.

What caused me so much death anxiety and spiritual disorientation was that I found there was no discernible correlation between choice and outcome. At least, it didn’t seem so.

I was seeing my patients’ futures fall midflight, and I was vicariously absorbing intrapsychic grief, the pain of losing what can never be.

So what can I say as a chaplain to my patient who has lost hope, who feels abandoned, who is living a phantom life not their own, especially when my own faith was so challenged?

Before, I had a box that I could use, a box of faith, and I could just cover them with it.

I could say, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.”

“Everything happens for reasons.”

I don’t know the reasons, but, you know, reasons.

“God is going to turn your mess into a message, a test into a testimony, a trial into a triumph.”

But as I kept saying those things, I felt like a freestyler suddenly losing confidence. You started so strong.

I realized that my theology was rushing my patients and their pain to a distant Promised Land.

I was pulling an eschatological curtain of hope that was far away and smothering their present suffering.

I realized that it wasn’t just sugarcoating. It was a sugar straitjacket.

All of this came to a head when, on my assigned floor, Room 5116, one of my best friends and colleagues, John, showed up.

Terrible accident. Wrong place at the wrong time.

He was there for five days before he died.

To see John that way, intubated under a tangle of tubes, was such a juxtaposition to how John was in life.

He was so joyous and energetic and vibrant, taking these long strides down the hallway. When I would see him in the hall, a hello would turn into 45 minutes.

Sometimes, if I saw him in the hall before he saw me, I would duck into another hallway.

But what I wouldn’t give for one more minute with him in the hall.

John’s death shook me because it seemed so random. I was shaken by the unfairness of his loss, and my thread dissolved like a wax thread over fire.

I concluded, after seeing so much suffering, that none of us are safe.

I lost faith. I lost hope.

Now, I wish I could tell you that what brought me back was some grand epiphany, some sudden realization.

But what began to give me some grounding was something very unexpected.

It was two inches of space on a piece of paper that I kept seeing over and over again.

It was this two inches of space that I saw repeatedly filled in, again and again, that began to build for me the shape of a new box.

As chaplains at the hospital where I work, we assist with a document that we learned about today called an advance directive.

Half of it regards a healthcare surrogate, and the other half regards a document called a living will.

A living will is essentially an expression of your wishes, of what you would want to happen if you were ever to end up on life support or life-prolonging measures.

On the document we have at the hospital where I work, at the very bottom, there are these two inches of space.

In these two inches of space, there are several lines, and those lines are labeled “Other Instructions.”

Other instructions.

Patients don’t always fill that up, but some do.

In nine years, having done hundreds of advance directives with patients, I saw a repeated pattern in these two inches of space that began to rebuild the shape of a box for me.

One patient wrote, “Let my dog see me to say goodbye.”

Another said, “Bring all my blankets and utensils.”

Another wrote, “Keep all my pictures of my family around me.”

Another wrote, “Keep putting ChapStick on my lips.”

The reason she wrote that was because she said that when she kissed her own dying mother goodbye, her lips were so dry and so chapped. When her own children were going to kiss her goodbye, she wanted to make sure that they would remember what it was like when they were kids.

What I saw in my patients’ living wills, in their other instructions, was them making a very, very small choice within an inevitable outcome to become their own safety.

It was as if they were finding a shaft of light through concrete, a sliver of sunbeam breaking through their box.

A chaplain I used to work with, Chaplain Amy, was a palliative chaplain. She would ask this question of families who were making the impossible decision from full-code resuscitation measures to comfort measures only.

She would say, “How can we relocate our hope?”

That means, if we can’t save a life, how do we bring life?

What I was seeing within these two inches of space, repeated over and over, was that even when the outcome is inevitable, even when there are no choices left, it doesn’t mean that dignity has to die.

I saw continually how death was both defied and dignified.

I needed my faith, my box, to get bigger, to be able to accommodate a world of no formulas, of other instructions.

What does it mean for our boxes of faith, race, gender and religion to be reconstructed with other instructions?

Relocating hope also meant that I had to redefine miracle.

I, for example, conduct the next-of-kin search. I find a guy who knows a guy, and I locate an estranged son who gets to see his mother at her deathbed and kiss her goodbye.

Or I hold the hand of a man who wanted to be a musician his whole life. He had to choose another way, but at the end, he finally gets to sing, and his final breath is a song.

Or a baby is born but doesn’t make it. Their family decides to do their cultural naming ritual anyway, and it’s beautiful.

This is how they choose to grieve, to name their dream.

Every one of us in this room has a box, a bias about what we believe is best. We can’t entirely get rid of the box, but I have learned to have an ever-shifting box.

I went from rigid square to oblong hexagon to Schrödinger’s trapezoid.

To be a chaplain in a room with so much suffering and grief, what I was experiencing was a constant, ongoing demolition of definitions and a renovation of my heart, making bigger and bigger room for everything I was seeing and experiencing.

I think I’ve come to discover that my death anxiety, seeing and hearing the dead, maybe in some way that was a gift.

Instead of letting go of the dead, I have learned that grief is letting them in.

I don’t have to move on from loss. I can move with it.

Though my friend John may literally be in a box, it doesn’t mean that his memory and his joy have to be. I can still talk to him in the hallway.

So I ask you, as I’ve asked myself: How can we make our box bigger?

How can we make choices in a choiceless room? How can we find the nonideal ideal?

And if we can’t find safety in an outcome, how do we find safety in an outstretched hand to one another?

Thank you.