It humbled me to be angry at God.
I used to be one of those people who thought she could never be angry at God. When others told me they felt that way, including bereaved parents I had supported through their grief (who may have had more right than anyone else to question God’s faithfulness), I always had a ready answer.
A parent would say, “I’m so angry at God for letting my son die. How could He let that happen?”
And I would reply, “It’s okay to be angry at God. He can take it.” I didn’t say it in a dismissive way, because … my God, I can’t even imagine the pain. Yet, I still wondered how anyone could possibly, ever, for any reason, blame God or be angry with Him. “He is the one,” I’d say to myself, “who loves you more than any other will ever love you.” I guess it all made me feel a bit superior in the “who loves God more” category.
Then, I experienced my own devastation, and a conversion … to someone who questioned why God allows certain things to unfold the way they do. And yes, to someone who was angry with God.
It made me understand the anger of those over whom I had felt so superior. I no longer felt special in the “who loves God more” category (as if I had any right to feel it in the first place).
Simply feeling anger toward God shook me. I had become the one I thought I’d never be. My adult life to that point had been one of, perhaps not always unquestioning faith, but always unquestioning contentment with God. To be angry at Him felt like my own deception. But for a while, it felt justified. Why? Because God had called me to the Promised Land, and then He disappeared. At least that’s how I started to feel during the late summer of 2008, after I realized that my days as a hospital chaplain were probably over.
So many of us spend years searching for that one true, meaningful purpose in life. You know the euphoria you feel when you think you’ve found it? That’s how I felt about hospital chaplaincy. When I walked into Hershey Medical Center on September 25, 2006 to begin training as a chaplain, I was convinced that God had finally delivered me to the doorstep of the fulfillment and purpose that I had craved for so long. The start to my journey there was serendipitous.
During a phone call with my friend Cecilia in early 2006, she mentioned that she was considering a training program in hospital chaplaincy—Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE)—at Hershey Med. I was intrigued, so learned what I could about the program online. Clinical Pastoral Education combined pedagogy, discussion, reflection, clinical time in patient units, and overnight on-call shifts. It sounded rewarding and exciting. And it seemed to have my name written all over it.
I ended up applying to the program; Cecilia did not. If not for the phone call with my friend, would I still have been a chaplain? Possibly not. But it’s also possible that things unfolded exactly the way God had planned. Maybe that phone call with Ceil happened right when God thought I was ready for chaplaincy, at age forty-seven.
It all made perfect sense. Everything I had been doing over the years—nurturing, caring, comforting—seemed like the ideal precursor to hospital chaplaincy. I felt like God had been grooming me for this all along. It was a relief to have finally found my true calling. I was to be a Hospital Chaplain.
And, oh the joy and contentment I felt in the role at times. There were moments I hold as close to my heart now as then: Sitting with an aged patient as he recalled a trip to India with his wife, and their meeting Mother Teresa (now Saint Teresa of Calcutta); being in the emergency room with an Amish family and seeing their relief when they were told that their daughter—run over by a truck on their farm earlier in the day—would survive; glancing out a window and seeing the sun rise over the mountains while paying an early morning visit to a double amputee; and the somber privilege of praying the Twenty-third Psalm in the early morning hours of another overnight on-call shift, at the bedside of a sixty-something-year-old woman who had just died, her gay partner standing across from me on the other side of the bed, holding the hand of the person with whom she had expected to spend many more years.
To be allowed onto the altar of sacredness and intimacy on occasions such as these, filled me with such peace of heart … the kind of peace that flows from a true union between the soul and God.
During the truly heartbreaking cases when, because of disease, an accident or violence, lives—sometimes very young—were lost … even those cases could make me feel that I was exactly where I should be, that I was exactly where God intended. In the midst of tears, fears, and anxious questions from patients’ loved ones, I remained calm, even as I often struggled to find words that would comfort. Composed on the outside; unsure and questioning of myself on the inside. It was as if I had grown an extra layer of skin to separate the two. My questioning hadn’t been about actually being at Hershey Med as a chaplain. That felt right; it felt almost ordained. I couldn’t stop myself, however, from constantly questioning my reactions, non-reactions, and responses to people and situations.
And the thing is, there’s no reason I should have expected myself to know how to respond all time; I had never been a chaplain before. But I lacked the ability to be vulnerable to what I didn’t know, while, at the same time, I expected perfection in myself. And, most of all, I expected God to protect me from the bad stuff.
Month by month, trauma after trauma, my certainty about chaplaincy became diluted … first by doubt, and then by fear. When even getting out of my car in the med center parking garage became a long, drawn-out pep talk (“Come on, Tess, I know you can do this!”), I knew chaplaincy was over for me. At that point, even the thought that hospital chaplaincy might have been God’s plan for me—a thought that had once been so comforting and inspiring to me—wasn’t enough to keep me there. I finished the training program, then left the hospital. In the months that followed, I started to battle the demons that eventually come after anyone who experiences trauma. Memories of the sights and sounds of suffering … things the mind holds onto for a very long time.
I also felt confused.
I felt deceived by The One who I believed would never desert me.
I was angry at God, who had called me tantalizingly close to the contentment and sense of purpose I had longed for over so many years. And I grieved, because hospital chaplaincy—to that point the closest I had come to finding my spiritual and professional home—had become something I could no longer touch. That’s what hospital chaplaincy becomes, in its most sacred sense—a world you gently touch and love, one patient at a time. Instead, that world had become toxic to me.
For a long time after I left Hershey Med, all I could associate with hospital chaplaincy was emotional pain, anger, and a sense of betrayal. The backdrop for all of that emotion were the questions I endlessly put to God: “How could my trying to do something good end in so much pain? How could you let this happen, Lord? Why didn’t you protect me?”
At the same time, I felt that I had failed God. He had called me to chaplaincy, and I couldn’t cut it.
I came away from hospital chaplaincy feeling depressed and traumatized.
I carried on with life and functioned pretty well. Most days, and in front of most people, I could keep up the façade that everything in my world was peachy. There were some days, though, when I had to will myself to get out of bed, take a shower, and leave the house. I’m thankful that, through the worst of it, my two kids were away at college and then off starting their own lives, but I suspect they could sense, at times, that something was wrong.
Somehow, through it all, I was never without the hope that things would get better. I always envisioned a return to a happy life, and that belief was a blessing. I just didn’t know how long it would take.
It ended up taking the better part of eight years. I’m so very grateful to the loving, caring people in my life, especially my husband and therapist, who saw me through.
I hate to think of all of the hours and days of my life that I lost to depression and PTSD. Hours creating, caring, holding my husband’s hand, calling the kids, playing with our dogs, reading … hours just being happy. I can’t get it back. But I have turned it around. Some memories will never go away, but I can now peacefully coexist with them.
The past few years have given me the time and distance I’ve needed to think of many of my past experiences as lessons learned, and acknowledge the graces they’ve bestowed on my life.
Explaining past pain as a means of finding grace sounds convenient, doesn’t it? From about 2008 to 2016, I never could have done it; I hurt too much. Honestly, though, sometimes you have to push yourself to find grace in a painful experience in order to start healing. The grace you find that way isn’t a lie, and it doesn’t suddenly make everything all better. In my case, as grace slowly revealed itself, it lifted such a burden from my heart and helped to dispel my anger.
One grace for me was in realizing and accepting that I didn’t have to fully heal from trauma. I wrote about that more fully in my February 1, 2019 Newsletter.
Another grace is the belief that, despite the resulting emotional pain, there were good reasons for me to have been at Hershey Medical Center as a chaplain … that it was still God’s plan for me. Not that He wanted me to suffer. No, not at all.
Without trying to infer that I have any idea what God is thinking, I’ll just offer that perhaps God thought that my experiences—good or bad—as a chaplain would take me to an even better place in my life.
What if God intended hospital chaplaincy to be the path, rather than the destination? (If you’re going through a difficult time right now, could you maybe think of it as a path to something better that God has planned for you?)
What if writing about my experiences as a hospital chaplain—what I’m now doing—is what God intended all along? Writing about those experiences in a way that has meaning for others … maybe that has always been God’s plan for me.
Far from making me angry, this thought only deepens my love for Him.
And I am humbled by the mystery of it all.
(I’ll have more to say about everything here in the memoir I’m currently writing.)
Photo Credit: Paola Chaaya on Unsplash.