medicine and religion: a closer look
Pastoral Care at St.Gregory’s Healing in a Religious Community Lynn Baird, Cheryl Hendrickson, and Sara Miles
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raying and caring for one another, and for strangers, is at the heart of our spiritual life as a community. At St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, we don’t provide pastoral care with the expectation that we can fix all problems or cure all illnesses and sorrows. Although we understand that there are clinical, medical, and psychological dimensions to pastoral care and to healing, we don’t pretend to be doctors or psychologists. Our focus is on spiritual support: We believe that by opening ourselves to others and accompanying one another through ordinary human joys and suffering, we will find more of God. Praying with others, sharing their grief and delight, and offering or asking for practical help opens us to receive what Jesus calls “life, abundant.” Cheryl Hendrickson, a member of St. Gregory’s, volunteers as a chaplain at San Francisco General. “When I randomly entered an ICU,” she writes, “I met Leon’s mother. I learned that Leon had been shot in the back of his head, execution-style, leaving him unconscious. Leon’s mother tried to reveal a bit about her only son, and then she told me, ‘I went home and cleaned his boxers. I did it out of habit, but he might not need them again.’” “Then the mother asked, ‘Honey, do you have kids?’ “‘No,’ I replied. “I started to wonder what I could do for the mother. I could have stayed and ‘fixed’ the problem, telling her that things would be fine and that God was working a purpose out, or something cheesy like, ‘God needs Leon up there.’ I did not know Leon. I could have left the room, giving the mother time to be alone with her son. That would have been easy. I could have left the www.sfms.org
image of tubes, breathing machines, and loss behind. “There was a third option, staying and
“Our focus is on spiritual support: We believe that by opening ourselves to others and accompanying one another through ordinary human joys and suffering, we will find more of God.” being. This meant that I needed to sit with my own fears of losing a family member and to sit with the fear that, as a childless chaplain, I was inadequate. “I stayed with the mother and I just said, ‘This has to be so hard.’ She looked to her son and she cried and I did not leave. I did not leave and I was uncomfortable. There was nothing I could ‘do’ but be comfortable with the uncomfortable feelings and believe that God was present in that space. In a space that was very close to the ground, very unadorned.” At St. Gregory’s, pastoral care is not the property of one pastor—the traditional overworked parish priest who hears all confessions, visits all the sick, counsels all troubled souls, and manages the health of an entire dependent congregation. Instead, we see pastoral care as the responsibility of a healthy and mutually pastoring congregation. The work is peer- and communitybased, serving church members, visitors, and the broader community. It relies on a network of trained volunteers work-
ing—usually in teams—under the direction of a pastor. We offer practical, logistical support for patients and families during emergencies and illness; prayer, calls, and pastoral support during illnesses and deaths; and spiritual and emotional support through individual and group meetings. We maintain contact with homebound members and reach out to those in trouble. We offer healing prayer after church services and coordinate ongoing support groups (for example, for those dealing with aging parents or chronic illness) and special trainings (for example, on end-of-life issues). We work with St. Gregory’s Food Pantry to serve the more than 400 low-income families who come to the church every week for groceries. Our pastoral care e-mail list, with more than a hundred subscribers, circulates requests for prayer and serves as a forum for staying abreast of pastoral care issues in the community. Because we’re Christians—a religion of incarnation––a lot of our pastoral care is intimately about bodies. We touch one another liturgically and in healing prayer; we share bread and wine together; we carry the sick, hold the injured, and rub the feet of the dying. St. Gregory’s—a church known for its liturgical dancing, its integration of children and adults in services, its fullthroated a cappella singing, and its feeding of the hungry––doesn’t separate the “spiritual” from the “physical.” Our baptismal font, an outdoor rock fountain, is just a few feet away from the columbarium that holds the ashes of our members. Our spiritual life is grounded in physicality: touch, bread, wine, oil. Lynn Baird, the priest who developed the pastoral care program at St. Gregory’s,
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