The Words of the Hendricks Family
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The Words of the Hendricks Family |
Rev. Harlan Ratmeyer, M. Div., D. Min., serves as the Manager of the Department of Pastoral Care and as the Supervisor for the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at Albany Medical Center, Albany, New York. Harlan is an ordained minister in the Reformed Church of America, and also pastors a local congregation. A native of Illinois, Harlan has counseled, trained and supervised in a variety of settings in Michigan, California and Illinois, and has led the department at Albany Med since 1998.
Tyler Hendricks: In her book, What's Your God Language?, Myra Pirenne describes nine spiritual styles, each of which has a different way of relating with God. What difference would that make in terms of your ministering to people? In what ways does your church include and affirm all spiritual styles?
Harlan Ratmeyer: Well, it's interesting that these nine styles fit in some ways with the Enneagram personality types (www.enneagraminstitute.com/). They agree there are nine positions or personality types out of which people basically function.
The first on the list is "naturalist." In terms of ministering to a naturalist, I'd say that God reveals Godself through nature, from the beauty and awesomeness of the universe to the tenderness of flowers behind the rock. There are miracles and splendor everywhere. Hopefully one would allow that person to give input as to how they experience the holy through nature. Maybe they would do gardening, to savor the beauty of the creation.
Question: You love gardening...
Answer: I'm most at prayer in the middle of the garden. It's a deep engagement with the earth. Frequently thoughts and insights arise that one is not planning on; they just happen.
Question: The next on the list is the "sensor."
Answer: Most communities of faith have people who experience God through stained glass windows, incense, flower arrangements, beautiful music and all the art forms. They add enormously to the community life by contributing aesthetic works. Everyone appreciates it although not everyone is able to create it.
A healthy person has aspects of all of these nine. Each trait will be stronger or weaker but balance is important.
Question: How do you nurture the traditionalist?
Answer: Much of our culture is getting away from traditions. Often institutions tend to destroy the corporate memory. Traditions bring a sense of history, the past, the foundation on which the faith has grown. They offer a great deal. Many faith groups are struggling between the contemporary and traditional; some congregations are split down the middle. That tension can lead to rigidity on both sides, which is destructive. Modernists at their best will work with the traditions and healthy traditionalists will recognize that their traditions were at one time con- temporary innovations. The interplay should be enriching.
Question: The next God language is that of the ascetic. This is the season of Lent; where does asceticism fit in the contemporary American setting?
Answer: There are movements that seek to be ascetic. We have patients in the hospital who want no frills, no TV, because they want to be simple and quiet, with space for solitude and reflection. During Lent people find deep meaning in fasting, in giving something up. Activists might take on something for Lent, but ascetics will surrender something in order to "be still and know that I am God.'
Question: What would you recommend to someone in your church seeking a spiritual practice?
Answer: Good question. I might send people to walk on the labyrinth we recently built, and ask them to empty their mind and walk without a lot of thought. To focus on one word, like grace, love or peace. To take their time quietly, with a little, gentle physical movement. It can be a moving spiritual experience. It may seem awkward, but can have impact with continual practice. Sit quietly and focus on breathing, for five minutes, emptying the mind. Out of that, things come to people that they could not hear when they are rushing and busy. Create spaces of quiet and focus. Work in the garden by yourself. In the quiet task of weeding, the spirit can speak to you in powerful ways.
Question: Do you have activists in your church? You have a background in social activism.
Answer: In our church as well as in the hospital you find people who find the presence of the Holy in working for justice, advancing the cause of making healthcare available for everyone, ensuring the system is caring and kind and just. I have a lot of empathy with that, with the command not just to say "Lord, Lord" but to bring the spirit of God when the hungry are fed, the homeless are sheltered and the disabled and prisoners are visited. Activism rounds out a spiritual life. This is how some express and experience the spiritual dimension of life.
Question: How do you meet God in care giving?
Answer: We name this department the pastoral care department. It is the word by which we are known. Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) educates us about the role of the spiritual care in the healing process. The art of caring is a profound one. The first intention of a caregiver is the same as the first intention in medicine and all caring professions, which is to do no harm. Then we explore those interventions that may be really positive and significant to patients and families. Providing such care can be deeply satisfying.
In the hospital as well as the local church, where most of this is volunteer-based, people need to receive appreciation and thanks for the care they provide. One danger for caregivers is that a lot of people who need care are too broken to thank you. If you are a caregiver by nature, you need to be able to carry on even without a lot of affirmation. So your lament might be that you did so much for everyone without them noticing. That makes it a tricky spiritual gift. It has great rewards, satisfaction in feeding the hungry, but if there is no spiritual support for you as the caregiver, you might run out of energy. Caregivers need built-in ways of being thanked and finding affirmation.
The lesson for pastors is, take care of your caregivers. They can burn out. We do it here sometimes in simple ways. A chaplain will stay up all night with the broken family of a teenager who was killed in a car accident or some such horrific thing, and the chaplain is providing care, but in the morning the caregiver is distraught and burned out from this work. So on most mornings we provide comfort and conversation casually in the cafeteria. We debrief with them; we talk about how difficult it is. We need to tend to the needs of those who take those risks to care, in the trenches, so to speak, working with wounded persons.
Question: I've had several enriching breakfasts with one of the Roman Catholic priests who serve AMC, and he's always attentive to what I experienced doing on-call the night before. The next category is that of the "enthusiast." How do you minister to the enthusiast?
Answer: She or he may be called charismatic, a person who is full of zeal for the Holy, who loves to sing or praise, occasionally almost at the embarrassment of those around them. They are likely to help a community to sing and praise and give thanksgiving. They engender an awareness of the holy, and they may feed the energy of the larger community to express other gifts.
If an enthusiast is a patient in the hospital, they will agree that they want prayer, but then they will lead the prayer very loudly and the chaplain will have to deal with that. But their zeal may be off-putting to those who don't understand it. While some are warmed to this enthusiastic expression, others may experience it as off-putting.
Question: Is the physical expression of spirituality gaining greater acceptance in American Christianity these days?
Answer: I feel awkward with physical emoting. I grew up in a rather staid, traditionalist community and those expressions are more distracting than helpful to me personally. Large groups we see on TV are very enthusiastic or zealous, but our CPE students show a great variety of spiritual styles and I don't see any increase of the enthusiast around here. Some churches gather around that value, become known for it and draw people who like that.
Question: What about the contemplative style?
Answer: Many people who are drawn to CPE have a contemplative appreciation. It may not be their strongest focus, but it is a significant part of many of us. Many students in their opening devotions will cite the great contemplatives, such as St. Theresa, Rumi, and others. They often are creative in using their insights to write prayers or reflections on their experiences in the hospital, where the Holy becomes present in their writing. They tend to make good reflective use of theology in their verbatims. (A verbatim is a writ- ten text that describes a pastoral care encounter in a hospital set- ting. It includes a rendition of the conversation between the chaplain and patient, patient's family, or staff, plus psychological, theological and personal reflections. The CPE group reads and discusses each other's verbatims. They are an important element of pastoral education.)
How people hear and reflect on what's said varies greatly, and I value those people who hear scriptural stories and who think reflectively about how they apply in the relationships in the congregation. It is a great gift to a church; they bring spiritual depth to the life of the church.
We have a labyrinth in the yard of the church I pastor, plus some walking trails in the woods and an outdoor chapel. I notice many people utilizing them at different times, even children. These re- sources assist them in cultivating the contemplative experience.
Question: How do you love and release the gifts of intellectuals?
Answer: Intellectuals keep your feet solidly attached to the earth. They reach into philosophy and theology. I see them as integrators who bring their understandings of the Holy in the form of concepts. But they speak in technical and remote language that is lost to most members of the congregation. The struggle is that they have a hard time to communicate their understandings. But when they accomplish it, they help us stay alive and contemporary in relation to the state of human knowledge, scientific discovery and social reality. There are many thought-provoking articles addressing spirituality and quantum physics, for example.
Each of the nine spiritual styles provide strength to the community, with many positive characteristics. They can also become occasions for discord and argument. The goal for our Clinical Pastoral Education program is to encourage the positive expression of these characteristics, and assist students to more comfortably work with individuals whose spiritual styles differ from their own.
Question: You are a renowned storyteller in the Albany area, and probably elsewhere as well. Where does your storytelling talent come from?
Answer: I heard that my great grandfather was a storyteller, though I never knew him. My dad would tell stories about the day's activities and I would be on the edge of my chair, about how a tractor was fixed or a threshing machine blew apart. When I was 6 or 7, they had me reciting poems or telling stories in groups. It just seemed to be there for me. As you know in the CPE course, I use storytelling as a way of teaching. It allows people to walk alongside you. Instead of hearing lectures that have A, B and C, they see a picture that reveals the nuances of how things should or shouldn't go.
Faith in most religious traditions is built around stories: the creation, the chaos and crisis, and redemption or resolution. Story is at the heart of religious traditions; the Christian tradition is focused around the "old, old story." The faith story is repeated in many ways around little events in small towns as well as the big unfolding dramas in history.
Question: You developed a great Pastoral Care Department here at Albany Medical Center. Can you explain, what is "pastoral care"?
Answer: There are many definitions. John Patton talks about it as a process of "membering and re-membering" (John Patton, Pastoral Care in Context: An Introduction to Pastoral Care (Louisville, KY: West- minster John Knox Press, 2005). First the person tells me about themselves, their story about what happened. They remember. Then we look at what went wrong and in the process may reconnect or "re-member" them to their faith or their family. Then you capture the disconnect, the rupture, and third you remember, or reconnect, the person to their own story. So pastoral care is to stand alongside someone in their journey. It is like being a midwife, accompanying a person for a short while on their journey. You are not there to "fix" them, but to be a companion on the journey, helping a birth process.
The wonder of teaching here with the Albany Medical Center CPE program is that we have people from many faith traditions, of enormous diversity, coming into one place and forming a team of 6 -- 8 students. The teams will often express radically different religious experiences and practices, and layered on top of that or woven within it there will be some of these spiritual gifts. So you bring together the spiritual gifts and the inherited traditions, and you create a team that provides pastoral care. It is a wonderful thing to behold. You have activists from different traditions who link to each other, or caregivers from different traditions, contemplatives, enthusiasts, or traditionalists, who can speak to each other. In teaching pastoral care, I view it as an art, discovering what can be formed out of the resources from many traditions and practices. When one tries to articulate their own faith formation and understanding, it is enriched by taking place in the context of people from a diversity of traditions unlike their own. It has a tendency to help us think through our own traditions and refine our listening abilities and be more aware within ourselves, and be more present to others.
Question: Could you elaborate on that concept of "member and remember"?
Answer: First you ask the person: what brought you here? They tell the story. It includes a crisis, a loss, a separation -- from their community, from their family, from their health. A separation from some significant aspect of their lives, from their expected story line -- so the process of walking together leads to a "re-membering", becoming once again a member of the body, reconnecting with God, a significant person, the treatment care team, their life as a whole person. They connect or integrate a new piece that they did not expect or want to happen, to a new story that makes sense to them. They are in disarray and need to integrate it. That is a holy process. Not everyone makes it. The pastoral care student or resident, the pastor, the chaplain, does best by not trying to be the fixer, to be the savior who makes it okay. She or he is more of a gardener, standing alongside as a facilitator or midwife to make a safe space for this new possibility to grow.
Membering is living in an organic body. It takes place with other people and with God. "Membering" comes from John Patton's saying that hearing and remembering is pastoral care. By life's circumstances, people get distracted and lost. You remember them and "member" them, to restore an organic whole.
Question: What would you say are the spiritual gifts that make for a good chaplain?
Answer: I would begin with the ability to provide a non-anxious presence. Add to that a great capacity for listening. Be a person of patience. To listen is to really know what is said and what is not being said -- to feel the whole story and hear on a deeper level. This means to ask the kind of questions or supportive suggestions that allow the person to go deeper with their story, to get beyond talking about more than the weather, to talk about the meaning of their journey, the meaning of whatever crisis they are in. You allow them to explore. They do a lot of their own work; it is not about convincing or persuading or giving advice. We rather let that person's sacred journey unfold. Then it is the task of gardening -- you plant some seeds and wait and protect the spot while the sun, water and air -- the other circumstances in their life -- allow them to grow.
Question: In CPE I've encountered the value of the concrete ritual elements of spirituality in this process, what we could call the sacraments. What are the values and the drawbacks of tactile ritual?
Answer: Here one has to get particular, as each tradition's concrete elements are unique. As you know, we talk about these at length in our lectures. The chaplain relates to different faith communities with respect for their sacred symbols and rituals and sacraments. In the Christian community the sacraments are provided. Other religions may have other symbols -- meeting for prayer, kneeling, lighting candles, sharing feasts. Each of these of course can be taken superficially or can add depth and significance to the story their tradition tells. Here the capacity of an interfaith chaplain can be limited, and naturally s/he invites the community's leaders to bring the candles, the prayers, the scriptures and so forth. The interfaith chaplain will encourage that and invite the faith community's representative to the hospital to share the tradition.
Question: Tell me how pastoral care is connected in a local church ministry.
Answer: We have many students who are pastors or lay-leaders, who provide ministry in their own local faith community. We hope that there is congruity between content and process, between the ideal and the way we actually live. Hopefully the way we live together and do ministry here at Albany Medical Center is congruent with principles that are good for and consistent with all traditions and communities.
Each of my students in their personal connections with their faith community will live these out in their own rituals, symbols and words, but a sign of healthy pastoral care is communities where integrity, love, joy, humility, kindness and justice abound. When it does, we have done our pastoral work.
Under the pressures of late modernity we organize by more of a corporate model, which can be incongruent with the process of the faith, which is love, joy, peace, faithfulness and trust, not productivity, performance indicators and output measures. These can be harsh in the way they address the value of the person. Faith Communities are not immune to such practices. We might learn the latest from the corporate world that might not be very healthy, in fact might be antithetical to the spiritual traditions. I want spiritual administration to be congruent with spiritual principles, and hope this is true in my community as well as for all my students in their communities.
Question: I have found that some best practices of the business community do reflect spiritual ideals, such as the motive to take care of customers and be attentive to their wants and needs so that they will come back.
Answer: Sometimes there's more hospitality at a Wal-Mart than at the local church. When I talk about corporate models, I'm thinking about the notion of using people for the sake of building a church rather than taking care of people. If you take care of people, your church will grow. Smart corporate models recognize that. People want good service; they want to be welcomed at the door.
Question: How would you work for justice in the local church context?
Answer: Love without justice is syrupy. The church would work for justice in your little town, to end lines of division that let us think there are people on the other side for whom I am not responsible. We can say that we're not Japanese and so were not responsible for Japan's suffering, or can we gather money, goods and services for those on the Japanese coastline, whose nation is shaken.
Healthcare is a good example. I've been engaged for some years in seeking universal healthcare coverage as a philosophy for this country, to gain better service for a cheaper rate. I don't have power to change the system but I have power to advocate. One cannot create justice by oneself, but one can do one's part, speak to and encourage what one believes is right. The role of the faith is not just to comfort, but to challenge. In my Christian reformed theology, the idea of justice comes from the books of Amos, Micah and Hosea: "Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!" (Amos 5:24) That needs to be part of the whole picture. You need the caregiver and you also need the advocate, the prophet. A faith system that is absent those gifts is the weaker for it.