Chaplain's Corner

A few months back I was chatting with a fellow chaplain and he asked, “How do you deal with being involved in so much death?” I didn’t have much of an answer. I knew that being involved with death wasn’t messing up my personal equilibrium and that I was able to be caring but I had no words to explain what I had learned. Earlier this week, I read a statement in an article that provided the words I couldn’t find for my response. “Boundaries do not mean ‘detached neutrality,’ boundaries need to be about passionate but trustworthy engagement.” (Miriam Greenspan)

“Passionate but trustworthy engagement…” Working in the context of death can have its perils. On one had it can easily nudge a person to developing an aloofness that never really engages on a personal and spiritual level with the dying person and the connected family. The thinking is “I have to maintain my objectivity and reason if my emotions get involved they will cloud my objectivity. Detachment and aloofness prevent us from getting emotionally involved. I think we can all understand that dynamic. The other end of the spectrum is that the caring professional gets so emotionally involved, enmeshed with the person and family that objectivity flies out the window.

But these are the extremes:  either maintaining one’s objectivity and capacity to think well despite the emotional turmoil raging beneath or immersing oneself so fully into the emotion of the situation that we cease to be able to serve the family. However, there are a lot of places between these two extremes to consider.

Miriam Greenspan suggests that being “passionate but trustworthy” is the balance we need to strive for. “Passion” requires that we be fully involved in the care we want to give another. By fully involved I mean engaging all that I am: my mind, my heart, my spirit, and my will focusing on what am I able to offer this person and family as they journey through “the valley of the shadow of death”. “Trustworthy” calls the caregiver to maintain the other-centered focus – not allowing the death and all the emotions around it to become about “me”.

The needs, the sorrows, the losses of those we work with at times can become overwhelming. Add those to our own personal stuff: the private struggles, pain, confusion, hope, conviction, relationships and everything else that I bring to my work and there are those times when engaging the pain of those I care for seems to be “the straw that will break the camel’s back”. Maintaining good boundaries is a task that requires constant evaluation and adjustment. When we set the boundaries hard and fast we easily become clinically cold and detached from the human tragedy that surrounds us. On the other hand if we allow the boundaries to collapse and get absorbed into the pathos of every encounter we lose any capacity to provide therapeutic care of any kind.

“Passionate but trustworthy engagement” is a lofty goal, but every worthy aspiration is lofty and reaching such aspirations requires that we maintain an awareness, and give attention to the goal: to be present for the other in a way that assists them in dealing with what is theirs to embrace, feel and journey through.

I have moved from one end of this spectrum to the other over the many years I have engaged caring for others. My cool neutrality under analysis was really a self protective mechanism and was not other centered at all. The same is true of those times I have become absorbed in the others pain, problem and journey through darkness. When under the light of day I was able to explore why I moved in that direction, I also discovered that it was again about “me”. “Passionate but trustworthy engagement” is where being there for the other is found.