At 1 p.m. on a weekday, the emergency department at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in Upper Manhattan is in full cry, with bays crowded, patients on stretchers lining the hallways, and paramedics bringing in more sick people. Time for the Rev. Margaret A. Muncie to work the floor.
Not shy, this pastor with the clerical collar, the Ann Taylor blazer and the cheerful insistence of one whose own mother called her a steamroller. Among the first women ordained an Episcopal priest and a self-described “Caucasian minority,” she’s an odd bird among the ethnically diverse staff and especially the patients, most of them black or Latino. But she keeps pecking her head behind curtains, parting gatherings of worried family members, impervious to startled looks of suspicion.
“Hi, I’m Peggy Muncie, a hospital chaplain,” she says. “Would you like a visit?”
She’s not there to thump. Deftly, she asks people how they’re feeling, then lets them vent their pain and fear, their anxiety and frustration. She nods, a little pushy with her probing. She flags a nurse. “Can you direct a doctor toward that patient?” she whispers.
And always, at the end of a visit: “Would it be all right if I prayed with you?” The health care chaplain will touch a forehead, hold a hand and quietly pray worries to the Divine, speaking with inflections that, as needed, may be Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim. For the Baptist woman in Bed 7 whose anxieties are making her chest pain worse, the chaplain prays for calm to allow the medicine to work. Gradually, the patient’s breathing slows.
I will always remember fondly the summer I spent in CPE at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. I learned so much about ministry there and I will never forget it. Parkland is the county hospital for Dallas County and, so, they get a lot of the poor as patients. It is also the Level 1 Trauma center for North Texas and we get a lot of patients with severe trauma. One of my areas of responsibility was the medical ER (Parkland has at least four ER’s – medical, surgical (trauma), Psych, and “womens” – emergency pregnancy, rape victims, and other woman specific emergencies). I also had on call responsibility for all areas of the hospital when I was on call. It was a thrilling time and a great time to be able to do ministry while learning about myself as a minister.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
My CPE internship at Stanford was also profoundly meaningful – so much about the work of minstry, the power of presence, the amount of theological hoo-ha that goes out the window in a hospital room (or in a fox hole).
I did my CPE internship at a big hospital in NYC, and it was an ethical mine-field. We were expected to see 40-50 patients a day, in addition to covering two different ER wards. The child cancer wards provided the most psychic pain and also many blessings. To add to the normal demands of that summer we had a two week long power failure in the city and a protracted nurses strike.
And now I’m sorry to get a bit negative here,
The chaplaincy was under ‘Patient Relations’ in the hierarchy. There were three overt cases where attempts were made to co-opt the chaplain interns.
1. As a group we were instructed to report disgruntled patients and their families.
2. We were encouraged to promote and/or discuss organ donation.
3. Some of us were approached at various times by the nurses reps to take the latest contract counter-offers back to the administration.
There were other situations that were less obvious – mostly a pervasive pressure to be supportive but ineffectual.
I think the reason some of this happened was because the hospital administration had, at some point, began thinking that chaplains and chaplain interns were providing human services. Since the hospital was paying for the chaplaincy program, I suppose admin assumed chaplains could be used also as part of the hospital risk management program. And, of course, the nurses representatives thought we were simply neutered shills for the administration.
During that summer I learned a great deal about ministering to people in spiritual, physical, or emotional distress. It was invaluable training. But I have reservations about a pluralistic model of ministry that forces chaplains to put the truth claims of their tradition in the background in order to provide generic support services. I came to think we were being encouraged to be team players, but the team were were supposed to be playing for was really the hospital.