Hospital chaplains

For years what ER has really needed was a good chaplain written in. They've had clergy come in as patients and occasionally had clergy come in to minister to a dying person but no chaplain. Well, this season they finally get one and she is so lame it hurts.

Last night's episode is a case in point. One story line saw a prison doctor save the life of a young boy from drowning. It turns out that he was responsible for executing 17 prisoners including the boy's father. He has come to the conviction that he was wrong to execute these prisoners and is now doing everything he can to make amends to the families before he dies. He is convinced that what he has done isn't enough and that he will be condemned to hell for killing the inmates. The doctors call in the chaplain to help relieve his torment and she is as helpful as spitting on a forest fire.

She says nothing of significance, doesn't understand his fear, and walks away distraught because she was able to bring no relief. In a scene with one of the doctors she says that she was ordained, she studied Buddhism, she went to an ashram, she thought that kind of synthesized approach would be good in a hospital but what people want when they are suffering is certainty and she can't provide it. Well, duh.

The issue of how to provide spiritual care in secular institutions is a complex one but I don't think the answer is to create some kind of weird esperanto of religious language that speaks to no one and for no one. There is an implicit criticism of the patient in describing what he wants as certainties. I think that what is at the base of this is the idea that people who are firmly within a religious tradition and take the worldview seriously are really people looking for fixed answers because they can't handle ambiguity or uncertainty. Someone who is satisfied by her vague, contentless reassurances is obviously much more spiritually mature.

The patient is tormented because he believes he is a moral agent and that his actions have consequences. Her platitudes aren't just useless, they are insulting, because she fails to take him seriously. She is in effect dismissing his ability to earn damnation, not for theological reasons - she isn't arguing that his repentance is all God needs to forgive him or that God does not condemn people to hell - she is neither a Lutheran or an universalist - but because no one would take the idea that human beings can do things worthy of condemnation seriously. When she concludes that she has nothing to offer patients I responded - ain't that the truth!

How different was the story line a few years ago when Luka treats a bishop dying of Lupus. The bishop sees Luka's torment over the death of his family and speaks words of absolution with authority.

Friends would say to me, it is just a tv show, and it is of course. But the issues raised by this episode get played out in chaplaincy programmes in many places. And you have to wonder how many struggling patients/students/prisoners get offered this kind of spiritual pablum.

Little Mosque on the Prairie Returns

Tonight was the second episode of this season's Little Mosque on the Prairie and I think after two shows it is fair to say that it is much better than last year. The writing is not so over the top, the premises are more believable and the characters are less caricatures. I hope the rest of the season is as good.

BTW, I think this season of Boston Legal continues to show promise although I'm missing some of last year's characters. I've watched four episodes of season three again and am loving it even more. Denny Crane.

Boston Legal - Season 4 begins

Just a couple of quick comments about last night's Boston Legal episode. It was interesting see them tackle the issue of corporate sponsorship of university research. Alan Shore's plea for independence in research was wonderful. I'm not so sure I like the changes in the cast. I'm going to miss Paul Lewiston and the Ken doll. We'll see. I do love Clarence and Jerry though - I'm glad we'll be seeing more of them. Thanksgiving and my Boston Legal, Season 3 marathon beckons!

The Emmys were tonight

Congratulations to James Spader. Alan Shore, you are my hero.

Season 4 begins September 25th. Amazon sent me an email today saying Season 3 is in the mail to me!!!!! I see a marathon Boston Legal session in my plans for Thanksgiving weekend.

Internet desert

I'm taking a few days holidays while renos are being done on my house and am having troubling getting internet access. So please forgive the silence.

I have had a chance to do some reading and movie watching. I reread Chaim Potok's The Book of Lights and the new Marcia Muller mystery. I'm now reading Donald Miller's Searching for God Know's What. I have also been rewatching season one of the West Wing for the first time in years. Last night I watched Reality Bites. I need to write about this but it will have to wait until I get back to a computer. My time on this one is about to end.

Little Mosque on the Prairie

Great! Our U.S. Anglican brothers and sisters have discovered Little Mosque on the Prairie! Read all about it here.

Reprieves

So the city has decided that trying to put a new line in might cause more problems than it solves so they aren't going to do it unless we have problems. Yeah! And the deadline for the piece I'm writing that I thought was this weekend has been extended to the middle of August. Yeah! And the toothache I've had for two days is gone this morning. Yeah!

The push to bring order to the chaos in my house is still on, however, and to that end I've been cleaning while watching Battlestar Galactica. It is a fascinating show and as I get closer to the end of it I'm beginning to have grief issues. I guess I will have to start rewatching the Sopranos when this is done. And then I'll look forward to September 18th when the 3rd season of Boston Legal is released. Already have it pre-ordered!

BG touches on all sorts of really interesting issues including whether or not is ethical to torture cylon prisoners since they aren't human. The show also has many religious symbols/themes running through it. The cylons return after a 40 year absence, the humans are searching for the promised land, they are led by the stars. Yet, I've decided that at its heart it is anti-Christian. The cylons are the ones who worship the One True God. It seems they aren't able to reproduce successfully and since their god has commanded them to be fruitful and multiply they capture and rape women and put them in baby farms in order to fulfil the commandments. The humans are either atheists or worship many gods like Zeus and Athena. The only human who worships the god of the cylons is the traitor in their midst who is collaborating with the cylons. I guess you could argue that this is a rejection of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Watching this is a bit like reading Philip Pullman's novels. You know they don't like your faith tradition but they are such good story-tellers you get sucked in anyway. Only two disks more and I'm done. Let's hope the house is in order by then!

Back Home

I spent my study leave in my favourite place in south Saskatchewan - a little piece of paradise. It was great to be able to read and think and write without easy access to my email and with my cell phone turned off. The local Co-Op brings in cilantro now and there is a really nice coffee place that makes a good latte so it is no hardship to be there. I rent a cottage from a super guy and we had some great conversations over some delicious meals. I've met some really interesting people through him too and had a chance to see some this trip. A friend of mine drove out for a couple of days and that was really great and of course I checked in with friends a bit via email and the aforementioned cell phone. Mostly though I feel quite cut off there - tv is limited and I didn't see a newspaper for two weeks.

Now I'm back to the reality of my van being in the shop again and an incredibly messy house - reality is crushing in again!

One thing I was really happy about though was being able to go to the movie rental place to pick up some more episodes of Battlestar Galactica. I'm hooked. I watched it in the '70s when it was fun but cheesy. Now it is really very dark with lots of sex and violence. Little kids watched it when I was a kid. Now it is hot enough that it set off the cottage's dvd player's parental controls.

It started out as essentially cowboys and indians in space. The bad guys were the cylons, robots invented by humans to do their grunt work. The cylons eventually rebelled and became the classic 20th century enemy - the faceless, emotionless horde that threatened to take over because when you killed one another just stepped forward to take its place. Maybe it was a metaphor for a time of war with an enemy that never seemed to give up and never seemed to diminish. Or maybe it was a way of talking about the dangers of the emerging technology - a kind of more popular (and much more enjoyable) version of 2001 a space odyssey.

In the new version the cylons have developed the ability to adopt human form so the war now is with the enemy within. They still fight cylons in space but the real threat is the cylons living next to them. A show about war has become a show about terrorism. Certainly this reflects the age we now live in.

Shatner Roast

Forgot to say...we started to watch the Shatner roast and except for a couple of funny lines it was clear after ten minutes that it was mainly crude, hurtful, unfunny abuse. Turned it off and watched Dogma instead. It is crude and kind of dumb but a lot more fun.

Jane Fonda

I caught the last 15 mins of The Actor's Studio on Bravo this afternoon. It was an interview with Jane Fonda. Hard to get my head around the fact that she's almost 70. I also didn't know that she had become a Christian. Here is an interview with her about her conversion. We both love Anne Lamott.

Friends, family, church

One of the problems of working in the parish and the chaplaincy is trying to balance both. Last week was a chaplaincy week. This week was a parish week. The first half of the week was clergy conference. Thursday evening was Bible Study. Friday evening was a parish potluck with the Bishop and this evening I went out with two families from the parish for Ethiopian food at the latest restaurant to open in Lethbridge. The nice thing about classes being over and lots of students being gone is that it is easier to flex my time. So chaplaincy work got done in the cracks around the parish this week - makes up for all the times of the year when it is the other way around.

A lot of neat things happened the last couple of days. We're doing a Bible study on the book of Revelation and it has been really interesting. Not every one is thrilled with the book. I'm having a hard time convincing folks that the message is really one of hope - they hear a lot of judgment in it. I've been reading Barbara Rossing's book The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation and I like her take on it.

The really neat part of the Bible study was when I asked them what message they thought the Spirit had for our parish. There was general agreement that the parish was a warm and caring community but that we could do more to reach out and serve the community outside our doors. They talked about the young people in the town of Coaldale and their worries for them. I talked about the ministry of one of our priests in Aboriginal ministry and my concerns about how to support him. We agreed that we would pursue this with others from the parish.

Last night's dinner was really good too. We had a good turnout and it was a laid back casual time for people to meet our new Bishop. There was loads of food too. My theory, based on 12+ years of ministry and many many church potlucks, is that there is a directly relationship between the amount of food at potlucks and the health of a congregation. When people want to be there and want to make other people welcome they bring lots of food. I've been to potlucks where we ran out of food before everyone has gone through the line and usually there were problems in the life of that community.

Tonight I went out with friends to try our new Ethiopian restaurant and we had a great time. These folks are like family and the food was really good. After dinner we left the adults to visit and the kids and I walked down the street to get ice cream. As we walked by a window I realized one of the kids is now 5" taller than me. He was two when I started in the parish and now he towers over me. Sigh. We laughed lots - it was a really fun evening.

One of the things I was told when I started in ministry was that it was really important to have friends outside the parish and outside the church generally. I'm really grateful for the community of friends I have outside the church. When I was ordained I had a very large family section in the church and almost none of them came up for communion. It was very funny. At the same time, the friendships I have found in the parish and in the larger church community bring me great joy.

Tomorrow I'm bbqing with two of my Lethbridge family and I've rented the William Shatner roast for afterwards. I'm hoping they are game to watch it. I'm in the mood for a little Denny Crane and we've watched all of Seasons one and two of Boston Legal already.

Little Mosque on the Prairie III

Well this week's episode was kind of fun but again things were said about the Anglican church that were just unbelievable. No, I'm not talking about the same sex wedding. It is hard to imagine that a priest who was so worried only a week ago about being shut down by the Archdeacon for financial reasons wouldn't worry about being shut down by the same Archdeacon for disobeying Church discipline (the issue is being debated in the Anglican Church of Canada but a retired Archbishop was disciplined for participating in a wedding when he didn't actually do the wedding - it is hard to imagine that the same wouldn't happen in small town Saskatchewan). But it is possible - probably as possible as the story line about Yasir taking a second wife. No, the objection I have is to naming the Anglican church Mercy Anglican. Anglican churches are not named for the town they are in. United Churches often are. But Anglican churches have some interesting saint's name. So I'd like to suggest that the church could be named St. Joseph the Carpenter, since Yasir the contractor has found a home there. Or it could be called St. Clare Anglican Church or St. Gabriel's for the patron saints of television. Or maybe St. Genesius Anglican, or St. Vitus Anglican after one of the patron saints of actors. Now that would be believable.

Little Mosque on the Prairies

Little Mosque on the Prairies premiered this week and apparently 2.1 million people were watching. I watched it and enjoyed it. It is drawing comparisons to Corner Gas because they are both Canadian comedies set in small town Saskatchewan but they have a different feel. I'm a huge fan of Corner Gas which moves at a slower pace than Little Mosque. Dog River is a smaller town, the cast is smaller and the scope of the stories is smaller. If I had any criticism of Little Mosque it was that it was a little too hyper - it felt more like Ontario than Saskatchewan. But it shows great promise.