Chaplaincy and the Medical Model

Last Friday I ran into a student who was looking a bit disorientated - not unusual at the start of the year for someone new to University. I asked if I could help and she told me she was looking for a centre that offered support for students. She said she had seen it on the Flinders website and she thought the website said it was in this vicinity.

I immediately thought there could be at least three options. We were standing outside the International Student Services Unit - could it be there? No, she was not an international student.

We were also outside one of the rooms of the Student Learning Centre - was she looking for help with her study skills? No, she had "walked out of an exam because she had had a panic attack" and "I need to look at my workload".

Well, maybe you were thinking of Health and Counselling. They help with these things and could get you some kind of an exemption from failing the exam. "No I don't want Health and Counselling. They're booked out weeks ahead."

I was a bit surprised at her negative reaction to Health and Counselling. Obviously she had had dealings with them already. But at this moment the student was clearly distressed and a discussion about the benefits of Health and Counselling wasn't going to help.

I thought that perhaps she might get a hearing with one of the Student Advocacy Officers in Flinders One. 'Why don't we go up to the Student Hub and talk with one of the Welfare Officers?' This didn't tally with her recollection of what she had seen on the FLO website, but, after some discussion and having ruled out the other options she agreed.

As we walked to the Student Hub she talked about CentreLink and how they don't give you enough money to survive. I quietly noted her reaction against traditional welfare bureaucracy.

We arrived and two welfare officers were sitting behind the reception counter. I introduced her and then she began her story again, with the same questions from them and responses from her. 

I felt her frustration. How come the most vulnerable have to go through this process at the very point of their vulnerability? I thought. Given her agitation, why didn't the Welfare Officer at least come out from behind the forbidding reception counter to show some empathy?

After some more question and answer, the Welfare Officer made a suggestion that she see the Disability Officer. There was some convincing that her panic attacks were in fact a disability and she finally agreed.

So off we walked to Health and Counselling to see the Disability Officer. The receptionist in the Waiting Room told us that she was on the phone. So we retired away from the area in which several people were sitting. A TV on the wall was entertaining itself. We waited, standing well away, near the entrance to the room. She told me about her childhood and some experiences she had - with a Student Exchange that went badly wrong in Denmark, how her parents split and she went to China to see if a change in environment would help her get control of her panic attacks. Why China of all places? That was where her father was. The change in environment worked. But now, back in Australia, the anxiety was back. 

I realise why the people in the Waiting Room sit in absolute silence. It is not possible to have any kind of conversation without everyone hearing it. People are probably wondering what everyone is doing here anyway, like a scene from "As Good as it Gets"!

Soon the Disability Officer arrives and we retire to the corridor outside the Waiting Room to talk. Yes, she will see her but she will have to make an appointment. She is booked solid for all of next week. But she convinces the student to make an appointment, otherwise she would never get to see her. She agrees at last, and, before they return to the reception counter to make the time, I invite her to drop by if she would like to continue to chat. I think it unlikely, but you never know. I leave them to it, and leave, wondering why any student in immediate distress wouldn't take the easy way out and jump off the Uni bridge.

Care Network

Yesterday I had the good fortune to be part of a nice example of how long term chaplaincy can create systemic care.

I was going to and fro  to the kitchen next door to my office in the hubub of Muslim men, washing and greeting each other and milling around my door opposite the meeting room ready for Friday prayer. As I turned back to my office I was struck by the incongruity of a petit young woman in a short red dress outside my office among all the men. Amil, a Muslim from Malaysia, whom I had got to know over the last two years as he worked on his postgraduate qualifications, was talking with her.

As I approached, Amil introduced me. "Geoff, this is Praneeta, who is a Hindu. She's from India. She would like to meet some Hindu friends. Where do the Hindus meet?"

We had a quick conversation about the Hindu young people meeting off campus at the temple on Friday nights, but it was noisy so we adjorned to my office. Amil assured her as he passed her into my care, "Geoff is a good bloke. He will look after you."

She looked quite disorientated. I began to get details for her to contact the Hindu chaplain, when Amil poked his head in the door. "She arrived two days ago." Turning to Praneeta, "You're jetlagged, two weeks behind in class and you need some Indian friends."

I am thinking that although Amil might have been influenced by a very attractive young woman, he is displaying many attributes of good chaplaincy.

He has noticed her distress, befriended her somehow and convinced her to go with him to find me as a possible source of help. He has noticed, made connections, built confidence and pointed to a way forward. Good chaplaincy. And cultural and faith differences have not got in the way.

As we unpack the causes of her distress, it turns out that the core of her problem is not a religious one. She has arrived late for the start of the semester; so apart from the usual problems of jet-lag and cultural shock, she is imediatley anxious about her studies.

We have a joke about getting off the plane and wondering where the people are, the sparse and ordered traffic, the lack of noisy bustle of three-wheelers smoking their way through the narrowest of gaps between overloaded trucks and buses.

She says that in India, you have books and you study what is in them and you sit an exam at the end of the year about what is in the books. But here there is none of that and she doesn't have any idea of what the people in her class are talking about. This is the main source of her distress. Her presenting need for Indian friends is not about finding the Hindu community as such, but the way she thinks she can get help.

In my mind, I agree with her, but also wonder whether, she will also need the Student Learning Centre, which is set up for this kind of support. But not immediately. I know who has a finger on the pulse of the Indian students. I call Nikhil on his mobile.

I had met Nikhil two years ago when he was employed as a student advocate in Student Assist upstairs from me. He set up the Indian Students Association and we became good friends.

Fortunately Nikhil is on campus and he can be down in 20 minutes.

Praneeta waits outside the centre and I get back to heating up the lunch I bought from the Indonesian women who bring in their little plastic lunch packs for sale to the Islamic community following prayer. I am a bit anxious about losing sight of her in case she disappears. She has already eaten and doesn't want to kill time with me. Friday Prayer begins. I see her pacing outside as I eat in the foyer. The benches in the Mall are all occupied by Muslim women, waiting for their husbands to finish.

Prayer complete, the men begin to file out of the meeting room. I gobble down the last of the noodles and go outside to see if Praneeta is still around. There is a throng od Muslims gathering. Nikhil arrives, earlier than I expected, and we find her. Introductions are made and we decide to find a seat by the lake. Nikhil asks me whether I mind if they speak in Hindi. Of course I don't, knowing that the sound of her language will be music to her ears and I am completely confident that Nikhil will have her best interests at heart.

Nikhil has already anticipated and has made contact with a female Indian social work student friend of his who has recently graduated and has agreed to help. 

It is a beautiful clear autumn day and the scene by the lake is idyllic. But she will have seen none of this. She is focussed on seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieving her goals and probably wondering why she was crazy enough to have left all the familiar surroundings of home and got herself into this situation. She feels completely alone and helpless, an alien in an impossible situation.

I leave her with Nikhil, comforted by the sound of her own language and his cultural understanding and beginning to see a ray of hope for the future. I will check with Nikhil next week.

I make a note in my head, that we need some female chaplains.

Doing what needs to be done

I remember seeing a TV program about a chaplain in country Victoria visiting farming families. There he was, helping repair a fence. When quizzed about what he thought chaplaincy was, he said that it was "doing what needed to be done".

The program revealed that his chaplaincy was more than that. His visit was an assurance to each family that someone was there for them. The "doing what needed to be done" was a demonstration that he was part of their dream, their struggle, their longing. He was with them. The mutuality was obvious from the way they opened the front door to him.

He was not asking them to be part of his life. If he said a prayer with them, it wasn't to exert a religious influence on to them or their situation. It was more like thinking aloud, from the heart.


Yesterday I visited a Magistrate from Bangledesh over here to complete a Masters. I hadn't seen N for a while and for some reason she came to mind. So I dropped in to her flat on my way home.

She was delighted to see me and told me that her oldest child had been asking why he hadn't seen "Grandpa" for a while. I had no idea I meant anything to him - he always disappeared into his room whenever I visited!

N would return to Bangladesh at the end of the year. She was anxious that above all she needed to maintain her moral standards. She was already anticipating the dilemmas she would have to face because of the widespread corruption in her country - the obligatory bribes. And the consequences of putting away corrupt officials.

I was on holy ground.

Chaplaincy is accompanying people in the ups and downs of their lives. It's remembering them, and being willing to "do what needs to be done".

St Francis is reputed to have said: "Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words" and to “Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

The Benefit of a Building

Faithfulness believes that what is needed will be given as you take the step into the path that love demands.

The vision of Oasis is one that takes seriously the determination and effort to live harmoniously with each other across difference - an achievement Diana Eck, of Harvard's Pluralism Project calls pluralism. While each of us maintains our integrity for who we are, we are open, through goodwill, to sharing a vision of genuine community.

Because we have inherited a building - the Religious Centre at Flinders University - we have been able to embody this vision in a tangible way.

In the late 90's we received a grant to refurbish the centre, facilitated by an architect. We were able to make a transition from what was established as a Christian centre, informed by the architecture of churches, where one 'faced the front', to one that recognised religious diversity.

The existing rectangular meeting space, with a raised area at one end, was converted into two level rooms - a large square meeting room and a smaller rectangular one which has a window overlooking the sea. The squareness of the main room signals a sense of equality. It is set with a central low table and a square of lounge chairs around the table. The space may be adapted for lectures using the lounge chairs and/or a number of conventional chairs.

The smaller room is a place of meditation and prayer.

The architect also refashioned the entrance to the centre, removing the walls of an existing office to provide direct and visible access from the Mall, a major walkway and the shopping precinct of the University. Extra space was made for this foyer by providing a concave wall at the far side facing a large glass entrance door. This wall provides a sense of welcoming embrace. On it, three colourful indigenous paintings greet you.

The foyer pays tribute, first up, to the indigenous owners of the land we tread in common. This is the only space where any one religious or spiritual tradition is acknowledged. The floor covering, for example, was deliberately chosen to suggest the red sand of Australia's centre.
But we decided early on, that to respect the diversity of religious groups using the centre, religious symbols for any religious observance in the meeting spaces would be brought in by participants but removed afterwards. Storage space is provided. In this way, the space is kept "religiously neutral" and so, available to all.

As the concept of Oasis has developed the idea that religious artifacts might be displayed in the foyer has emerged. I take this to be a shift in acceptance of religious diversity - that now we can appreciate the presence of diverse religious symbols without taking offense. Two glass cases on either side in the foyer now house various religious artifacts and add to its colour and character. A segmented bookcase mounted on one wall houses religious texts from various traditions. The foyer has become a place to relax and read or to share conversation over a tea or coffee.

Love demands that we live in this world in harmony. Focusing the enterprise of fostering such harmony is made easier when one has a physical centre; beliefs and values are explored as stakeholders engage in decision making; just as the world of the artist is revealed by her creation, the centre is a tangible reflection of the extent towards which we share such a vision.
Conversely, just as a work of art may influence those who live with it, we hope that Oasis will speak of hospitality, kindness, goodwill and integrity.

Diversity and Pluralism

The plurality of religious traditions and cultures has come to characterize every part of the world today. But what is pluralism? Here are four points to begin our thinking:

* First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettoes with little traffic between or among them. Today, religious diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement. Mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.

* Second, pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference. Tolerance is a necessary public virtue, but it does not require Christians and Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and ardent secularists to know anything about one another. Tolerance is too thin a foundation for a world of religious difference and proximity. It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotype, the half-truth, the fears that underlie old patterns of division and violence. In the world in which we live today, our ignorance of one another will be increasingly costly.

* Third, pluralism is not relativism, but the encounter of commitments. The new paradigm of pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for pluralism is the encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.

* Fourth, pluralism is based on dialogue. The language of pluralism is that of dialogue and encounter, give and take, criticism and self-criticism. Dialogue means both speaking and listening, and that process reveals both common understandings and real differences. Dialogue does not mean everyone at the “table” will agree with one another. Pluralism involves the commitment to being at the table -- with one’s commitments.

Diana L. Eck. Director of Harvard’s Pluralism Project

If an institution has had a history of chaplaincy it is usually of the Christian variety.

When religious pluralism begins to be recognised as a reality by the chaplaincies of institutions an initial response is a recognition that people of other faiths have an equal right to access the services of chaplains.

So what are the choices for the Christian chaplain?
1. to continue to try to meet the needs of all within the institution – in which case the chaplain soon finds that she has no rights to enter the sacred space of the person of another faith.
2. to continue to try to meet the needs of all within the institution, but refer the faith needs of others to appropriate persons outside the institution.
3. To invite suitable representatives of other faith traditions to establish a multifaith chaplaincy service where each minister to their own adherents.

These choices each represent a response to religious diversity.

They are not necessarily easily taken. Some Christians, having had the monopoly on chaplaincy within institutions for so long, are hesitant to give up their status and control to others, whose faith, from their perspective, is inferior or defective. Some object to a vocation of Christian origins being taken up by others outside, and, in the past, seemingly opposed, to Christian faith. Some religious people have long – very long – memories!

Then there is the difficulty of a chaplain, employed by a Christian denomination, having to deal with the denomination’s own values and priorities. The chaplain may be caught between the pluralistic values and inclusive culture of the institution and the narrower culture of the employing church. Her job description is not able to deal with these realities.

So the step of recognising the validity of other faiths can be a very big one for some. But accepting the reality of religious diversity is the beginning of a process of respecting those of other faiths for who they are.

A number of multifaith chaplaincies express this recognition of mutual respect within their mission statements. Within the paradigm of acceptance of religious diversity, such a multifaith chaplaincy works under a common rubric of mutual respect and agreed ethical behaviour.

This was the case at Flinders University with the formation of a multifaith chaplaincy service within the existing Religious Centre at the turn of the Millenium.

But note that none of the Eck’s points about religious pluralism are necessarily met because of this achievement:

1. while individuals recognise and respect each other, nothing need change for each chaplaincy – each may still “do her own thing”.
2. There is no dynamic within the structure to produce understanding, to go beyond mere “tolerance”.
3. There need be no “encounter of commitments”, building relationships across difference.
4. There need be no urgency to enter into dialogue.

The Religious Centre at Flinders University began to recognise religious diversity in the late 90’s. That itself was a big struggle. But the eventual acceptance of the right of religions of other faiths to be able to access the Religious Centre did not necessarily mean an end to hostility. “Walls” may still be built while accepting the reality of diversity. Ignoring others or other passive forms of exclusion may be as damaging as outright denial of the rights of others.

What we needed was to establish an environment that would encourage religious pluralism.

This has been signalled in the change of name from Religious Centre (diversity) to Oasis – faith, spirit, community.

Pluralism, says Eck, is “an achievement”.

It’s still early days.

The "Lone Ranger"?

What picture of the contemporary chaplain is conjured of a chaplain at work?

It may be one that corresponds to the picture of St Martin, moved by compassion, encountering the poor man: the chaplain working as an individual with another individual; the hospital chaplain at the bedside or the prison chaplain in the cell.

Or we may picture the chaplain among a group, perhaps leading a memorial service in response to some community tragedy; the Army chaplain leading prayers with the troops or the school chaplain speaking at a school assembly.

These are common images, but they are of the chaplain as a loner.

When St Martin left the army to follow his vocation, inspired by the vision of the incident with the beggar, he set up communities of compassion. These were places of sanctuary where anyone, no matter what station in life, no matter what religion or race, could find shelter and sustenance. They were communities of open hospitality.

It has been easier for the churches to promote an individualised chaplaincy, based on the beggar encounter image. Churches can understand a model that is a simple extension of the parish priest model; the chaplain-priest in geographically isolated settings. If the parish can’t come to church, the church goes out to the parish in the person of the priest – to those confined in hospitals or prisons or abroad in the armed services. It is the priestly model. The priest-chaplain conducts religious services, hears confessions and connects with those communities.

Such a model assumes a level of religious uniformity within those communities. Even in our religiously pluralistic situation today, the appointment of chaplains of other faiths in the armed services or police forces is dependent on the relative number of people of other faiths who may be served by such an appointment. This is perfectly reasonable if one assumes an individualistic model of chaplaincy in the tradition of the priest-chaplain ministering to his (sic) adherents. If there is a sizeable Catholic constituency, a Catholic chaplain is appointed to minister to Catholics; a reasonable number of Buddhists, a Buddhist chaplain to Buddhists etc. Draw a pie-diagram of religious adherence and appoint accordingly.

Such a model begs the question, is there a chaplain for the religiously non-committed or for the “secular humanists”? Is the role of chaplain irrelevant (not seen to be needed) among the non-religious? And what about those minorities who don’t make the cut?

I think that in the university context a community model of chaplaincy is worth exploring, one that is strategised beyond the individualised image of St Martin and the beggar to St Martin’s communities of hospitality.

Elements of Chaplaincy

One of the difficulties of defining our roles as chaplains today is that life is so unsettled. I have had great difficulty coming up with a neat job description that still leaves me open to respond to the needs of the day. The realities of life have their own life, and don't seem to recognise neat job descriptions.

In adopting an open stance to chaplaincy, one that can accommodate change, I have found it useful to recover generic elements of the chaplaincy tradition to provide a set of values and priorities, so that I place myself within the disciplines of that tradition.

I have written about this in a sermon for the commissioning of a chaplain ("Chaplaincy -then and now". http://www.flinders.edu.au/oasis/chaplains/geoff_papers/)

I believe that although chaplaincy has been a Christian tradition, these generic values and priorities may be adopted by those of other traditions who may want to adopt chaplaincy as a means of ministry. This seems to be particularly relevant in our situation, as the traditional avenues of pastoral care, through extended families and village life, assumed in Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu and other societies, seem to be breaking down in the west. Chaplaincy may therefore be a useful vehicle for all traditions, a way of connecting and responding existentially to religious and spiritual needs as they present themselves.

This was, after all, how chaplaincy began. St Martin of Tours saw a beggar shivering in the cold. He responded out of compassion. What could he do? He cut his cloak in half and gave half to the beggar.

So the first element of chaplaincy is responsive.

Chaplaincy is not "doing a job"!

The encounter with the beggar had a profound effect on Martin. He had a dream that night in which he saw Jesus wrapped in the half of the cloak that he had given away. He was reminded of the Gospel message of St Matthew, Chapter 25 - “In as much as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me”.

The second element of chaplaincy is vocational conviction.
This means that there is congruence between the aspirations of the chaplain and the chaplain's religious experience.

I now remind myself that a non-religious person may also be a chaplain. But whatever the source or inspiration of compassion, there is a conviction that it is the primary motivation in each encounter and there is a commitment to practice it.