Baptist and Buddhist
Stuck in the throes of a chaplain’s crisis, I leaned on the everlasting arms while consulting the ancient dharma.
When I worked as an on-call chaplain at a level 1 trauma hospital, I almost never slept through the night. Whether it was a call to keep a lonely patient company or a call to sit vigil with a family as they watched their loved one take her last breaths, there was always somewhere to be. To be honest, this was the kind of call I would hope for—a quiet, calm call where the emergency was not so much about being the anchor in a human drama but rather about gracefully meeting an inevitability of our human condition. Loneliness. The death of an elder. The inverted blessings of being alive.
One summer night in 2015 I got the other kind of call. The kind that, despite your training and your supposed groundedness in faith, makes your stomach seize.
“We need you down here,” I hear. “We have a gunshot victim in the Brady room, and the family’s here.”
