Being a Chaplain in the ICU and Prison – Public Christianity Podcast – Joseph Park and Tim Abbey

Simon: This week on Life and Faith.

Joseph: “I went to see this lady and as soon as I walked in, she actually said, “F off,” I don’t want to have anything to do with you people.”

Simon: Welcome to Life and Faith of CPX, I’m Simon Smart.

Justine: And I’m Justine Toh.

Simon: And that was a chaplain we heard in that opening grab, which makes the first point worth mentioning about chaplaincy in Australia, Justine, it’s contested. Now the word chaplaincy or chaplain sounds religious, which is the source of people’s uncertainty, in some cases, hostility to that idea. Our chaplains, the majority of whom are Christian in Australia – are they secretly trying to convert people? And if people have had bad experiences with the church, a chaplain walking up to say hi might get that reaction. Now part of the reason chaplaincy is so contested is because of how that issue has played out in schools. The federal government way back in 2006 established the National School Chaplaincy Program and that’s been pretty controversial. Although I have to say just then, a lot of schools that I’ve come across have been very grateful for that role in their schools.

Justine: Yeah, it is interesting, isn’t it? Because I think that while as a debate, as an abstract issue, it’s quite contested. I think on the ground seems very different in terms of how people react to it. It’s probably worth saying right now that today on Life and Faith, we’re not talking about chaplaincy in schools, but about chaplaincy in two different areas, the ICU or intensive care unit and prison.

Simon: Yeah, and there are chaplains in all sorts of areas, of course, in the defence forces and sports chaplains, for instance, other places, but we especially chose these two settings because not everyone knows what the inside of those places is like and they’re probably very glad they don’t. And also the kinds of spiritual questions that open up for people as a result of being inside those places. So, Justine, who are we speaking to today?

Justine: We’ve got two chaplains from Jericho Road, which is the social services arm of the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales. We have Joseph Park, who before working for Jericho Road as kind of like a Senior Chaplain or a chaplain to chaplains, worked for six and a half years in the ICU of a major Sydney hospital.

And we also speak with Timothy Abbey, who is the Christian chaplain stationed at Kirkconnell Prison in regional New South Wales, which is a minimum to medium security prison. So you can imagine that prison and hospital are places where life and death are very vivid and real for people. It’s worth saying now that we’re going to hear some challenging stories today, so it’s not suitable for children. But first up, given the uncertainty over the term chaplain, what does it mean? Here’s Joseph Park.

Joseph: It’s about offering a safe space for people who are going through probably the most difficult times in their lives. Offering a safe space for them to talk about the meaning and the purpose. What it’s like for them to be grieving the loss. For example, in a hospital, losing a loved one, losing their own health, independence. For those who are in prisons, it’s about losing their freedom, even dignity or even humanity.

Chaplaincy is hospitality where we offer a safe space for people to talk about those things and help them find faith, love, hope. It’s not a ministry of where we proclaim particular doctrines or ideas about our faith and imposing that on the people, but it’s about being with people. It’s about journeying, accompanying people through difficult times in their lives.

Simon: Accompanying people through difficult times – Now sometimes that’s finding themselves all of a sudden in the ICU. There’s lots of medical equipment and wires and people looking worse for wear. Life seems to hang in the balance. And sometimes that means landing behind bars into a whole new world.

Tim: You very quickly know it’s a gaol as soon as you enter through the main compound gate. Yeah, it’s quite confronting.

Simon: This is Timothy Abbey who’s been at Kirkconnell Correctional Centre for the past eight and a half years.

Tim: They’re very regimented even in the gaol that I’m at, which is a minimum-security gaol, minimum to medium. There’s a very strict routine, so a lot of freedom obviously goes out the window there. The inmates are living with people that they probably wouldn’t choose to live with on the outside. They have a lot less rights – they’ve forgotten some of those rights because of their offences. And so for security reasons, they have to follow the routine. They have to follow, as it needs to be, fairly strict protocols.

Justine: There’s a similar but different loss of freedom that haunts the world of ICU.

Joseph: We say in intensive care, people die many deaths, and it’s not just biological death, but it’s death of dignity, death of independence. Death in a way that it’s a separation from their families and loved ones, and a place where they feel comfortable.

It’s a death to their sense of safety or even a sense of self. Intensive care is like other world from many eyes of the public. And it is a world where a patient might receive up to probably more than 180 medical interventions per day. And it’s a highly technical environment. And as the word suggests, it’s intense. It can be quite a dehumanising place.

Where you’re dressed in this sort of gown that, has a bit of a backside wide open, only held by two strings. And it doesn’t matter what you used to do, you’re there, and become like a child completely dependent on the nursing staff and doctors. And also if you’re on a ventilator, there’s a lot going on around you. It can be quite an overwhelming place for the patients and for the families.

Justine: As Joseph said, it doesn’t matter what you used to do. The worlds of prison and ICU give people a strange equality. Suddenly they’re no longer that high powered professional or that PNC parent. They’re just human and from all walks of life.

Tim: They’re from the famous to the people you might normally suspect to be, in gaol. So professionals, highly successful people, famous people – and yet they’re also people from the lower socio-economic kind of areas that we often think of. It’s probably in a way, the most accurate snapshot of society. Because if you live in a well-to-do suburb, you’re probably not going to come across many of the lower socio-economic group. It’s quite wonderful, I think, seeing high professionals in some of the things I do sitting down next to somebody that they never would have talked to before from a different side of the tracks. There’s a lot of people from different ethnic backgrounds, which reflects Australia these days as well.

Justine: I asked Joseph and Timothy, how well-received are they by the people they’re there to see?

Joseph: If I get a dollar every time someone says I’m not religious, I’ll be a millionaire.

Tim: Our gaol has about 200 inmates, and there’s about 40 of those on average who would work with me each week through the various things I do. So that’s one-fifth of the gaol, who directly want to engage [with me] in an active way in that level, which is much higher than society. Gaol is a unique opportunity for that, where people can think a bit deeper. But then there are people, at least another quarter who might have a yarn with me or come down just for a one-off talk, or they might have lost someone or had some bad news, retrial or something, and they just might have a chat about that, not necessarily from a religious perspective, just as a fellow human being.

Then there’s probably a quarter that don’t really want to engage at all in any of those levels. They’re okay doing their own thing. There’s probably a quarter who, the last thing they want to do is talk to somebody about a chaplain, perhaps because they don’t want to face up to their offences or they really are quite militantly against any kind of thing like that. So that’s their choice.

Justine: For the people who do want to talk, what are they grappling with in prison or in the ICU?

Joseph: About eight o’clock at night in intensive care, I walked in just to see how everything is going. The nurse in charge taps on my shoulder and says, go and see that daughter standing by that patient there. Her mom just had a huge heart operation and she was standing there and completely in shock and distressed. And she turned to me without really hearing [my introduction]. My introduction usually goes like, my name is Joseph and I work here, I’m part of the support and I’m here just to see how you’re going.

She just said, “If there is God, why does he let someone like my mom have to go through something like this? How can he be good and a loving God, as many Christians say?” So she throws that sort of kind of question at me and I’m like shocked and suddenly the whole ward goes really quiet as if everyone is listening in.

Justine: I asked Joseph, what happened then? What did he do?

Joseph: I took a deep breath to start with because you don’t want to dismiss such a question. What does she need to hear at this point?

So I simply said, I called her name, let’s just call her Sarah. “Sarah, that’s a really important question. I wonder whether this is not the right time to get into that, but it’s time for us to hope and pray that your mother will get well, and then we can talk about that bit more. All we can do at this time is just trust that if there is God, He will show His goodness to your mum.” And so that’s all I said. That’s all I said and I think in some ways I was wanting to acknowledge her troubles. I wanted to acknowledge her distress. I never wanted to dismiss someone’s questions like that. But at the same time, I want to continue that conversation when the right time comes, just after the surgery with a big, open surgery – at that moment wasn’t the right place to do it. But to say that “I will be here for you and we can talk about that.”

Simon: For the prisoners that Timothy speaks with, the appeal of the chaplain is someone to talk to, who’s in the prison system but is independent of it. This part of the conversation also delved into the unique gap that chaplaincy filled. It wasn’t social work, it wasn’t psychology, but something entirely different.

Tim: With some of them they feel the deep shame. This is probably the most important thing that they talk to me about is the shame of what they’ve done. I know they do talk with psychologists and social workers in the gaol, but they can also at a spiritual level talk about that with me as well.

Justine: I suppose someone listening in could say, well, the psychologist and the social worker, as you’ve said, can address these certain issues. What is the specific component that the chaplain offers?

Tim: A Christian chaplain, all chaplains from all religions will address those kinds of issues in terms of the spiritual side – the shame of what they’ve done. Psychologists and social workers will still talk about that and have psychological answers for that, which can be helpful. Again, I want to be fair to psychologists and so on. They will talk about how they can improve their life and how they can move forward and how they can let the past go, but it’s still very hard to let the past go from a spiritual angle. And psychologists, good psychologists, social workers will not pretend to try and enter that space. Good psychologists and social workers in the gaol will refer people like that to, we might want talk to the chaplain about that or go and see Tim.

I work with all backgrounds and will be encouraging inmates, “okay, how are you dealing with that from your perspective?” You know, “what helps you from your Muslim background to deal with that?” But unashamedly, I wouldn’t be a Christian chaplain if I didn’t think we had something that really spoke into that space and when somebody wants to find out about that, then the gaol itself wants us to do that. They recognise that the spiritual angle is not in the resumé of all those other workers. They don’t want to have to deal with that space. They want to deal with the other side of it.

Justine: I know what plenty will be thinking. We live in a multi-faith, multicultural society. How do these guys navigate such a diverse space?

Joseph: Well chaplaincy is a pastoral service to all faiths, to none and in-betweens. I guess our focus is on the very fundamental human needs. Need for meaning, purpose, need to make sense of the overwhelming events and crises that they are facing. So we must connect with people on that fundamental spiritual space. As we do that, we recognise there’s still quite a lot of people that have had some sort of encounter with some form of religious faith of some sorts. And so, this is what I call the footprints of God. God had been walking somewhere in their lives. But also, there’s a lot of research that now says people’s patient outcomes in case in hospitals, also in a lot in corrective services and centres, that chaplains provide important service that actually leads to positive outcomes for people, whether they’re patients or inmates.

And it’s also important that chaplains have their own religious convictions to come, because we do have, and rightly so, I think, reflecting the community, we have humanist chaplains as well, chaplains who have nothing to do with the religion, but coming in to support people, and we have a place for that. But chaplains with religious or faith convictions, they bring that into that special area of spirituality. And I think people are more supported in that way if they want to explore religion. I think it’s about the catchword, I guess these days, is “holistic care.” We’re looking after people, body, mind and soul. I think definitely chaplains have a role to play in that.

Justine: I got the impression that the opportunity to listen to someone where they’re at is quite a precious space.

Joseph: As a chaplain I think we’re bringing dignity to human beings. And when a patient is open to have a seat with them, just by simply listening to them and saying, “I am seeing you, I hear you, not as a patient, but as a person. [Acknowledging] yes, you’re going through all this medical stuff.”

And often I get misunderstood as a doctor, the glasses and Asian face, the shirt and the pants. They start telling me all their medical stuff and I’m just waiting for that moment, a gap, to say, “actually I’m not a doctor.” And they go, “what are you doing here then? Who are you? You look like one.” And then I have to explain what pastoral care and chaplain is and what we do. But we bring back that sense of who you are and that’s important to me, just simply by listening. Just offering that listening space and holding their grief and their sense of loss, just journeying with them, just even for that whatever, 10-20 minutes, just for that moment, I can just sit with them as a human to human. That brings the humanity back into that place.

Justine: Why do you see that being human with them as a spiritual thing?

Joseph: I understand spirituality as very simply, a connection. It’s a connection with yourself, connection with places, connection ultimately with the transcendent God. I mean, people may call that God, people may call that nature, or whatever it might be. It’s about connection. And I think at the core of what it means to be a spiritual being is seeking that connection. And the chaplains are, in some ways – we are spiritual caregivers.

And when we connect with another person, on that most fundamental level, being a human, and that is need for meaning, purpose, exploring what it means for them to accept, I guess, the horror of illness that have just broken through their lives and being with them and holding them in that moment. I think that’s the most fundamental way that we can connect with another person. And it is on a spiritual level because we’re touching the sacred ground of meaning, purpose, in the midst of sense of loss and grief, even need to forgive, to reconcile, and to love, and to receive love. All those things are very fundamental needs of a human being.

Justine: I imagine that people would have said things to you that they may not have said to other people closest to them.

Joseph: Yeah, it’s really interesting. So they tell me things and they go, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, and I’ve never told anyone about this. But I’m telling you this.” And I think it’s because people are in a very vulnerable space when they come to hospital. And in some ways there is this, unconscious need to be heard. And I think that’s where we come in and if we have done our work well, people tell you stuff. And it’s a really sacred thing. We need to hold that really carefully. Even though after our visit, we have to write into the medical notes. We make sure that we keep the most sacred part of that story to ourselves and we hold it carefully.

But as people talk about things, often I hear people say, “I feel much lighter.” So there are some things or some stories have been a burden to them. And I think we come in just to carry that for a bit with them and they learn to carry that. And I think a lot of it to do with grief and loss, and I explain grief, that grief has a weight. And at first grief, could feel like a huge boulder on your shoulder and it’s pressing down on you and weighing you down. But with time and with right support, that becomes in front of you rather than on your shoulder and you learn to carry that. You never want to put it down, but you learn to carry that weight of grief.

Simon: You’re listening to Life in the Faith with me, Simon Smart, and we’re hearing from Justine Toh’s interviews with Joseph Park, who worked as a chaplain in the intensive care unit of a major Sydney hospital, and Timothy Abbey, the resident chaplain at Kirkconnell Correctional Centre. Joseph explained that at the hospital where he worked, there was a real integration among different specialists, and the chaplain was part of that team too.

Joseph: I had the privilege of working in this particular hospital in Sydney that viewed chaplaincy as a part of their holistic care of a patient. So intensive care just had a real sense of integration and collaboration. We carry a pager and when there is a trauma or what we call Code Blue, which is if somebody’s having a cardiac arrest in the hospital they don’t actually call an ambulance, they call a Code Blue and the hospital sends out a pager to a team from intensive care to go there with perhaps a defibrillator and other things to do first aid, and we get that same page as well.

So I will go and attend to Code Blue. And I’ll be looking out for any families or visitors for that patient. But also if a patient is having a Code Blue, I make sure that I check in with other people that are in the same ward. Because suddenly a huge crowd comes and there can be lots of noise going on and it can actually cause a lot of anxiety as well. So I check in with them. Once I turned up to one of those things and a doctor pulled me aside and said, “can you make sure you check in with that junior doctor that this is his first Code Blue?” So I checked in with him afterwards as well. So you’ve got to look after the doctors, they’re not invincible. They don’t see you as someone who’s like a satellite, just coming in for that and leave. They see you as part of the team and it’s a real pleasure to be part of that.

Justine: What kind of impact does the chaplaincy journey have on people? Timothy and Joseph shared a few stories of people and experiences that have stayed with them.

Tim: Early on in my piece, there was a guy I worked with. He was in for about 20 years for murdering his wife. And he started coming to chapel, initially because we do music and stuff. But then he started to sort of become more keen and he asked me, “you know, I killed the woman I love. I can’t forgive myself,” and we talked that through. He was open to a Christian perspective on that and to see him grab hold of forgiveness in the next few months. A year later, he got released. I connected him with a great church down in Sydney. They really helped him and he became part of that community. And then a year later, he was at the beach having a swim with a friend from church – he had a heart attack and died. And it was amazing that the church family grieved his loss. He was missed. Whereas a few years before, no one would have missed him.

Joseph: I don’t know if you’ve seen, I guess a comedy show called Thank God You’re Here, where you dress up a comedian, you chuck them into this room without telling them what’s going on behind the door. And as soon as they get in, they just have to go with the flow. But someone always greets them, says, “thank God you’re here,” right? I had this moment when I was just walking into – every day, just a normal day, in intensive care. As soon as I walked in, the nurse in charge grabs my whole [body], and says, “thank God you’re here.” And she just takes me to this patient who was just waiting to go into a major surgery.

I learned that it’s actually an amputation, but he refused to go in without having someone come and pray with him. So I walked in and I could see there was an anaesthetist and the theatre nurses all around this guy and he’s screaming his head off and saying, “I’m not going, I’m not going to get someone to pray.” And they didn’t know what to do. I walked in, thank God you’re here. I walked over to him, and I introduced myself briefly and I can see,  an anaesthetist and others like folding their arms and looking at me like, come on, do what you need to do, let’s get going. I reached over to this guy and said, “Hey, what is it that you need?” He said, “pray, pray for me.”

I didn’t know, there was no time to ask him, what faith affiliation, all that kind of stuff. I said, “do you know a prayer that we can pray together?” He launched straight into, “our Father in heaven, hallow be thy name.” And he was saying [this] so loudly, that everybody could hear it. I just launched in with him saying the whole Lord’s Prayer. And afterwards I said, “hey, go well, take it easy, and I’ll see you after.” After that, everybody just came and reeled him into the theatre and things like that. So that really stayed with me that, even in places like that, at the very dying moment, people would reach out. I was able to catch up with him afterwards and understand more about his stories, but he’s not religious at all. He grew up in a sort of family where they said that prayer every now and then. But somehow it came to him. He also told me that as he was waking up from the surgery, he saw a bright light and all that sort of stuff. Something really interesting thing happened for him as well.

Justine: This next story made me marvel at Joseph’s bravery. It takes guts too, as he will soon say himself, keep going back to people who don’t like him.

Joseph: This one particular patient, this wasn’t in intensive care, but in a different unit. She was in a room with 3 other patients. And my routine was just to go one at a time and say hi and introduce myself. And if there’s a conversation that can happen, it happens. And if it doesn’t, I move on, things like that. But I think after the first lady, I went to see this lady. And as soon as I walked in, she actually said, “F off. I don’t want to have anything to do with you people.” So I knew there was, “ooh, there’s something going on there.” And it took me about a week, and I didn’t go back to her, but I kept on visiting some other patients in the same room that she stayed. And you can hear everything in that room, so she must have been listening to the way that I interact with others. And anyway, I couldn’t help one day to just say hello again. There’s something about me that just keeps going back to people who don’t like you, in a kind of way. I was just going to quickly say hi and walk by, and then she started talking to me.

And then I learned that she had a son who committed suicide after he was abused by a clergy when he was young. And this is her words, “the church did nothing.” And I represented that for her. So that’s why she’s saying, “I don’t want to have anything to do with you people.” Unfortunately, that’s part of the badge that I have to wear. But it’s also a moment for me to show compassion, willingness to ask for forgiveness. Not that I can ask for forgiveness on behalf of the church, but in a small way by just staying with her and listening to her story. And I think she’s spoke to me for about 40 minutes and just listening to her, it just broke my heart. And I think I said, after sort of listening, I said, “it breaks my heart just to hear what you had to go through and what your son had to go through. I wonder whether it broke your heart as well and it broke your spirit.” She said, “yeah, it destroyed me.” So in that way, we can connect in that way and just listening to her. I think afterwards she said, it was time for me to go as well.

And lunch was coming, in a hospital when the lunch trolley comes, that’s the end of chaplain’s time – he’s got to move on. I didn’t expect anything to be able to see her or do any follow-up, but she said, “you’re always welcome to come back. We can have another chat.” And I did. In some ways, I don’t know, I don’t want to sort of say that I made a huge difference in it like that, but in some ways I brought that sense of reconciliation for her, probably not between her and the church, perhaps. But maybe with God, maybe with herself and her past, or maybe even her sense of this world is a terrible place, it’s been a terrible place for her, but there is someone who cares. I wanted to say that in my heart, when those things happen, it’s not meant to be. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. No child should ever be abused, and this breaks God’s heart as well. And God didn’t like this to happen and his heart breaks for you as well.

Tim: There are people who might come along to some of the programs I run and they seem to be going really well and then we have a phrase for it when they get out of jail that they leave God at the gate. So they seemed really keen but then they kind of just didn’t pursue the things they could have on the outside and that’s sad and I struggle with that. But the one thing I do find encouragement is that that’s maybe not the end of the story for that person. Down the track, I believe God might use that. But I’m also very thankful that at least I had an opportunity to try and help that person. It’s their choice what they do with it.

An Aboriginal guy who I did a lot of work with seemed to go so well, very close to him actually. We followed the same football team, so that used to help. But we really connected and I had great hopes for him when he went out. I even met him at the footy when he got out. But then six months later he was back in gaol. He went back to his old girlfriend who was part of the problem in leading him into drugs again. Very discouraging. Anyway, he eventually got back to our jail a couple of years later and he said, “I haven’t given up on faith in Jesus, even though I’ve stuffed up, I haven’t given up on it.” That was encouraging. And he became even stronger in the next two years and had enormous hopes for him then. He said, “I’m not going to go back to that girl, I’m going make sure I connect with church properly.” And for six months he did. He was really strong. And I thought, “Oh, great.” But then he had to connect with his old girlfriend because he discovered they had a child and she kind of still was in the drug world. And he ended up back in it. Very discouraging, But he wrote to me and he said, “Look, I still haven’t given up. I’m still looking to the Lord to help me.” So in that sense of failure because he’s back in gaol, but in another sense a great joy that he still has hope and hopefully he’ll get it this time.

Justine: I can hear the struggle like you want the best for him and yet his old habits are reasserting themselves. Some might say that you shouldn’t hope in him, he’s clearly shown that he’s beyond redemption.

Tim: Yeah.

Justine: But what do you think about that?

Tim: Yeah well I mean, the stats are 40% of guys are going to be back in gaol within two years. I like to think that we can break some of that with God’s help, but some people just really struggle with life skills and they need a lot of support around them and our current society doesn’t really help that. This is the problem with our rampant individualism. He goes well in gaol because he has that regular input and support to help him. That’s why we tried to really encourage him to hook him into a church community, which he did try the second time a lot better and it was working really well. And yeah, he still ended up, took longer, but he ended up falling over. But we don’t give up. We never give up because until our last breath, there’s always hope. As Christians, we believe God doesn’t give up on us. So nor should I give up on people who aren’t interested in the religious side that I bring. That’s why I keep doing it, because God didn’t give up on me.

Simon: You’ve been listening to Life and Faith with me, Simon Smart, and Justin Toh, who brought us today’s interviews.

Justine: Thanks to Timothy Abbey and Joseph Park, they’re both from Jericho Road. Now Joseph also mentioned that if you find yourself in hospital, ask for a chaplain. Now if today’s interview has piqued your interest in chaplaincy and you want to find out more, you can head to jerichoroad.org.au/chaplaincy. There you can find the program Love Your Neighbor, which is an introduction to pastoral and spiritual care. Basically, this means how to love people well and look after them, as well as yourself. I’ll link to that in the show notes.

Simon: Please do pass on this episode to someone you think might enjoy it and leave us a rating or review it helps us get out to more people. If you’d like to know more about what we do at CPX and catch up on all our work go to publicchristianity.org and sign up to our newsletter we’d love you to do that. And as always thanks today to our producer the always pastoral Alan Douthwaite.

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