I remember a distinct moment of realization when I was fifteen. I was sitting in my bedroom, wearing my favorite t-shirt, which I thought was very radical because it was covered in MC Escher drawings and that was precisely my kind of weird. I was probably listening to Enya, because I did that to an embarrassing degree as a mid-teen. And somehow it dawned on me that the intersection of science and spirituality is a very interesting place. And that I wanted to build my career on that precise point. It was an adolescent upgrade of my earliest, preschool aspiration: “to be a baby doctor so I can hold the babies.”
A year later I was sixteen and found myself on an airplane for the third time in my life, on my way to go see my grandmother, Bana, who was dying of leukemia in Ohio. Only a few memories have stuck with me from that trip. One was her request for a Jamoca milkshake every day from Arby’s, which we dutifully brought her.
Another was the moment of awareness that I would have to say goodbye and walk away from her, knowing I would never see her alive again, and how weird that was, how arbitrary, to just walk away. THIS is the last moment we’ll spend together. And I remember the effort to keep walking in that moment, because unless I was going to sit with her until she died, I was going to have to pick some moment to be the last one.
The most significant memory of that trip, however, was the moment I knew my calling was spiritual care. We met with a doctor. I think it was a man. I have a very abstract memory of what the scene looked like, and where I was and where my mom was in the space. Was anyone else present? I can’t remember. Basically everything about the memory is vague, actually.
Except what it felt like—I remember that precisely. It felt important, meaningful, and timeless. Some quality of the conversation touched my heart so deeply that woke a part of my sleeping-dawning-emerging soul.
I didn’t know what to do about it, though, because all I knew of spiritual care—this was pre-Internet—was ministers and nuns. And though it is true that I aspired to actually be Mother Theresa as an eight-year-old, I think I also knew a path of celibacy was not my future. So that dawning part of me did a Punxsutawney Phil: I took note of my shadow and went back to sleep.
Until I ventured into an Al-Anon meeting in 2021. My therapist put me up to it: “By the time I see you next I want you to go to at least one meeting.”
So I went…and I cried through the whole thing. Clearly, it was not nothing. So I kept going back.
The Big Book of AA, which is also used by some Al-Anonners, talks about the program bringing about a spiritual experience. Specifically it references:
A personality change sufficient to bring about recovery…sudden revolutionary changes…a profound alteration in one’s reaction to life…an unexpected inner resource which [members] identify with their own conception of a Power greater than themselves.
Which was precisely my experience. After two decades trying to force myself to like working in an office on technology and marketing and project management things, I had a spiritual experience that renewed my felt sense of relationship with and to a Power greater than myself, to God. Which, somehow, led me to where I am today.
It must have been within the first couple weeks of my first meeting, even, that I found myself on the phone with V, who is the educator of the chaplain residency program at St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma. I have no idea how I got connected with V. But she was so wise, and so heart-full, and so generous with her time. I hung up the phone and thought: I have found my people. That conversation led to me interning at Harborview and, ultimately, to my current residency—with V!—at St. Joseph Hospital in Tacoma.
The other day I was in the NICU helping a nurse who was having a hard time caring for three premature infants at once. She needed someone to hold one of them, in particular—a baby who was born addicted to opiates. The baby was in terrible withdrawals, experiencing aches in his whole body and restless. The minute he would fall asleep, he’d startle and wake himself up. If he didn’t have someone there to immediately soothe him, he couldn’t rest. If he can’t rest, he can’t grow.
So I picked up my tiny, swaddled charge and cradled him close to me, and rocked him like I did my own son, jostling him to mimic the womb, making my own white noise of shhhhhhhhh, and I held that little baby like a dream come true.
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So magical how the soul moves us through life, and we can only see it when we are ready to take in the expanse and mystery.....