At Duke University, I majored in religious studies and then served as pastoral assistant and director of religious education in a small church in upstate New York.
Then, in the summer of 1967, I went to Tucson to study creative movement expression education at the Tucson Creative Dance Center.

Now, where would I go to church? There was time and opportunity to explore.

Exploring the options

I visited the Methodists, the Presbyterians and the Lutherans, but no particular place beckoned.

I had already ruled out the Catholic church — but then the maintenance man at the dance center convinced me to give it a try.

"Go to a 6 a.m. Mass. You'll still have time to go somewhere else after that."

I snuck into a back pew at 5:45 and knelt down, unprepared for what was to follow.

The priest appeared, looking like he had just rolled out of bed, kissed the altar, mumbled, "The Lord be with you," and then snorted and wiped his nose across the sleeve of his alb!

What immediately went through my mind was, "These people are not here for this man, They must be here for ... God!"

Laugh if you will, but I knew at that moment I would become a Catholic. What about my call to ordination? No worries. It was 1968. Vatican II. Change was in the air. All I had to do was be patient. Ordination of women was just around the corner.

Waiting

A few years later, I was a full-fledged Catholic.

I worked at a parish school for more than 15 years, first as a teacher and then as a liturgist.

When it came time for a change, I took a year off to write and live under private religious vows, supplementing my savings with part time jobs.

Over the years, I earned a master's in pastoral ministry from the University of San Francisco, along with certificates in spiritual direction and therapeutic harp work.

I then went to work for 15 years as a certified music practitioner, playing my harp at the bedside of patients at a hospice inpatient unit.

It was a "holy ground" experience. The unit felt like a church, and the patients like beloved parishioners.

Becoming a chaplain

The hospice was looking to increase its number of chaplains, so I enrolled in the ordination programme at the New Seminary for Interfaith Studies, a two-year, low residency programme in New York City.

There were three women in the accelerated programme — all three of us Catholic! All denied ordination by our own church, nevertheless grateful for this path to ordination as interfaith ministers.

After retirement from hospice, and until COVID-19 shut everything down, I volunteered weekly as a chaplain and bedside harpist at a Tucson hospital.

Now I write for the Keeping the Faith section of the Sunday edition of the Arizona Daily Star, drawing on the many years of work for the Catholic church and the broader Christian community.

I have no complaints. But I will forever ask, "Why?"

Why couldn't I be ordained by my own church for service in hospice, hospital, a retreat center, the military, a women's prison, a battered women's shelter, a parish church? Read more

• Carolyn Ancell is a writer and musician in Tucson, Arizona. She has authored 18 books and numerous articles on liturgy and the liturgical arts and is a retired "chaplain with a harp."

"Our concern was not in relation to Fr. David's views themselves, but the manner in which these views have been expressed in the context of our diverse community of people of many faiths," the university says.

Palmer had been named as chaplain to the Catholic community at the University and as Catholic chaplain to Nottingham Trent University.

Nottingham Trent University accepted the appointment. However, after interviewing Palmer, the University of Nottingham wrote to McKinney about concerns regarding the appointment.

It later explained the concerns related to Palmer's social media posts, highlighting one on assisted suicide and another on abortion.

"They referenced a tweet where I had referred to the proposed ‘assisted dying' bill [introduced in Britain's Parliament in May] as a bill to allow the NHS ‘to kill the vulnerable,'" Palmer says.

"I was told it was fine for me to have this opinion, but they were concerned with how I expressed it. When I asked how they would suggest I express it, quite remarkably, they suggested I should call it ‘end of life care,' which is a completely unacceptable policing of religious belief."

Palmer tweeted last week that the university also objected to a second post in which he described abortion as the "slaughter of babies,". His comment was made in the context of the debate over U.S. President Joe Biden's reception of Holy Communion despite backing legal abortion.

Palmer says he defends both posts as reflecting Catholic belief.

He says after the university rejected his placement, the bishop declined to nominate another priest. The university then agreed he could offer Mass on campus on Sundays as a "guest priest."

Stressing that the university supported its Catholic community, a university spokesperson said: "We have no issue with the expression of faith in robust terms, indeed we would expect any chaplain to hold their faith as primary."

"The University of Nottingham remains committed to supporting staff and students of Catholic faith and continuing our 90-year tradition of providing Catholic chaplaincy for them," the spokesperson said.

Tweeting about the issue, Palmer noted that the university does not pay for chaplains. He also said most pastoral work with Catholic students would take place at the Newman House and St. Paul's in Lenton, a parish that includes the university within its boundaries.

Palmer rejects the university's explanation.

They say they have ‘no issue with the expression of faith in robust terms,' but this is precisely what they had an issue with, he says. It appears "diversity only goes so far, certainly not as far as the Catholic chaplain being able to express ‘robustly' mainstream Catholic beliefs."

"The suggestion that they are grateful for the bishop's ‘solution' almost seems to imply that the bishop somehow agrees with the university ‘policing' the expression of Catholic teaching on pro-life issues."

"His ‘solution' was an attempt to ensure that the university didn't end up barring sacramental ministry to the students entirely. It wasn't tacit approval of their behavior."

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• Image: British Council

Harrison, who is the Dunedin police chaplain, says there are many shortages across the diverse field of chaplaincy, including among Catholic chaplains.

Chaplains play a crucial role, including being part of the overall response to traumatic incidents, such as the recent Dunedin supermarket knife attack, he says.

Otago's first chaplaincy lecturer, the Very Rev Dr Graham Redding, says New Zealanders call on chaplains often.

The demand for their services " — be they paid and unpaid, secular and religious — across sectors ranging from the military to healthcare to education to sports and the arts, exceeds supply," he says.

In his view, suitable training and credentialling is "crucial".

Despite New Zealand becoming an increasingly secular society, people remain interested in issues of faith, meaning and spirituality.

Events of "deep personal significance,"which can often be traumatic, could trigger such interests, Redding says.

Since 2016, Otago University has offered a postgraduate certificate, postgraduate diploma and a masters in chaplaincy. These are the only specific university qualifications in chaplaincy offered in New Zealand.

While various academic staff teach the programme, Redding is the first person to be hired specifically as an Otago lecturer in chaplaincy.

Many organisations see the value of chaplaincy for enhancing the wellbeing of those who come under their care and employment, Redding says.

Schools, tertiary institutions, hospitals, hospices and retirement homes, the military, police and corrections facilities, professional sports teams and the media all have chaplains, he says.

Redding has been the master of Dunedin's Knox College since 2015. He is a former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand (2008-10) and was principal of the Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership in Dunedin (2007-14).

His five-year, fixed-term post - which began this week - is funded by the Longview Trust and the Presbyterian Synod of Otago and Southland.

Source

• Otago Daily Times
• Image: University of Otago

Nineteenth-century Catholic teachings declared it the Church's duty to support the working poor. And in the Great Depression, industry titans hired chaplains to visit workers on the Hoover Dam.

But in recent years, a number of companies have gone one step further: They've hired spiritual leaders to serve on their staffs. Though slightly less trendy than nap rooms and yoga classes, workplace chaplaincies are another attempt to make workers more productive by catering to their "whole" selves.

Sometimes, these chaplains serve as spiritual social workers, advising staffers about everything from divorce to cancer.

They might conduct weddings or funerals; they'll often refer people to local churches and, at times, professional psychologists.

People find Jesus everywhere, cubicles and factory lines included. But why would a corporation bother providing guidance to workers as they search for him? What's in it for them?

The potential for profit doesn't hurt.

According to David Miller, a Princeton professor who studies faith and work, these chaplaincies add value to companies, potentially helping create lower turnover rates, increased levels of focus, and reduction in stress-related illnesses.

"Human beings still have problems in life—we get cancer, we get divorced, we have workplace accidents," Miller said.

"In different situations we seek and heal through different kinds of help and services. Sometimes it's a medical service, sometimes it's just a friend to cry on their shoulder, and other times there's a spiritual dimension to it."

For many people, particularly in the United States, religious leaders and institutions often offer that support structure. For those who don't have that kind of independent community, work is a logical place to look for help—and some employers seem to be recognizing that.

As Miller put it in a 2013 paper, "Due to people not having sufficient social support networks, whether at church, in the family, or community, it has become necessary for the work organization to become the new community." Continue reading

Sources

• The Atlantic, from an article by Emma Green, the managing editor of TheAtlantic.com, where she also writes about religion and culture.
• Image: The Gospel Herald

The truth I have to face is that the Christian religion I represent has become so irrelevant to the greater percentage of the New Zealand population that it's now a stumbling block in my job as a hospital chaplain.

It's not that Kiwis aren't into spirituality. Recent studies have shown that the vast majority of us consider it to be important but these days we tend to talk in terms of essence, values, meaning and purpose of life, rather than religious beliefs.

Whilst chaplains of any persuasion may see that these are exactly the questions that religious traditions have always explored, the perception for many is that the label chaplain and in particular Christian chaplain represents rigid, moralistic, outdated dogmatic religion that we don't want a bar of. Ouch!

Language matters; especially when trying to express the vulnerability our mortality brings, which is the point at which words burst the confines of their shape. All religions develop a set of signs and symbols to try and help communication along but once these have lost their potency we become unintelligible to each other.

For spirituality to become an integral part of the healthcare system, where vulnerability and mortality intersect, then the communication and perception gap has to be bridged. It's as though we need a new, shared language that crosses the traditional religious, cultural, philosophical and scientific boundaries so that we can see our human experience in an integrated way. Continue reading.

Par for the course now but this was Paris during the Second World War. A world in turmoil meant people were thinking for themselves, taking up with new liberation movements and deciding not to come to church.

Like any church facing hard times, good ideas were fallen upon with enthusiasm. So when news of a priest grafting alongside the dockworkers in Marseilles hit town, the worker-priest model got legs fast.

Broadly speaking, the idea was that priests and monks were to take the good news of Christ with them as they moved out of religious houses to live and work with the ordinary folk of France.

The inevitable happened. Priests fell in love, got married, joined trade unions, the communist party and all manner of trouble-making groups. In short, the communities they had become part of transformed them.

What's more, the official good news seemed superfluous. The light already existed in the people they thought they'd come to help. As though Christ had sneaked in with no permission from the church and strangely enough, didn't realise Christianity owned him.

This is exactly my experience as a hospital chaplain. God, the Divine, the Light, the Christos, however you language this underpinning of human existence, this presence, it exists in the most basic of human interactions.

Spiritual presence that becomes apparent in offerings like cleaning up folk who can't control their bowels, in wiping blood off the floor, in carting equipment, in attending to birthing and dying, and sometimes even in arguments about budgets. It lives without fanfare, often without words and definitely without adherence to any particular faith tradition.

Get too close to those everyday actions in an effort to describe their interconnectedness and you will be blinded by their ordinary functionality, and appear ridiculous in your quest for understanding. Spirituality is a shy beast, tentative but passionate.

Being near, like the worker-priests were, offering space and acceptance, pointing to the ancient spiritual traditions without expecting belief or commitment is enough, but not always for the authorities. By the 1950's worker-priests were considered to be out of control and the project was stopped.

There's always tension around spirituality and organizations because Spirit is about liminality, walking the thin places where the Divine is sensed and known. Ways of being that are at odds with institutional creeds and mission statements.

Church or health organizations can offer an environment that encourages this fragile mysticism in motion, or exert controls that push it under.

To suppress it maintains the fiction that being religious has to be about belief instead of awakening to what lies deep within.

Source