The Hospital Chaplain

This is an original story, written for this site. It is fiction, not a teaching or a traditional account. Naomi Weiss, Ama Choedon, her son Rinzin and their hospital are invented. Hospital chaplaincy and the two prayers in the story are real, and what is said about them comes from the sources listed below.

Before light

Naomi Weiss had been a hospital chaplain for nineteen years, and she still liked the building best before sunrise. At twenty to six on a Tuesday in late October the lobby lights were half on, the coffee cart was shuttered, and from the eleventh floor Lake Michigan was only a deeper dark beyond the city.

She was fifty-seven and Jewish, and her title was interfaith chaplain. Chaplains in hospitals like hers are trained to care for people of every faith and of none, and to keep their own.

She had trained the usual American way, in clinical pastoral education: hundreds of hours on the wards, and a supervisor who made you write down afterwards exactly what you had said. That way of learning owes a good deal to Chicago, where in the 1930s a minister named Anton Boisen first sent seminary students to sit with patients.

The word chaplain itself goes back to the cloak that Saint Martin of Tours gave to a man in need. Naomi enjoyed being a Jewish woman with a job named after a Christian saint's coat.

The young man in the work jacket

Her pager went at ten to six: pre-op, bay seven, family asking for the chaplain.

The family was one young man in a heavy navy work jacket, turning his car keys over and over: about twenty-five, broad, tired and kind. His name was Rinzin.

“It's my mother,” he said. “Her heart surgery is at seven-thirty. I signed everything last night. But I work on the ramp at the airport, and my shift starts at seven. I asked to swap. They said no.” He looked at the floor. “She's scared. Her English is hello, thank you, no problem. That's it.”

Naomi asked what she always asked first: what would help?

“Can someone just sit with her? Until they take her in?”

Naomi said she was Jewish, and that she knew almost nothing about his mother's religion. Rinzin smiled for the first time. “She won't mind. She'll pray anyway. Before anything big, she says the Seven-Line Prayer.”

He explained quickly, one eye on the clock. It is a prayer to Guru Rinpoche, the Lotus-Born, the teacher Tibetans remember for bringing the Buddha's teaching to their country in the eighth century. Its lines say where he came from, how he was born in a lotus and what he attained, name him, picture the company around him, and wish to follow where he went. “The last line asks him to come,” Rinzin said. “To come and give his blessing.”

Then he went behind the curtain, bent down, touched his forehead to his mother's, and said something in Tibetan that made her flap a hand at him: go, go. At the gap in the curtain he looked back once. Then he went to work.

Bay seven

Ama Choedon was sixty-three. Ama means mother, and it is how Tibetans often speak to a woman her age. She looked small in the big bed, a pale blanket drawn up to her chest, her grey hair in one thin plait. Her eyes went from the curtain to the drip stand to Naomi and back to the curtain.

Naomi sat down. “Naomi,” she said, touching her own chest. “Choedon,” said Ama Choedon, touching hers. That used up most of what they had in common.

Naomi had been taught that a chaplain is not there to fix anything. The hardest lesson, which she still relearned most weeks, was to stop talking. So she did not explain the operation, or promise that all would be well, which she did not know. She put her hand on the blanket, palm up.

Ama Choedon looked at it for a while. Then she took it and held on hard.

By ear

After a minute Ama Choedon's lips began to move. The words came low and quick, in a rhythm that went round and came back. Naomi understood none of them. She had sat beside a great many people praying in a great many languages, and she knew the sound of someone holding on.

Then Ama Choedon stopped, looked straight at her, and said one short phrase slowly, the way you speak to a child. She pointed at Naomi's mouth. She said it again.

Jin-gyi lab-chir shek-su sol.

Naomi tried and made a mess of it. Ama Choedon shook her head and laughed, the first laugh of the morning. She broke it into pieces: jin-gyi, wait; lab-chir, wait; shek-su sol. Naomi gave each piece back. Wrong, said the head. Better. Again. Then all of it, twice, and Ama Choedon nodded once, very serious, the way a teacher nods.

Naomi had learned her first Hebrew blessings like this, at seven, by sound, from her grandmother. She could not say so, and anyway this was not her prayer. It was the last line, the one Rinzin had told her about: the asking. She knew that much and did not pretend to more.

The Tibetan word for blessing, chinlap, is explained in many ways. One explanation, from the Dalai Lama and recorded on Rigpa Wiki, is “transforming into magnificent potential”. Naomi did not know that yet. She only knew she had been asked to help someone ask.

Her own

Beyond the window at the end of the bay, the sky over the lake had gone from black to deep blue, with a line of rose along the bottom.

Naomi pointed to herself, then upward: a question of her own. May I? Ama Choedon understood at once and nodded.

So Naomi said the prayer she says by hospital beds when it is welcome: the Mi Shebeirach, a Jewish prayer for blessing about a thousand years old, which for many Jews has become the main prayer for healing. It asks the One who blessed the ancestors to bless and heal the person named, in spirit as well as in body. She said it softly, partly in Hebrew and partly in English, and where the name belongs she said, “Choedon.”

Ama Choedon closed her eyes to listen. At the end she said, “Thank you,” one of her three English phrases, and patted Naomi's hand twice.

Neither tried to make the two prayers into one. Naomi did not become a Buddhist that morning, and Ama Choedon became nothing but what she already was. Each had asked in her own way, and kept the other company while she did.

The doors

At twenty past seven a nurse and an orderly came for her. Naomi was allowed to walk beside the bed as far as the double doors.

There the bed stopped for a moment. Ama Choedon reached for Naomi's hand and began the prayer again, fast, all seven lines in one breath, slowing at the last. Naomi came in with her, a beat behind: jin-gyi lab-chir shek-su sol. Once.

Then the doors opened, the bed went through, and they closed.

The day

Naomi had a whole day of other people: a man whose wife had not woken, a girl who wanted to talk about anything but her leg, two nurses who needed ten minutes and a door that shut.

At noon she sat for a while in the hospital's multifaith room: a small plain space with soft chairs, a shelf of books from several traditions, and nothing permanent on the walls, so that anyone may use it for anything. Naomi used it for her own prayers, in her own words, to her own God. She put Choedon's name among them.

At one she walked by the lake for ten minutes and found the three pieces of the line keeping time with her steps. She did not think the words belonged to her. It felt more like being trusted to carry someone's coat.

At half past two the surgeon found her in the corridor. The operation had gone the way they had hoped. Ama Choedon was in the cardiac intensive care unit, asleep, being looked after. The next few days would matter, the surgeon said. They always did.

Evening

Rinzin came straight from the airport at six, still in the navy jacket. Naomi met him outside the unit and told him everything the surgeon had said, the hopeful part and the careful part.

“Did she pray?” he asked.

“We both did,” said Naomi. And because he was waiting, she said the line for him, in its three pieces.

Rinzin laughed out loud, then put a hand over his mouth. “My mother taught you that?” he whispered. “Then it's correct.” He looked through the glass towards the far bed where she was sleeping. “Okay,” he said, more quietly. “Okay.”

Naomi went home on the train, the city going by in long gold streaks. She did not know what the next days would bring. That was most of her job: not knowing, and staying anyway.

Somewhere between stations she found the line in her head again and let it be there. Then, in her own words, she asked once more for Choedon.