Episode Eight: The Byte-Christine

A few weeks after the Pulse Massacre, Christine found herself working as a chaplain in a hospital. The encounter she had there changed her life as well as her patient's life forever. Find out how the simple practices of conversation and sharing created a space for a healing miracle.

Transcript

So I got I was on call overnight and I got a call from the nurses who said we've got a patient.

His name is Robert.

He came in with chest pains and shortness of breath and we've run every test and his heart is fine but he does not want to go home.

He seems very anxious.

He says there's unresolved things and he's very worried and the nurses basically said to me there's nothing medically that we can do.

I think he needs you and I was like well no pressure they are.

In order to understand the story you got to have a little bit of context for it and there's two huge pieces of context.

One is as part of the process to become a Unitarian Universalist minister I had to do a semester of chaplaincy training and for me it was in a hospital where and I chose to do it where I lived which was in Orlando,

Florida and the only hospital program that had the training chaplaincy was the Seventh-day Adventist program because it was a Seventh-day Adventist hospital.

So you first of all just kind of say if I wanted to stay home which I did I had to as a female minister was going into a bear and a progressive liberal religion was going into a very conservative hospital system where the chaplains paid chaplains were all Seventh-day Adventists.

So that's the first part of the story.

The second part of the story that's so important is I was in Orlando,

Florida and I started my chaplaincy on June 13th,

2016.

So if you know dates the Pulse Massacre that happened in Orlando,

Florida was on Sunday,

June 12th,

2016.

So this is you know this was not just a incidental happening this was my club for my community.

I am a lesbian was very familiar with the clubs and the shows that were going on down there in my town and it was a very just a really awful awful time.

So my first day of chaplaincy I'm walking in and seeing patients when there are people who were victims of the massacre that are in that hospital system.

In addition you've got everyone around the country around the world affected by this and kind of looking at how we are treating our LGBTQ folks similar to the awakening that we're seeing with the death of George Floyd where it's like wait this is wrong and there was also a real reckoning that was happening with reconciling religion and our treatment of the LGBTQ community.

So because there were family members that were not picking up their children's bodies because that's how their children came out was to die at Pulse but their religious beliefs were so strong that that were there were two bodies that were not even picked up because of the homophobia that had been instilled by religion you know and it's really notable to to say that it was Latin night at Pulse that night and most of the people were brown or black and so it was a it was a very intersectional event but it was was very personal.

So and I walked to chaplaincy right and my cohort didn't know that I was a lesbian.

My supervisor did but didn't said anything.

I was in shock.

I was in grief.

My church community had activated.

The whole church had turned into a counseling center.

We had turned it around immediately,

Opened it up.

Everyone was bringing water and I was starting in the hospital and seeing patients.

So that that context is really everything in this story.

The story I wanted to tell you is a visit that I had with a gentleman and we'll call him Robert.

That's not his real name and I've changed some of the details so it's not too too personal but it's broad enough and I was about maybe five weeks in.

Pulse was still there but it wasn't on the news every day but it was still very present for folks and there had already been a lot of conversations of people who wanted to talk to the chaplain because they were watching the news 24-7 and they wanted to reconcile this and I don't present as gay and I think there's a lot of people have the assumption that when the chaplain comes into their seventh day Adventist hospital room that they would never occur to them that I was gay.

So I got I was on call overnight and I got a call from the nurses who said we've got a patient his name is Robert.

He came in with chest pains and shortness of breath and we've run every test and his heart is fine but he does not want to go home.

He seems very anxious.

He says there's unresolved things and he's very worried and the nurses basically said to me there's nothing medically that we can do.

I think he needs you and I was like well no pressure they are like you know he's got he's got chest pains and all of this and he's you know like so come on in chaplain and can you fix him and I was like all right sure great wonderful okay so I walk in and he was probably in his mid-60s white man kind eyes and we started talking and he just needed to get some burdens off of his chest.

You know his partner his wife was sick there was some money concerns there was you know this and this and this and this and he just started making a whole list and I could just see this really heavy weight and anxiety on him so I ran out to the nurses station and I immediately went into in my previous life I was a brainstorming consultant and I did you know I did brainstorming and I'm like okay let's go we need we need something tangible for this man to let go of so I ran out to the nurses station and I asked them for a stack of paper and they said okay we're going to write down each one of these pull them apart and then my thought is that we can we can tear each one and you're going to crumple it up and throw it across the room you know or I'll I can take them and I can burn them later turn it into a ritual where he could pull them apart and then release them in some way and he was like okay you know very confused women's ritual was probably not the thing that he was used to he was raised Catholic and I didn't do anything like that in the Catholic church so I was like okay and then I was like well let's write this down and he's like well can you I don't want to I don't want to throw them away because I want to share them with my wife later I'm like great okay we're just going to make a list and we got about halfway through the list and we got into his brother-in-law and we got that they had loaned the brother-in-law some money they had done some things some things that he wasn't quite sure about had had some challenges about and he kept going back to the brother-in-law and I was like okay what's going what's going on there and they had just recently found out that the brother-in-law was a Catholic and they had just recently found out that the brother-in-law was gay and this man was really not struggling with the fact that they had had money concerns or that there were trust issues he the more that we dug into it it was that he was gay and he was really he was disgusted by it by it he was he just couldn't reconcile it and it was eating him up inside it was just eating him up and you know I have a little context here where I can say oh I recognize this I know what this is and I immediately knew that it's like I was meant to be on call tonight and I was meant he he came in on the night that I was in call I didn't have anything else it was 10 o'clock at night um it's like let's let's go here and in the meantime he had slowly reached onto my hand by this point he was holding my hand and he was squeezing really hard and I remember it because I had just gotten this brand new engagement ring and I could feel him squeezing my pinky onto the corner of this new ring that it wasn't used to and it's like there was something there and we kept on peeling it and eventually we he got to the point where he's like I just the act of sex disgusts me and I don't know what to do with that I was like okay great you've named it let's explore that where does that come from and we talked more about religion and by this point there had already been tears on both of our points and on both of our sides and he got to a moment he's like I just I think some of it is I've just never met a gay person before I don't think in my life I've ever met anyone who was gay so then I've you know I've got a moment there right and the thing that you learn about chaplaincy is it is never about you like it's not about me I am here as a tool and an instrument to help people reconcile their religious things or or their trauma of being in the hospital or the pain but in that moment I knew that I had an opportunity to have an aha because this was a man who had already shared some of his deepest things he had already said I've never even told my wife these things he had shared with me things we have that he had never shared we had already shed tears together and he was saying I've never met anyone gay and I said Robert you actually have he's like I just don't think I have and he I held his hand and I said Robert I'm gay and he immediately started crying but I think especially in that traumatic summer I was doubting some of that of you know how do humans change things when there is so much heartbreak and devastation and hate and that can just kill 49 people in a nightclub as they're dancing ironically let's bring it back to to to dancing and the interaction with Robert made me go no it is about interactions with another human being one-on-one we can change the world by being open and vulnerable and sharing our stories and being open to the possibility that we can impact each other this has been episode eight of bite-sized blessings the podcast all about the magic and spirit that surrounds us if only we open our eyes to it and whether you choose to listen to our bite-sized offerings for that five minute podcast we're going to be doing today we're going to be doing a podcast called the magic and spirit podcast where we're going to be talking about the magic and spirit of the spirit of the spirit of the spirit of the spirit of the spirit of the spirit of the spirit of the spirit,

But you can also take one second to enjoy your time and then another second to get into our bite-sized offerings for that five to ten minutes of freedom in your day or the longer interviews we're grateful you're here I need to thank the reverend christine dance for sharing her story today as well as the creators of the music used Please see the Bite-Sized Blessings website at bite-sized-blessings.

Com.

And remember,

That's bite spelled B-Y-T-E.

On the website,

You can find links to other episodes as well as to books and music I think will lift and inspire you.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

Be like Christine,

Be your authentic self,

And person by person,

Change the world.

Be like Christine,

Be your authentic self,

And person by person,

Change the world.

Be like Christine,

Be your authentic self,

And person by person,

Change the world.