...am I saved?

They tell me that doing Clinical Pastoral Education is about facing your fears.

Facing the realities of life and death, evaluating your own theology. Everyone has monsters in the closet. It didn’t take long for me to have to face one of them. God, it seems, is not without a sense of humor. Then again, I’ve known that for a while. Even the staging was good.

It was my first overnight on-call shift. Being the overnight on-call chaplain for a 400-bed hospital means that you’re the one who carries the pagers, the one who responds when somebody wants to talk to the chaplain, even if it’s 3:00 in the morning. You’re also the one who answers the emergency page when somebody stops breathing, one of twenty people, all from different disciplines, who read their pagers, decode the locator message, and drop what they’re doing and move as swiftly as they can to the patient. Seconds, they tell you, are critical.

As the chaplain, of course, you’re not next to the patient. The bed will be ringed with physicians and nurses, doing CPR, evaluating, barking orders. You’re across the room, watching. Praying, if you do that. (But not all chaplains do.) The chaplain is usually out in the hall, watching, waiting, praying with the patient’s family.

The on-call pager at my hospital was set to a particular sound: a strident three-beep repeating pattern that would halt all conversation and freeze everyone in the room. It still haunts my nightmares. No other pager was permitted to sound like that. It was a sound that meant, somewhere close by, a human being had stopped breathing. Somewhere, close by, eternity beckoned.

The first time they hand it to you, it weighs a hundred pounds. You feel the weight of it on your belt, pressing against your waist, even if you normally carry something there. The first day I carried it, I kept reaching down to touch it. To check the battery. To confirm the reality. And you know, you know, that the damn thing is going to go off. Like the starting gun at a race, but worse.

In one of the chaplain offices, high in one of the towers, in a mostly unused hallway, there’s a back door. Through the back door is a tiny cell for the on-call chaplain to sleep in (if you get any). A tall person can stretch out and touch both walls at the same time. Tiny bed, nightstand, bathroom, TV bolted to a stand high up on the wall.

It was my first night. I’d been like a runner at the starting line, tense for the sprint, all day long. I’d been handed the dreaded pagers at noon, and all day long I’d carried their awful weight, the weight of unanswered and unanswerable questions, the weight of death and pain.

Knot in the stomach, sweaty palms, thoughts chasing themselves around the ceiling at breakneck speed. I had set up the tiny room in combat-ready fashion: Clothes laid out, pagers at the bedside, finally convincing myself to get undressed and try to sleep—if a patient coded at 3 a.m., the extra 120 seconds to get dressed wouldn’t really matter all that much. I couldn’t help staring at the pagers a few times before turning off the lights. I surprised myself by being able to fall asleep.

I was up, adrenaline racing, lights on, halfway out the door in my underwear, before I remembered to breathe. It was the ‘regular’ pager, not the emergency one. It was a few minutes to midnight, and somebody wanted to talk to the chaplain.

Tonight, that meant she got me instead.

The patient was in the last stages; only days, or hours, left to live. Cancer everywhere—lungs, breast, abdomen, brain. She looked terrible. Hairless, shaking, with an oxygen mask covering her face. A picture taped to the wall told of her former head-turning beauty, a sad contrast to how she would meet her end. I had to lean over and strain to hear her as she struggled to get the words out.

Am I saved?

I tried the mirror technique first. “Are you saved?” I asked, hoping to draw her into further conversation. Good try; no banana. She asked me again.

Am I saved?

Then I asked what she thought, and she told me she didn’t know. Slowly, laboriously, with me leaning over the bed, ear next to her mouth, she told me the story of her life.

The Bible says this, and that, and I did these things...
is my baptism valid, if it was done this way...?
If I lived this way, did this and such, is that okay...?
Is there anything else I need to do?

Well, who am I to judge, anyway?

I don’t think that there are entrance criteria to God’s love. I firmly believe that God doesn’t keep score. I could never imagine an enormous roll of parchment, held by a tired old angel with a quill pen, on which the names of every baptized Christian was recorded. Nope, sorry, you didn’t quite go all the way under the water when you were baptized—-straight to hell for you. Just like Achilles and his heel. Next... let’s see, how about you? Oh, too bad, your priest turns out to be a child molester, so the sacrament isn’t valid. Well, at least he’ll join you in hell to keep you company.

I asked her, “What do you think?” How are we to be saved?

“I was baptized,” she gasped. “I confessed my sins. I confessed…the name of Jesus…” she trailed off into unintelligible mumbling.

Let’s pray about it, I suggested. She closed her eyes; I thought she was asleep for a minute. Then I realized she was weeping. That was a mess. Snot in the oxygen mask, all over the cannula. And then a moment of real panic—she couldn’t breathe. Had to clear away all the stuff so she could get some air. (I could see the headlines: ‘Patient drowns in her own snot during prayer with chaplain; student sued for malpractice’)

We prayed. It took a while. She had difficulty focusing, difficulty finishing sentences, difficulty breathing. It became clear that she had done everything she thought she needed to do, but she was worried that there was something else. She didn’t want to be left out of glory on a technicality. I don’t blame her.

It's now 3 a.m. The city is still. eternity beckons.

Am I saved?

She’s asking God, but she gets me instead. I stood up and put a hand on her forehead. “Yes, you are. It is enough. Be at peace.”

God have mercy on me if I’m wrong.