For the first two decades of my life, you could have told me a chaplain was a type of boat, a cozy shirt, or someone’s favorite meal, and I would have believed you.
In retrospect, this seems perfectly sensible. English is my father’s third language (mine as well, technically), and it’s my mother’s fourth. How do you say “chaplain” in Shanghainese or Cantonese or Mandarin? Was chapelain in my mom’s French-Chinese dictionary? As immigrants with no other family in America, we had little exposure to the hospital, military, prison, or hospice settings where people are likely to receive spiritual care from a clergy member or lay religious.
I certainly did not expect to apprentice with Buddhist chaplains in Cambodia. But there I was, the summer after college graduation, shadowing the staff of Brahmavihara, a nonprofit serving indigent AIDS patients in Phnom Penh hospitals and prisons. This NGO, which ran from 2000 to 2016, was founded by the American Zen priest Rev. Beth Kanji Goldring. She and a multigenerational group of Cambodian lay Buddhists, many of whom were themselves HIV-positive, were my first teachers of chaplaincy.
We cultivate the brahmaviharas without bounds; they embrace us without distinction.
They were bodhisattvas on motorbikes, branching off in different directions from the Daem Thkov roundabout to offer reiki, chanting, food, medicine, and companionship to the dying, as well as funeral rites for the deceased. They were embodiments of their organization’s name: the brahmaviharas (divine abodes) of metta (loving-kindness), karuna (compassion), mudita (empathetic joy), and upekkha (equanimity).
More than seven years have passed since I last served as a spiritual caregiver in an official capacity. At that time I was at a hospital in Oakland, serving on an oncology unit and a medical/renal unit. Of that yearlong chaplaincy residency, I often joke (though rather seriously) that I wouldn’t trade it for the world, and I wouldn’t want to do it again.
Two years after completing the residency, I was undone by the too-early death of a dear friend. Those four units of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) prepared me to feel at ease on the oncology unit in Portland where my former college roommate died, six months shy of her thirtieth birthday. If CPE had given me only that, it would have been more than enough.
A recent Gallup survey, conducted in March 2022, found that one in four Americans has been served by a chaplain. A patient once declared to me that chaplains, available 24-7 at the call of a pager, were “Bonus like cream in coffee, like—” He paused in search of the right analogy, “like fried chicken!”
So maybe we are someone’s favorite meal. Maybe, too, we’re a shirt that coats: after all, the word “chaplain” derives from cappellanu, the priests who cared for the sacred relic of the fourth-century saint who famously cut his cape in half to warm a beggar in rags, only to have his own cape restored in whole after dreaming of Jesus wearing half a cloak. Maybe we’re even a kind of boat, ferrying each other to safe harbor.
The brahmaviharas are immeasurable. We cultivate them without bounds; they embrace us without distinction. We are fed even as we do the nourishing. We are clothed in a shared fabric of joy and sorrow, fear and dreaming. As we embody these divine dwellings, we are transported to the other shore.
