Hospital Chaplaincy and the Knowledge of Hearts - What on earth is a chaplain? And what is a Muslim chaplain?

Rabia Harris

This is a question that presents itself forcefully through Clinical Pastoral Education, and perhaps more forcefully in hospital chaplaincy than in some other contexts. In the hospital, there is a clear difference between being a chaplain and being an imam (though the functions may overlap), and between being a chaplain and being an `alim (though the functions may overlap). Hospital patients only occasionally need ritual observances or practical advice from us when we come into attendance; they almost never need learned opinion—or else they need opinion that is outside our competence. Finding out what they do need from us was a great experience for me, and helped my own religious development in surprising ways.

I came to Islam from a very secular intercultural Christian-Jewish family, so like most born Muslims, I didn’t grow up with any exposure to chaplains. I entered the Hartford Seminary Islamic Chaplaincy program not in order to “become a chaplain,” but because I was excited by the idea of a new complementary approach to formal Muslim religious education, one that might open new horizons for women. Little did I know what I was actually going to get myself into when I started my unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE.

Interestingly enough, my training director, or supervisor, wasn’t about to tell me what I was getting myself into, either. Right from the first interview, I knew I was entering unknown and peculiar territory. John wanted me to decide what I was going to learn! That was a real puzzlement. I didn’t have the faintest idea what CPE had to teach, so deciding what I was going to be taught, via a “learning contract,” seemed absurd. But since no one was going to lay the course out for me, I took a swing at laying it out myself, as required.

I decided that my goal was to find out what the whole business was about. Define a chaplain. Define a Muslim chaplain. See if I can become one.

Immediately, a complication: hospital chaplaincy is interreligious. I was to attend all sorts of people, Muslims and non-Muslims. So what on earth is a Muslim interreligious chaplain?

Many people might find such a role to be a contradiction in terms. But for me, it was precisely coming to terms with it that proved to be one of the greatest gifts of the CPE program. For I not only discovered what being a chaplain is all about: I also gained new insight into what being a Muslim is all about. And so, I expect, will every one of us who takes the risk of moving into the kind of spiritual world that the Prophet himself (s) occupied—a world of human spiritual variety; a world that is not uniform at all.

As Muslims, as chaplains, we enter that world to serve. And one of the first things a hospital trainee experiences is that our da`wa and well-intentioned advice-giving do not serve. They tend to make patients worse, rather than better. In this we are very different from the Prophet! So we must take a different aspect of his mission for our exemplar.

And of them are those who vex the Prophet and say: He is only an ear. (Surah Tawba, 61)

In the hospital, it turns out, if we wish to be effective agents of rahma, we must enter the variegated human world not to preach, but primarily to listen. The hospital patient needs us, most of all, to listen. Most patients are in greater or lesser acute crisis, and a soul in crisis needs the presence of a spiritual friend in order to be able to clarify itself. This is one of the secrets of the hadith “The faithful is the mirror of the faithful.” So listening is a primary form of service. And it turns out that listening is not a passive, mechanical process: it is a great art. For we can only listen with the ears that we possess. And we cannot hear any speaker properly until we have taken account of the unique properties of the

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