Why we still need to remember

At a glance, there doesn’t seem to be much of a link between today’s readings and today being Remembrance Sunday, although you may have found like me that a lot of things this week haven’t made much sense. In the words of Rosalind Brown “today's readings make no special concessions to Remembrance Sunday, which is appropriate, because war makes no special concessions to our lives”.

This year’s Armistice remembrance comes at a time when the world, and the concept of Peace, seems very fragile with the ongoing war in Ukraine, Escalation of hostilities in the Middle East, the Sudanese Civil War, Myanmar Civil War, and dozens of other conflicts the world over.

This is the most fragile peace has felt to me in my lifetime and this has been exacerbated by the election of a notoriously unpredictable US president. So, we might find ourselves asking - where do we find our hope?

This morning’s readings help me to remember two things which you may find helpful when searching for hope; firstly, like Jonah, James, John, Simon-Peter and Andrew we too are called. Everyone is. Some respond and some don’t. Like Jonah some may run away from where their call leads them, until a point where God becomes so insistent you have no choice – like being swallowed by a giant fish and spat out where God told you to be in the first place. Although our experiences are perhaps a bit less literal.

Or maybe, like these 4 apostles, we jump in with both feet, giving everything to Jesus, but finding we’ve make mistakes and had our doubts on the way. Whichever we’ve been, I’m sure there’s aspects of your lives – your career, the things you’ve given you time to, the people you’ve found yourselves amongst, that felt right, that felt it was the place God wanted you to be. When something feels right, I think it’s often a sign that we are where God wants us to be.

The second thing these readings lead me to remember is that Jesus’ work is already done. We continue it and strive to bring his message of love and equality to every corner of our lives, but He’s done the heavy lifting already. Memory and remembering is a peculiar thing, it’s so easy to forget God’s in control and at times give ourselves over to despair.

I don’t know if any of you have seen the film Coco? Years ago, we watched it at The LOFT as a way of engaging with this remembrance season. The film looks at memory, remembering loved ones who’ve died and our common memories. We’ve already had the feasts of All Souls and All Saints and today is the solemn day set aside to remember all those whose lives have been lost in conflicts the world over.

Coco is the story of a Mexican boy named Miguel, who accidentally ends up in the Land of the Dead on The Day of the Dead and must get help from his ancestors to find his way home.

We see the people of Miguel’s village both in their homes and at grave sides making offerings and remembering their dead ancestors. There’s an air of celebration to their remembrances.

It might surprise you to hear that visiting the graves of loved ones to honour them, lighting candles and decorating them with seasonal flora was also a practice in the British Isles on All Soul’s Day.

Film critic Clarisse Loughrey writes that our relationship to the dead is a key theme of Coco. Those who reside within the colourful, bountiful Land of the Dead can do so only as long as there is someone to remember them in the Land of the Living; once that last memory is lost to time, that individual – quite literally – fades into nothingness.

It's incredibly important that we find ways of engaging with younger generations about remembrance, that we keep alive the memories of our ancestors but also keep remembering the reasons for the world wars of the 20th century, and don’t let them fade into nothingness. When I was young the reasons for and outcomes of two devastating world wars were burned into our communal memories and conscious. Alongside “we will remember them” we said “never again”.

And yet we find our world in this fragile place, alongside the increase in and nearness of conflicts, we’re seeing a worldwide rise in those with extreme views gaining power and discrimination of certain minority, ethnic and religious groups. Our communal memories should be reminding us that we’ve been here before, and it wasn’t good.

Remembrance is central to the ritual of church life. Each time we gather here it’s an act of remembrance for the life of the one we’re called to follow. Every communion service has Jesus’ words “do this in remembrance of me”.

Our gathering here is a reminder that like the fishermen in today’s gospel we’re called to something else, for someone else. We recognise and remember the importance of God in our lives each day.

Remembering Jesus doesn’t mean we just think about him and hear stories from his life, it means we have a call to act and be different. Our remembering directly affects our actions in the world. Maybe remembrance is always about more than remembering, maybe true remembrance is about how we’re influenced to act and be because of those memories, because of the experiences of those who’ve gone before us and because we should learn, grow and change through our shared memories.

It may sound obvious, but I think it’s important to remember that today is a memorial of peace, and that we as Christians are the agents of God’s peace.

We can’t let these memories fade into nothingness because by keeping them alive we highlight the importance of peace, and hopefully have a better chance of achieving it.

To finish I’d like to share a prayer of remembering:

In the love that created a universe we remember

In the love that created those who have died through war we remember

In the love that blessed their lives with love we remember

In the love that blessed their lives with laughter we remember

In the love that wept when they wept we remember

In the love that healed them by welcoming them home we remember

In the love that holds our broken hearts in its heart we remember. Amen.

My Dual Role - and how I realised EVERYONE can benefit from spiritual care

 

This is the talk I gave at the EMBT UK NAP conference on Friday 18th October.

Good morning, I’m Fi and I‘ve been a haematology-oncology nurse for 24 years. I started work as a newly qualified D grade in September 2000 on the haematology and transplant unit at The Christie in Manchester (my hometown) after falling in love with haem as a student in Liverpool. 

In January 2007, after returning from maternity leave when I had my second child, I became a band 6 and I’ve now been a sister for over 17 years – and my baby has just turned 18. 

So, I’ve been around a while, I’ve seen a lot of developments, I feel like I have a lot of knowledge and skills, and I’m still completely in love with haem and transplant, and I’m particularly passionate about supporting early career nurses so that they hopefully stick around like I have. It’s so important to have skilled and experienced staff on our units and if we nurture our teams, we’ll hopefully retain those who like me find the most job satisfaction at the bedside.

I’m also a Church of England priest. 

 

I was brought up in a church-going family, which was already a bit weird 30 odd years ago when I was still in school, and like a lot of teenagers I stopped going as I had better things to do and many of the things I perceived as the teachings of the church didn’t sit well with my own values, particularly those around the role of women and the inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community. 

But then, compelled by something and newly married, in March 2002 I started attending my local church, which had a woman vicar – one of the first – and I learnt I was allowed to believe in things like evolution and that there’s an incredibly wide breadth of beliefs in the Church of England - so wide that I’m sure there’s a C of E community for anyone who follows the Christian faith. I was incredibly lucky that my local church was, and continues to be, progressive and inclusive.

It became a huge part of my life, I had the kids, and I was feeling compelled again, this time drawn to a more formal leadership role in the church, and it felt like that was a call to the priesthood, which made no sense with my vocation as a nurse – I’m sure many of you feel that nursing is your vocation and you can’t imagine being anything else.

I subsequently learned about something called an MSE or minster in secular employment. MSEs are priests or accredited lay people (lay means someone who isn’t clergy) where it’s recognised that their priestly work or ministry is actually in their place of employment, and I met MSEs who were nurses, solicitors, vets, dentists and even tax officers! I went through a very lengthy selection process (it took about 3 years), started training in September 2013, was ordained in 2016 and priested in 2017.

I’m also now a Chaplain at the Christie. 

I’d worked as a staff adviser with the team since 2010, so when I was ordained I took up an honorary chaplaincy role. I have to be very careful and very strict with boundaries, so the honorary contract formalised and authorised the work I was already doing. 

In 2019 the opportunity arose for a paid role within the team, I dropped my nursing hours to 30 per week – the biggest career decision I’ve ever made - and I work one day a week as a chaplain - I’m now the deputy lead for the service.

So that’s a whistlestop tour of how I got here, and I guess what I’ve been asked to convey is how the dual role informs each of my jobs, where there’s overlap, where’s there’s clashes and how it can benefit patients and staff in a transplant setting. I’m pretty sure this is an entirely unique combination of roles within the same trust, but I truly believe that each makes me better at the other.

My personal belief is that each one of us has a spiritual life that needs to be fed, what this needs is as different and unique as we are. For some it may be our faith. If like myself you work in a tertiary or regional centre, you’ll know the joy of working in a diverse, multi-faith and multi-cultural environment. Those of us with a religious faith might practice or express that in vastly different ways.

 

For others our spirituality might be fed by music, literature, nature, poetry, pets, craft, hospitality, baking, meditation – it’s vast, and as a nurse who’s always worked with patients in isolation I’ve always been keenly aware of how our patients can feed and care for their spiritual life whilst isolated from most of the things which nurture and ground them, and what we can do to help.

 

Spirituality is anything that helps us connect- with ourselves, with others, with our world, and (if we have faith) with God or a Higher Power. Spiritual need, and even distress, kicks in when these connections are compromised or broken. 

The role of a chaplain is in essence to walk alongside the patient and assist them in whatever way is right for them to care for their spiritual needs, which keeps a person grounded in who they are at their very core. 

 

They way I explain to people how our chaplaincy service at the Christie works is that we’re the one person who goes to the patient’s bedside with absolutely no agenda, each of us who goes to see a patient in our various healthcare roles has an agenda to meet- an assessment to do, information to obtain, bloods, tests, observations, something to administer, and this is true of the wider MDT as well.

As a chaplain you’re meeting your patient where they are, as who they are as a complete person, not the one aspect of their care I may be concerned with as a healthcare professional but as someone who just wants to check “how are you today, is there anything you want to talk about?” 

We’re the privileged witnesses to and holders of people’s stories, the number of times I’ve gone to a bed side and felt the overwhelming honour of someone sharing their story or that of their loved one.

There can be misconceptions of why we’re there due to perceptions of what a chaplain is, we introduce ourselves as being there for spiritual support, and very little of what we do is religious care. Mostly we give pastoral support, and around 1/3 of the patients under our care are not religious.

 

In 2023 we had a total of 1138 patient contacts, from 10 different faiths or world views, we had 398 new referrals, assessed 127 patients in the last days of life and this was between our 3 paid team members, who between us make up 1 full time equivalent, our Roman Catholic cover 2 days per week and 2 honorary chaplains from minority faiths. This year the numbers are already much higher as our volunteers have finally returned post covid, we try to have a volunteer assigned to each ward and visiting weekly to help build those therapeutic relationships.

 

So, does being a chaplain make me a better nurse? 100% yes. In chaplaincy you’re journeying alongside someone in a different way to how you do as a nurse, and it changes your perspective. The patients who as a nurse we find the most difficult or frustrating -  you know the ones I mean - are often the ones that as chaplains we do the most work with, it helps you to understand their complexities, the origins of those complex, frustrating and obstructive behaviours and therefore how they need us to work with them to achieve the healthcare goals necessary.

I may have known a person for months or years as a nurse, but then the richness of what I learn about them through their significant chaplaincy conversations teaches me things about them I would never have otherwise known and might in some cases transform how we care for them medically. 

One of my boundaries is that, unless it’s an emergency I don’t give religious care on the ward I work on, but this is one of the important ways my work as a nurse informs my chaplaincy – by identifying those patients I’ve worked with as a nurse who will benefit from chaplaincy input, and I’m almost always right! Giving that opportunity for someone to open up and release into the world the things they’re holding inside is transformative.

We’ve very carefully chosen the chaplains who do see the patients on the transplant unit. We have Rabbi Lisa (who sadly has just left us to take up a Rabbinical post in Birmingham), who has extensive training in mindfulness and was employed with a specific focus on the teenage and young adult patients on my unit, which alongside our haematology and transplant programme houses the regional TYA oncology unit.

Our volunteer chaplain is Mary, a retired GP who’s a humanist, she focuses on the adult patients and as well as her medical knowledge has the unique perspective of just returning to us after fighting for her life in ICU. It’s had a huge impact on how she empathises with patients. 

When we recruit Rabbi Lisa’s replacement our focus will be on the needs of the TYA and non-religious patients, including the many going through transplant under our care.

For my chaplaincy work with the oncology patients in the rest of the hospital my nursing knowledge gives me the ability to quickly assess where a patient is at medically as I often don’t even know their diagnosis. I process what they’re attached to, how they look or the snippets of medical information we’re given about them. All these things I’ll interpret in a much more clinical way than my non-clinical chaplaincy colleagues. 

Most of the patients who end up in our care are long stay – at least 3 weeks – and my long experience with long-stay and isolated patients has created the empathy to hopefully understand where they’re at and what they may need. 

The other way the roles complement each other is in my passion for staff support, which is part of my focus within chaplaincy and a huge part of my nursing role. I’ve recently completed PNA training, and the skills honed through this seamlessly feed into chaplaincy, where we also offer debrief after complex or traumatic events, and support staff as individuals and as groups.

Since coming into post, I’ve tried to raise our profile amongst staff as another means of support, entirely separate from nursing structures. We’ve supported staff through cancer and other illnesses, through caring for family members, abusive relationships, disciplinary hearings, pregnancy loss, the death of colleagues, racist abuse, financial struggles and many other things. All our staff data is anonymously recorded.

Chaplaincy might not be someone’s first choice through difficult life events and traumatic work experiences, but chaplains work at the cliff face of trauma and grief. And we have a ritual for any occasion! Something deep within us as humans seems to crave ritual, and we can come up with something religious or secular for any purpose. My colleague Andrew developed a secular service for staff to use to say goodbye to patients who’ve died, knowing that with our long-stay patients staff often grieve deeply. 

Every November I take part in a day where we invite the families of TYA patients who’ve died to collectively remember their loved ones.

In conclusion, in my experience, my two roles seamlessly inform the other, how could they not if I’m to be an authentic practitioner within each role? I’ve avoided clashes by ensuring my boundaries are firm within each role and by helping raise awareness of what good spiritual care can look like.

All means all

May I speak in the name of the One God, Speaker, Word and Breath. Amen.

Today is Disability Awareness Sunday, coming at the end of Disability Awareness Week, which began last Sunday. It’s a day when hundreds of churches focus on disability inclusion within churches, what it means and what it might look like.

The Christian Disability Awareness organisation Through The Roof tell us “churches are often not aware of the many barriers disabled people can face on their journey to join, or be fully included, in church communities. Accessibility of church buildings isn’t the only barrier – there are lots of social and attitude barriers too, which are easy to overlook.

In a UK survey by Scope, 2 out of every 3 people said they felt ‘uncomfortable’ speaking with disabled people, and 3 out of every 4 disabled people reported experiencing negative attitudes or behaviour from others.” Just yesterday Mike and myself popped into Nandos for lunch, the young man we met at the door looked flustered by Mike being in a wheelchair and never once spoke to him directly.

I wasn’t sure if I was the right member of our team to preach today, even though I live in a household with multiple disabilities – some more obvious, others more hidden, their stories aren’t my story to tell. 

As many of you know our team has a variety of lived experience with disability, so if anything I say doesn’t feel correct then I welcome you and anyone here with lived experience to challenge and question, that’s how we grow together as a community.

And there’s another caveat I want to add – disability is a word with such enormous scope. It covers physical differences – congenital or acquired, surgical or degenerative - some of these are more obvious than others. It covers sensory deficits – hearing and sight being the most common but conditions which cause loss of sensation in the hands or feet can be hugely challenging in day-to-day life – how we turn the pages of a hymn book or climb the step to the communion rail can limit church inclusion.

There’s intellectual disabilities (a term I don’t like but I don’t know a better one), mental health conditions and neurodivergences – a category so broad and individual that each person’s needs will be vastly different, this makes it hugely difficult to know how to be the inclusive space and community which meets such a vast range of difference.

In our gospel reading today Jesus tells us that if we welcome a child we welcome him. Many preachers take this example and speak of the innocence and simplicity of children, that with the disciples argument about greatness the greatest is actually the person often considered the least, but others have read this symbolic act differently.

Professor Eugene Boring, in his commentary on Mark, writes, “In the first-century Mediterranean world, the characteristic feature of children was not thought to be their innocence, but their lack of status and legal rights. Jesus is not teaching a lesson about being child-like but speaking to the issue of status. 

Embracing children, contrary to their cultural evaluation as nonpersons with no ‘rights,’ was characteristic of the historical Jesus and early Christianity, who accepted the least and the lowly without asking what benefit they could receive from such people. Placing a child in their midst, Jesus speaks directly to the disciples. The child is not a prop or visual aid for a lesson Jesus wants to teach but belongs with the congregation; those who receive [even a child] receive Jesus, and those who receive Jesus receive the one who sent him.”

Now I don’t want to patronise, other or misrepresent, and I don’t consider people with disabilities to be “the least”. Many, maybe most, people with disabilities in the UK feel empowered and fulfilled, able to live full lives with some appropriate adjustments. Coming off the back of the Paralympics we know what can be achieved when funding and support are given where it’s needed (and hopefully Team GBs results give us hope we’re doing something right), but we also know that when cuts are made to government spending or local services, people with disabilities are disproportionally affected, and poverty disproportionately affects people with disabilities.

We know our world, our buildings and public spaces, outside of compulsory legislation, are designed for able-bodied neurotypical people – something we wouldn’t even notice until it becomes an issue.

There’s also a darker side to the way public life and policy affects people with disabilities - NHS and benefit cuts, the pandemic, the way PIP and Disability Living Allowance are assessed and awarded have all led to disproportionate numbers of excess deaths, partially due to not receiving timely or appropriate care but also people have taken their own lives due to the additional physical and psychological strain put upon them. They have been made to feel, like the child in our gospel reading, like nonpersons with no rights.

In the gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples that greatness in God’s eyes comes from being a servant to all, and for today our focus is on how we serve people with disabilities both inside and outside of our community.

We’ve made a step towards this service by joining the Inclusive Church Network. Their statement, which we aim to follow, is “We believe in inclusive church – a church which celebrates and affirms every person and does not discriminate.

We will continue to challenge the church where it continues to discriminate against people on grounds of disability, economic power, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, learning disability, mental health, neurodiversity, or sexuality.

We believe in a Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.”

To concentrate on serving and welcoming all, we’ve begun to look at our building, materials and services. We’ve undertaken extensive risk assessments which try and account for multiple areas of disability, and they’ve been undertaken by people with disabilities. 

Being a part of the Inclusive church network doesn’t mean we’ve got it sussed – especially with a very old and listed building to account for – but it’s a journey, a statement of intention and we know there’s going to be bumps along the way. We also know with the huge scope of disabilities we’ll miss something, so we rely upon our relationships as a community and the disclosure of our community, to tell us where we can do better or even where we’re getting it wrong. 

This takes all of us and it takes a commitment to noticing and to communicating.

There’s another aspect to being an Inclusive church and that’s challenging the systems, whether that’s church systems or the wider systems of government and legislation. 

To relate this to how we tackle for example racism, we know it’s not enough to not be racist, we need to be actively anti-racist, challenging behaviours and systems which discriminate or oppress, and lifting the voices of those affected.

Within our community we have representation within the Diocese disability group, but it takes more than that one person. 

To actively serve people with disabilities we need to be actively anti-ableist, to challenge behaviours and systems which discriminate or oppress them and find ways of raising up their voices to be heard, using the privilege of able-bodied people to lift up those who ableism affects. 

And this takes each one of us, it takes awareness and a knowledge that being servants of all means ALL. 

Amen.