Illustration by Charity Ellis
I am leaving my family to be with someone else’s family. These words reverberate through my mind as I drive down the freeway. I have been called to the hospital to respond to an end-of-life event. I clutch the wheel with an intentional grip to steady myself for what awaits me at the threshold of the hospital entrance. I am leaving my family to accompany a child and their family between the threshold of life and death. The gravitas of this moment is both sacred and humbling to me. Walking through this valley of the shadow of death, I do not fear evil; I fear that my finite human language is not sufficient enough for this moment. There are no words to express the sorrow, grief, unfairness, and anguish when a child dies. And when there are no words, there remains the gift of presence.
To accompany someone well through the thresholds of life and death as a chaplain requires us to be present to the emotions, values, and spiritual needs that a person or a family is expressing in that moment. To allow oneself to be accompanied requires families to spiritually and emotionally trust the chaplain will hold their deepest pain and vulnerabilities in a tender and compassionate way. In this way, accompaniment becomes a mutual invitation to hold and behold one another’s humanity and the stories that embody our human experiences. Artist Makoto Fujimura once said, “The most courageous thing we can do as a people is to behold.”1 I would add that allowing oneself to be fully seen, especially in moments of deep sorrow and pain, also takes tremendous courage.
From a Christological perspective, this mutual act of courageous beholding creates space within us to experience the interdependent nature of God. As Christians, we serve a God who intimately and intentionally knows the contours of our pain, grief, and death. When Christ faced the threshold of death, the one thing he asked was for his disciples to accompany him, to pray with him and to stand watch with him for what was to come (Matt 26:36–41). I am struck by the vulnerability of Jesus’ human need to have someone behold his pain, grief, and ultimately his death. As followers of Christ, we carry Christ’s story, testifying to his pain and suffering by living in such a way that we can sit well with people in their pain and not abandon them in their grief.
One of the many names for Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us (Matt 1:23). I understand the heart of chaplaincy to be essentially this: We are with God as God is with us. As Christian chaplains, we are called to be Christlike, not to be Christ. It is not our work to save people from their suffering, their pains, or their diseases. We cannot resurrect bodies, broken dreams, or long-lost hopes. But what we can do and are called to do is to accompany others and to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn (Rom 12:15). We can affirm they are not alone and invite them to express their emotional and spiritual needs. We can offer our presence, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, hands to hold and to bless, prayerful words, or prayerfully not saying words at all, if the moment calls for that. All of these offerings can be gifts of compassion, which can be like a salve to the spirit in those moments (the word “compassion” deriving from Latin, meaning “to suffer with”). In many ways, these offerings represent our best human attempts to bear witness to and to temporarily suffer with the families we serve, amidst the reality of suffering and pain.
From my own perspective accompanying patients and families, I have learned that the more we behold one another’s stories, the more we see God incarnate in the faces, voices, and experiences of our fellow human beings. As hospital chaplains, the amount of time we are given to bear witness and hold stories can be fleeting. This reminds me that our time on earth is limited, yet we can choose to live intentionally at the thresholds of our pain and the pains of others. In To Bless the Space Between Us, Celtic theologian John O’Donohue writes about how being in the space of such thresholds requires an individual and collective awareness of the emotional, spiritual, and physical shifts in rhythms and ways of being.2
These are the places where chaplains co-journey and accompany others through their deepest joys and sufferings. This requires that both the patient and the chaplain take an emotional and spiritual risk in journeying through a threshold together. It takes courage to walk through the thresholds of life and death, as one cannot fully discern what awaits them on the other side of the threshold. I have learned that all thresholds do not hold the same psychic pains.
Each time that I touch the blue curtains in a patient’s room, I am reminded that I am touching the boundaries between my suffering and the suffering of another human being. I am reminded that there are sometimes oceans of distance between the type of suffering I hold and what others experience. Other times, I find the common human suffering that we all share is as close to us as our very breaths. The fragility of life is like the fragility of those blue curtains in just one moment; we are all one touch away from life and death.
I take a deep breath and say a quick prayer before knocking tenderly on the patient’s door. I am aware that once I open this door, I will not leave this threshold in the same way I arrived. As I slowly open the door, I am bathed in neutral white artificial light that makes it suddenly difficult to remember whether it is day or night. The neutral color of the light reminds me not to be too bright and cheerful, while also being a calming presence. The lack of natural light reorients me towards the liminal nature of grief, as grief operates on its own time, outside of the conventional and orderly scheduled rhythm of societal time. Grief time moves slow as molasses and infuses itself into every molecule of air in the room it inhabits. At this threshold of life and death, I make eye contact with the parents and their child. We mutually behold one another and enter into sacred, liminal space together. Without saying a word, there is a shared understanding between us that no matter what, they will not be alone in this moment. For the first time, the Word becomes flesh to me (John 1:14). For the first time, I truly understand that where two or three are gathered, so the Spirit of the Lord is (Matt 18:20).
Here, within this sacred liminal space, we exchange stories, tears, and prayers. I leave to give them space and time together as a family. I prepare to document the encounter, but the words are escaping me. How do I write what transpired in the room? What is the story I will tell about this moment? At the same time, I am aware that their story is not my story to tell. Their story is a gift that I have been blessed to share, even for a few hours.
A theology of story allows us to make meaning of the stories that make up the fabric of our lives. Philip Sheldrake once said, “The whole of our life is spiritual.”3 From the moment we first open our eyes to the moment when we take our last breath, our lives are being informed by the stories we tell and the stories we are gifted to hear.
In her book, This Here Flesh, author and theologian Cole Arthur Riley writes about the importance of story theology within our Christian faith. Riley writes, “The Christian story hinges on a ceremony of communal remembrance.”4Within the liturgical calendar, we collectively remember the joyful and sorrowful stories of Christ’s life and death. As Riley aptly notes, we do this in remembrance of Christ. This act of remembrance and storytelling is an integral part of our expressions of faith. We serve a God of embodied parable. Upon a close reading of the parables of Jesus, one can notice that Jesus speaks plainly, uses metaphors of daily living, and uplifts the extraordinary divine presence woven throughout our ordinary lives
and stories.
The deeper I dive into my vocational calling as a chaplain, the more stories and people I am humbled to behold. Though no two stories, patients, or families are the same, I believe that everyone has a story that reflects their own unique and universal joys, challenges, and struggles. In the words of Rachel Naomi Remen, “We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory.”5
As chaplains, our role is unique in that we help others to make meaning of the stories that emerge and ultimately form the shape of their lives in moments of emotional and spiritual crisis. For patients and family members who identify as Christian, meaning making can also look like drawing connections from their story to the larger divine story. I have witnessed and held the hands of wailing mothers as they began to grieve the loss of their child like Rachel in Ramah (Matt 2:18). I have witnessed and been deeply moved by fathers who have pleaded on their knees like Jairus to ask Jesus for their children to be healed (Mark 5:22–23). Most notably, I have been intrigued and astounded by the rich interior spiritual lives of the children and adolescents I accompany. Like the teachers hearing a preadolescent Jesus share his understanding of God, so I too find myself amazed by the levels of depth of their self-awareness and awareness of the divine presence of God with them (Luke 2:46). I might be their chaplain, but they are my greatest teachers of what it means to have an embodied faith, genuine compassion for the wellness of others, and a deep understanding of God’s accompanying presence in the midst of their own and their family’s suffering.
As I continue to ponder all of these stories in my heart, like Mary (Luke 2:51), I am thankful for the spiritual practice of storytelling, which can facilitate healing, be a pathway to wisdom, and draw us deeper into connection with God and with one another. After all, in the words of the hit Broadway song “Why We Tell the Story,” “For out of what we live and believe, our lives become the stories that we weave.”6
For those who lean into the beholding tradition of our Christian faith, we behold and tell our stories as a way to process our pains and our grief, to remember the power of love, and to hold onto our hope. Each time we behold one another’s stories and testimonies, we fortify our faith in God’s faithfulness throughout each chapter of ours and others’ stories. And when the act of beholding becomes too much for our hearts to bear alone, we need to seek support from trusted members of our communities. Beholding one another fully opens doors to transformation, healing, and a remembrance of how Christ’s own story is shaping us.
I’ll end this piece with an excerpt of a blessing by Kate Bowler and Jessica Ritchie called “For the Ones Who Bear Witness.”7 May you receive this blessing as people who accompany and hold the stories of grief, loss, and hope however your vocation unfolds before you. May this blessing accompany you and be a light unto your feet as you minister to those whom you are called to be with:
Blessed are the noticers. The ones who see the story in its fullness.
Blessed are the attenders. The witness- bearers. The story-holders.
The ones who tiptoe to the edge right
alongside us,Knowing that the very act will break their heart in pieces too.
Choosing us anyway.
Blessed are those who are amazed by a life lived in its fragility, in its brevity, in
its beauty.Blessed are the ones who stand close enough to say, “BEHOLD.”
Tyler Brewington-Mathis (MDiv ’23) is a chaplain from Los Angeles. In addition to earning her MDiv at Fuller, she earned a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. While at Fuller, Brewington-Mathis was the recipient of the 2023 Frederick Buechner Award for Excellence in Writing. She finds joy in the creative arts and contemplative spiritual practices and is passionate about the intersections of spirituality and public health.
I am leaving my family to be with someone else’s family. These words reverberate through my mind as I drive down the freeway. I have been called to the hospital to respond to an end-of-life event. I clutch the wheel with an intentional grip to steady myself for what awaits me at the threshold of the hospital entrance. I am leaving my family to accompany a child and their family between the threshold of life and death. The gravitas of this moment is both sacred and humbling to me. Walking through this valley of the shadow of death, I do not fear evil; I fear that my finite human language is not sufficient enough for this moment. There are no words to express the sorrow, grief, unfairness, and anguish when a child dies. And when there are no words, there remains the gift of presence.
To accompany someone well through the thresholds of life and death as a chaplain requires us to be present to the emotions, values, and spiritual needs that a person or a family is expressing in that moment. To allow oneself to be accompanied requires families to spiritually and emotionally trust the chaplain will hold their deepest pain and vulnerabilities in a tender and compassionate way. In this way, accompaniment becomes a mutual invitation to hold and behold one another’s humanity and the stories that embody our human experiences. Artist Makoto Fujimura once said, “The most courageous thing we can do as a people is to behold.”1 I would add that allowing oneself to be fully seen, especially in moments of deep sorrow and pain, also takes tremendous courage.
From a Christological perspective, this mutual act of courageous beholding creates space within us to experience the interdependent nature of God. As Christians, we serve a God who intimately and intentionally knows the contours of our pain, grief, and death. When Christ faced the threshold of death, the one thing he asked was for his disciples to accompany him, to pray with him and to stand watch with him for what was to come (Matt 26:36–41). I am struck by the vulnerability of Jesus’ human need to have someone behold his pain, grief, and ultimately his death. As followers of Christ, we carry Christ’s story, testifying to his pain and suffering by living in such a way that we can sit well with people in their pain and not abandon them in their grief.
One of the many names for Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us (Matt 1:23). I understand the heart of chaplaincy to be essentially this: We are with God as God is with us. As Christian chaplains, we are called to be Christlike, not to be Christ. It is not our work to save people from their suffering, their pains, or their diseases. We cannot resurrect bodies, broken dreams, or long-lost hopes. But what we can do and are called to do is to accompany others and to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn (Rom 12:15). We can affirm they are not alone and invite them to express their emotional and spiritual needs. We can offer our presence, a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on, hands to hold and to bless, prayerful words, or prayerfully not saying words at all, if the moment calls for that. All of these offerings can be gifts of compassion, which can be like a salve to the spirit in those moments (the word “compassion” deriving from Latin, meaning “to suffer with”). In many ways, these offerings represent our best human attempts to bear witness to and to temporarily suffer with the families we serve, amidst the reality of suffering and pain.
From my own perspective accompanying patients and families, I have learned that the more we behold one another’s stories, the more we see God incarnate in the faces, voices, and experiences of our fellow human beings. As hospital chaplains, the amount of time we are given to bear witness and hold stories can be fleeting. This reminds me that our time on earth is limited, yet we can choose to live intentionally at the thresholds of our pain and the pains of others. In To Bless the Space Between Us, Celtic theologian John O’Donohue writes about how being in the space of such thresholds requires an individual and collective awareness of the emotional, spiritual, and physical shifts in rhythms and ways of being.2
These are the places where chaplains co-journey and accompany others through their deepest joys and sufferings. This requires that both the patient and the chaplain take an emotional and spiritual risk in journeying through a threshold together. It takes courage to walk through the thresholds of life and death, as one cannot fully discern what awaits them on the other side of the threshold. I have learned that all thresholds do not hold the same psychic pains.
Each time that I touch the blue curtains in a patient’s room, I am reminded that I am touching the boundaries between my suffering and the suffering of another human being. I am reminded that there are sometimes oceans of distance between the type of suffering I hold and what others experience. Other times, I find the common human suffering that we all share is as close to us as our very breaths. The fragility of life is like the fragility of those blue curtains in just one moment; we are all one touch away from life and death.
I take a deep breath and say a quick prayer before knocking tenderly on the patient’s door. I am aware that once I open this door, I will not leave this threshold in the same way I arrived. As I slowly open the door, I am bathed in neutral white artificial light that makes it suddenly difficult to remember whether it is day or night. The neutral color of the light reminds me not to be too bright and cheerful, while also being a calming presence. The lack of natural light reorients me towards the liminal nature of grief, as grief operates on its own time, outside of the conventional and orderly scheduled rhythm of societal time. Grief time moves slow as molasses and infuses itself into every molecule of air in the room it inhabits. At this threshold of life and death, I make eye contact with the parents and their child. We mutually behold one another and enter into sacred, liminal space together. Without saying a word, there is a shared understanding between us that no matter what, they will not be alone in this moment. For the first time, the Word becomes flesh to me (John 1:14). For the first time, I truly understand that where two or three are gathered, so the Spirit of the Lord is (Matt 18:20).
Here, within this sacred liminal space, we exchange stories, tears, and prayers. I leave to give them space and time together as a family. I prepare to document the encounter, but the words are escaping me. How do I write what transpired in the room? What is the story I will tell about this moment? At the same time, I am aware that their story is not my story to tell. Their story is a gift that I have been blessed to share, even for a few hours.
A theology of story allows us to make meaning of the stories that make up the fabric of our lives. Philip Sheldrake once said, “The whole of our life is spiritual.”3 From the moment we first open our eyes to the moment when we take our last breath, our lives are being informed by the stories we tell and the stories we are gifted to hear.
In her book, This Here Flesh, author and theologian Cole Arthur Riley writes about the importance of story theology within our Christian faith. Riley writes, “The Christian story hinges on a ceremony of communal remembrance.”4Within the liturgical calendar, we collectively remember the joyful and sorrowful stories of Christ’s life and death. As Riley aptly notes, we do this in remembrance of Christ. This act of remembrance and storytelling is an integral part of our expressions of faith. We serve a God of embodied parable. Upon a close reading of the parables of Jesus, one can notice that Jesus speaks plainly, uses metaphors of daily living, and uplifts the extraordinary divine presence woven throughout our ordinary lives
and stories.
The deeper I dive into my vocational calling as a chaplain, the more stories and people I am humbled to behold. Though no two stories, patients, or families are the same, I believe that everyone has a story that reflects their own unique and universal joys, challenges, and struggles. In the words of Rachel Naomi Remen, “We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory.”5
As chaplains, our role is unique in that we help others to make meaning of the stories that emerge and ultimately form the shape of their lives in moments of emotional and spiritual crisis. For patients and family members who identify as Christian, meaning making can also look like drawing connections from their story to the larger divine story. I have witnessed and held the hands of wailing mothers as they began to grieve the loss of their child like Rachel in Ramah (Matt 2:18). I have witnessed and been deeply moved by fathers who have pleaded on their knees like Jairus to ask Jesus for their children to be healed (Mark 5:22–23). Most notably, I have been intrigued and astounded by the rich interior spiritual lives of the children and adolescents I accompany. Like the teachers hearing a preadolescent Jesus share his understanding of God, so I too find myself amazed by the levels of depth of their self-awareness and awareness of the divine presence of God with them (Luke 2:46). I might be their chaplain, but they are my greatest teachers of what it means to have an embodied faith, genuine compassion for the wellness of others, and a deep understanding of God’s accompanying presence in the midst of their own and their family’s suffering.
As I continue to ponder all of these stories in my heart, like Mary (Luke 2:51), I am thankful for the spiritual practice of storytelling, which can facilitate healing, be a pathway to wisdom, and draw us deeper into connection with God and with one another. After all, in the words of the hit Broadway song “Why We Tell the Story,” “For out of what we live and believe, our lives become the stories that we weave.”6
For those who lean into the beholding tradition of our Christian faith, we behold and tell our stories as a way to process our pains and our grief, to remember the power of love, and to hold onto our hope. Each time we behold one another’s stories and testimonies, we fortify our faith in God’s faithfulness throughout each chapter of ours and others’ stories. And when the act of beholding becomes too much for our hearts to bear alone, we need to seek support from trusted members of our communities. Beholding one another fully opens doors to transformation, healing, and a remembrance of how Christ’s own story is shaping us.
I’ll end this piece with an excerpt of a blessing by Kate Bowler and Jessica Ritchie called “For the Ones Who Bear Witness.”7 May you receive this blessing as people who accompany and hold the stories of grief, loss, and hope however your vocation unfolds before you. May this blessing accompany you and be a light unto your feet as you minister to those whom you are called to be with:
Blessed are the noticers. The ones who see the story in its fullness.
Blessed are the attenders. The witness- bearers. The story-holders.
The ones who tiptoe to the edge right
alongside us,Knowing that the very act will break their heart in pieces too.
Choosing us anyway.
Blessed are those who are amazed by a life lived in its fragility, in its brevity, in
its beauty.Blessed are the ones who stand close enough to say, “BEHOLD.”
Tyler Brewington-Mathis (MDiv ’23) is a chaplain from Los Angeles. In addition to earning her MDiv at Fuller, she earned a master’s degree in public health from UC Berkeley. While at Fuller, Brewington-Mathis was the recipient of the 2023 Frederick Buechner Award for Excellence in Writing. She finds joy in the creative arts and contemplative spiritual practices and is passionate about the intersections of spirituality and public health.
Wendy Cadge, cofounder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, shares about the critical role chaplains play in the spiritual and societal landscape of today.
