Chaplains in south-west London

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Written November 2023

 
My return to clinical medicine at the bedside included six months at a hospice in south-west London. Its Catholic attachment was unobtrusive but obvious with a simple crucifix in each room. It conveyed a gentle assurance of a quiet spirituality. 
 
I was warmly welcomed by the Sri Lankan-born medical director whose day usually began with time in the small chapel, prayers often led by one of the sisters from the community associated with the hospice. Priests from the local church visited as part-time chaplains.  I got to know a couple of them. One in fact became an inpatient when his prostate cancer had damaged his spinal cord, resulting in lower limb weakness. He was determined to walk but then ended up on the floor.
'I'm totally embarrassed,' he confided in me. 'I can't let them see me like this.'
Not quite knowing what to say I paused for a moment and pointed to the crucifix.
'How many times did he fall?' I asked. 'He needed help. I think you do too.' He smiled weakly. The conversation continued as we acknowledged together that even  a chaplain and a priest, to say nothing of a doctor, may need someone alongside them in their time of trouble. 
 
Each week the doctors met for a lunchtime journal club. One of them was a retired psychiatrist generally regarded as the father of modern psycho-oncology.
'I'm here in a religious setting, but I'm not at all religious myself.' he told me. 'I try to understand it all, so I meet up with a priest for lunch once a week and he tries to convince me why I should be a Christian.'
He then continued with a challenge. 
 'Why don't you bring an article that will help me understand your claim that spirituality and religion are a significant part of palliative care?' I agreed. At one point I thought I might be getting somewhere. Perhaps, I thought, he was starting to understand the faith, though that was probably more in hope than with evidence. But he always responded, vigorously reinforcing his atheistic position. Nevertheless when it came to the time for me to move on he asked me to consider staying.
'We need you here to attend people who have a strong faith,' he told me. 
 
I'd never met his lunch-time priest. But years later while collecting for The Salvation Army I knocked on the door of a house adjoining a Catholic Church.
'O do come in,' said the priest. 'I'll get you something.'
 In a few minutes of conversation I discovered that he'd once been a chaplain at a hospital in south-west London. Yes, he was the priest who'd spent years trying to explain the faith to our mutual friend. Even a psychiatrist knows he really needs someone in times of need, I mused as I knocked at the next door. We just have to leave that to the Spirit.
 
Please Lord, sustain those who faithfully try to witness to the one they follow.