What Kind of Healer is a Chaplain?

We don’t provide medical services or promote physical healing.  Neither do we lead physical training, except where we encourage the precept that the body is a temple.  Not being Roman, this is not an endorsement of creating a temple to Bacchus, the god of wine and debauchery. 

We don’t go rummaging around in your brains, we aren’t head shrinkers, we’re not going to invite you to lie down on the couch, sip some White Zinfandel and tell us about your feelings.  When we make diagnoses about depression or PTSD or something else related to mental health, at best we are educated, relatively observant laypeople working from long experience with our fellow human beings.  At worst, we’ve been watching too much television. 

No, the chaplain deals with that imprecise term of ‘spiritual care’.  We’re not talking alcoholic spirits or evil spirits.  No, spiritual care is about the human spirit.  The human spirit is a level of our humanity beneath our physical, beneath our mental, even beneath our emotional selves. 

The spirit is the iron in our being.  I’ve met 95 year old ladies, physically more brittle than uncooked spaghetti, but spiritually harder than a Marine Corps DI.  You can force them to do something, but you can’t make them.  That spirit is what sent First Responders back into the North Tower after the South Tower collapsed on 9-11.  That spirit drives when everyone else says it can’t be done and you do it anyway. 

Your emotional reactions are governed from your spirit.  Your mental toughness finds foundation in the toughness of your spirit.  Your physical health can hold up miraculously on the energy of your spirit.  The spirit is the thing of miracles, connecting us to questions of eternity.  Which is why chaplains deal with it.