Welp... I obviously forgot about this blog. I would blame it on the fact that we are supposed to keep a journal for conversion class and hence all of my time discernment has been devoted to that... but I only have a few entries actually written in that journal. The truth is, I slacked off because of school and life.
I haven’t REALLY slacked off, I’m still wrestling with everything in my head and had plenty of inner turmoil... but as they say in the hospital: If it’s not in the chart, it didn’t happen!
New Year, so new try at actually doing this. It’ll actually be useful because I realized that my Rabbi actually does want to read/ skim/ pretend to read our journals to see where we’re going and how we are progressing and it is easier to give her a tumblr link than the chicken scratch of my journal.
I dropped Greek halfway through the semester because It was too much stress on my life, and if I do end up converting, there is really no reason to take it. Also the professor was horrible and had a very European and masculine teaching style that focused more on challenging people’s assertions and abilities than affirming when someone actually gets something right. It’s really not a good model for teaching language. He also had a bad habit of calling on people he knew where struggling and just digging into them their inadequacy. It should be noted that he did this exclusively to women in the class. I jumped the boat at the right time apparently because next semester (It is a year long course) what used to be a class of 15 is down to 2 (bless them, the only reason they’re still in it is because the middle TN presbytery is unwavering about one full year of greek).
I have been loving my work at the hospital. I love being able to provide pastoral care in interesting and meaningful ways. I really do think that it is my calling... but I am also starting to recognize that there may be ways that I can do that work without having to be ordained. The big problem is with accreditation. I many or may not have enumerated this before, but one of the central requirements for board certification as a chaplain is endorsement by a religious body. In most cases that means ordination, which frankly makes sense. It helps to weed out the crazies who claim to be prophetic in unhelpful ways (i.e those who only want to convert everyone or those preaching the end-times which are frankly unethical motivators for chaplaincy)... especially since most endorsing bodies require the candidate to go through some sort of phycho-analytical testing. Go religious endorsement processes!
It leaves me in a pickle because once I convert, no christian body will endorse me (nor do I think they should) and I don’t feel comfortable claiming some sort of religious authority about Judaism. I don’t think it is my place. So, I’ve been having several conversations with my supervisor at the hospital which have been great but also raise up a lot of other questions. The pressing one as of now being, am I even prophetic? Do I feel like I can provide any spiritual or religious authority on anything? Theologically, is that even possible? All of this brings me back to my call story and whether or not the ‘clergy’ title/role even played a part in my ‘calling’ or decision to pursue theological education... or if my own ambition clouded what the real calling was. Do I feel like it is my job in life to provide spiritual and religious care in a pastoral setting or do I just want an honorific? I do think it is part of my calling to help people come to terms with their own spiritual needs and identity, but part of me wonders if being clergy is the only way to do that? I also guilt myself in recognizing that being called Reverend or Rabbi or Chaplain does sound nice. The fact that I feel that way worries me.
I guess my main question is am I even doing this for the right reason? Is being in a clergy role something that I am in fact meant or should do?
When I told my supervisor this, he gave me a look and told me that I damn well am prophetic, but these questions are still itching the back of my mind.
I’ve started looking at things that would still touch base on religious themes and pastoral care, but do not require ordination or ecclesiastical sponsorship (I still want my degree to be somewhat useful to justify the mound of student loans it is costing me!). Two things that have come to mind are: pastoral counseling and death midwifery.
Pastoral Counseling from my perspective covers the same ground that hospital chaplaincy does but involves more long-term care. Which might be interesting and worth exploring. I have a few patients who I have been working with for months due to the nature of their healing (I work on the transplant wing so I get a lot of repeat offenders). I appreciate the ease that I can start a conversation and provide care, but none of them have any lasting needs other than just wanting a visit every now and then. I wonder if that is something I am even capable of doing. It also is a relatively stable career path because it is basically therapy with a religious lens. I could even get a degree in social work which would open even more doors if I go the LCSW route.
Death Midwifery sounds interesting but I think it would be more difficult to navigate. So it is basically exactly what one thinks it is and is something relatively new emerging out of the alternative death industry and fighting against the more corporate (and expensive) funeral industry. One of the things that has drawn me so much to Judaism is the way that Jews understand and ritualize death. The fact that we say the mourner’s kaddish and recognize the importance of mortality and mourning within a theological framework literally EVERY WEEK, sometimes every day depending if there is a daily minyan at the synagogue, offers leaps and bounds to the importance of community within Judaism. The Kaddish is my favorite part of the service. Likewise, the actual grieving process immediately after death in Judaism is so beautiful and prophetic in its own right. Traditional Jewish burial is not littered with the societal expectations of embalming or picking an elaborate casket that is indestructible and a financial and ecological burden to the living. Jews treat death just how humans have treated death for millenia... as a part of life... a visible and tangible part of the human experience... which modern society has sought to run away from by pumping up the dead unnecessarily with expensive carcinogens to make death look pretty or ‘sanitize’ the idea of our own mortality, and preserving the dead by locking the corpse in an airtight metal box protected from the earth of burial by a concrete vault that makes it easier for landscaping.
Can you tell I’m passionate about this?
Death Midwifery is an emerging vocation trying to change the way humans deal with death and dying and reclaiming it as something that we can in fact do... just like we have always done, through digging a hole in the ground, and throwing the body in with respect instead of fear. Part of the job would be to facilitate ritual such as washing the body and putting it in a shroud instead of a casket and returning the body back to the earth in which it came, even facilitating thinks like wakes and having things done in the home versus the expense of having to take the whole shebang into a funeral home.
The only problem with this vocational option is that it requires a lot of maneuvering which I’m not sure I am capable of. Did you know, for instance, in TN as well as many other states, if someone dies in the hospital, one can’t just take the body home? A licensed funeral director is the only one that can claim a body from a morgue and even if one where to finagle to get the hospital to release grandma’s body to a non-funeral director, one would have to have her buried within 24hrs and have police permission and an escort for every county that one drive’s grandma through? We are so afraid of death, that we can’t even imagine a person’s need to bury their loved ones at home or by themselves. We are so afraid of death that we somehow think law enforcement is necessary to transport grandma who is just as likely to rise up and start the zombie apocalypse as the police radio which extols more useful means of a police officers time than keeping a close eye on a family wanting to respect and mourn their matriarch.
In order to become a death midwife, I would probably need to go to mortuary school (which is a joke and basically a school where they offer 20 courses on embalming and 1 on mourning and empathy) to get licensure in whatever state I end up in, so that I could work within these ridiculous legal confines that prevent freedom in death and dying and provide care that some families might find more natural, meaningful, and//or comforting.
I don’t know. I feel like there are so many options but so few that are real possibilities if I convert. Sometimes I feel like I am having to decide between my faith and my vocation as well as the respect that people show me.
Leaving Christianity would mean leaving a sort of family that I have been raised and nurtured in... people who have formed me and made me see the value in my calling. It would also mean that I would forever be considered an outsider. As much as empathetic rabbis claim that Jews by choice are just as Jewish as Jews by birth, there is still a stigma that is very much present in the Jewish community as well as in the community that I end up leaving. People in the christian church will always wonder when I will come back... and people in shul will always wonder when it is I will leave. People treat converts like we are unreliable and never to be trusted.
*sigh* It’s just so exhausting to think about.
This ended up being a long one, but then again it has been a long time since I have actually posted... so there you go.
