|
The Christmas Minstrel This music and performance is © by Adam Thomas. |
What I Did On My Summer Vacation.
(June through August, 2006, Dallas, Texas)
Adam Thomas (athomas@vts.edu)
Seminarian at Virginia Theological Seminary
More often than not, I don’t realize my life is changing until after it has happened. I look back, reflect, and see that something is different. It may be a time of tracing a path through the years that leads to change; it may be a time of looking in the mirror and seeing myself differently because of an experience I have had. It may be a time of reflecting on small changes that add up to one big one. This reflection usually happens after an event.
This summer was different. This summer, I knew my life was changing while I was living it. I am sure many of you know, but for those that don’t, I spent this summer in Dallas, Texas, at the Children’s Medical Center. I was doing a ministry program called CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education. In CPE, one’s learns how to be a hospital chaplain by actually being a hospital chaplain. The first couple of weeks I felt like an imposter because my badge read chaplain, but I did not feel like one. Remember the last time someone mistook you for someone else? That’s how I felt at first. “Hi, my name is Adam, I’m the chaplain,” I would say, but the words sounded like someone else’s. I could feel my life changing this summer because over time the voice became mine; indeed, I donned the clothes of my pastoral identity, and they fit.
I worked in two units at the hospital. The first was the whirlwind of the pre-surgery floor. My job was to visit all the families whose children were having major surgeries—mostly heart and brain operations. I had to use my agility, which I honed in centerfield as a kid, to get in and out of a room in between the surgeon and nurse and clinical technician and anesthesiologist. Most families were appreciative to know they were in my prayers, others wanted spoken prayer for there children. I developed a prayer over the course of the summer: Gracious God, we thank you for the gift of (child’s name); please send your healing and grace upon her, guide the hands of the doctors with the gifts you have given them, keep watch with this family as the wait for the surgery to end, and help us each to remember that we are all in your hand, especially (child’s name) today and everyday. Amen
My other unit was the neurosurgery floor. Most of my patients were recovering from surgery, but others were children with head trauma from car accidents (we called them Motor Vehicle Collisions) or, too often, child abuse (we called it Non-Accidental Trauma). I also had several patients with brain tumors. One inspirational child used to play several instruments, but since having a tumor, he has not had enough hand-eye coordination to play. So he took up singing. The staples in his bald head reminded me of a halo.
The hardest part of my ministry this summer was taking on-call shifts. These are 30 hour shifts which start one morning and go through noon the next day. At night, I was the only chaplain in the hospital. At night, most of the traumas came into the ER. At night, many children died. As a chaplain, it was my job to remain with the family throughout the night from the time the doctor told them there was nothing else they could do to the time I walked the family to their car—without the child they came with. After all that, I walked the body of the child to morgue. I did that five times.
Through all of this, I could feel God working in me, developing in me the pastoral identity I yearned for. The job did not become easier, but it did become more natural. With three weeks to go, I prayed the rosary kneeling at the bedside of a dying child. I know the strength I had to do that was not mine but God’s, and God had given me the gift to develop my identity enough to pray with a sobbing mother at my side. With two weeks to go, I had the high point of my summer, which was also the high point of my owning my pastoral identity. At midnight, on my last on call, after being with two families as they lost children, I was called to a room on the sixth floor. There I performed my first baptism. The godparents had brought water from their church. I put the water in a Dixie cup and sprinkled the three-month-old baby boy saying: Yo te bautizo En el Nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espiritu Santo. Amen.
The rest of my time at Children’s was denouement. As I said goodbye to the place that has shaped me like no other, I felt a supreme sense of gratitude for all I had learned about ministry and about myself. I start my second year of seminary more exhausted than I have ever been, but also more excited to continue to live into my calling to ministry, eager to discover new facets of my pastoral identity, and energized to be serving God with the best and only gift I can give back to God—myself.
Houses, Horror, and Hope: Selected Images from my Trip to Louisiana
(January, 2006, Slidell, Louisiana)
The article written by Adam before he left on this trip is posted below.
Adam Thomas (athomas@vts.edu)
Seminarian at Virginia Theological Seminary
| The houses are like corpses. They are no longer homes like dead bodies no longer have souls. Inside, many have a skeletal look—studs and ceiling beams are all that is left after they have been mucked and gutted. But most are frozen in a horrific moment in time, the moment after the nine or more feet of water finally drained out of them. That moment has lasted almost five months. Our house was one of these. I was the first of our group to make it past the front door, which, at first, refused to leave the grasping mud which had held it for so long. Three things hit me at once as I ventured inside. First, it was dark—of course, there was no electricity, but it was more than that. The flood had painted the walls with the dark mud of the delta, so not even the once-bright wallpaper could catch the grey light of the morning. Second, an overwhelming stench of decay penetrated my supposedly air-tight respirator—everything was still wet after four and a half months, and old standing water filled every pot and cup in the kitchen. Third, I couldn’t move. I looked down, and in the half-light I could only see down to my ankle. My foot had been swallowed by eight inches of festering mud. I wrenched it out, and stepped into hell. This hell used to be somebody’s life. John Grisham and Stephen King littered the mud-covered floor. Some framed pictures—now faded past obscurity—survived intact on the wall. Diet Coke cans were everywhere. And we had to discard everything—once-plush furniture, hardcover books now made paperback by the flood, moldy stuffed animals that grandchildren would never hold again. At least, I thought, the owner of this house still has her life. Not everyone was that lucky. Each house has a mark on it—as I looked, I thought of the Passover, but a cruel perversion of it. The mark is a spray-painted X; the quadrants of the X are filled with numbers and letters telling when the house was inspected, by whom, and how many dead bodies were found. Most houses had a merciful zero, but too many had a one or two. We mucked with mute determination. Our original plan was to break into pairs to carry out furniture and have a few people pick up the odds and ends. But this was immediately unworkable due to the ubiquity of the muck. Mucking is as onomatopoetic as it sounds. We shoveled, we wheelbarrowed, we pried decayed wood from the mud. We pushed the heaviest furniture, making a human chain to achieve purchase for our feet since the floor (once free of the mud) offered no traction (because the mud was never really all gone). In two days, we finished the living room and made dents in the kitchen and two bedrooms. We never even opened two of the doors. Those were the last two days of our stay in Louisiana. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the immensity of the work needed to be done there. Indeed, I was overwhelmed the entire time down there and for several days after I was back in Washington. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to relate to you this picture of devastation, because there are definite signs of hope, too. We were just a small piece of a relief effort that is drawing volunteers from throughout the country. We ate lunch the last few days at this amazing example of human solidarity, a huge domed tent that housed volunteers who served three hot meals a day to workers and residents alike—for free. We saw birds, pelicans and cormorants, fishing on the coast of Lake Pontchartrain. We brought back three puppies—conceived during the hurricane—who remind us now that life is being renewed on the Gulf coast. I guess I related to you the story of the house we mucked because it made the most impact on me. Over the course of the week, we organized a Habitat for Humanity warehouse, gutted a house of its drywall, cleared a field for RVs, stapled netting to hold insulation in place, worked on a Habitat site, and mucked the house. Ironically, it was this last task, one for which I was totally isolated (gloved, masked, goggled, booted, and chemical-suited), that I felt most connected to the people of the region and their suffering. I am now called to relate to you my experience and their need. Please, if you have any question, or would like to talk more in depth about my time in Louisiana call me at (304) 550-6842 or email me at athomas@vts.edu. I thank God and you for your gracious support of this trip. A final story: the afternoon we were gutting a house in Slidell, we went to Wendy’s for a break. The woman who served us said she had lost everything, but she was going to rebuild. How are you, we asked. I’m exhausted, she replied, but I know that God is still blessing me everyday, and that is enough. |
 |
The flash from the camera briefly |
|
 |
|
 |
Greetings from Virginia Theological Seminary!
From Adam Thomas (athomas@vts.edu)
Advent, 2005
Peace to all of you in this season of Advent. As I write this, I look at my planner and see several papers and exams looming, so I am glad to take a few minutes to pause and write to my church family. Seminary is going well. It has, however, been a much larger adjustment from college life than I expected. I still live in a dorm and eat dining hall food. I still go to class, read (a lot), and write papers. But here, it is somehow different. I have not put my finger on it exactly yet, and it surely is a host of things. One is the fact that I am learning about the subjects that are going to form my ministry and my life. Talk about pressure! Another is the emphasis here is not entirely academic. My teachers and administrators expect me to be “balanced.” I achieve this balance when the academic, physical, spiritual, and emotional facets of my character align. Easier said than done. The academic in me tends to take charge, and the others fall away. However, with God’s help, I have slowly been finding that balance. Prayer has been instrumental. It almost seems too simple to say, but just taking the time to pray in the morning and at night has wrought a discernible shift in my well-being and my outlook.
I have been studying in seminary now for almost four months. I have read a lot about God and the church. I have talked a lot about service and pastoral care. I have studied theories of teaching and liturgical planning. But I have done nothing yet with my hands. In all the reading, talking, and studying I haven’t gotten dirty. God’s work in the world is out there and at times I feel like I am twiddling my thumbs, like I’m sitting on the bench watching the game. Not to say that the study is unimportant. I would not be in seminary if I didn’t think it is. But reading about serving makes me want to serve.
So, in January, I am going with a group of students on a Habitat for Humanity mission trip to Slidell, Louisiana to help rebuild after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane only makes occasional blips in the news now, but the work to be done is still enormous. Our trip to Slidell is part of an “immersion” course for the seminary’s January term. I will be trained as Habitat for Humanity trip leader, and our team will have two weeks to clean up, build, get dirty, and serve God by bringing hope and relief to a community in sore need of a reminder of the light of God’s love.
I invite you to join me in this service. I ask especially for your prayers for me, for my Habitat team, and for the people of the Gulf Coast. I also ask for your financial support for my trip. Each member of the team is expected to raise $900 dollars, half of which is a direct donation to Habitat for supplies and the other half of which is living expenses for the two weeks we will be in Louisiana. I plan to keep a photo-journal of my trip, and I cannot wait to share with you the experience of serving God in this manner. Thank you for your prayers and support.
I will be home for three weeks starting on December 19th. Please come find me at church if you are curious about my first semester of seminary. I would love to share the experience with you. Also, find me if you have questions about my trip in January. Thank you again for the loving support you have given and are giving me as I journey toward the priesthood. God bless you this Advent, and may the celebration of the nativity of our Lord remind you that Jesus Christ is for ever present when we share God’s love with each other.
Saint Matthews has two young people preparing for the priesthood at the Virginia Theological Seminary (www.vts.edu): Second Year Student Paul Francke (pfrancke@vts.edu) and First Year Student Adam Thomas (athomas@vts.edu). Contributions in support of Adam’s Habitat for Humanity mission trip to Slidell, Louisiana may be sent to the parish office and made payable to Saint Matthews Episcopal Church with the notation Adam’s Habitat Trip or directly to Habitat for Humanity on-line by clicking here for Adam and the Seminary Nine's Habitat Trip.