Christmas. Hanukkah. Kwanzaa. All three of these holidays revolve around tradition, family, friends and assessing the year that was: Have I done everything I could have done? Have I been the best person possible? Have I given as much of myself as I could? Did I fulfill my purpose?
These are questions that beg self-reflection and, for many, prayer.
Prayer is an interesting term. Prayer can be represented in as many different ways as there are languages around the world. Sometimes prayer is formal, other times musically bold, or silent. Sometimes prayer is action. Around the holidays, the spotlight is on prayer. And, for many, it’s what gets them through. 
For those who have lost loved ones in the previous year, each step is a painful reminder that the ones they so enjoyed spending their holidays with are not at the table, not around the Christmas tree, not lighting the menorah. Painful, as well, for the elderly or sick. 
“This time of year, for a lot of people, things revolve around family tradition. If you’re in a place where you can’t be involved in family tradition, you’re in the hospital or too frail to get places, perhaps your friends are all gone, suddenly you are alone. You are left with this deep loneliness,” reflected Phil Ingle, a Baptist minister and member of the Pastoral Care Team of Chaplains at Parkview Adventist Medical Center. “It’s almost a deep, abiding loneliness that pervades your entire thought process. Sometimes prayer really helps with the loneliness.”
The Rev. Ingle, who prefers to be called Phil, ministers to Parkview patients; as he says, “only to those who invite me in.” 
Each patient, upon registration, is asked whether they would like to have one of the members of the Pastoral Team stop into their room. 
Phil shows me the list. About 80 percent of the patients that day would like to have someone stop in, the other 20 percent have asked to not be disturbed. He says he is neither offended nor hurt by this and will respect those wishes. 
“Sometimes when I present myself, ‘hey, I’m Phil, I’m one of the chaplains,’ oftentimes people think, ‘oh chaplain, that means religion.’ No, it doesn’t,” Ingle emphasized. “Spiritual care. And it’s the same questions they all ask: ‘Why? Is there meaning? Is there purpose? Did my life make a difference to anyone? Will anybody remember me when I’m gone? How will I be remembered?’ Those are the questions it seems everybody is asking.”
They are questions that Ingle cannot answer with certainty. But he knows that just being there is often the most important way he can support the patients. 
“As chaplains, it’s a unique position because when we go into somebody’s room we don’t really go in with our set agenda of what we’re going to do, what we’re going to say,” he said. “We really let the patient set the agenda. It’s kind of ‘what do they want to talk about? What’s important to them, where they are in terms of their needs, their hopes, their fears.’”
Chaplains involved in Parkview’s pastoral ministry meet with patients all over the hospital; in private rooms, in the emergency room, diagnostic imaging, in the chapel, wherever they are needed.
“Some people definitely want a chaplain to pray with them out loud. For other people, just having the chaplain sitting there with them quietly is a form of prayer,” Ingle reflected. “Most people just want a presence, we call it a ‘pastoral presence,’ because in many ways we represent God, by the patient’s definition. We’re very much respectful that we’re not coming in to lay on the patient how we define God, but to be very much aware of the patient.” 
And he says much of that requires being an excellent listener. Most patients, he said, just want someone they can talk with. Someone who won’t judge them. 
“We can chat, it just opens up everything,” he explained. Often, he added, the person’s past and what they did or did not do spills forth. His presence, he said beaming, often prompts “confessions of decades old infractions. Once they’ve told me about them, they feel so much better!” 
Ingle recalls one patient, an elderly woman, who pulled him close and thanked him afterward saying, “now I can die in peace!” 
Sometimes it is death that requires the most of the pastoral team. Ingle remembers one death in particular around Thanksgiving time. 
“I got paged. I came in at 3 in the morning and we made a prayer circle. We held hands, and I always include the person who died in the circle by putting my hand on their shoulder to complete the circle. I said, ‘Good Lord, even in the midst of death, I give you thanks for what this life means. I give you thanks for this person.’ And, after we had a time of prayer, then the family felt free to go home. They didn’t feel that they could leave until the sacredness of life was acknowledged, a prayer was given,” Ingle explained. The prayer, for this family, reflected a need, a desire for something formal, perhaps a ritual to help them process their loss.
“They didn’t care if I was Catholic, Adventist, Lutheran or whatever. They just wanted a chaplain, specifically a chaplain to help them at that moment,” Ingle said. “And, it’s our privilege to help them at that moment.” 
For Phil Ingle and the Parkview pastoral team, it’s about making the spiritual connection, about listening to the patients. It’s about being the person who calls the patient by name and makes them feel, right there, right then, that their life really does matter. That their life really does have purpose. 
“You start to put a person’s name out there instead of ‘patient’. They are a person who happens to be a patient but they are a person,” he emphasized. “And when you start to treat them like a person, pretty soon their self-worth starts coming back, and it’s amazing how as their spirits rise, physically they respond better. They start to feel better!”
And that, in itself, is a gift all religions, all beliefs, can appreciate. A gift the founding fathers of Parkview Adventist Medical Center would surely hold up as a sign that what they set out to do back in 1959 — to care for each patient mind, body and spirit — continues to thrive today.

Tory Ryden is director of community relations, marketing and development for Parkview Adventist Medical Center in Brunswick.

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