Shiki Shiki

In August, I went to Santa Fe for a chaplaincy intensive at school, one of two required each year, and the final one of the two-year program. I went a couple of days early so I could see friends. I spent a day with my Episcopalian priest friend and his mother and nephew. We had lunch at a diner, went to the Georgia O’Keeffe museum, and had sushi for dinner. The next day, my friend M. and I had breakfast at the Counter Culture Café and then went next door to the rock shop, where she bought me a lovely larimar pendant, to remind me of school and of Santa Fe. It will also remind me of M., a tremendously kind and gentle soul.

The chaplaincy intensive, besides being wonderful because it was a reunion of my splendid cohort, was the most powerful yet, with mini-courses on power and privilege, and eco chaplaincy. A Native American man led a prayer circle on a very hot, sunny day; we stood outdoors for about an hour at high noon. No one keeled over, though a person or two had to kneel. Then we did an exercise where we broke into small groups, and had to put cards labeled with various events into what we thought (often incorrectly) was the proper chronological order. Several of the events were ghastly, like Native Americans being invited to a celebration and deliberately fed strychnine.

The final evening, we had “cultural sharing”: a talent show, with many dazzling skills on display. There were several very accomplished musicians in the room. My cohort is huge on group projects, so we had prepared extensively for this. We were the final act, which began with one of us going up front to invite the audience to participate in the gentle movement exercises she claimed we had been doing together each evening. She invited the rest of our cohort to join her up front, to help demonstrate.

Her movements became slightly more animated and then all of a sudden Chaka Khan’s “Like Sugar” came over the PA—pre-arranged with the sound guy—and it became a wild dance party; everyone in the audience stood up to dance, too. (The official video for this song is delightful.) I saw Roshi dancing in the back.

But wait, there was more! One of us who happened to have the entire Heart Sutra memorized in Japanese rapped it while one of us beatboxed and the rest of us did our best to impersonate hip hop-style dancers, with intermittent synchronized movements we had rehearsed; we all waved our hands in the same way along with “shiki shiki.”

I believe I can accurately say we brought down the house. Afterward, a bit of icing on the cake, a student in the cohort after mine said I was her favorite dancer. Someone said there was going to be an after-party at one of the dorms. My peer the rap artist and I went over there and danced for an hour with maybe 15 other people.

It was a memorable evening, and I think the burst of joy at end of the talent show was welcome, because it had been a very heavy week, due to the curriculum and there was also a suicide, the spouse of a beloved staff member. Roshi led us in an impromptu memorial service, which was very somber and also comforting, doing this ritual together.

Back at home, the participants of the street retreat I had signed up for had a Zoom meeting to go over logistics. We were reminded that we were not to shower for five days before the retreat began. I asked if that included not brushing our teeth, and one of the leaders said it was up to me. He said he has done it both ways. (I did comply with the requirement not to bathe for five days prior, but decided that, since I’m paying a small fortune to a team of tooth-related professionals to keep them in my head, it didn’t make sense to take a break from dental hygiene.)

At County Hospital, I visited a young woman patient who had attempted suicide by drinking Drano—it is just never a good idea to drink Drano; it will not kill you, but there will not be one single day in the rest of your life when you will be able to forget that you did this—and also an older woman, diagnosed with mental health issues 60 years ago, who was worried about her SRO housing disappearing while she was in the hospital. This I only found out after about 20 minutes of conversation. After I left her room, I went to the nursing station and spoke with a social worker who advised me to call the patient’s case manager, because she did not have a social worker assigned. As I went off to do this, the social worker said, “Good luck.” Uh oh.

I did leave a detailed message for the case manager, whose outgoing message advised that he was actually a utilization manager, which sounded even less promising, and I asked the patient’s nurse to ask her doctor to request a social work consult. This is a new thing. It used to be that a given social worker was responsible for the patients in a certain area, but now a patient evidently only gets a social worker if a doctor requests it. But when does a doctor ever have 20 minutes to sit around chatting with a patient until her fears emerge?

Finally, I went back to the patient’s room and coached her: “If it were me, every time the nurse came in to check on me, I would say, ‘I’m worried about this, and I’m worried about that.’ I would express my worries, concisely, over and over, until I got the feeling someone was going to do something. Does that make sense?” The patient said it did, and that was all I could do.

I went back to the chaplain office and literally wept over these two patients, remembering the older woman’s incredibly sweet smile.

I was very surprised and relieved later that day to get a voice mail from the utilization manager saying he had gotten my message about such-and-such patient having such-and-such concerns, which he accurately stated, and he said he had passed all of this on to the social worker.