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Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: Seen and Unseen: Race, Belonging, and the Black Buddhist Chaplain

Hi, welcome everyone. Thank you so much for making it to this presentation. For me, it's a little early. It might not be so early to some of you, but I just appreciate you being here and seeing all your familiar faces. I love it. Thank you.

So I'm going to do a presentation now that stems from my experience at Sati and throughout my chaplain life. Can everyone see the screen? Yes. Thank you. And you don't see my notes, do you? Oh, wonderful. Thank you. All right.

First I want to thank you for the invitation. It's meaningful to return to Sati as an alumni. I came through the Sati Buddhist Chaplaincy program at an important point in my own formation. So returning here gives me an opportunity not simply to look back, but to ask some questions that have become increasingly important to me through the years.

This presentation grew out of a conversation with Sati about representation in Buddhist chaplaincy, about who is seen, who remains unseen, and what belonging asks of our institutions and our communities. I want to approach those questions today through one particular location: my experience as a Black woman, a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner, and a professional chaplain. But this is not only a presentation about my experience. I've also been listening to other Black chaplains and chaplain educators. Their experiences have helped me recognize that some things I once understood as individual encounters may belong to larger patterns. So I invite us to hold one question as we begin: What does it mean to truly see the person who's entered the room?

I want to locate myself before I say anything about anybody else. My path to chaplaincy began in Buddhist practice. I've been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for almost 25 years, and that practice formed my understanding of compassion. I'm going to keep reading my own script: compassion, suffering, presence, and service. Long before I became a professional chaplain, Sati gave me an early bridge between Buddhist practice and chaplaincy. Later came clinical pastoral education, professional healthcare chaplaincy, and eventually teaching and formation.

Each of these settings taught me something different. Buddhist practice taught me something about how I wanted to be with suffering. Chaplaincy education taught me that being present with another person requires more than good intentions. It requires self-awareness, curiosity, humility, and the willingness to examine what we bring into an encounter. And professional chaplaincy taught me something else. I never enter a room simply as the chaplain. I enter as a person who is perceived before I say a word. My race, gender, age, body, clothing—all of these may become part of the encounter. And the person I am meeting brings their own history, culture, expectations, assumptions, fears, and hopes. Spiritual care happens somewhere in that meeting.

What Does a Chaplain Look Like?

One of the questions that emerged for me through chaplaincy was deceptively simple: What does a chaplain look like? We may immediately want to answer a chaplain can look like anybody, and ideally, yes. But that is different from asking whom people actually expect to see when someone says, "The chaplain is here." Who is immediately recognized as a spiritual caregiver? Who is trusted? Who has to establish their credentials? Who is questioned? Who is assumed to belong in the room, and who is initially understood as being there for some other reason?

These aren't questions I began my chaplaincy career intending to study. They arose from encounters. I want to tell you about an encounter from my chaplaincy formation that I've carried with me as a student at Sati. One of my fellow students told a story about being afraid because three Black men were on the sidewalk in front of his house. He then went on to say, "Of course he was afraid," and then went on to tell the rest of his story.

It took me a beat, but I found that I was offended because the teachers didn't explore the assumptions behind the student's fear because these three Black men were in front of his house. What interests me now is not simply what was said or what happened in that moment. I'm interested in what happened around the moment. What did I notice? What did the other people in the room notice? What assumptions were operating? And perhaps most importantly for our conversation about formation, what could we have learned from it?

Looking back, I keep returning to this question: What could we have done with that moment? Not who was the bad person. Not who should have known better. And not even how could we have prevented anyone from ever saying the wrong thing. I think formation asks something more interesting of us.

First, notice something has happened. Something has entered the room. Don't rush past it. Then pause. We don't necessarily have to know immediately what it means. Then inquire. What just happened? What did different people experience? What assumptions might have been operating? What did I bring to the encounter? And finally, learn. The uncomfortable moment becomes material for formation rather than something we simply survive and leave behind.

That distinction matters to me because I'm not arguing that good formation will create people who never make mistakes around race. I'm asking whether good formation can create people and communities who know what to do when race enters the room. And that brings me to something D'Angelo Smith said that gave me language for what I'd been trying to articulate.

Race is Already in the Room

As I began preparing for this talk, I didn't want to assume that my experience was the experience of Black chaplains. So, I reached out to several Black chaplains and chaplain educators whom I know and respect. One of them, D'Angelo Smith, said something that immediately stopped me: "Race is already in the room."

We don't have to introduce race into a spiritual care encounter. It arrives with us—with our bodies, our histories, our assumptions, and the meaning that other people may attach to us before we ever speak. D'Angelo also helped me to think differently about what happened during my training at Sati. He wrote that when racial bias or racialized assumptions emerge in a learning community, we shouldn't treat those moments as interruptions to the educational process. He said they are the educational process.

That gave me another way of looking back at that classroom moment. Perhaps what was needed wasn't condemnation. Perhaps what was needed was curiosity, courage, and a willingness to stay with what had entered the room. And as I moved into professional chaplaincy, I began to understand that race being in the room could mean very different things. Sometimes it could even become a doorway to connection.

I want to be careful not to tell a story in which race only produces injury. Some of my most beautiful experiences as a Black chaplain happened precisely because someone saw a Black woman walk through the door. I remember an African-American woman whose daughter was hospitalized. When she realized that I would be her daughter's chaplain, she was delighted. I remember her looking at me and asking essentially, "Why aren't you teaching?" There was something in that encounter that didn't require a great deal of explanation. I think she saw something in me that made her feel that her daughter would be understood and cared for.

Another time I was asked to visit a Latinx patient who was feeling down. Something about him reminded me so much of my father. I told him that. And between warmth, humor, and my decidedly imperfect Spanglish, we found our way toward one another. I wasn't pretending that we shared the same culture. We didn't. But there was enough recognition between us to create an opening.

That taught me something important: representation can matter. Recognition can matter. But neither guarantees relationship, because sometimes we recognize something in one another and discover that our spiritual worlds are still very different.

I learned that lesson with another patient during our encounter. He learned that I was Buddhist. I explained that professionally I served as an interfaith chaplain, that my role was to care for all people across religious traditions, and also people with no religion at all or no religious tradition at all. That wasn't what he wanted. He wanted a Christian chaplain, and he asked me to leave. And he had that right. I think that's an important part of this conversation. Cultural or racial affinity doesn't guarantee spiritual affinity. And being a chaplain doesn't entitle me to someone's trust simply because I've entered their room with good intentions. Seeing someone clearly also means respecting the spiritual care they want, even when that means accepting that I am not the chaplain they want to receive it from. Chaplaincy asks us to bring ourselves fully into the encounter, but it also asks us to know when to get out of the way.

Buddhist Practice in Chaplaincy

And then there were those rare encounters when someone's spiritual world and my own met almost exactly. One of the most meaningful experiences I had as a chaplain occurred when I encountered a woman from my own Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I was able to lead her in Phowa^[1], the practice associated with the transference of consciousness at the time of death. In that moment, I didn't have to translate my spiritual language into another religious vocabulary. We shared one.

But my Buddhist practice enters chaplaincy in other ways. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo^[2] personally advised me to practice Tonglen^[3] while sitting with patients in the ICU. Tonglen is often described as a practice of giving and taking. Very simply, it is a practice of opening ourselves toward suffering rather than turning away from it, while cultivating the wish to offer relief, compassion, and well-being. What mattered to me as a chaplain was that I wasn't asking the ICU patient to practice Buddhism. The patient didn't even need to know that I was practicing Tonglen. The practice was working on me. It was shaping how I sat beside suffering, how I remained present, how I resisted the impulse to turn away when there was nothing I could fix.

These experiences taught me that Buddhist practice can enter chaplaincy in at least two different ways. Sometimes it can be an explicitly shared spiritual practice, as Phowa was with the fellow Tibetan Buddhist. And sometimes Buddhist practice forms the chaplain herself, shaping the quality of presence we bring into someone else's spiritual world without asking them to enter ours. But before any patient can receive us as a chaplain, something even more basic has to happen. They and the people around them have to recognize us as chaplains in the first place.

Invisibility and Hyper-Visibility

These examples come from actual incidents involving chaplains of color in local hospital settings. I have permission to share them, and I've deliberately removed the identifying institutional information.

A Black woman chaplain was mistaken for service staff. A chaplain of color was leading a visit, yet the patient directed their attention toward the white colleague accompanying her. A chaplain of color had their educational qualifications questioned with suspicion. And in another encounter, a nurse repeatedly insisted that a Black woman was not the chaplain, even after being given evidence that she was.

These examples stayed with me because they resonated with something I had difficulty naming in my own professional experience. There were times when I felt invisible to hospital staff. I sometimes felt that I wasn't called upon or recognized in the ways I expected to be as a chaplain. When I eventually left, only one unit formally said goodbye and gave me a gathering. Now, I want to be careful here. I cannot tell you how much of my experience was about race. I don't know what individual staff members thought or why particular things happened. I don't want to assign motives that I cannot know. But I can tell you what it felt like. It felt like being unseen.

And that raised a question for me that has stayed with me. Who do we imagine when we hear the word chaplain? What does spiritual authority look like in our imagination? And what happens when the person who walks through the door doesn't look like the person we expected?

And then I encountered another paradox. A Black woman can sometimes be professionally invisible and at another moment become painfully, even dangerously, visible. There's a strange paradox that I experienced as a Black woman chaplain. At times I felt professionally invisible, and yet there were other moments when I became intensely visible. Not necessarily as a chaplain, but as a Black woman's body.

I remember visiting a white male patient who attempted to touch me inappropriately. During the encounter, he also told me graphic stories about sexual abuse he had experienced as a child. I left that encounter with questions that I could not answer. I wondered whether race and gender had shaped what happened between us. Black women in the United States have a long history of being subjected to racialized sexual stereotypes. But I want to be careful here, just as I was in the previous slide. I cannot know what motivated that particular patient. What I do know is that the encounter made me think more deeply about what happens when the chaplain herself becomes the object of someone's projections.

Compassion does not require the chaplain to surrender her body, dignity, or boundaries. And perhaps spiritual care sometimes requires us to recognize not only the suffering of the person before us, but what is happening to us in the encounter. So I found myself holding these two experiences together: invisible as a professional, hyper-visible as a body. And eventually, I began wondering, was this simply my experience?

Recognition, Authority, and Representation

When I began preparing this presentation, I knew that I did not want to take my experiences and turn them into something called "the Black chaplain experience." There is no single Black chaplain experience. So I reached out to Black chaplains and chaplain educators I know and trust. I asked them about recognition and belonging. I asked whether race had ever helped create connection with patients and family. I asked about stereotyping, invisibility, religious assumptions, and professional authority. And I asked a question that was particularly important to me because of my experience at Sati: How well did your chaplaincy formation prepare you to recognize and navigate race?

Their answers didn't simply confirm my experience. Some echoed it, and some took me somewhere I hadn't expected to go. What began to emerge wasn't one Black experience. It was a conversation. And one of the strongest themes in that conversation was authority.

D'Angelo Smith asked a series of questions that stayed with me: Who is assumed to be knowledgeable? Who is assumed to be competent? Who is allowed to speak with authority? And who has to demonstrate competence before that authority is granted?

Another chaplain educator described experiencing this quite literally. She told me that when she has entered a room accompanied by a white male student, physicians have sometimes directed their conversation toward the student, apparently assuming that he was the person in charge. Another Black woman told me that she has repeatedly been mistaken for the cleaner. And she reflected that people's reactions sometimes changed when she did not behave in ways they apparently expected of a Black woman.

Different people, different encounters, but they left me with the same question. What does authority look like before authority is spoken? Sometimes the person entering the room has to establish not only who she is, but that she belongs in that role at all.

And for Black Buddhist chaplains, there can be another layer: assumptions about what religion itself is supposed to look like. One Black Buddhist chaplain told me that patients frequently assume she is Christian, and often specifically Baptist. Some have even assumed that, as a Black woman, she should be able to sing a spiritual for them. But something else she told me was particularly interesting for this audience. She has encountered white Buddhist patients who questioned whether she was sufficiently qualified to provide Buddhist spiritual care. She's also experienced rejection from some Asian patients before they knew anything about her Buddhist background.

These are her individual experiences. They are not statements about white Buddhist or Asian patients as a group. But they raise an interesting question: What does a Buddhist look like in our imagination? If someone says "Buddhist teacher," what image appears? If someone says "Buddhist chaplain," who do we expect to walk through the door? And what happens when the person standing before us doesn't match that image?

I know something about that personally. I'm a Black woman. I'm also a longtime Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. Neither of those truths cancels the other. And my colleague's reflection on race led me toward an even deeper Buddhist question.

Emptiness and Convention

I want to be careful here because I come from a Tibetan Buddhist tradition. While Sati's orientation is primarily Theravada^[4], I don't want to collapse meaningful differences between Buddhist traditions. But there are Buddhist teachings that invite all of us to examine what we make solid. In the early Buddhist and Theravada traditions, teachings on Anatta^[5], non-self, and dependent arising challenge us to look carefully at the identities and categories we mistake for fixed, independent realities.

That raises an interesting question about race. Race cannot tell us the essence of another human being. It cannot tell me who someone ultimately is. And yet, we've just spent much of this presentation looking at ways racial perception can affect what happens when someone enters a room. So perhaps the question isn't, "Is race real?" Perhaps a more useful chaplaincy question is, "What is race doing in this encounter?" What assumptions is it activating? What histories are entering with us? What expectations about authority, safety, belonging, intelligence, religion, or trust have already begun operating?

One Black Buddhist chaplain gave me language for holding that paradox. She wrote that although race is ultimately empty of inherency, it continues to function conventionally in ways that can be positive, negative, and neutral. I want to present this as her Buddhist reflection, not as though every Buddhist tradition formulates emptiness in exactly the same way. But her words immediately resonated with me because of my own Tibetan Buddhist formation.

They also reminded me of a story about Tara^[6]. In one traditional account, before becoming Tara, she is told that she should aspire to be reborn as a man in order to attain awakening. She rejects the premise. Male and female have no inherent essence. And yet she makes an extraordinary vow. She will continue to appear in female form for the benefit of beings.

Think about that paradox. Gender is not an inherent essence, and gender still matters in the world in which we beings function. That made me think again about race. Blackness is not some permanent essence called Karen. And yet my Black embodiment sometimes affects an encounter before Karen has said a word. Empty does not mean inconsequential. And perhaps this gives those of us who don't share the same racial experience another doorway into the conversation. Have you ever entered a room and realized that someone had already decided something about you before you spoke? And then the harder question: have you ever realized that you had already decided something about someone else?

That second question deserves a pause. Race is not even experienced identically among people whom American society categorizes as Black. Father Joseph Mumba is a Kenyan Catholic priest who practiced chaplaincy in the United States. Joe's reflections reminded me why I needed to speak with people whose Blackness was formed differently from mine. I grew up Black in America. Joe came to America as an African priest. He talked about culture, nationality, language, and especially accent. He told me that although he speaks English as well as Kiswahili and other African languages, his accent marked him as different. At times he found himself trying to sound more American because he wanted to belong. And Joe said something wonderfully simple: "There is no superior culture."

His words reminded me of something I learned much earlier in my own life as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica. Culture shock eventually taught me to stop asking, "Why don't these people do this the way I do?" and began understanding my way is simply one among many ways of being.

Joe's story reminds us that even the category "Black" contains enormous cultural, linguistic, national, religious, and historical difference. And yet, Joe also experienced what it meant for his Blackness to enter a patient's room before he had spoken. Joe told me about visiting a patient who upon seeing him changed visibly and eventually asked him to leave. Joe left. He felt deeply hurt. He had entered the room prepared to offer care and had instead experienced rejection. The next day, Joe made a choice. He returned. This time the patient invited him in. He apologized. He shook Joe's hand. He asked where Joe came from. And eventually, the patient began sharing his joys and sorrows.

I didn't tell the story to suggest that Joe's decision to return is what every chaplain should do. Compassion does not require us to repeatedly expose ourselves to harm. But Joe's choice created the possibility for something neither man could have predicted the previous day. Rejection became curiosity. Curiosity became relationship, and relationship made spiritual care possible. That story leaves me with a question rather than an answer. What does compassion ask of us after rejection? And what does it require us to do or us to tolerate?

The Role of Education and Community

When I asked Black chaplains how they learn to navigate encounters like these, another pattern caught my attention. Two Black women I spoke with independently identified Black women educators as especially important in preparing them for the racial realities they encountered in chaplaincy. One told me, "I had a Black female educator who was the only one to prepare me for any of this." Another described her Black female advisor and cultural training during residency as important preparation for what she would encounter.

But one chaplain educator told me something slightly different. Race wasn't meaningfully addressed in her residency training. Later when she became an educator, she brought the race question into formation herself. She now introduces questions of race, privilege, power, gender, and culture early in the educational process. She asks her students what their parents taught them about race and gender, and teaching privilege and power from the beginning.

That brings me back to the concern that started my conversation with Sati. Who teaches matters. Representation matters. Not because every Black teacher will teach race in the same way. Not because BIPOC faculty should carry all responsibility for educating institutions about racism, but because our social locations affect what we notice, what questions occur to us, and sometimes what we recognize as worthy of attention.

But if we stop at representation, I think we stop too soon. My original concern to Sati was about representation. I looked at the chaplaincy faculty and wondered, where are the BIPOC and global majority teachers? I still believe that question matters. But preparing this presentation has made the question larger for me. Representation is necessary. Is it sufficient? A diverse faculty does not automatically create a community capable of recognizing racial dynamics, and racial competency cannot become the responsibility only of teachers of color.

D'Angelo made an important distinction between learning about diversity and learning to recognize power. Another chaplain educator told me that when racial bias surfaces, educators have a responsibility to address it. But the learning community also has a responsibility. Students cannot simply remain silent and leave the person affected by the racialized moment to carry the burden of responding. Yet another chaplain educator similarly told me, "Everyone has responsibility. We're paying attention to what is happening in the room."

And now I find myself returning to those three Black men from the beginning of this presentation. What if the question isn't simply, "Why didn't the teacher say something?" What if the question is, "What kind of learning community are we creating so that all of us know how to notice, pause, inquire, and learn?" Representation matters, and representation must be accompanied by the capacity to recognize race, power, difference, and our own participation in what is happening. Which brings me back to something D'Angelo said that I think may be one of the most important things I heard while preparing this presentation: Racialized moments are not interruptions to the educational process. They are the educational process.

I began this presentation with a question: What does it mean to truly see the person who has entered the room? I don't think I have a simple answer. Preparing this talk has actually made the question more complicated for me. Race is already in the room. So are gender, culture, religion, language, history, power, fear, hope, and all the experiences that have formed each of us before we encounter one another.

The work is not to pretend that we don't see difference. And it's not to make difference the only thing we see. Perhaps the work is to notice what arises in us when another person enters the room. Who do I see? Who do I fail to see? What have I already assumed? What might I be missing? And perhaps the most difficult question: am I willing to discover that something I believe about the person before me may be wrong?

My Buddhist practice has taught me that seeing clearly requires attention. Chaplaincy has taught me that seeing clearly requires humility. And being a Black woman chaplain has taught me something about what it feels like to both be seen and not to be seen. I came back to Sati today because this is one of the places where I learned to become a chaplain. I've shared something today that I wish we had been able to explore more deeply when I was a student here. I don't offer that as an indictment. I offer it as an invitation.

An invitation to create learning communities in which difficult moments are not rushed past. Where we can notice, pause, inquire, learn. Where representation matters and where the responsibility for seeing clearly belongs to all of us. Because ultimately, whether we are sitting in a classroom, walking into a hospital room, or simply encountering another human being, perhaps the practice is the same: To notice the person who is actually before us and to remain curious about what might prevent us from seeing them clearly. Thank you.

Q&A

Karen: So, I invite questions. Thank you so much.

Audience: Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for the hearts and claps. I'm interested in this chaplain program. So if I have questions, can I email you?

Karen: Well, I think the person to contact in that regard is Vanessa. But I really enjoyed going through the chaplaincy program here. I think I learned a lot and I felt prepared to go on to other institutions afterward. Whether I was prepared or not, I don't know, but making mistakes is how we learn.

Audience: When you say "professional chaplain," what does it mean?

Karen: Well, a professional chaplain works in a variety of places. Typically you find chaplains in hospice care. Sometimes they have chaplains even in airports. I think there's a show on Netflix that talks about the airport chaplain. Chaplains are in hospitals, hospices, airports, some corporations. Really, if they're Christian corporations, they typically have a chaplain. And a chaplain is someone who just recognizes that there is more to a being than just their physical exterior. We have the spiritual life, and a chaplain is there to be present with it, with your fears and all your emotions.

Audience: Yeah. Thank you.

Karen: Thank you. Hi, Rita. Yes, I see Helen, you have your hand up.

Helen: Thank you. If it's not intrusive, I'd be interested to hear how you handled the situation of that man behaving physically and verbally inappropriately with you.

Karen: Yeah, I can finish the end of that story because, in telling stories, it brings you right back to the situation. When I was talking to the man and he was telling me about his sexual abuse, I told him that I didn't feel necessarily so comfortable with that and I wondered if he could talk more about his current feelings and his practices. He just kept going on and on. I wasn't touching him, but I was near enough to the bed where he reached out to touch my thigh. I thought, "Hey, what are you doing here?" I backed away from him and a nurse was coming in, and I told her that he tried to touch me inappropriately. I told her, "Be very careful around this guy." And she's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got him."

So then I went to the desk in that particular nursing station and I reported it, but I still felt uncomfortable. So then I went and sought out my teacher for that particular unit and I told her what I had experienced. This particular teacher just gives the best hugs, and so she just hugged me and I cried. I mean, I was just really upset because I was a student at this point, and I'm going in thinking I'm going to help this person spiritually, and all they do is think about you sexually. I thought, I'm not a spring chicken. If he's doing this to me, what is he doing to younger people? So I was very upset and tried to report it all around, but it was a very busy hospital, so people moved so quickly. He was no longer on my unit and I didn't have to experience that again, but I felt like my teacher held me and listened to my experience and respected it. I brought it to group. We dealt with it there, and I did my due diligence by reporting him to the nursing staff.

Helen: Thank you.

Karen: Thank you. Any other questions? Do you see the Zoom hands that are raised? No, I don't see—oh, I see. Oh, is that why those people are over here? I'm sorry. Yes, Matthew is first.

Matthew: Thank you so much, Karen. That was truly a very soul-touching presentation. So much came up. I'm trying to formulate a contribution. My first thought is back on the "always already listening," which is Heidegger's term for that whole thread in your presentation about how inevitably, because of positionality and history and all of the reactive chain of karma that shapes the subject, that one can't help but already be listening to this Black female Buddhist body that's walking into the room. Or whatever body. So in some sense, we're always already embedded in that, and it probably is a fiction to think that we can sort of be frictionless and not have that go on.

One of the challenges, which you named, is that every word, every category of thought, has something at the center. At Berkeley in cognitive science, we talked about the prototype as the way of thinking of categories. I was thinking about this whole issue of how the folks that are inviting you into the hospital room—all they have is this word and whatever particular associations they might have with it, and then this body shows up and there's a delta. There's a difference between what they might have expected and who shows up. What you were unpacking was what to do with that mismatch, because your goal is to have this therapeutic rapport with the client.

I was struck by where and when a chaplain makes a decision, moment to moment, because this is what it comes down to: the lived experience of two bodies in a room. You have a few choices. You can kind of just let it pass if it's a little blip, and that probably happens every day. And then there are two-chili-pepper transgressions. And then we had an example of a four-chili-pepper transgression with the thigh grab.

My question is about mindfulness as applied to this situation and discerning for oneself: Is this something where I'm willing to be 10% braver? I think that's what I was taking away, is don't just automatically assume, "Oh gosh, that was uncomfortable, I think there's some racist vibes in here," to sit with that discomfort. And this is where I think the chaplain's own spiritual practice and social support are essential, because you do have to go through maybe even the first or second level of discomfort, and that is where some really juicy stuff happens.

So I'm wondering if you have thoughts about that moment-to-moment decision about when to make something explicit and to name the elephant in the room. Have you found yourself in a situation where you're like, "I'm uncomfortable because of this," or "I see that you're making assumptions about me"? Or do you very explicitly try to avoid that explicitness? Maybe that's a lot to—

Karen: It is, and it really talks about chaplaincy practice. I need to get in the room and I need to be able to offer you the spiritual care, and I need for you to recognize that that's what I'm doing. You can sometimes see on the faces of the people whose rooms you enter that they're like, "What kind of chaplain are you?" But one of the chaplains I interviewed said it best and said it in a way I completely understood. You know, a lot of times you use humor. I can't give you any example—

Matthew: Absolutely.

Karen: —but humor is a door opening.

Matthew: I was thinking about how the trickster archetype could be really useful in this profession, and that's something to bring into the Sati curriculum. It probably is implicit, but I could see how you could defuse some things with just a really good quip.

Karen: Right. Right. You just come in there. When I was going through my CPE at the hospital, I was also undergoing cancer treatment and had lost all my hair. That was shocking too. It wasn't a long time, maybe a month or two I didn't have any hair, but that was an excellent entree. Going in and being like, "You know, this job has made me lose my hair!" I try to do that because right away I figure, oh, that might be the first shocking thing.

I was working on oncology floors, and that was just wonderful because people were wondering, "Will I come back? Will I be able to live after this?" The fact that I was working through it was really supportive to that particular audience. So I feel like as a chaplain, you get a lot of tools in your toolbox. And one of the main tools is getting in that room, letting them know that they are being looked at as more than just a physical body. That we're recognizing this spirituality within them. Getting in that room and then doing my thing, which is mostly just listening.

Matthew: Yeah. Just one final comment. It's just about the work of chaplaincy as getting to that spiritual rapport in the first place and then, quote-unquote, "doing the work." But how it's all seamless, that in fact the work starts as soon as they ask for a chaplain. It's all of a piece, right?

Karen: Well, if they asked for a chaplain. When I had an assigned unit, when I was a staff chaplain, I would just introduce myself to everyone. So they hadn't even asked for me. Sometimes they didn't ask for a chaplain, or they didn't even know that was on the menu. "Why is a chaplain here? Does that mean I'm gonna die? Last rites?" Like, "No, no, no. This is my unit." I kind of start out with that, and already you're starting with a little humor because it's bringing them back down. You've got to be cognizant that that happens just seeing you. I'm glad I have no collar, because that is a thing in itself.

And then, I don't know if you know this, but a lot of chaplains are Buddhists. It's funny because I think we equate chaplaincy with Christianity, and it's like, no, there's a very strong Buddhist presence because we're trained in compassion, we're trained in giving. We're trained in being present. I mean, that's what Buddhism is all about.

Matthew: You're also willing to talk about death. Like when my mom became Tibetan Buddhist, she said, "Matt, I'm going to have a good death. That's my goal from now on." And I'm like, "Mom, that's morbid." You knew my mom. And then she said, "Oh, no, but I'll have a really good life on the way to that death." And she did. So, yeah. Thank you again. I don't want to dominate the time. Being the white guy up in here and all that. So let's move on. I think Sonia's next.

Karen: Sonia, if you have a question, thank you for your patience.

Sonia: Yeah, sure. I did find myself wondering during that contribution, I was like, "Oh, I really hope that Karen gets a lot of space to talk in this interaction." But I thought your presentation was, I mean, beautiful, masterful, so much wisdom in it. I understood it on so many different levels and as applying to so many other things, which I think was exactly your intention, and I just felt like you really brought the Buddha Dharma forth. So I'm very grateful to you.

And then if you wanted to say anything further about the journey of—what I understood at the beginning of your presentation is that you were invited in by Sati to also take a look at these things and see how perhaps other modalities or instruction units could be incorporated into the programs, or other ways of thinking about representation. I just wondered if you wanted to say anything more about how that journey is unfolding beyond this very helpful talk.

Karen: I was invited to give this talk because I gave some feedback to Sati. Vanessa reached out to all of us graduates and asked us to share about the program, and I had some feedback for her. Based on my feedback, she invited me to give this talk. So I really appreciate it because I felt like, even when I went through Sati, we did invite someone to talk about diversity, but I don't think that person was so well-prepared.

So hopefully I've given you a stronger presentation. That's how I feel. I'm a college professor; I always base my teaching on what I didn't get. You know, I try to scaffold assignments. I try to explain things. I try to be open to students. And that's because I have this experience as a student, which—I don't know if people forget they were a student once. I try to be better than what was before me. Anyway, that was the intention behind it, and I'm very grateful to Vanessa for inviting me in.

Vanessa: And I'll jump in as well. Thank you, Karen. I'm so grateful for your initial outreach and starting this conversation. That's really how I felt. And I was so delighted that you were willing to come in and give this incredible presentation. I feel so touched and it's opened up so many things for me and questions. I appreciated that you came in and you said, "Hey, I'm seeing six white faces on the chaplaincy faculty again for so many years running," you know, a fact which hasn't been lost on the faculty also. I think it's a question that we're really trying to address, and so something like this, you coming in and talking to us, is such a helpful part of that. It really is. I have so much gratitude for the fact that you have. So, thank you.

I'd like us to transition into just the student part if we can, because we've run over a little also for our event. I hope we haven't kept folks from doing things you needed to do. But thank you everybody for joining us. So, Sati students stay on the call, whether it's an encumber or chaplaincy training. And everybody else, I wish you a wonderful day.