Blog Post by
Rev. Brandan S Eddy, BCC
Chaplain, St. Elizabeth Hospital, O’Fallon Illinois
“What is something that really bothers you…?” A simple but deeply complicated question and one that hardly gets asked these days. Especially these past few years amid the heartbreak of the pandemic in addition to the politically charged climate that surrounds us, perhaps we fear the answer? Yet, as we prepare to welcome the newborn Christ into our midst once again, a continuous fulfillment of God’s promise to make all things new, it’s an important question we must find the courage to continue to ask.
In my own context, the question was presented to me a few years ago by my program head at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary as I was trying to settle on a research question for my Doctor of Ministry project. At the time, I didn’t have a good answer, but fast forward a couple of months, and then suddenly, we are in the midst of COVID-19. As a chaplain working at St. Elizabeth Hospital, it didn’t take long to see the gaps in healthcare the Pandemic revealed. As quoted by a later 2019 edition of Catholic Health Association (CHA)…“The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has presented untold challenges to an underprepared health care system. Frontline Health Care professionals are facing unprecedented acute workplace stress as they struggle to adapt to the challenges presented both professionally and personally.” Pretty soon, at least professionally, I finally knew what bothered me.
Up to this point, Hospital Ministry has always been patient-focused. Most organizations barely employ enough chaplains to cover patient census, let alone time to focus on hospital staff. Yet once COVID started, Healthcare leadership noticed the problem quickly and hospital systems across the country immediately rerouted their chaplains to focus care on hospital staff as much as patient care. The question of the hour
though: how best to do this with minimal staffing and resources? One thing I often heard during COVID-19 is people looking to whatever good might come out of the Pandemic. For me, it was the search to offer care to my healthcare colleagues that led me to the grassroots ideology and movement of Restorative Justice.
Originating mostly in the Criminal Justice arena, the movement sought to move away from the more punitive justice model in favor of a system that seeks to offer more healing and restoration for all the stakeholders to include the victims as much as the offenders. In more recent years, Restorative Justice has become popular in the educational system as well, finding restorative practices useful for creating community and dialog among students in addition to its usefulness in conflict management. Inspired by this and John O’Donohue writings on the Celtic concept of “Anam Cara,” aka Soul Friend: the spiritual connection we can find with others that allow us to explore our innermost self, I was able to develop a program of intervention for my colleagues at the hospital and bring Restorative Justice and practice into the Healthcare setting, a context that it had yet to really enter. Finally, not only did I know what really bothered me, but Restorative Justice provided me the tools to address it in my own context.
Now, as I work to finish my project report and graduate with my Doctor of Ministry, I hope to share more of my findings with you soon, however, I am grateful via this blog the opportunity to at least introduce you to the Restorative Justice movement. I wish you all Merry Christmas and Blessed New Year, and if you know of something that really bothers you in ministry, but find yourself lacking a way to address it, I encourage you to learn more about the Restorative Justice movement and perhaps get involved. A couple of resources I would recommend for our area:
- Louis Council on Restorative Justice: https://slacrj.org/
- International Institute for Restorative Practice: https://www.iirp.edu/
Merry Christmas!
Blog Post by
Rev. Brandan S Eddy, BCC
Chaplain, St. Elizabeth Hospital, O’Fallon Illinois
