TENDING TO THE CITY’S SPIRIT
Serving the extremes of human spiritual needs, police chaplain Lawrence Peck belongs to a growing occupation that bridges faith and practicality. ‘I love what I do,’ Peck says.
TO SERVE AND PROTECT
Chaplaincy is a job of extremes. For Lawrence Peck, that happened June 8, 2015.
That evening, during an arrest, Edmonton Police Service Const. Dan Woodall was shot and killed. As the only chaplain for Edmonton’s police department, Peck says that day was one of the hardest.
“Times are changing too drastically right now, but hopefully we don’t have another (police death) any time soon,” said Peck, recalling the priorities he was forced to concentrate on after helping to notify Clare Woodall of her husband’s death.
As news broke of the incident and the city began a long grieving process, Peck’s thoughts jumped ahead to a few individuals.
“We can get all trapped up in all this stuff that we think we need to do, but in the end of the day it’s really about the fact that Claire Woodall has lost her husband. Gabe and Calen have lost their dad,” he said. “So my focus … is to basically be there for those people.”
Peck came to the police department after doing similar work with the RCMP on the East Coast. A homebuilder by trade, he was doing outreach work with the Baptist church when some members suggested he become their chaplain.
A poster anonymously left on his door years later nicely illustrates the result of that decision. It shows an officer in profile, seemingly tired but resigned to his duties, a shotgun resting on his shoulder. A line from scripture is written on it.
“Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” it reads. “And I said, Here I am. Send me.”
“Gun situations, death notifications, suicide intervention, you name it, critical-incident stress management, I was the person,” Peck said of his first experiences in chaplaincy. “If there was something major went down, they’d call me up and say, ‘Can you be on the plane tomorrow and go up the coast?’ Yep, I’ll be there.”
He said police suicides are some of the toughest things to deal with because of the close-knit relationships of members. But his job, which covers the gamut from extreme crises to listening to a person’s everyday concerns, is more a privilege than a curse.
“Seeing people be able to take what they’re struggling with by the horns and deal with it,” he said when asked what gets him through it. “I always talk about a journey, helping people be able to make steps through a journey and see them moving forward, that just makes my day.”
He has people across the country to whom he can turn for stress, so he doesn’t take his work home. “You go home exhausted, but in the same breath you go home comforted just in knowing that you’re able to make a difference in people’s lives that have just gone to hell in a hand-basket.
“I love what I do.”
CITY OF ANGELS
Why chaplains? At a time when the separation of church and state is so pronounced that the Supreme Court has told city councils to quit praying and get to work, the existence of chaplains in public places seems anachronistic. John Dowds doesn’t think so. “To some degree my role is very much client driven, so a lot depends on what people want and need,” said Dowds, who has served as Edmonton’s city chaplain for the past 10 years. His role is unique. He serves every employee — elected and non-elected — of the City of Edmonton.
Though individual municipal services such as fire and police across the country have chaplains, no other Canadian city has a chaplain to serve all its employees.
He recalled when his role was questioned by a resident and the topic raised at an executive committee meeting.
“It is a taxpayer-paid position and at face value it can be seen as a religious position,” Dowds said.
“It was quite intriguing, actually, to be a part of that discussion because the council of the time and the administration of the time said, ‘No, the position is valuable to the corporation so we’re not going to withdraw that position.’ “
The ordained Presbyterian minister defends that perspective.
“I encourage people to nurture their spirit in whatever way works for them and for some people that’s within the context of organized faith, organized religion, for others it’s not. To me that’s not right or wrong, it just is. I have no agenda,” he said.
“It’s never about proselytizing. It’s about service to people — grace-filled, but hopefully service to people.”
In Edmonton, that means 12,000 staff members and their families — 40,000 people.
He said some of the more harrowing experiences he has to walk people through do stick with him, but calls the role an “honour and a privilege.” He finds therapy in a variety of places, including his grandchildren.
Though the relationship between faith leaders and the city’s growing population of urban aboriginals hasn’t always been positive — especially with “white, Anglo-Saxon protestants” as Dowds self-identifies — he said bridges are slowly being built each time he is invited to take part in an event.
The multi-faith community is just as welcoming. Before the Supreme Court ruled against the practice last year, one of his roles was to organize prayers to open the city’s council meetings by using census data to invite faith groups.
He is disappointed with the court decision but, in characteristic form, he has found a silver lining.
“In 1978, city council decided they would open their council meetings with a Christian prayer,” he said. “That evolved into a prayer and prayers that would represent a whole variety of different denominations and faiths. I want to see this now as another step in the evolution where we see this as still another way for us to nurture our spirituality.”
He accepts that others might want council to just get on with their business.
“But let’s seize this as another opportunity to sort of stand back for a moment and just pause,” he said.
A report is going to be coming to council in April with recommendations on what a moment of reflection will look like in place of prayer.
“A lot of people who were in council meetings before, some of them weren’t engaged in the prayer. It wasn’t a good fit for them,” he said. “But they did value the opportunity to stand back for a moment and just breathe.”
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
For many, Elaine Nagy is the last person they want to meet. It may not sound like it, but that’s a compliment.
A palliative care chaplain for more than 20 years, her job puts her in the unenviable — she would call it privileged — position of comforting people, regardless of faith, in some of their last moments of life.
“I came to understand myself as a midwife, birthing people, assisting them as they were birthed into eternity, whatever that was for them,” said Nagy, who has been at the University Hospital since 2006 and is currently a teaching chaplain and spiritual caregiver.
“So many people are allergic to death and pain and suffering, and they don’t want to hear about it,” she said.
She believes everyone has a basic spirituality that needs tending. Often, times of serious medical distress can make that need more obvious for patients as well as for their family and friends.
Of course, her job isn’t always so dire.
“I’ve done a few weddings,” she said. “Often those are very beautiful, sometimes very sad. The one that had a happy ending, though, was a case of someone who had to come here in a real hurry for a lung transplant.”
In the interest of privacy, details about the people were kept to a minimum, but it involved a couple to be married in a remote part of the province.
Before the weekend of the wedding, a call came from the hospital saying a new lung was available for a child of the couple.
“As soon as that pager goes off, they’d been waiting for a match, they’ve only got a few hours to get here to make everything happen,” Nagy said.
Understanding the seriousness of a lung transplant, the couple wanted the child to experience the wedding ceremony before going into surgery.
“They had all their paperwork in order. From the time I found out there was a need for a wedding to the time it was done in the patient’s room was two hours,” Nagy said.
Months later, the organ recipient was recovering and Nagy felt fortunate to be able to help make that moment happen.
She said she depends on fellow staff to debrief after particularly traumatic events involving others. She’s facing a big change herself. Nagy’s taken a new job across the street from where she began her chaplaincy career, at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto. She leaves in May.
WITCH TO CHOOSE
Chaplains come from a variety of faiths, but tend to serve everyone. Case in point: Sam Wagar, the University of Alberta’s Wiccan chaplain.
Wicca forgoes an institutional structure or credo. Instead, the beliefs can often be traced to folklore and mythology and include influences from other social movements such as feminism and environmentalism.
“Over the course of these 60 to 70 years now, Wicca’s grown from being the project of a couple of eccentric Brits to a world religion, a small world religion,” said Wagar, who counts among his professional tools a wand he says is meant to be an expression of a person’s willpower and used to point and move energy.
“You can’t be a witch without a wand,” he said.
Of the seven million Wiccans worldwide, about 1,000-1,500 live in Edmonton.
“I have to be available to anybody who seeks me out,” he said.
That often means working with other chaplains for group ceremonies.
“The greatest highlight for me, I’m afraid, came out of a tragedy,” Wagar said.
A student had committed suicide. Family and friends came together to celebrate his life.
“Not only were we present, but we were available to talk to people, we had some roles in the ceremony,” he said.
“Then a few days later a group of us did a ritual called cleansing the space.”
The multi-faith group went to the spot where the young man died.
“We did a ritual to say goodbye to the spirit, transformed the place into a place of healing rather than a place of pain. I think that was a really healing experience, certainly for me,” he said.
It’s such moments that give purpose to the chaplaincy for him.
“I don’t think any of the other support people in the school would have been able to do the work that we chaplains did to bring closure and to bring harmony back to the place.”
A lot of people who were in council meetings before, some of them weren’t engaged in the prayer. It wasn’t a good fit for them. But they did value the opportunity to stand back for a moment and just breathe.