In chaplaincy work, as in life, nothing remains quite the same. There is an unpredictable, periodic rhythm to the task that can both be a source of frustration or hope: frustration because good times and once-successful ventures fade and fail; hope because change brings with it fresh possibilities. This rhythm is neither circular (because it never brings the return of the same), nor spiral (because it is certainly not a question of inevitable advancement). It is a dance of ebb and flow which brings into view that which is at once both strange and familiar.
If chaplaincy work is only ever undertaken in short, let’s say three-year, bursts then the full force of this rhythm may not be apparent. But certainly once one has been more than five years in post its reality will have become apparent. Numbers of participants come and go. One’s sense of one’s place in the institution shifts and modulates. Precious initiatives, exemplars of what one believed was best about one’s work lose traction for reasons that are hard to fathom and even harder to accept. In chaplaincy there is a need for constant reinvention which is both invigorating and exhausting. But, there is always hope. One never knows whom God will bring across one’s path, or what new possibilities the Spirit may awaken. In the university context nothing sets so hard that it cannot be shaken lose into wondrously new configurations. That is why many of us stay in this work!
No thoughts yet on “The inevitability of change”