In my chaplaincy class, we did arts and crafts, using pieces of magazines to tell our story. I was unashamedly giddy to be doing arts and crafts in a professional setting; I forgot how satisfying it was to put scissors through paper. We each took 30 minutes to present the posters. It’s incredible to hear other people’s stories and what’s most important to them, like carving a sculpture of a person and watching it come to life. It was also extremely vulnerable and itchy to share the deepest parts of us, and I was reminded of how little we actually get to connect with others face-to-face, how seldom we get to share how we got here. We’re comfortable in functional transactions; we’re afraid of depth. But one is living, and the other is alive. One is necessary for survival, but the other is why we survive. I hope we each have a place for that clumsy kind of openness. And for arts and crafts.
— J.S.
J.S. Park: Hospital Chaplain, Skeptical Christian 