At this time last summer I was eating miso soup and practicing my handstands during a month-long yoga teacher-training program at the Kripalu center in Western Mass. I was surrounded by able-bodied young people searching for meaning, relaxation, healing and joy through the practices of yoga and meditation.

This summer, like many other seminary students, I am adding a broader depth of meaning and skills to the text-heavy learning of school in a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program. Last year living at the former ashram I was one of only three active Jews in a program of sixty people taught by Jewish-turned-Hindu yoga masters. This year, in our seven-person CPE group working at a large Jewish assisted living facility in Boston, we are taught by a United Church of Christ Reverend and my fellow students are Jewish and Unitarian Universalist, some with a fundamentalist background. The residents I work with range from age 41 to 103 and are Jewish, atheist, Buddhist and Catholic and speak Russian, Spanish, English, and Vietnamese.

CPE trains us to be chaplains, invites us to explore the depth and limits of our theology, and challenges us to look inward and outward simultaneously, as we open ourselves to immense suffering, incredible love and unbearable loss.

Like those living in most institutionalized settings, my residents have endured great hardship, both emotionally and physically: the loss of parents, siblings, children, friends, hearing, sight, mobility, speech, mental capacity, memory, homeland, taste, smell, organs, connection to the outside world, love, and companionship. My conversations with people often revolve around their boredom, anger, nostalgia, sadness, fear, and a profound loneliness bespeaks their desire for love and belonging. It seems naïve to acknowledge this now, but—perhaps like other healthy, happy twenty-something’s who have not known the existential fear that comes from being sick—I never considered myself becoming old, worn down, disabled. Though I have had an intense fear of death since I was a child, somehow this fear never expanded to encompass all the other pain and anguish that can precede it. When hearing the stories from my residents, leafing through old photo albums, going through memorabilia of past careers and passions, I am constantly reminded of the unpredictability of life—no one ever imagines oneself at a place like this.

Yet, through the fluorescent light and linoleum floors, the standard issue meals and constant drone of daytime TV that echoes the halls on my floor, I am continually amazed by the love and tenderness I see all around me. Residents grasping hands from their wheelchairs as the sing out loud during Shabbat services. Nurses’ aides joking with their patients, coaxing smiles and laughter from wrinkled faces happy to see the person who takes care of them each day. Doctors holding families’ hands through the decline of a loved one, preparing them for what is to come in such a gentle and compassionate way. Rec therapists planning trips out to the waterfront, to a restaurant, on boat ride, anything to help stimulate her residents and make them feel a part of the world around them. I have had families open their arms to me, embracing my emerging chaplain-self as I sit by the bedside of their dying mother, stroking her arm and holding her hand as they tell me stories of their childhood, the love they have for their mother, the sadness and the fear they feel as they face the unknown.

Last night we screened a film at our house. It is a new documentary called Four Seasons Lodge. The movie grants us a glimpse into the lives of a group of Holocaust survivors who, for the past thirty years, have summered together at a lodge in the Catskills. Emerging from the most intense suffering imaginable, often with no family to speak of as immigrants in this new land, these survivors banded together, as they tell it, and became one large family. Through the film we hear of the brothers and sisters they lost, the parents they saw killed in front of them, the starvation and the work they endured. But the pervasive feeling of this movie is one of incredible joy. We see these eighty- and ninety-year-olds laughing, flirting, joking, playing, singing, praying, and, most of all, dancing. Nothing will ever take away their past, yet they have been able to seize their present, embrace one another, and celebrate life together.

I am amazed by the unending drive for life within us all. My residents have made clear to me that we have inside ourselves us wells of strength so deep that, despite what life may bring, they are able to replenish. That an unbelievable optimism, even within the most hardened-seeming and suffering soul, seeks love again after loss, feels gratitude for the kindness of others, desires to help those in need. At Kripalu, we learned as one of the foundational teachings a statement from Plato, “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” May we help share the burden when it weighs our fellow down, and may we erupt in song and dance at the miracle of each day.

Image from Candida Performa via Wikimedia Commons