This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: Community Chaplaincy with Trent Thornley. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Trent Thornley at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Thank you. Thanks, Jen. That’s very warm and good to see everybody. I see a lot of familiar faces. It’s nice to see you this morning, and some new faces. So, welcome. I’m looking forward to sharing some time with you today. We’re going to be talking for maybe about an hour, I suppose, on the topic of community chaplaincy, and specifically using and introducing you to the San Francisco Night Ministry, which is an example of community chaplaincy. That’s where I work, and I’d love to share a little bit about that and really have a bit of a discussion, just open it up to questions and see what’s coming up for folks around this topic. And just go where the spirit leads us, I guess, and see what’s of interest. So, that’s the plan for today.
I do have a few slides to share, but they’re mostly photos, so don’t feel like you’ve got another slideshow with a bunch of text and stuff. No, these are mostly just photos of the ministry, so you can get a sense of what we do through the pictures as I’m talking as well.
But maybe I’ll just say a few words about community chaplaincy first. I assume many of you know about chaplaincy or are in a chaplaincy arena yourselves, or maybe are interested in chaplaincy. But for those who may not know, chaplains in general are people who offer spiritual care out in the field, you could say, and usually in some kind of institutional context. The idea is that chaplains are firmly grounded in their own spiritual tradition, in their own practices. They’re deeply rooted in that tradition, in those traditions, but yet they’re prohibited, ethically even, from proselytizing or converting or trying to convince people of their tradition.
The idea is that they’re instead going out to places where people are having some kind of need, usually some possibility of crisis where there’s an existential need arising, where the deeper questions of meaning, of purpose, of what is life, of what is suffering, what is freedom from suffering, start to arise. And they’re out in that field helping people and companioning people, really, through those questions and trying to connect people to their own meaning-making, their own spiritual resources. So that’s a little bit about what chaplains are and do.
And then there’s a whole professional track that you may be aware of where people can get board-certified as chaplains and they can work in various institutions. As was mentioned, many chaplains work in hospital contexts because, of course, when we’re in the hospital room, these questions arise, right? Sometimes we’ve had a situation where we’ve taken ill or we’ve had a serious injury, and we’ve been stopped in our tracks by life. And all of a sudden, the sort of deeper questions of who am I and what am I doing here anyway, and what is this about, and those kinds of things naturally start to arise. And we don’t always have your local rabbi or your local pastor or your local meditation teacher on hand. And so that’s why chaplains sort of step into the breach and do the best that they can to bridge those resources to you and companion you.
Often times we’ll have chaplains in a prison context. I think hopefully that seems obvious also, as opportunities for people where there may be in a crisis point or point of major transition or transformation, hopefully, in their lives. War zones. So chaplains have been traditionally associated with war and the trauma of war, and you can imagine the existential questions that arise in that area. And then also, we’ll have chaplains sometimes in government positions, like for parliamentary bodies. Schools can have chaplains, so there’s a lot of education chaplains out there.
So that’s the field in general. But what the Night Ministry has been doing for 61 years now is pretty radical. It was started in 1964. And what they’ve been doing is saying, “Okay, let’s do this chaplaincy thing. Let’s just go out in the community. We’re not going to be a part of an institution. We’re just going to be offering spiritual care to people at night.” And that’s really the whole mission of the Night Ministry: spiritual care at night.
We were founded under the premise—and we were founded by Christian organizations, although we’re interfaith now—but the premise was, well, your local pastor, your local spiritual leader is usually home in bed at night, especially in the late-night hours. And yet, it’s nighttime when the demons come out, right? I mean, so often when we’re trying to go to sleep or we’re starting to relax from the day, all of a sudden the other anxieties or issues or stresses start to come to the fore. And so in some ways, nighttime is a ripe time for this kind of care around existential need because so many people face these things at night, and yet there were so few resources to meet them at night. So, the Night Ministry said, “Well, why don’t we go out and do things at night, both out in the community, and we’ll also operate a phone line where people can call in and they can get care at night.”
And so, that’s how we started. And now that has been joined by a few other programs around the country and maybe the world which are focused on this kind of community-based chaplaincy, where we don’t have a particular institution that is governing us other than our own nonprofit mission, and we’re out doing this care to anyone who needs it. So that’s the basic model of it.
Our history, as I mentioned, we were founded in 1964. This is our first night minister, Reverend Don Stewart, out on the streets. And it was founded as an outreach of Christian ministry. So a bunch of Protestant churches got together and had different service projects in the community, and one of them was the Night Ministry. And so the Night Ministry consisted of the night minister, Reverend Don Stewart, and then there was the phone line, and the phones were staffed largely by church volunteers at the very beginning, and then eventually students and other volunteers from the community joined in.
But there’s something kind of sweet about this origin story for me, too. It reminds us of religious communities that are focused on, “Hey, you know, we can get together and do something in the community,” which I just love that part of that tradition. That there’s some way in which there’s a hopefulness to go out and serve together. And this was actually different denominations that came together, too, in this coalition, which I personally find a bit inspiring. And they did that work in that way for most of our history, actually, all the way through the 80s and even into the 90s. It was just the model of the night minister with the phone lines.
The night minister changed over the years. We had Don Stewart as our first night minister, and then Chuck Lewis was the second night minister, and then Reverend Don Fox, and Reverend Lyall Beckman, and Reverend Valerie McIntyre were all of our night ministers. They all had different Christian traditions, although Valerie was also a Zen Buddhist, so that was our first foray into another tradition in terms of the night minister. But these were folks who were out on the streets about five nights a week, and then they’d have assistant night ministers cover the other two nights. So, we were 365 nights a year out on the streets. And like I said, they were going in the initial time up till 6:00 a.m., and then eventually that was scaled back to 4:00 a.m. and then 2:00 a.m., and now midnight/2:00 a.m.
Different decades had different focuses. So even though everybody was out at night opening their hearts to anyone who was out at night—including people who are sleeping outside to people who are working outside, sex workers, all the way to police officers and construction workers and the doughnut shop server and the bartender and just anybody out at night—that was the mandate. But yet there were different focuses. In the early days, Reverend Don Stewart in the 60s actually did a lot of work with runaway youth. You can imagine San Francisco had a lot of kids coming to the city in the mid-60s, and some of them, of course, found their way here, but a lot of them fell through the culture, didn’t quite have enough resources to sustain themselves, and found themselves on the streets and maybe into substances and really quite lost. He actually became one of the founders of Larkin Street Youth Services, which is another very big nonprofit in San Francisco focused on youth. So that was a huge focus of his ministry.
And then when Chuck Lewis became the night minister in the 70s and in the 80s, he actually did a lot of work with HIV/AIDS. He would go to the AIDS ward in San Francisco General Hospital. It’s quite well known nationally; there’s now a historical recognition of it. The night ministers would often go to that ward and provide care at night. There were a lot of people in that era who were estranged from family, and of course, there was a lot of stigma around HIV/AIDS. So, one of the things Chuck Lewis did in his clergy collar at the time was that very early on, I think it was in 1981 or 1982, he got his photo in the paper taking an HIV test. Well, that was a big deal. Here he is, clergy taking an HIV test, really trying to destigmatize it.
By the time Don Fox, Lyall, and Valerie came along, there was a lot of ministry to the unhoused, which was growing unfortunately in size, even up to this day.
More recently, the board changed the structure so that we’re no longer an extension of Christian ministry. We’re no longer about one night minister out on the streets. We now have an executive director, and that’s me. I’m the first executive director. So, this is new for us. The last six years, we’re almost really in a startup mode because we’re actually restarting the whole organization where we now have these different areas. Reverend Lyall, when he was the night minister, started Open Cathedral, which I’ll talk about, and he also started the Clinical Pastoral Education program. We started to do more than just the night walks and the care line, and we now have these four areas of service, each with their own director.
Our mission, as already mentioned, is to increase access to spiritual care. We see there’s a social justice component. If you’re unhoused or you’re out at night, or even just at night, you may not have access to spiritual resources. So, we’re increasing access to care at night on the streets and on the phones. We’re looking to be a nonprofit that does this, and we’re also looking to be a model for community chaplaincy. We get a lot of people from around the country who come to the Night Ministry. We just hosted a gentleman, a pastor here for a whole week who was out from Kansas City wanting to start a night ministry in his city. He was out seeing how we do things. So we’ve become a bit of a hub of community chaplaincy training.
Every night we go out on the street and walk. We’ll often wear either a collar or a jacket. We have these Night Ministry jackets. Depending on your tradition, some people have actually worn robes, some people have worn cassocks. Whatever religious garb you want to wear, or just a jacket that identifies us. It is important to wear something that sets us apart from just wandering around on the streets. But we’ll go out and we’ll talk to anybody that is interested in talking to us. Even during COVID, we were out every night doing care and offering masks and hand gel and things like that. We do offer some resources, and we can talk more about this, but we do offer sometimes a little bit of food or a blanket or a hat or socks. But we do try to remain focused on the spiritual care element. That’s really what we’re about. We’re not primarily distributing resources.
On our phones, every night we’re taking calls. The phone number is 844-HOPE-SF, or 844-467-3734. We offer care at night on the phones, and now our phone counselors, as of COVID, also work from home. We have technology that routes the calls to people’s homes. So anyone can be a care line counselor right from the comfort of your own home. We have a very strong Buddhist contingency, I’m happy and proud to say, in large part because of the Sati Center, Upaya, and other programs too. We also offer for CPE1 students, if you are in CPE and you’re not at the Night Ministry, you can still use our phones as a clinical setting.
Lyall started something called our community programs. We started with our Open Cathedral, which is an outdoor Christian worship service. We do it twice a week. We have one in the Mission District of San Francisco. It’s bilingual, Spanish and English, the whole service. That’s on Thursday evenings. And then another one on Sunday afternoon at 2:00 p.m. in Civic Center. It’s out on the streets and it’s a full service. We have regular attendees. We have people who stop by and sit down and join us. We have people who are from the community, either unhoused or living in marginal housing like an SRO2, who are regular attendees, and they’re ushers and they participate in the service. It’s a full congregation.
Every single program at the Night Ministry, we offer a meal, although it’s very important to us that you do not need to attend any service in order to get a meal. The services are ecumenical in the Christian tradition. So we’ve got Lutheran and Episcopalians and UCC and MCC and Presbyterians and different Christian traditions, but it’s still unapologetically a Christian service. We’ve had weddings, we’ve had baptisms, we’ve had memorial services, we’ve had ordinations, everything you can think of. And the meals are donated by local churches.
We’ve now expanded that to queer programming, “Faithful and Fabulous.” This is an outdoor church service on Gay Pride with drag queens and lots of pink and rainbows and a very queering of the whole event. And then we have our now our Open Shabbat. So once a month now, we have an open-air Jewish Shabbat, and we’ve also done Passover. We did an open Passover, we’ve done open Hanukkah. And so we have local Jewish congregations now supporting those programs with meals and funding.
And our newest one, Open Sangha. We got a Buddhist one. Third Monday of the month, we partner with the San Francisco Zen Center. We do meditation out on the streets and a little dharma talk, and we chant the refuges, and so on. That one is still newer but very well-received, and we’ve got a great partnership with the Zen Center.
In addition to that, we have our Clinical Pastoral Education program. So CPE, which is really my area because I’m the CPE educator at the Night Ministry, is the formal, accredited training for chaplains and upcoming spiritual leaders. Often times, people will be required to take a unit of CPE in order to be ordained in a Christian tradition or a Jewish tradition. But then also if you’re going to be in chaplaincy full-time as a professional, you’re required to take four units of CPE toward board certification. Most accredited programs are in hospitals, but we have a pretty cutting-edge program out at the Night Ministry. We have a hybrid program. Our winter program will be online with the education hours, but you can do in-person service, or you could do the phone lines and some local work and still participate in our CPE program online. So, you don’t have to be in San Francisco during the winter to take CPE at the Night Ministry. But then our summer program is in person.
We do other events over the year. One of the big ones we do is the vigil which happens around the winter solstice every year. These are the names of every person who passed away on the streets that year. And so we partner with organizations that create these banners, and we offer a full interfaith service reading the name of every person who passed away and ringing a bell and having a moment of silence for them, and framing that with different prayers from different traditions.
We do community night walks. So, once a quarter, we’ll take a group of people from the community out on a walk with us. We also offer special night walks for groups. So we’ll have groups of kids who are going through a confirmation class, for example, at a church or a teen group at a local synagogue. We’ve had the Buddhist group that was doing a street retreat do a night walk with us. We see that as part of our ministry also. We call it a ministry of awareness because we’re really bringing awareness to what we do and how our neighbors are living and working outside at night and connecting the community together in a sense.
We always ask for prayers. We believe in the power of prayer. We believe in the power of metta3. We believe in the power of good intentions and good energy. We pray for people every night that have asked us to pray for them. We have a prayer board of people on the phones and streets who’ve asked for that support. And so, your prayers and support are always welcome every night.
Question: How does your phone line differ from a 24-hour suicide line or a friendship line?
Answer: Great question. Actually, the Night Ministry, when we were founded in 1964, that was right around the time that the suicide prevention line was founded in San Francisco. This was the dawn of call lines in the early 60s. The Night Ministry had a close relationship with the suicide prevention line. What would happen is that people would call in to the suicide prevention line, and they were strictly instructed not to talk about religion and spirituality. So they would refer people who were having suicide ideation to the Night Ministry, actually. A lot of people who are having suicide ideation have theological questions.
To answer your question more directly, that spiritual care element, that ability to pray with people, for example, to meditate with people, that’s going to be something that you may or may not get on a warm line depending on who’s on the other end, but it’s certainly not in their culture or institution to offer that, where we are explicitly charged with offering spiritual care. The other difference is that we actually don’t have a topic limitation. Most phone lines do. We can do crisis; we have training on suicide intervention on the line. Our counselors are trained on that, all the way down to the warm line. So, we don’t have any topic, and we are able to and do actively talk about spirituality and even offer things like prayer and meditation.
Question: Do you have a time limit on calls? It sounds like that would be an issue, that people want to keep you on the phone as long as they can.
Answer: It’s a great question. When I first arrived, the Night Ministry had no time limits on the calls and no restrictions on the number of times you could call. I believe this was a bit misguided, to be honest, because the idea was that somehow that was compassionate, that we were not going to put limits on people. But in my training and my understanding, boundaries are compassionate. Especially with people who are in a trauma situation, that kind of trauma looping is actually not compassionate. If anything, it’s reinforcing patterns that are not so helpful. So, re-establishing boundaries, which is a form of healthy relationality, is a kind of ministry in itself. Not to mention, we want to be able to have other people call in.
So we have established a 20-minute limit on the phone conversations, and you’re only allowed to call in once per night. Now, those limits are suspendable if, in fact, somebody’s in crisis. So if you’re in crisis, you can talk as long as you want, and the counselor has to assess that. And you can also call back. If somebody has had suicide ideation or whatnot and it’s been de-escalated, we will invite them to call back that night if they want, because we don’t want to leave anybody in the lurch.
Question: When you go out into the streets in those neighborhoods, do you approach people or do you wait for people to approach you? And when you approach people, how do you do that?
Answer: One of the long-standing traditions at the Night Ministry is sauntering. The word actually comes from French, à la sainte terre, which means “on the way to the Holy Land.” Pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land in medieval times were called saunterers because they were walking to the Holy Land. And so we saunter at night. Another way of considering that is it’s a bit like a Buddhist walking meditation. We really bring a kind of sacred intention, a certain kind of presence and orientation to how we move through the city. And we do that because we don’t have anywhere to go. We don’t have anywhere to be. We’re just walking, right? We’re just seeing what’s available.
In terms of how we approach people, it’s very gently, very hospitably. We certainly are not there to intrude on someone’s space. We want to walk slowly. We want to open our space. We want to show that we don’t have anywhere to go. We’re not rushing by. We’re just making ourselves available. Maybe a little glance to see if there’s an opening. Maybe there’s lots of, “Hey there,” a fist bump, or sometimes I get “Father” if I have my collar on. You just kind of see if there’s an invitation. And then sometimes there’s just that, and that’s fine. That’s a contact. That’s a moment. Maybe they do that three or four or five times, and then a night minister’s walking by and they say, “You know what? I want to talk to you about something.” So we have that kind of longer view. You just have to feel it in the situation.
Question: How do you introduce yourself in terms of your tradition, if at all?
Answer: It comes up very much like a regular chaplaincy context. Often times we get people who say, “What church do you belong to?” or “Where are you coming from?” And we just say we’re part of the Night Ministry, we’re out here walking and interacting with people. But we can now also say, if someone’s really looking for a church, they can come to Open Cathedral. They can come to Open Shabbat. So, we have services that we can direct people to of our own, too. Now, we’re not there recruiting people, obviously, but sometimes there’s a real question for that. But yeah, in terms of our own tradition, we introduce it just in the same way that you would in a chaplaincy context. If it comes up, you’re going to say, “Yeah, I’m a Zen Buddhist,” or “I’m a reformed Jewish cantor,” or something like that.
Question: I’m wondering if you have any more to say about self-care, and how a spiritual caregiver cares for themselves given the intensity of what they might be called to be present with.
Answer: It’s a great question. We have the community call every night, and it’s actually in the middle of the shift. We also have regular night ministers’ meetings, and of course, the CPE program has a lot of structured spaces for this kind of processing. But yeah, I think there probably ought to be more, and there probably ought to be more in most chaplaincy contexts. I think a lot of chaplains kind of end up being lone wolves out there, on their own having to do this and hold this. But I believe that self-care is essential. It’s not ancillary, it’s not extra, it’s absolutely essential to the work. And as you’re already suggesting, debriefing is self-care. It’s not just, “I’m going to go off and meditate,” which is great, of course, but there are things that can be and should be processed, even relationally, that will help things move. That’s a key component of the work.
CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education): A form of theological education that takes place in a clinical setting (like a hospital or, in this case, the community) where ministry students and clergy of all faiths can develop their pastoral care skills. ↩
SRO (Single Room Occupancy): A form of affordable housing, typically a small, single room within a larger building, often with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. ↩
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, and goodwill. It is a form of Buddhist meditation in which the practitioner cultivates a feeling of universal, non-attached love for all beings. ↩