This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Chaplaincy Speaker Series: “How Can I Help?” with Renshin Bunce. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

How Can I Help? - Renshin Bunce

The following talk was given by Renshin Bunce at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on December 18, 2023. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

How Can I Help?

Introduction

Vanessa: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our third installment of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series. This morning, I am delighted to welcome Renshin Bunce, who is joining us today. Renshin is the author of three books: Entering the Monastery, which is an account of life at the San Francisco Zen Center; Love and Fear: Stories from a Hospice Chaplain; and Remembering Myōgen: Steve Stucky, a collection of stories about the late former abbot to whom Renshin is a Dharma Heir. Renshin lived for seven years at the San Francisco Zen Center and worked for twelve years as a hospice chaplain. She is now retired, lives in Eureka, California, and leads two sitting groups affiliated with the Everyday Zen Foundation. Welcome, Renshin. Thank you for joining us this morning.

Renshin Bunce: Thank you, Vanessa. Good morning, everyone. [Laughter] Which window to enter to once again tell this familiar, wonderful story?

It is so beautiful up here in Eureka. It is so beautiful to get out of bed, look out of the window, and be grateful to be alive. I think this is the accomplishment of spiritual practice. I come from a difficult background, and I came to meditation as a last resort. I came to meditation, as I think almost all of us do, hoping that I could find a way to settle my mind. I came to meditation for self-improvement.

I recently heard Norman Fischer give a talk, and in the talk, he said there are two goals in spiritual practice. One is self-improvement. Most of us—I watch the people who come to practice with me—are hurting, right? We want to stop hurting. Norman points out that this first goal is focused on the self: Me, me, me. What about me? What's wrong with me? What's right with me? What am I going to do about me? In more advanced practice, the point is to drop the self and begin to practice for all beings. I thought that was great. It is a natural progression, and it is certainly my story.

The Path to Chaplaincy

As Vanessa mentioned, I lived at the San Francisco Zen Center for seven years. I was in my late 50s when I left my conventional life, moved to the monastery at Tassajara¹, and just decided to give everything up and plunge in completely. If a little bit was good, a lot was going to be better. The monastery was one of the many times in my life where what I got was not what I expected. The monastery did what it did really well.

I had trashed my conventional high heels and red fingernails life because I thought I'd live at Zen Center forever. I thought it was safe to be in my late 50s and have no money. After seven years, it was time to leave. Whoa, what was I going to do?

By that time I was ordained. To me, the essential meaning of ordination is the vow, and the vow is to be helpful. It's very important to me that the vow is not taken—it's not something that any person from the outside gives me. There's too much "I" in "I take the vow." What I saw after a couple of years, as I am so fond of saying, was that the vow took me. So there I was. By that time, I was already collecting Social Security. I was driven by vow, I had no money, and I needed a job. It was really scary.

I had a friend who had gone through the Buddhist Chaplaincy training, and she was a volunteer chaplain in the regional hospital. She was finding that rewarding, and I liked her stories. She said, "Why don't you do that?" So I thought I'd give it a try. I went into the Buddhist Chaplaincy training and I just loved it. I was still on staff at City Center. Once a month, several of us would pile into someone's old car, drive down to Redwood City, sit with nice people, and listen to Gil Fronsdal, Jennifer, and Paul. I thought it was terrific.

Like many people in that training, I liked it better in theory than in practice. In those days, you could get away with not doing your volunteer work; you could just come down to Sati Center once a month and be happy. I was in the training for nine or ten months before I realized, "Oh, I'm gonna have to do volunteer work."

Learning to Listen at Laguna Honda

So I went to Laguna Honda. That huge hospital is the safety net in San Francisco. If you are chronically ill and you have no money, no resources, and no family, this is where you end up. The Zen Hospice has a wing there, but in general, if you're really in need, you go to Laguna Honda.

There was one chaplain and a bunch of volunteers. That one chaplain was taking a small group of us around the hospital, and he told me that he wanted me to visit on the women's ward. But when we were walking around, we passed the AIDS ward, and there was some guy leaning in the doorway wearing a leather jacket. He looked at the group of us and said, "Please come here, visit here, we need you." So I said okay. The head chaplain objected and said I should stick with the women, but I chose the AIDS ward.

I bought a new pair of black Levi's—my dress pants—for my first day. I printed out the 23rd Psalm and put it in my back pocket. Somehow I thought what I was walking into was a private room: clean white sheets, white curtains blowing in the breeze, and one very sick man lying there. What I got was an extremely large room with beds lined up on either side. It was noisy, messy, dirty, and complicated.

I introduced myself to the staff. They didn't have time. Everyone was understaffed and overworked. So I had to find a way. Necessity drives us. I was driven to walk into that huge room, walk up to a stranger, and say, "I'm the chaplain." Those guys taught me. They began my education: What is help? You don't say, "I'm here to help." I hope I didn't say, "What do you need?" They showed me. Some of them would pull me aside: "Chaplain, I need to talk," and we'd go find a quiet place. They had stuff they needed to say to someone. Not deathbed confessions, just, "Here I am. Do you see me? Here I am." So I began to learn to listen. I'm sure in those visits I tried to fix things. They'd say stuff, I'd say stuff, and they'd say, "Thank you, Chaplain, that really helped."

I made mistakes. I made one terrible mistake. I still regret it, and I still try not to do that again. One time when I came in, they pointed to a man in the bed right there and said, "He's dying." I said, "Oh, that's too bad." And then I realized what they meant was I should be with him! He was dying! Oh, that's part of what a chaplain does. So for the first time, I sat with someone who was dying. He was no longer responsive, but he was dying, and he was essentially alone.

Dropping the Script

After that, I did Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE)—the hospital residency. When I told Jennifer that this was working for me and I wanted to be a professional chaplain, she told me, "Most of the work is in hospice." That was good because I already knew that I needed to learn about death. I had helped my mother die, and what I saw was that my mother was death-avoidant. She avoided everything unpleasant. What this meant was when death came for her, it came as a stranger and she was terrified. When I saw my mother's terror in her final minutes on earth, I reflected, "Huh, if I'm going to die too, maybe I should try to be a little friendlier with death."

But before I could get a job, I had to do this one-year hospital residency, and that's where the learning really took off. I was the chaplain for a section of this big hospital at California Pacific. There was only one staff chaplain for the entire building.

I out-Christianed the Christians. Nobody prayed more than I did. Jennifer taught us a formula for how to pray that I never stopped using. I never stopped praying, but I think I stopped inflicting it on people. On reflection, I was acting like a Christian because I thought that's what they expected, and I didn't want them to be upset with me. I realized if I were going to continue in this work, that was corrosive to me. I had to stop and figure out what I believed. Who do you think God is when you say "God"? I had to continue to keep riding that razor's edge between the patient's needs and my needs, because if I didn't stay true to myself, I wouldn't be able to continue in the work.

When there's a crisis in the middle of the night in a major hospital, it's the newbies who get paged. I got paged at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. Your heart starts beating fast. I put on some black clothes, drove across town, and showed up at the ICU. A woman greeted me. She asked, "Are you a nun?" I said, "Oh, I'm a priest." She said okay, and disappeared. There was a fairly young man having a really difficult death. His wife was with him, screaming, throwing herself across his body, crying, and begging him not to die.

There's the scenario. New chaplain here to help. They didn't want a chaplain. What are you supposed to do? Once again, I had my handy 23rd Psalm. I had gone through a little Gideon New Testament and crossed out all the hate and smiting so I could read Psalms to people. So in that ICU cubicle, I read the 23rd Psalm. They were like, "Okay." I stepped back and left them to it; for those two, there was no one in the world but each other. But it didn't seem reasonable for me to leave. What are you supposed to do? How can you help these people?

I found a chair, put it in the hall outside of the cubicle, and I started to chant to Guanyin² silently, which settled me. I sat there thinking, What am I supposed to do? And I received information that carried me through all the years of my work as a chaplain: You represent the fact that there is a spiritual side to this. You are a visual reminder of the spiritual side of life. The nurses, the patients, the family—anyone looking at you is going to be reminded we are not just a piece of meat, and this death is not just a physical event.

I worked with many chaplains who developed a script. They would enter a room, read a passage from the Bible, and leave on every visit. I don't get to do that. I'm a Zen Buddhist. I'm operating under instructions to keep turning to beginner's mind, to keep greeting each moment fresh. Every time I enter a room, I don't know what they need. The only way to find out is to listen. Which is really hard! You want to walk in and solve the problem, like Bing Crosby playing a Catholic priest in the old movies. I'm not Bing Crosby.

The gift that I, as a Zen Buddhist priest, had to bring to the event was this awareness of beginner's mind. Through thousands of hours of zazen³, I developed the courage to walk in fresh and not have some kind of shtick.

My beloved teacher, Myōgen Steve Stucky, died nearly ten years ago. Steve remained my teacher for twenty years because he never told me what to do. He didn't criticize and correct. All Steve ever asked me to do was to be who I am. This meant I had to get quiet enough to strip away some of the external frills I'd developed to get through life. Let that emerge. That's what we, as Buddhists, can bring to a visit.

The Urge to Fix

I like to say that it took me about five years to learn how to listen. Once, I went to a death doula training. The instructor talked about the importance of listening, and then we broke into small groups and practiced listening for fifteen minutes. The whole four days should have been about listening! Listening is so hard. It is so hard to get my ego, my wanting to look good and be wise, out of the way.

Eventually, I worked in hospice. It was all home visits, so I liked the freedom. I was the person they called when there was a crisis no one else knew how to handle. Once, a fairly young woman had come across the country with her family for a last-ditch treatment at Stanford. They were staying in an Airbnb, and the treatment had not worked. She died. My phone rang: Go help them. I had never met them. They were in trauma. You knock on the door, and there are no do-overs. There is a certain imperative to get it right the first time.

There is always practical stuff to do, and it's important not to get hooked by the practical stuff just so you can say, "Oh good, here I am being helpful." In that case, they needed help with the mortuary.

Here's another story: I was very close with Zen teacher Blanche Hartman at City Center. She was my ordination teacher. I was also very close with her husband, Lou. Lou was dying in the old Zen hospice on Page Street. It was a beautiful scene. Lou was non-responsive in the bed, and the room was full of us sitting with him, accompanying him, listening with our hearts. As I was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the bed, a thought entered my head to check his nasal cannula. I thought, No, wait a minute, that's not what you're here for. Relax, you're sitting zazen. But then the next thing I knew, I was standing up and I was adjusting his nasal cannula! I couldn't help it. I had to do something. And it didn't look like it helped Lou.

This urge to fix is really important to watch. Taking the position of power—"I'm here to help, and you're the person who needs help"—is not helpful. We have to learn to listen, to meet fresh, and to be willing to be equal. On my refrigerator, I have a picture of Thomas Merton⁴. Thomas Merton is saying, "Our job is to love everyone without stopping to judge whether or not they're worthy of it." Being a chaplain and walking up to strangers all day long is the best opportunity to learn how to love unconditionally and drop the script.

Standing in the Hallway

Where does help come from? For me, it gets to the mystery of zazen. I still think the secret is to get quiet enough that the information can arise. We're born Buddha. Everyone has Buddha nature. How do we access it? If I'm continually creating an acceptable personality, there's no room for that information to arise.

I retired almost two years ago and moved up to Humboldt County. I am now a hospice volunteer. A couple of weeks ago, I went to visit my patient in a pretty big facility. When I arrived, the nurses were changing her catheter and asked for a few minutes. I stepped out, and I heard someone calling. I went through these big double doors, and here was this long hallway, completely empty except for one old blind lady. She was leaning on her walker by the door to her room, calling out, "Hello? Hello?"

I walked up to her and said, "Hi, what's up?" She asked what time it was. I looked at my watch and said, "It's 2:30." She punched her watch, and it announced, "The time is 5:30." She argued with me. We went in her room, and she asked again. I said, "It's 2:38." She punched her watch again, and it said 5:38. Then she asked Alexa, and fortunately, Alexa agreed with me. Don't argue. Don't say, "I told you so."

I love that story because I think we are all standing in a long empty hallway calling out, "Hello? Anybody there? I'm feeling alone over here." I did do something practical for her—I looked up the make of her watch on my iPhone and set it to the right time. But in all those hundreds of visits, when I asked myself, What can I do to help?, behind that is the question: What is it that people want? Clearly, what we want is just to be seen. To have others say, "Yeah, you're here."

I sat vigil for a woman who was dying yesterday. She was non-responsive. I'd say to her every once in a while, "I'm still here. You're not alone." I'd say, "You're doing great. You look really good." And something that I began to say to dying people that I think is helpful is: "You understand what you're going through only goes in one direction." It is a way of saying you're actually not going to come back from this, and that seems to be a release.

A lot of patients on hospice have dementia. What are you supposed to do to be helpful? One of my trainers in CPE told a story about a ward full of comatose young men after World War II. The chaplain would go through that ward every day and talk to each of them. He would say their name, his name, the date, and say a little more. When I began to do this, I'd tell them something about the news, or give an extended weather report—some kind of really gentle reality check. The point to this story is one of those young men came out of his coma, and he said he lived for that. That was what he had in his life. I never stopped doing that with my patients with dementia. Read to them, sing to them, or just sit and listen.

What is help? It's not the power position. It's not the script. There is no answer. It's never black and white. It's always looking at each situation and asking: What is help here? What can I do here?

Q&A and Reflections

Joshua: Thank you for your wisdom. I'm a chaplain and a mindfulness meditation facilitator at Rikers Island prison. I work in the maximum security facility. Some of the men are shackled to a desk all day and then put into their cell at night. Inevitably, someone in the group—sometimes part of a gang—will purposely interrupt, make a problem, and disturb the group. I have tried a different way of dealing with it every time, but I still have a problem with how to effectively address that individual with the rest of the group there. There's always the immediacy of the potential for violence, and there are the other people to consider. How can I more effectively deal with a situation like that?

Renshin Bunce: Wow. I have no idea. What comes up for me is something we used to say in the monastery about people whose behavior was outside the norm: They're showing us their suffering. We were actually being snarky—"Oh, he's showing us his suffering today"—but that has stayed with me. One reaction I have as you tell that story is thinking, Why would they do that? What do they want? Who in the room is in need of help? Who is really needing to be seen?

Beyond that, what to say, what to do? I bow to anyone who goes into prisons. What is there for us to do but try to stay loving and greet it fresh? How long have you been a chaplain at Rikers?

Joshua: Nine months. Actually, I'm a Rabbi. Some people call me a JuBu⁵, but I am there as a mindfulness meditation facilitator. That way I get to work with people of all religions. But I struggle with how to introduce Vipassana concepts without making them feel uncomfortable.

Renshin Bunce: I didn't visit as a Buddhist; I visited as a human being. Almost always they'd ask, "What are you?" I learned to say, "The tradition that brought me to the work is Zen Buddhism." I claimed my priesthood. But I didn't try to teach anyone to meditate. If they asked what the deal with Buddhism was, I might spin out a couple of minutes about the Four Noble Truths to certain people if it appeared they could hear the information. I might say, "You do understand you have some control over your thoughts," just to plant that in there. But thank you for doing what you're doing. It sounds like you're really jumping in the deep end.

Shockey: I also studied with Myōgen Steve Stucky starting around 2002. He married us right after the Tassajara fires. I am in the Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy program. I lead a meditation group for people with chronic illness and disability because I live with that as well. I wonder if I am physically able to do chaplaincy, but I've discovered I want to step into that position to help others who are disabled. Because there's this unspoken hierarchy that arises around people who live with disability. What comes up is that it's not about fixing, but serving. Just being somewhere for someone to be heard in whatever is going on.

Renshin Bunce: Exactly! I'm not here to fix you because you're not broken. If I enter a situation and I start trying to fix it, I'm implying you're broken. Nobody wants that. You have a unique opportunity to be of service. The connection between chaplain and patient is everything, and what creates the connection is the feeling of being seen, heard, and understood. Few of us know how it is to be you. Someone else who has a chronic illness is going to be really happy to have you come in.

Vanessa: It looks like we're at time. That went so quickly! Renshin, thank you so much for joining us today. The Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series greatly benefits from donations and Dana⁶, so I'm putting a link in the chat. Thank you so much.