c. 1998 Religion News Service

HERSHEY, Pa. _ The hospital bedside conversation was routine _ small talk meant to break the ice. It consisted of little more than chaplain J. Anthony Stultz asking patient Jeremy Bentley how his recovery from being struck by a car was going (well, Bentley replied), followed by a few words about tattoos (both men have them).”The technique is just go in and hangout,”Stultz said later about his chat with the 22-year-old college student.”I try to pick up clues about what’s needed and if I’m accepted. It’s about building rapport and trust.” While the conversation may have been standard hospital fare, Stultz is by no means your average hospital chaplain.

Not only is he the only Buddhist chaplain at Penn State Geisinger Health System-M.S. Hershey Medical Center _ a sprawling, 500-bed regional trauma center serving 15 southcentral Pennsylvania counties _ he also is one of the very few Buddhists working as hospital staff chaplains anywhere in the nation.

As such, he’s a living example of the changing nature of the American religious scene and its impact on the pastoral care administered in the nation’s hospitals.”As our culture has become more open to looking at all faith traditions, we’ve come to understand that regardless of their tradition people experience the same suffering,”said Candace Veon-Nyiri, another Hershey Medical Center chaplain and a lay member of the Presbyterian Church (USA).”We’ve also come to understand that it’s not what you label yourself that makes you a good chaplain, but how you relate to people in their most vulnerable moments.” Because no one agency certifies chaplains _ faith groups generally oversee their own _ it’s difficult to ascertain how many work in American hospitals. Moreover, not all hospitals require chaplains to be certified and many rely on volunteer priests, ministers, rabbis and lay people who perform the task on an intermittent or as-needed basis.

However, Stultz _ who is due to receive full certification later this year _ is the only Buddhist currently working in an American hospital who is affiliated with the College of Chaplains, the nation’s only interfaith chaplaincy accreditation agency, located in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.

Only one other Buddhist _ the Rev. Madeline Ko’i Bastis, a Soto Zen priest currently not working in a hospital _ has ever received certification from the College of Chaplains, according to administrative director Jo Schrader. Bastis was certified in 1997.

So rare are Buddhist hospital chaplains that even Hawaii, which has more Buddhists than any other state _ about 150,000 _ has no full-time Buddhist hospital chaplain. Instead, said Bishop Chikai Yosemori of Honolulu’s Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii, the state’s largest Buddhist organization, several of the group’s ministers volunteer time at local hospitals on an irregular basis.

Although not officially chaplains, lay Buddhists connected with the San Francisco Zen Center also work as volunteers at that city’s Laguna Honda Hospital, a long-term care public institution. Frank Ostaseski, who directs the center’s program, said the volunteers spend one-year working with dying patients”as an extension of their spiritual practice.” Given Buddhism’s great emphasis on compassionate service, Stultz believes there also must be at least some Buddhists working as hospital chaplains who prefer to keep their beliefs hidden out of fear that openly calling themselves Buddhists will hamper their careers in a society still dominated by Judeo-Christian beliefs.

Stultz said that’s particularly true for non-Asian converts to the faith, such as himself. Stultz was raised a conservative Protestant”with a little charismatic thrown in”and considered becoming an Episcopal priest before fully embracing Buddhism. “They identify themselves as Jews or Christians to get jobs, but if you took away that title you couldn’t tell them apart from an open Buddhist,”said Stultz.”I couldn’t live like that. I found it too neurotic. I had to live openly.” Trudi Hirsch, one of the nation’s only other Buddhist chaplains who works at New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center, agreed that chaplains with Buddhist beliefs are more numerous than they might appear.”It’s a pioneering time for Buddhists,”said Hirsch, a former Zen Buddhist monk who has not sought College of Chaplains certification.”But you’ll see more and more openly Buddhist chaplains as the years go by because the chaplaincy works well with Buddhist theology.”You have to be present in the moment to listen well and have an open heart. That’s what is required to be a good chaplain and that’s what Buddhism cultivates.” The Rev. Paul Derrickson, a Presbyterian Church (USA) minister, who coordinates the Hershey Medical Center chaplaincy program, said Buddhists _ given their generally non-dogmatic, psychologically attuned approach _ may have”a leg up”when it comes to working as a chaplain at his hospital.”We try and pay a lot more attention to a patient’s process rather than the content of a particular situation. I think Buddhism does that very well,”he said.

Stultz, 35, is one of five chaplains at the Hershey hospital in a year-long chaplaincy certification program. The other four are Christians, as are the hospital’s four certified chaplains.

Hershey Medical Center serves a predominantly white Christian community with no more than a sprinkling of southeast Asian Buddhists, mostly Vietnamese and Thai. That means Stultz _ whose personal practice combines Zen and Tibetan Buddhism _ rarely works with Buddhists.

Yet he has found wide acceptance among the hospital’s patient population, said Derrickson.

Hospital patients with strong ties to a faith community tend to want their own clergy to visit, Derrickson noted. That means Stultz and the hospital’s other chaplains generally work with those who lack such ties, are geographically removed from their community, or are in such critical shape that they cannot wait for their own chaplain to show up.

For them, Stultz and the other Hershey Medical Center chaplains represent a sort of”generic link to a higher power”_ which they may or may not call God _ from which they draw comfort as they confront the sort of life-threatening illnesses or injuries that land them in a trauma care hospital, Derrickson said.

Stultz, who generally wears dark business suits and ties that give no hint of his own beliefs, said patients rarely question him about his own faith and tend to assume he is Christian. They often call him”father”without giving it any thought, he said.

Nor does Stultz correct them, unless it becomes necessary _ such as when someone asks him to perform a particular Christian rite.

Derrickson said that because people’s deepest beliefs often stray from the official dogma of their faith group, patients may feel freer to disclose those beliefs to a”non-threatening presence,”such as Stultz, than to a representative of their own religion.”For many non-Buddhists who may know a little about Buddhism, Buddhism in their minds is more a philosophy than a religion,”said Bastis, who currently runs retreats for people with”life-challenging”illnesses, such as AIDS and cancer, following work as a chaplain at three New York-area hospitals.”Most (hospital patients) related to me better when they learned I was a Buddhist because they feel rejected by the religion of their origin. People who would not speak to a Catholic, Protestant or Jewish chaplain would speak to me,”she said.

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Stultz’ own religious journey reflects the unorthodoxy that has become a hallmark of liberal American religion.

Born in Altoona, Pa., he grew up in a conservative Protestant home. By age 9, he played at door-to-door proselytizing and would gather his neighborhood friends for Bible study classes.

Soon after he became”mesmerized”by Asian martial arts and the Buddhist meditative focus that accompanies them when seriously studied. He earned a black belt while still a teen-ager, become an instructer and broke his nose kick boxing.

That exposure to Buddhist thought led him away from what he now calls his”root tradition”and into the more liberal Episcopal Church, in which he was married. He spent time as an Episcopal parish lay assistant in Johnstown, Pa., and earned a masters degree at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., while also studying Buddhism at Harvard Divinity School.

Eventually, he came to identify more with Buddhism than Christianity and settled on trauma center chaplaincy work as a spiritual discipline.

Stultz views his personal history, as well as his acceptance as a Buddhist chaplain at Hershey Medical Center, as reflective of changes in the American religious rainbow.”I represent a new world of religion, one in which religions interact more fluidly, and a new type of religious person, someone who can draw from more than one tradition,”he said.”I believe that’s the future of religion in America.”

DEA END RIFKIN