Apprentices
/Elisha said, ‘Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit.’
-2 Kings 2:9
In the 2 Kings reading for this Sunday, we witness the moment at which the great prophet Elijah passes the mantle to his apprentice, Elisha, before he disappears into heaven in a chariot of fire. This story always reminds me of my first experience as a chaplain. During my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) training, I served for a summer as a full time chaplain at Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, MA. It was the summer between my first and second year of seminary, so I was pretty inexperienced in ministry. And I was assigned to the cardiac intensive care unit, having had no life experience at all with people with heart problems.
CPE began with a few weeks of training off the floor, in which we learned all the do’s and don’t’s of pastoral care. But we also spent time delving into our own wounds, fears and insecurities, so that we could begin to identify our personal ‘hot buttons’ which might cause us to lose focus on caring for the patient and instead turn our attention inward to our own pain. Finally, after a lot of intense work together, the day came when my CPE colleagues and I were sent to our floors to visit patients, each of us wearing our official name tags, identifying us as hospital chaplains.
One of my first visits was to a man who’d just had a serious heart attack and was awaiting open heart surgery. I came in and introduced myself and asked how he was doing. That was the day I learned that patients are often far more open with a chaplain than they’d ever be with any other stranger in any other setting. This man began to tell me about all the most intimate stresses in his life - about his estrangement from his daughter, the death of his wife, the job that he hated but felt he had no choice but to keep. After telling me all this he looked up at me and said, “You know, I’ve been a good person. And all this has happened to me, and now this. A heart attack. Tell me now. Why has God done this to me?”
My first thought was, “I’ll go and get the chaplain for you.” But then I remembered with a thump of recognition that I was the chaplain, and I was the one that was being called on to respond to this man’s unanswerable question.
There is a weight of responsibility in this life, and we each have our various responsibilities. As we grow into the person God is calling us to be, there will be more than a few occasions upon which we feel unfit for the tasks set before us. Elisha begs Elijah to leave him a double share of his spirit, so that he’d have the wisdom, somehow, to follow in his wise teacher’s footsteps. But God had chosen Elisha just as surely as he’d called Elijah before him. And generally, God does not call the equipped. Instead God equips the called.
We are all quite unworthy to attempt to walk in Christ’s footsteps and to claim to be disciples, let alone friends, as he so generously refers to us. How can we possibly manage to have even a speck of his abundant spirit or a spark of his unworldly light? Nonetheless, as Theresa of Avila once wrote:
Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
We’re all just bumbling apprentices, but with God’s help, we follow, and we serve, and we share Christ’s love with the world.
