Tending the Inward Light: A Quaker Medical Student’s Reflections on Spiritual Care After Clinical Pastoral Education
Quinlan Morrow, Loma Linda University School of Medicine
Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) is a spiritual care clinical curriculum for student chaplains. Spiritual needs are inextricably linked to illness yet medical students rarely receive spiritual care training. After a year of clinical education, I recognized the limits of my physician training to care for patients holistically. Between my third and fourth years of medical school, I pursued additional training in religion and chaplaincy, participating in CPE with a cohort of first year chaplaincy students. Holding the hands of a lonely patient with nonfluent aphasia, praying over the waning lives of twins born at twenty weeks, and caring for overwhelmed nurses and crying visitors in elevators forever changed how I practice medicine. As a Quaker, my experiences as a student chaplain revealed how Quaker practice enriches spiritual care.
Quaker faith and practice relies on a healthy engagement with silence, ambiguity, and mystery. Quakers believe all people have access to the divine through the “Inward Light.” The Quaker value of equity challenges typical medical and pastoral power hierarchies and allows for bidirectional spiritual care where patients minister to clinicians. Quaker communalism demonstrates the transcendent power of community, emphasizing healing through connection. Quakers practice communal silence and believe connection is sacred. In clinical settings, chaplains are trained to see all encounters with patients and medical staff as sacred. As I reentered clinical training, these values enhanced my medical practice. By expanding the definition of spiritual care, enhancing interprofessional collaboration, and developing a gentle presence, chaplaincy training forms medical students into better clinicians. Weaving narrative experience and Quaker theological tradition, I explore a vision for spiritual care where incarnational sacramentology imbues all interactions with sacredness, bridging the gap between chaplaincy and medical training.
Quaker faith and practice relies on a healthy engagement with silence, ambiguity, and mystery. Quakers believe all people have access to the divine through the “Inward Light.” The Quaker value of equity challenges typical medical and pastoral power hierarchies and allows for bidirectional spiritual care where patients minister to clinicians. Quaker communalism demonstrates the transcendent power of community, emphasizing healing through connection. Quakers practice communal silence and believe connection is sacred. In clinical settings, chaplains are trained to see all encounters with patients and medical staff as sacred. As I reentered clinical training, these values enhanced my medical practice. By expanding the definition of spiritual care, enhancing interprofessional collaboration, and developing a gentle presence, chaplaincy training forms medical students into better clinicians. Weaving narrative experience and Quaker theological tradition, I explore a vision for spiritual care where incarnational sacramentology imbues all interactions with sacredness, bridging the gap between chaplaincy and medical training.