Book Review: Apara Mahal Sylvester,Chaplaincy: A Hospital Chaplain Intern’s Journey

Abstract

Apara Mahal Sylvester candidly shares her personal experience as a Clinical Pastoral Education intern in the hospital in which she worked as an Emergency Department registration staff member. Sylvester starts by briefly explaining her religious/spiritual roots and how she came to embrace more open-ended religion/spirituality for herself. Sylvester moves on to how she started her CPE internship and highlights a number of her clinical experiences from, when she was the on-call chaplain. Sylvester focuses on her own learning process as a CPE intern rather than on any of her particular patient encounters or aspects of the CPE curriculum in which she participated. On the one hand, Sylvester’s fluid style of writing about her experiences is interesting and inspirational. On the other hand, however, someone who already has experience with Clinical Pastoral Education may want to hear more from the author both in depth and in detail.

Sylvester begins with her positive and not-so-positive experiences of having gone through her Catholic primary and secondary schools as a non-Catholic student. Sylvester (2020, p. 3) describes her spirituality in the following words:

Ultimately, I believe in God and, to me, that’s all what matters. I’m just a speck, a tiny little speck of being in the Universe. I’m a small voice in the masses. But I know that there is an all-loving, all knowing God who hears me and listens, despite the fact I may not always agree with what his followers preach. For me, to have God’s ear is enough. I do my best to be a good person and that’s all I can ask for. That’s all I believe God can ask of me, too.

Sylvester then explains how she began to work as a registration staff member for an Emergency Department and how she became familiar with the work of chaplains there. She writes, “What I learned about what Chaplains do reminded me so much of my ‘Moments of God.’ I wanted to be like them. It was then I decided that I wanted to learn how to become one of them.” Sylvester introduces a number of her memorable patient care experiences from, when she was the on-call chaplain in the second half of the book. At the end of the book. Sylvester explains how she became the Office Coordinator for the Department of Pastoral Care at her hospital, providing vital administrative support to all the staff and trainees in the CPE program.

This book has achieved its purpose of sharing the author’s experience of a CPE intern with those who may not be familiar with the CPE program or clinical chaplaincy. Most of the evidence that the author mentions in this book is qualitative rather than quantitative, as its orientation is experiential rather than scientific. I am not sure if there are similar books to this one on the market. As I hinted at it earlier, this book is a helpful and interesting introduction to the CPE internship program for those who may not be familiar with CPE or clinical chaplaincy. However, for more experienced readers, this book may say too little about CPE internship training or clinical chaplaincy.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Yongbom Lee

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