Faith Journey

GOD'S SUSTAINING GRACE

Christy Dumont reflects on her faith journey as Chaplain at Sarasota Memorial Hospital during COVID-19.

Iam blessed to be a part of the rich variety of healing ministries in the Diocese of Southwest Florida. Bishop Dabney Smith has commissioned me to serve as a full-time health care chaplain in this diocese. My church membership is at Christ Episcopal Church in Bradenton, FL, where Fr. Robert Baker has supported me in ministry. I am a lay woman who received an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, a M.Div. from Vanderbilt Divinity School and then proceeded to complete both an internship and a residency in Clinical Pastoral Education at AdventHealth. I have served for three years as a staff chaplain at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. For almost two years, I have often been the lone presence of God’s compassionate love to many of God’s people who have died from COVID-19. God has prepared me for this service through excellent professional training, years of service with my family in ministries with those marginalized from the mainstream of society and most importantly my fifteen years of commitment as a Benedictine Oblate, as I have lived that within my family setting. For many years my family and I have blended a Benedictine way of life with the vision of life in God so beautifully offered in the Sermon on the Mount. The sweet refreshing and healing water of life in Christ Jesus first came to me as a young child suffering from frequent bouts of severe asthma. I remember the terror I felt as I struggled hour after hour for air. However, what I now remember most clearly is the warmth of my mother’s arms wrapped tenderly around me and her voice offering gentle prayers and sweet songs as she rocked me through the night. These tender gifts of God’s life came as sweet water to calm and renew my soul, offering the peace that passes all understanding upon which our soul depends for its eternal life. Little did I know that some forty years later, as a chaplain serving a large hospital amid a pandemic, I would be asked to be present at the bedside of hundreds of persons as they struggled to draw their last breaths here on earth. What I offered them was the tender, compassionate, love of God in the form of prayer, song, touch, or silent presence filled with heavenly grace. I offered what God had given me first in childhood and then repeatedly through my many years of contemplative prayer as a Benedictine Oblate. The years of prayer have opened within me a place of trust in God’s sustaining grace. Amidst the human tragedy that we experience, as we persist in our faith, God opens in countless practical and miraculous ways the blessings held for us in the promises given in the Beatitudes.

I am a long-time practitioner of Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina, and my family and I join in Evening Prayer with Fr. Robert and friends from Christ Episcopal Church. I am currently finishing my final year with Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School. My life’s journey has led me into an interest in spirituality and depth psychology. Now God has called me to serve in chaplaincy and spiritual care with the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in Naples, Florida. I will serve adults and children suffering with the longterm journey of their souls as they deal with many forms of biopsychospiritual illnesses which are involved in addiction and mental illness. Since ancient times the Church has addressed such healing and soul renewal through many and varied spiritual pathways to inner healing. At present, I am in a doctoral program at Vanderbilt Divinity School that is researching a better articulation of this psychology of grace in a manner that will allow the medical fields, particularly those of psychiatry and psychotherapy to better integrate and utilize the ancient healing waters of grace so sweetly flowing from the heart of God in the Church. I am excited about this new academic adventure, bridging mental health and chaplaincy. One of my interests is in the role of chaplains in developing and implementing programs of Christian contemplative prayer in healing and in-depth Christian development for individuals, families, ministries, churches, and Christian schools. I hope to articulate and develop programs that address key issues I have encountered in hospital chaplaincy, as well as, in my many years of chaplaincy experiences involving church groups, school children and family groups. I look forward to adding my gifts and talents to the already rich and vibrant work in healing and teaching so abundantly offered in the Diocese of Southwest Florida!

Above: Christy Dumont is commissioned as a health care chaplain by Bishop Dabney Smith.