Receiving and giving hospitality
12-01-2023
The hospitable and supportive environment Jeanne Hale (M.Div.’06) experienced at McCormick is what she offers students and staff at WakeMed, a healthcare system in Raleigh, North Carolina. An ACPE certified educator, Rev. Hale provides clinical pastoral education to those who will offer spiritual care to patients and their families.
While a project manager engineer for a company in Charlotte, North Carolina, Rev. Jeanne Hale found that her volunteer role as a Stephen Minister at her church was rewarding in a different way. “I enjoyed the one-on-on meetings with people…walking with them through difficult times,” she says. “But I knew that I didn’t necessarily want to go into parish ministry, and I wanted to explore my relationship with God.”
That desire turned into visits to seminaries across the U.S. What caught her attention at McCormick was the hospitality shown to her. It led her to believe that McCormick was the place to explore her relationship with God as well as her vocational call.
Rev. Hale defines hospitality as a space where she’s invited to hear different perspectives, bring her questions, and learn from the people around her. “I spent a lot of time in the LRWC [Language Resource Writing Center] helping international students,” she recalls. “There was one man from Korea who I helped with his papers. He helped me learn about Korea and rethink the assumptions and stereotypes I had about Korean people…we were encouraged to do that at McCormick.”
It’s an openness, a broadening of perspective that Rev. Hale encourages students and staff to have with the patients and families they serve. In the hospital’s setting, hospitality looks like “meeting people where they are,” she explains. “It’s not imposing our thoughts on them but inviting them to talk about their sources of hope, meaning and connection. These sources could be faith, religion, friendships, music, nature. We want to help them access the strength needed for the situation that is in front of them.”
This kind of learning process, notes Rev. Hale, calls for both action and reflection. “Chaplaincy is meaningful and rewarding work and it can also be emotionally hard work,” says Rev. Hale, who chairs the Specialized Ministries of the Federation of Christian Ministries. “That’s why community is a big part of what we do with our students and staff…it’s important to us to create a place where students and staff feel supported… that they have a place where they can talk about the emotions and questions that surface as they are supporting others. A lot of what we learn in the clinical pastoral education program is about ourselves and how we show up when we are helping others.”
The learning that comes from times of reflection becomes part of how students continue to enhance their spiritual care and chaplaincy skills, she points out. “We’re very much a part of the care team,” she says, “here to help in that moment of crisis while the medical staff is focusing on the physical part...people need emotional and spiritual strength along with their medical care…they need to know that they are not alone.”
Making sure future McCormick students experience this same sense of hospitality is the reason Rev. Hale provides financial support to the seminary. “McCormick was the cornerstone for what I’m doing now,” she says, “My life would be completely different without my McCormick experience…without meeting the people I met there. I want to continue to make that kind of opportunity available for years to come.”
Rev. Jeanne Hale
Alumni M.Div 2006