Prepare for the Life You’re Meant to Live With Chaplain John Fox

- How do you know when to walk away from the wrong path? - Start to prepare. Like these are your passions, do something. Like if you wanna write, join a writing group, get yourself ready for when that step comes. You're not gonna be able to make the step because you have no preparation for it. So I would say if you have some other passion, do it as well, like seriously, so that you're preparing yourself to be able to do it as what you do. - I love that. - Sometimes the life we're living isn't the life we're supposed to live, but sometimes the life we're living is preparing us for the life we're meant to live. The question is, will you be prepared when the opportunity to pivot strikes? John Fox was. He spent 25 years in high finance, climbing the corporate ladder and collecting all the traditional markers of success, but beneath lived a quiet ache, a pool towards something more meaningful. So he started doing what he thought was preparation for the next thing, even though he didn't know what the next thing was. Through his church, he started doing community service. And then the right time came. He left finance to become a chaplain. He wasn't fleeing his old life. He was stepping into a new one and he was prepared. As a chaplain, he felt called to work with those who need him in a hospital, a hospice, a homeless shelter, and a jail. And talking to John reminds me that our lives are so much bigger than the thing we're doing right now. This is a bit of optimism. John, thank you so much for coming in. This is, you were one of those magical human beings who I've described as the Joy of Serendipity. I was at brunch with a friend sitting at the bar of a restaurant and sitting in catty corner to us having brunch was you, having your brunch, thinking that it was going to be a nice, peaceful time, but for the fact you were thrust into conversation with the two of us. Honestly, you were so inspiring and so such a delight to get to meet. I wanted to share your story and your philosophies with the world, which is why you're here today. So thank you for coming in. You went from high finance, even from a finance career, and you are now a chaplain. That is not the normal career path for, I would imagine, either most finance people or most chaplains. First of all, what took you to finance? Let's start there. Sure, I mean, neither of those is as unusual as you might think. Although a lot of my friends also thought, you know, you're the only person I ever did this, and I'm like, I'm not at all. The stranger thing in a lot of ways is that I did work for 25 years in finance. Because when I graduated from college, I decided to go to grad school in English, but I had a math background. And I didn't want to go straight to grad school because I thought I was going to be an academia for the rest of my life. And I wanted to live in New York. So I got a job at an investment bank in New York because that's what was in New York was things like that. And I didn't even know what an investment bank was, but they didn't really care about that. Like I read a couple of books because they're like, we'll teach you everything you need to know. They didn't really want you to have studied finance beforehand. They just wanted you to be capable of the work in whatever ways that they saw that. I did that job for a couple of years. I applied to grad school. I actually then spent most of the next year in Paris between the job and the going to grad school because I also just wanted to do some more stuff before I went back to school. I like the intellectual challenge of the work. I do like math, even though I'm not doing anything like that anymore. And it's also just when you have a job where you're being rewarded for showing competence and mastery and something, then that's also rewarding in its own way. I mean, it was a little bit of an accident, but it's not an accident that I really regret or didn't enjoy. Did you ever imagine that you would end up in the clergy? Was that ever like as a young boy or even as a young man, like one day, one day, you know, that's where I want to go? Or did you sort of fall into it? Yeah, no, it wasn't either. Like I was, I mean, I grew up in the South in the 1970s. And so I just grew up in a world in which everyone went to church. And I didn't even know any people who weren't like, you know, Protestant Christians until I was in high school. I didn't, like even Jewish and Catholic people, I didn't, I mean, I knew that there were people around us, but I didn't actually personally know anyone because of that's what the world was like at that time. Church was a very social thing at that time. So I didn't, I don't recall having a whole lot of religious or theological thoughts, but I was in a church and I liked it. I thought in my 20s about going to seminary because I was really interested in the Bible. I was really interested in, I mean, I just grew up in that environment, but I also thought I never wanted to be a pastor on the church staff. So I thought, what's the point? And I didn't, I didn't do it for another like 30 years. So 30 years go by. You have this successful career in finance. I mean, you were in it for 25 years, you said, right? Could you have stayed in finance? Like what was going on in your mind that you thought? I'm so curious of that transition. So when I was around 30, a whole bunch of things happened to me that caused me to think about what I was doing in life. My mom got a serious cancer diagnosis and passed away like four years later. I had a couple of relationships in my 20s that did not, that I had more hopes for than was realized this previous picture of my life that I'd had for like a while of, you know, getting a PhD in English and being a professor had not worked out. And I was working in something that I liked for the reasons I mentioned, but that didn't see-- I was like, is this the point of life that you just make money so you can save for retirement and retire and go on vacation and eat in restaurants? And so I guess I had what you could call a mid-life crisis, although I was like 30. I thought there has to be something else. And since I had grown up in that church context, and I actually was studying like religious literature, religious poetry, in grad school and had kind of hung on to a lot of those questions, I thought, well, I know what that is. Maybe I'll go back and see what that's like. So I didn't go to church a whole lot in my 20s. I mean, I didn't have some deconstructive crisis. I just didn't-- it just really wasn't a big part of my life. And so I went back to church, and then over the next sort of 20-- about 20 years, I became slowly and more quickly at times, more involved in that. And a big part of that was being involved in, like, interfaith community development work with poor people in the Bay Area and with asylum seekers. Those were the main things. And as I did that, I thought, OK, I think when I leave this work, I want to go and do that. So you were doing both simultaneously. But like volunteering, the community volunteering. But I thought, I think that that's what I see as a-- like, this is giving me a lot of sense of meaning. And I did a lot of things to have more sense of meaning and community usefulness or whatever. Every year, it was easy to say, well, I'm just going to make money for one more year. And then, suddenly, in January 2015, there was an internal reorganization in my company that was sort of sparked by some external things, no one saw it coming. Like, we had a lot of mergers and combinations and spinouts and was a constantly changing environment. And I had to reinvent myself multiple times. But this time, it didn't seem as good to me. And I felt like this was the sign that I had been waiting for. So I decided very quickly within two or three days of this reorganization and seeing what was going to happen. OK, this is the time. But I didn't know what I was going to do. Because I had been doing this volunteering stuff, but I wasn't really ready to not have a job. I didn't really want to retire. And so I spent several months talking to people. I talked to a career counselor. But I had also started this practice the summer before, as part of that religious life of something called praying the Hours, where you have a prayer practice, where you pray at specific times of the day. So some people, in some traditions, it's like three times a day in Islam. It's like five times a day. I think the Catholic priest or monastery tradition is like seven times a day. I did one that was four times a day. And I did use a lot of the structure of material. You could almost think of that. One person I didn't know called it priming the pump. You're reading scripture. You're reading devotional material. And then there's different practices. And the morning, often you're doing prayer for other people, like intercessory prayer. In the middle of the day, a process of asking questions, trying to, if you have something that's going on in your life, trying to be open to hearing something about that, what you should do. At the end of the day is often a kind of review of the day. Where did you feel most connected? Where did you feel most love? Where did you feel less connected and less love? And just sort of understand that. And also kind of forgive yourself. So let go of those things and go into the night and the new day in a new process. I want to say this again, because actually it's beautiful. So the morning, what was the morning? It's mostly praying for other people. So morning is for others, lunchtime. It's for discernment is a word we often use. But if something's going on in your life to create a space for openness, to kind of let go of things and create a space to hear something about what you're trying to do. Start for others, then discernment and openness. The afternoon was-- So that one was less some specific purpose? So that was wherever your heart found it. And then the evening was sort of a gratitude finding where there was love, finding where there wasn't love. So taking the day in the summary. So you're still at the bank. You're still working. You knew after two or three days, this wasn't it. You took the sign of the restructure to be like, OK, I got to figure this out. You didn't want to retire and just volunteer. You still wanted to do some sort of work. But you sort of-- you started this practice much more conscientiously. You're having your four time a day prayer sessions and take it from there. And then-- Well, so I started that in the summer before, and I didn't know why, but I had started a lot of practices to say, what does it feel like to do that? A lot of people have this structured prayer practice. A lot of traditions have it. Mine did not. So I was like, what is it going to be like? And I didn't know why. And the way I saw it was, and the reorganization, a lot of things that had happened in my company, we had scene coming. They had been planned. I had been part, sometimes, of the planning around an acquisition or something. But this time, no one saw it coming because no one-- it wasn't foreseeable what happened. It had to do with people changing their roles in a way that they didn't even know they were going to do. And so the way I saw it was, well, none of us knew that this was going to happen. But the way that I would phrase it is-- but God knew it was going to happen. And so put this prayer practice in my heart because it was like, you're going to need it. And so I had it. So the unexpected-- So the scene was the sign, because everything else we can prepare for, we are aware. But if something unexpected happens, God knew. So you should-- And God made me prepare it. God, you should pay attention to the fact that this is happening, is the sign, is the message. And how long were you working at the bank while now changing the way you saw the world, changing the way you saw your life? More than a year. But in the summer, after talking to all these people and doing these practices-- And preparing for change, figuring out what change was going on. Yeah, I was just thinking, should I change to another company in this industry? Should I change to another industry? Like, what kinds of things? And I was praying about that, and I wasn't hearing anything. And then I ran into, as I was also investigating these kind of community opportunities, the community development-- it's called community economic development sector in the Peace Corps in some countries in South America, or in Latin America, broadly. And so I did it. I applied. It was like a two-month process or so to apply, interview, and then they gave you a country. You don't get to choose your country. And I accepted it the next day. Like, there was no question if I got that opportunity. I went to Paraguay for-- I was there for about two and a half years. The Peace Corps is typically-- you can extend it if you have good reasons, but it's typically two years and three months. And during that time, I had a lot of opportunity because I was living in a rural village in a developing country. I had a lot of time. And I mean, I was working, but I had a lot of time. And I had a lot of time to think about what came next. And I also talked to some people. I had what's called a spiritual director at the time that I met with like once a month and helped me through some processes of making decisions and thinking about things. And that's also when I thought, well, I thought about going to seminary. And I was led into this by my life of faith and practice. And so I looked more into that. And I learned that half of people these days who go to seminary don't become religious professionals of any kind. Like I had not gone in my 20s because I thought, well, I don't want to be a pastor. But half of people nowadays go to a lot of seminaries so that that kind of process of religious formation can inform and guide their business career, their career as an artist. They don't-- I mean, I'm not even saying they don't become pastors. They don't become any kind of religious professional. So I thought, well, I'll do that. And that's the place where I'll figure out the next thing that comes next in the context of that formation and with people who are also going through that process. Yeah. You said when you were young, you went to church, because I already went to church. And it wasn't really religious. I mean, obviously it was-- For some people it wasn't. For some people, it was very social. For you, it was very social. And you like the people. There's common values, shared perspective on the world. And so there's that community aspect. And I guess some degree of predictability as well. So now you join the seminary. And then you went-- which state were you when you went to seminary? So I ended up in Pasadena because when I was going through that process, which the spiritual director helped me with another Ignatian process for making decisions, then I was like, oh, I lived in New York when I was in my 20s and I loved it. It was the goal of my whole childhood was to grow up and move to New York. But then I was like, after 25 years in California, I'm just two Californians. Like, I thought of these two seminaries, even though a lot of people would see them as kind of different as both large, urban, multigenominational seminaries that have underlying their religious formation have a big focus on social justice. And so to me, they seemed like very similar places. Although one is the kind of-- was the headline seminary of the kind of liberal mainland tradition for the 20th century and the other one is an evangelical seminary. And I want to be the evangelical one. And when one graduates seminary, is that like a graduate degree or you ordained like, what's the terminology when you graduate seminary? Well, it depends on your tradition. If in my tradition, ordination is something that's done by a church or a denomination. And a church within a denomination and seminary is an educational process. So you've got a degree. Yeah. In some traditions, seminary-- like Catholics, I think-- well, I've known a lot of people working as a chaplain in the last few years in different traditions. And in some traditions, seminary and ordination are more tied together, but not in mind. So many people, if they're not going to be pastors, they never do get ordained. And so you are not ordained? No, I am because to go through the process of chaplaincy formation and board certification, you have to be ordained or endorsed. But for most people, that's ordination because the whole idea of that process is you think that you're called to be a chaplain, which is great. But does anyone else think that? And so it's to say there's a community of people that knows you that you have lived in mutual discernment with for a time. And they say, we also believe this is what you're called to. I kind of love that. It's a challenge to what we tell our kids right now. You can be anything you want to be. And in this, it says, you can be anything you want to be. So long as others think that that's true too. I mean, I kind of like the checks and balance that goes along with that. That you think you have value to the world and the world agrees that you have value. Yeah. What is a chaplain for those who are-- So a chaplain is like a clergy person who works outside of a church. And so let's be clear, you're not a priest or a pastor. You were a chaplain at a hospital. And a hospital, I also do some hospice chaplaincy. I have been working for six years. All of this is part time in a homeless shelter. And also some in the LA County Men's Central Jail. OK, so hospital, hospice, homeless, and prison. You are a jail. Jail. You are a chaplain in all of these places. Is one of them sort of your main gig is-- I mean, I work more hours in the hospital. So I never intended to work in health care. But there's a process of clinical, pastoral education that you have to do as part of certification as a chaplain. And most people do it in a hospital. Hospitals have organized programs around it. Medicare pays for-- it's like a residency that you do. It's much less intense than a medical residency, but it's the same kind of model. Most people do it in a hospital. And so I applied to hospitals. I learned later you can do it in other ways and I probably should have. But I worked at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown LA in the West Lake area near downtown. And I fell in love with that hospital, with the staff there and their commitment to serving the downtown community. There's a lot of poor people that go to that hospital. There's a lot of homelessness. There's a lot of addiction and overdoses. There's a lot of kind of diseases of poverty, like diabetes that is not well managed. And just a lot of things that-- so I never expected to work in a hospital. And I don't think I would have stayed in a hospital if I'd worked at more of a kind of suburban middle class hospital because I do feel like middle class people need spiritual care, too, but just not for me. That's not what I think. That's not the community I think I'm called to be with. But working in that hospital, in a hospital-- I mean, hospice, it's all end of life, but in a hospital, that's a significant, like I'd say, a quarter to a third of the time. And people will often say to me, because I go in as a chaplain, I don't necessarily use that word, but they'll be like, oh, I'm not religious. But they'll talk, because I'm like, I'm just here to listen. And whatever you mean by spiritual, whatever gives you strength and hope and meaning, if there's anything that I can do to listen to that and be with you there, you're definitely not allowed to evangelize in a hospital. And I mean, I don't want to do that anyway, but you'd be fired. And people will-- then at the end of our time, sometimes people are talking to me for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, sometimes an hour. Then people will say, oh, can you pray for me? And I'm like, oh, but-- so how do you do that? What, like they said, they weren't religious. And they're like, oh, I'm not religious, but I definitely believe in God. And they-- because they-- and they'll say things like, religion doesn't come from God. It's something made up by people. Because so many people have been hurt by churches. And most people-- especially, this is LA. Most people grew up in a Christian, Catholic, or not Catholic context, the vast majority of people. And they still adhere to that context, but they no longer want to participate in that community. And they're like, I have my own relationship with God. And I personally don't think that is as enriching and fulfilling a way to live your relationship with God by yourself. I do think that for me, we need to be with each other in these things. We need to do them together. And we need to shape each other together in them. But I don't give advice in these contexts. So if that's what a person at this point in their life is telling me that they want support in, then that's what I'm going to do. What's so interesting is all the data shows that religion is in decline. People are less religious. But it's because the question is flawed. Are you religious? No. Do you believe in God? Yes. And to your point, which is people are defining religion as the organization, the church, the stuff. And that's not me. I'm not into that. And I'm not into that community for whatever reason. But I still have my-- I'm spiritual. I have my practice. I believe in God, whatever people are defining it. But to your point, which is perhaps part of the challenge in our modern day and this sort of increasing rates of loneliness is-- and you're putting it in its own experience, which is a belief in God should be a communal thing. It is more enriching as a communal thing. And people see-- it sounds like even just meeting you in hospital, sort of dare I say a chance encounter. They're learning-- they're learning the value of faith by sitting with you, asking you to pray for them, knowing that somebody is thinking about them and willing to pray for them. What a beautiful thought that to have the confidence and knowledge that somebody is praying for me. We're not even always 100% sure our friends like us. Let alone to believe that someone is praying for my well-being, that sense of care that I matter, that somebody's willing to take time for me. It's a small but very powerful thought. There's a little insight in there. Can you share a story, a specific story of someone you helped in any one of those places that you work early when you made this transition to become a chaplain that sitting with this person, you realized I made the right-- this is for me. This is where God wanted me. This is where I'm supposed to be. Yeah, that's actually a good way of asking the question. One thing I remember early on was a woman who was about 60 years old, who had lived in another state. Her two daughters had graduated from college and were beginning their adult lives. And she and her husband moved from this southern state to California to LA to continue their work. I mean, they both had sort of secular jobs, but they'd been very involved in a spiritual movement. And they came here because there was a branch of it here in LA and to start the next act of their lives. And right after she got here, she found out that she had a stage for cancer diagnosis and there was going to be no next act. And one thing I learned about in chaplaincy formation was this thing called counter-transference, which is basically the idea that the patient is-- or the client or whatever-- is creating things in you. It's kind of the opposite of the idea that the patient is projecting things onto you. It's that your care is being created by things the patient is invoking in you. And this has happened to me a number of times. But my mom-- also, she was 57 when she was diagnosed. And she passed away at 61. It brought a lot for me. Now, this was like 20 years ago with my mom. So I'm not saying that this was an open wound at the moment. But I realized there was a lot of things in being in that experience. And I was with her for about 15 minutes when someone came in to check her blood pressure and something else. And I just waited. And then she talked to me for more than an hour. And at the end, she said, wow, I didn't even think I needed you when you came in. Like, I guess I had more to get out than I thought. And it's interesting that a lot of times when women who are around that age or even younger are thinking about the end of their life, there's so many of their thoughts are about, what will my husband do? How will he survive? And a lot-- much more than their fear of their own death, another woman I saw that summer was younger. And she actually sent her husband out of the room. And he was actually really angry. But she said, he won't let me talk about what I want to talk about. He'll say, you're giving up if you're talking about the end of your life. And I'm not giving up. I am not giving up. But I need-- it might happen. And I need to talk about that with someone. And he won't let me talk about it. And it's very often when you ask, what is a chapel in doing if people have families in church and whatever, there's a lot of things that you will say to a person who's a stranger. For a lot of reasons, you don't have a relationship with them that we're-- they're trying to get things as well. You don't have to deal with being around a person after this who knows all these things about you. People have even explicitly told me that. I'm glad that I won't see you again. But after all the things I've told you-- So many thoughts. What was it about her that made you realize you're in the right place doing the right thing? You'd made the right choice. So it's what can a stranger do? That's what I didn't understand. I understood that I was drawn to exploring this path. But until I started doing it, I was like what-- and then I realized, oh, there's no one else she can tell this stuff to. There's no one else who will listen to it. And there's no one else who will understand it because everyone else in her life is working out their own issues with her. And her husband is mainly working out the loss of her for him. And that makes it difficult for him to be present for whatever's going on with her. And because she was a person who took care of other people, that's why she said at the end, I guess I had a lot to get out. I didn't even know that. Because everything she said for the first 15 minutes was about other people. And then she started to talk about herself. It's also interesting is there's a connection that the two of you had. I don't know if this is coincidental or if this is important. But she had a whole plan for what her life was going to be until that wasn't the plan. And you said you put in your path in part because you thought you're going to be an academic. That didn't work out. The relationships that you thought you were going to have, those didn't work out. You lost your mom, all of these expectations and plans of what you imagined the future was going to be for you. For whatever reason, none of it worked. Even at work, where all of the planning and meticulousness of what the future is going to look like in future planning. And in a heartbeat, it was all turned upside down that there's that connection as well, which is I thought this was my plan until it wasn't. I think part of the thing about being a chaplain maybe is that in my role of it, I'm not trying to fix anything for anyone. And a lot of times what people want to talk about is not fixable. And that's why their family sometimes doesn't want to listen to them because there are a lot of times your family and people close to you. And not just people close to you, but anyone you talk to practically, often when you tell them about the hard things in your life, they feel helpless. And they don't like that. And they want an impulse to fix it somehow. Even things that are obviously not fixable like death. This thought that it's so hard for people to open up about unfixable or unchangeable things. And it's very hard for people to hold space for it because it's the listener that feels powerless. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to help you. And I guess there's a guilt associated with it, which is you've come to me, you're opening up to me, you're sharing your darkest or deepest thoughts with me. And I don't know what to do. And that powerlessness or guilt damages the dynamic. Where do you, why do you not feel powerless? - One thing I realized during my 15 months of this residency, because it's a supervised process where you do 10 hours a week of group process and 30 hours a week of clinical time. And you're with other students and an educator who's certified to do this. And one thing I realized is more things about my personality that I already knew, but I didn't realize. And one thing that a lot of people in my context use as a personality system is called the Enneagram. And I am a five, which is not super common for chaplains. Most chaplains are two, which is like a helper. - And which one is five? - So five is called an observer or an investigator. And one thing, so the strength of that for chaplency is that you're just a person like me is just really interested in learning things. Learning things for my own sake and independence, but also just listening to people. And I also, to some extent, it'll probably sound weird, but I kind of don't really believe in the truth. Now, people don't like it because obviously I'm a committed Christian. So in some strong sense, I do believe in the truth in some very strong sense in a lot of ways. But I just very constitutionally in my personality, I think almost every important question in human life, there's no single correct answer to. There's like a-- - For example. - Like, what are valuable things to do in the world? What are valuable ways of being present with and caring for each other? Different people have different answers. It's kind of like Isaiah Berlin talked about the incommensurable goods. And so, meaning that there's no way we're gonna find some system of good and virtue that is universal to all people that there are good virtues, ways of life, ways of being present in the world, ways of caring for each other, ways of improving our community that are just so different from each other that they can't be put on the same scale. So, and this is where people often get into conflicts like, I mean, one example that I learned about when I was taking a class on Islam and we were reading about the Western idea during some of the, like that, certainly Afghanistan, but I think also other wars after September 11th that we're liberating the women in these societies from the patriarchal structure of the societies. And I was reading some of these like Islamic feminist authors which is, it's not, if feminist is almost the wrong word because we think of Western feminism because what they were basically saying is, okay, we agree with you that there are elements of our society that are patriarchal and we wanna talk among ourselves about how to be liberated from it, but we do not want you to do it for us by killing our men. And we don't want the liberation that you want. So, I think that, I mean, that example really struck me. I don't know a whole lot about that topic. I read some of this stuff, but what I mean is we sometimes look at other societies and we judge ways that they are recognized around value. - Yeah, this is an ethnocentric perspective. - And we're like Western individualism and materialism is the best way of reaching human flourishing. - Right. - And we can't conceive of a system that doesn't support individualism as leading to human flourishing. - But I wanna pull on that string that the, because if I look at your story where you knew even when you were in finance, like that there's, you said, like you worked, you made money. You liked it, not because you're doing any social good, you liked the people you work with. This is what you said at the beginning, right? Give or take. - Yeah. - And at some point you realize this can't be, this can't be what life is. Just like work make money, work make money. Like this, there's gotta be more to it than this. And you, we're doing this volunteer work which you found more fulfillment. And now you've completely committed your life to what I would argue is a life of service. And though you've served a little and made a lot of money before, you make a little bit of money and you serve a lot now. And I guess the first question I have is, are you more fulfilled now than you were 25 years in finance? - Yes. So I have thought about that for in some different ways. One way that's interesting to me is I met a person a few years ago that we didn't know each other at all but we were having very personal conversations once a week. And we got to know each other well over the course of a couple of years. And he said to me in one of the early conversations learning about what I was doing, he said, "Wow, you really like to help people." And I was like, "Wow, I just would not describe it that way." Like I don't think I'm doing this work because I really want to be a person who helps people. And, or because I want to help you, like I just didn't, that's not a description I would apply to myself. I did this work because I felt like this is the kind of world that I wanted to live in and this is the kind of community that I wanted to live in and because it made me feel more whole. And I didn't even, I just didn't think about it as self-sacrificing service. And I still don't. - I don't think service has to be self-sacrificing. And that's part of, I think that's part of the problem that people think they, like in order to serve, you have to sort of suffer or give something up. But only you can answer this, which is, the bankers you work with, the finance people you work with, the analysts you work with, you know, were they happy? Were they, like this is what life is supposed to be? Or could you see that there was a, that this had a time frame, that they too would come to some sort of realization that there's got to be more to life than this? - Some people were, especially some of the most senior people, were got a huge amount of reward from being extremely successful in a very competitive field and being extremely well rewarded for that. - Were they happy? - So, I mean, that's, you know, I, I don't know because those people, I knew them in a sense well and spent time with them. But I wasn't really part of their, like, social world or whatever, and very few of them lived in California. They were mostly in New York or London. But most people I knew, if you ask them, what makes life meaningful, their work and the reward of their work, would be a way of, like other things were the most meaningful things in their life. Very often, family was the most meaningful thing, but family in the context of a community a lot of the time. But also people had hobbies, and that were very meaningful to them. But you have to pay your rent, was the view that a lot of people honestly had. And it was a really eye-opening thing to me when I was in this business career, and I read this book by that management guy, Peter Drucker. And he, and he said, and it was called like the effective CEO or something. And he said, there's no personality or formula for being an effective CEO. He said, I've met people where this is the most important thing in their life. I've met people where this is how they pay their money, and their hobby is the most important thing in their life, and they would never say that they get meaning from this job, and they're highly effective, because they have oriented their organization around meeting their objectives. And one of their objectives is to have a lot of money and financial security, and they know that's why they're doing it. And for me, that wasn't enough, but it was a significant part of it, was not being financially, because I didn't grow up in like a really well-off family, and I grew up in a family with like a decent amount of anxiety around money, like we weren't super poor, but, and I didn't want to live that. I just didn't want that, which is part of the reason that I worked in an industry that paid a lot of money, was because I didn't want to live with economic anxiety. - Financial goal setting is a series of finite games where once you reach one goal, you know, the person who makes a million wants three, the person who makes three wants five, the person who makes 10 wants 20, the person who makes 50, that's how it goes. It's a series of moving goal posts. - Yes, that's why I had to get kicked out. - And what I know from my work is that's not an infinite game, that's a series of moving goal posts, which always feels like it's never enough, it always feels like you never fulfilled, you never satisfied, and for those who rationalize that, you know, got to pay the rent, like, holy cow, how much is your rent? But more importantly, what happens when you have to leave work at some point? If your whole identity and reason for being is the goal setting, the paying the rent, whatever you want to say it, I love the game, dot, dot, dot, but when that is removed, then what? And I've seen so many people, and usually the more senior, the more successful, the more I see this, obviously, which is they're either very bored because they're good at it. Like, it was exciting at the beginning, but they have fear of change, they don't know what they're gonna do next, or their whole identity is wrapped into this thing. And when they have to leave, literally, identity crisis is the thing. I know this one CEO who, big CEO, big company, blah, blah, blah, and he left, and he was talking to a friend, this is a big fancy party that he would go to every year, and he wasn't invited, and he says to his friend, "Did you get your invitation?" And the guy goes, "Yeah, of course." He goes, "I didn't get mine, I wonder if I got lost." It never occurred to him that they were never, ever inviting him to the party. They were inviting the CEO of this company to the party, and they quote unquote his invitation went to his replacement, you know? The next guy, it didn't occur to him that he's not invited. And to see him go through this crazy identity crisis, 'cause he'd so intertwined his entire reason for being with this job that he had. So people who truly, like family, community, hobbies, anything other than something that truly is infinite, I could do this forever, and it would never run out, and I'm not moving the goalposts. James Carst, the guy who wrote finite infinite games, a theologian, he was a philosopher and theologian, and in the mid-1980s to find these two types of games, finite games and infinite games. Finite games, baseball, football, known players, fixed rules, agreed upon objectives, infinite games, known and unknown players, changeable rules, and the objective is to perpetuate the game. I got to meet him before he died, and I asked him very simply to like, how did you come up with that? I mean, that's a truth. You know, that happens every hundred years that somebody comes up with a truth rather than just a theory. Just notice, there's a picture of me and him right there. And he said, when his kids would play ping pong, there was, which is a finite game, there's a winner, there's a loser. There was always fighting at some point, and there's always accusations of cheating at some point. When they would draw or play with Lego, kids would come and go, they would go for hours, it was always quiet. People would join, they would leave, they would come back again, 'cause there was no goal or end. And he realized that we were so obsessed with finite games, we were so obsessed with zero sum, we're so obsessed with winners and losers. You know, that we've completely forgotten the joy of play. And I would argue that hobbies, family, community, service are play, which is there's no end state. And there are finite goals within, obviously, obviously. But the satisfaction comes from the, I mean, you go in, you come out, you talk to some people, you miss other people, but there's an intense joy that comes from helping stay in the game, being in the game. You know, the term community keeps coming up as we talk and the feeling seen. And I go back to what you said before, which I found the thing that I'm taking away from this conversation with you, which I find overwhelmingly powerful, which is that somebody sees me, not likes me, not knows me, right? But somebody sees me and wants to pray for me. 'Cause these aren't your friends, these aren't your family, 'cause we usually think that you have to fall in love with someone or have a deep lifelong relationship before I matter enough that somebody would care about me and pray for me. But that somebody just sees me for who I am as a human being and is willing to take time out of their very busy day to pray for me, I find overwhelmingly powerful. And turns on its head, the notion of what it means to feel seen, which is deeply understood, which is not really what it is. Yeah, I mean, just people feel seen when they sit with you and though you can't solve their problems and this is what I'm learning, which is your ability to let go and accept that I can't fix, I can't change. And the reason you have no frustration and the reason you have no guilt is because you, it seems, from the time we're talking, it seems that what you have defined your role as my goal is to make this person feel like they matter and feel seen. So this is making me think, so I agree with what you said. And this is making me think, one thing that I struggled with, I was working in community development in the Peace Corps. And I had been working in community development although not necessarily using that name before, in with poor people in the Bay Area and like I said, also asylum seekers but that was a little bit different. And I learned later and I took a couple of classes on community organizing and that there's kind of a war in between community organizing people and community development people. Community organizing people say to people who are working in community development. - What's the difference? - So one is you go into a community and you listen to people to learn what's going on and you walk alongside them in participation. - And that's organizing or development. - Development. - And so the idea is, and also a kind of Christian community development idea is that you go and be present with people and you live in their community and you learn their stories and they learn your story because you're actually there. You're not just there as an outsider or as a helper or fixer. And then you in the kind of Christian version, you take those two stories and the third story of like our Christian life, our scripture story and you weave these together and set off with the people on a shared journey in a different direction because you've all changed each other. And community organizing is trying to address structural problems and the organized people so that they can address problems that can't be addressed in that way. And what they say can be, this is a kind of cartoon, but they can say community development people are just putting an endless series of band-aids on wounds that will be inflicted over and over again. And community development people can say to community organizing people, you're just another form of colonizing conquest where you come in and save people and fix their problems that's so disempowering. Like a big part of the international community, like international community development called in that name in like the mid 20th century was, you go to individual communities and you're like, you either say one of two stories. You all lack of resources. You lack knowledge, money, technology, whatever it is. We have them, we'll give them to you. Well, that's certainly not how Europe developed. That's not how the US developed where some aliens came and gave them all the things they were lacking. And it's so disempowering to people to be like, you're just lack and we're going to give it to you. The other story is your helpless victims of systems of injustice and we will work together with you to remove the injustice. Well, that's also extremely disempowering to people. And I think for me, I accept you're not necessarily going to change systematic injustice by being present with people, but I just can't do that other thing. I just I just want to be with people even if it's not as effective. And my professor of community organizing in seminary said, that's a false choice. Like you don't have to accept these false choices. And like we don't have to decide the only one. Like organizing or development is not a binary system. You have to pick one. Yeah, that we need to do both and we need people who do both. Or neither. Well, this was a class on community organizing. So it wasn't about people who don't do anything. What have you learned about yourself since you became a chaplain? I guess I would say, some are just the way I think about helping people with their spiritual and faith questions, but that's kind of almost secondary. Well, it is because it's made me think about the way I understand those questions in my own life and meaning. But I also think one thing that I learned in the residency was that my observer, investigator type, one of the strengths of that is that it makes you genuinely interested in people. It makes people feel like you listen to them and you're not judgmental. And often does make people feel that because of that, you are able to be present and support them and help them, even without trying. But the downside of that personality type is that I'm not very in touch with my feelings. And I realized that more and more going through that process and being with people who are in a different situation, it caused me to look back at my life and realize, I don't know what I feel about something when it's happening. It's often hours or even the next day. And like I would leave a movie for instance and people would be, what did you think about such in such or what did you think of that movie? And just to be social, I would often just make something up or like I go to an art museum and someone would say, what was your favorite part of it? I would have no idea. I mean, one time I went to the African American Museum in Expo Park with a friend who I've known for decades. And then afterwards we were having dinner with her partner a few hours later and I talked about how it had been a really powerful experience because of these things. My friend got really mad and said, you didn't tell me that. And I was like, 'cause I didn't know it until just now. Like I didn't know what I was feeling when I was there. And so the problem is I have the same feelings as other people and they influence how I care for people but I don't know what they are. And so one thing that helped me, and at one of my closest friends in that process who I'm still friends with, she's a hospital chaplain, she's very different from me, and she said, it's all head when we're talking about these things with you. 'Cause this is a group formation process, it can be brutal. It can be extremely brutal part of it because people are like taking you apart and telling you what they see and you have to write these narratives of like patient contact. And then people are like, why did you do that? And I noticed they said that and you didn't pay any attention to it but then you brought up this other topic, things like that that you're like. And she said, it's all head. And I want to know what, where's your heart in this? Where's your, what are you feeling about this? And she said, because I can't trust someone unless I know their heart. And I was like, oh, that's so interesting for me because one of the frustrations, we are good friends but one of the frustrations with her was that she couldn't explain why for things. And so for me, and I was like, see, I can't trust people. You can feel anything and I can't trust people until I know why. Why is that an okay thing to feel? Why is that the right thing to feel? You wanted more head and she wanted more heart. She's bleeding hearted so on her sleeve at all moments, inability to explain. You can understand but maybe you don't feel in the moment. The problem is, the biggest problem is that I do feel but I don't recognize it and it's influencing what I do. And so one of the things that I tried to do, I'm never going to fix this problem in the sense that I don't believe you can fundamentally change your personality. And but I do think you can live healthily or less healthily into the personality that you have. That's what you can do. And one of the things I learned is to pay more attention to my body because when I feel my chest tightening, when I feel things like that happen, when I feel my breathing changing, then I'm like, something is happening and it's gonna affect the way I am with this person and I better slow down and make some attempt to understand what's happening. Oh, this is so magical, I'm accused of the same as you, living too much in my head and I remember a friend of mine asked me, how do you feel? I said, well, I'm tired and I'm a little frustrated and she goes, no, I asked you how you feel. Not if you got enough sleep, you know? Like how do you feel, feel fine? That's not a feeling, fine is not a feeling. And I realized how inarticulate I was to explain a feeling. And so then she asked me things, tell me how you feel below the neck. And I was like, what? Like I'm supposed to tell you a word that captures whatever, you know, and she said, no, I want you to explain your physiology, you know? And I was like, and you use these terms that I've never used before. Like I can feel my breath shortening. I can feel my heart pounding. I can, and like what am I supposed to do with those things? How do I process those things? And I think for someone who's learning to understand their feelings, not to try and label the feeling per se, that comes a little more, that takes a little more skill and comes a little later. But to recognize one's physiology in the moment and just say, I don't know what this is, I don't know label it, but I better pay attention. This is a thing. It's such a good lesson. You did say, however, that you have people that you work with, clients, patients, that there are some that you just walk away and cry. Mm-hmm. That's immediate. Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it is. But I mean, there's times when we encounter such a fundamental human tragedy that, we just feel overwhelmed, you know, by, like the person who's in their 20s who said, I feel like my life is over almost before it began. The person can't see where they can go. Is your job to help them see that it's not over? Well, it's definitely not in the hospital, because one of the things that people have to realize trying to help people in the hospital is you, you have to be very careful about intervening because you're gonna leave that person. You can't go into a room and intervene in someone's life and walk out of their life forever. If you are in a hospice situation or to some extent in the jail and certainly in the homeless shelter, you are committing to be there with them on their journey. And then once you get to know them, you can risk pushing them, but you cannot do that in a hospital. And that's the great danger. Like this woman that I was just talking about, one day she came back and she just seen someone who had had a baby and had was giving it up. And so after the baby was born and they took it to the, nursery, whatever, the nurse said, you need to see this baby. And she's like, I don't wanna see it, I'm giving it up. I don't wanna see it. And the nurse is like, you have to. You will regret this for the rest of your life if you don't see it. And this friend of mine, who's the chaplain was there and she was telling me, she didn't say that because I mean, by this time we've been doing this for like a year and she was like not going to do something like that, but it tore her up to the idea that a person would not want to see that baby. Which she was telling me the story. And there was a huge amount of emotion in this story about what this woman was doing and what she thought about it. But she also had to kind of try to help the nurse to not force things on this patient. And that, and I don't blame the nurse. But this is what you mean about truth. Like there's no right or wrong here, though we all think. Oh, that's true. You know, though many people have already formed in their head, there is a right and a wrong. That's true. The reality is that we're really, really, really honest with ourselves is there's no truth here. In that one, yes, that I think is me thinking that, that's what I thought. So I finally said to my friend because it was very intense for her. And this was our job to process with each other. So that's why I was listening to the story. But I was like, why is this so important to you? Like what's going on? And she looked at me and she said, because I'm a mom. And I knew her like story of those things. And I was like, Oh, see this is where the one of the ways in which we're so different from each other. You know, because I just don't get that immediate emotional thing in the same way. It comes from our own story. Yes, she was also certain that this woman, this young woman would regret for the rest of her life. I was not certain of that, but I also wasn't there. Yeah. So, so fascinating. I just have a couple more questions. I could talk to you forever. Can you tell me another story of a person you've been with helped serve, listen to, that really captures the joy of the service, the joy of this life that you've chosen? Well, I mean, one, but I already told you is the story of that woman that in my first few months in the hospital, where I did feel like because of the combination of circumstances of our overlap and stories. But you, but you work with people where there's no overlap. And I mean, more often there's less, there's no overlap, but you still get satisfaction and belief that this is the right calling. Yeah, I mean, one thing I'll say is because I'm in so many contexts where people have had abuse and like family, violent family trauma. So I know that. I know like child abuse from personal experience. And it wasn't as severe as what a lot of people. And, you know, I mean, but just once I said to a friend of mine when I was talking about other people sharing their stories with me, because they're often very difficult stories to share. And I was like, well, I mean, I, it took me a long time to acknowledge and say that I was abused as a child. But you know, at least I wasn't like sexually abused, which is the story that people are sharing with me. And she said, that's the nicest thing you ever said about that person. And I was like, wow, like, and you know, like, like, the stories that we tell about these are our own stories. I'm not really talking about other people in the situation in my family. I'm talking about what I remember and experienced and was shaped by. And this was a long time ago. And so I've had a lot of time and training and some amount of therapy and stuff. It's not, again, an open wound right now. But I do think I'm in a position to listen to people's stories. Almost everyone I know has experienced trauma. Like I said, family also being really, really hurt by a church, and I think understanding what people are talking about there is really kind of essential to having people believe that you're really hearing them. Now, could a person who didn't experience, is there any people who don't have any trauma in their life? I don't know, you know? So probably not. I mean, I don't know. So, but like dealing with that in your own way, so what I would say is people have shared with me these, I mean, it's a little bit difficult for me to tell the detailed story because the people that have shared these stories with me are people that it was longer, in most cases. And, you know, so the details, how do you listen to the stories without filtering it through your own? 'Cause we said before, one of the advantages you have is you can listen to someone's story without wanting to fix them or feel the guilt or feel powerless. You know, all of these things that make us bad listeners, which is we are involved in the story with the person we care about or love. Like, we are a character in that story, which makes being the ability to simply hold space. You know, I'll give a silly example. You know, my girlfriend is telling me how she feels about the relationship and I'm getting angry. 'Cause she's saying things that are triggering me and making me feel guilty or making me feel like I'm a bad boy or a friend, she's just telling me how she feels about the relationship. It's all I have to do is hold space for her, but I cannot disconnect myself from the fact that I'm involved in her experience and she's not accusing me of anything, but I'm feeling guilty, right? So that makes it very difficult for me to be a good listener in that situation. I wish we all could learn to do what you do, to have somebody in our life who maybe we do know, who can again, just make us feel seen, let go of the guilt, let go of the need to intervene. Do you know who prays for you? - Yeah, that's an interesting thing. I mean, people do pray for me. I have sometimes asked people to pray for me, but I grew up in a context where we didn't do so much of that. And so I don't really ask people to pray for me that often. - Why not? - Because it's just not, it's one of those things like we grow up in a certain context around practices and we can change them. Like Mother Teresa once said, "I don't pray for results, I pray for faithfulness." And I feel like that is, faithfulness is a result anyway. So it's like maybe a distinction that doesn't exist, but a lot of people pray for good outcomes, and it's just never been my practice. So I don't have to ask people, but people have prayed for me recently. Some people have said, "I'm gonna pray for you for this." Like I was applying for a job and I wanted to get it and they said, "I'm gonna pray for you to get that job." And I'm like, "Oh good, 'cause I can't pray to get the job, "but you can pray for me." - 'Cause it's an outcome. Last couple of questions. What would you say to someone who says religion is outdated? - I mean, no one's ever said that to me. I mean, one of the things in this work that you realize is that a lot of people talk about religion and say I'm not religious, but that almost nobody doesn't have some kind of spirituality that is connected with something like immaterial, transcended, storytelling. People can't survive without some connection to something larger than themselves. Even if they think that they're living for themselves, that's what I would say. - So maybe the terminology is outdated, but the fundamentals are alive and well. - Yeah, and also, I mean, even though, you know, traditional religion is shrinking in the United States, I'm not sure that religion that kind of faith is shrinking in the United States, and certainly even the traditional religions like Christianity is still growing in the world. And I don't just mean numbers. I mean, percentage-wise, in the South, in the global South. - As someone who changed their life in your 30s, how do you know when to walk away from the wrong path? - Well, the easiest thing is when I left grad school because I'm like, this isn't gonna work. I just can't do it. Leaving the business world 25 years later was more like preparing myself. Like this, I have said this to friends who are talking about having other passions and things and just continuing to work for a while more for more money. Start to prepare. Like if you wanna write, join the writing group, like do it, get yourself ready for when that step comes. Because if you don't, you're not gonna be able to make it. So I would say if you have some other passion, do it as well. Like real, like seriously, so that you're preparing yourself to be able to do it as what you do. - And that's interesting because you, when that change happened at work that was unexpected, you made the decision to leave two or three days later, but you didn't actually leave until a year later. You spent a year preparing for leaving. - Well, I also spent 10 years doing community work and developing my own relationship with my church and things like that. - I love that, that to use our experiences, even though unhappy ones is and to understand preparation before you make a leap. Like put the parachute on before you jump. Pack the parachute yourself. Learn how to pack a parachute. Do you have any life hacks, little tricks that you've that help you in your work and your life? - One thing I've realized recently, but I don't know if this is something that people can do is, I also have days where I wake up and I don't really have a lot of will to live. And the way that I survive that is that, well, it's not really life, it's just, I tell myself this will end and it does, but that's not true for everybody. Some people have like severe long-term depression and it won't end. But I think sometimes people give in to shorter-term things and you can't necessarily work your way out of those things so much as have the hope of knowing that it just can't last forever. I guess the main thing, but I'm just a person who likes to learn and so I feel like you can learn anything if you work on it every single day. - John, thank you so much. I literally could talk to you for hours. - Yeah, the same. I've learned this idea and I think that you can genuinely see someone who you don't know just because you have interest in them in curiosity and you want them to feel heard and be seen and the power of, as I've said it already, multiple times, to give someone the peace of mind or confidence that somebody is thinking about me. And I realize how simple it is to do for people and we don't have to do it for strangers. We can do it for our friends. We're also busy and so distracted and the whole conversation is social media and addiction and like going down rabbit holes and blah, blah, blah. And it's all true. And then just every now and then, I've done this, I'm guilty of this where I don't call a friend because I'm like, "I need to talk to them. I always talk to them for an hour. I don't have an hour. Okay, I'll do it tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow." I just go by and I've realized that this very small notion of someone is saying a prayer for me, not devoting their life to me, but somebody saying a prayer for me, is as simple as like when I'm getting in the car and I think about this person and I can pull out my phone and text them and just say, I just want you to know I'm thinking about you. Which is somewhat equivalent to, I said a prayer for you, you know, and something I've also done, which is I'm literally in the car. I'm arriving where I'm going in five minutes. I can see it and I have five minutes. I've got nothing, I'm listening to a song. And I think of a friend I haven't talked in a while. I literally dial the phone and I say, hey, I'm in the car, I'm literally gonna pull up to where I need to be in five minutes. But I just wanted to call and say, I have been talking forever and just hear your voice for four minutes before I have to park. And I have a four minute conversation and it's the best. And I'm realizing the value of these very small gestures that have outsized impact, you know, in your work, it's, I'll say a prayer for you, I will pray for you. And for the rest of us, you know, to do that, just to let somebody know that they exist and that they matter, it's like the greatest gift we can give someone. Yeah, thanks so much. Yeah, I'm so grateful. - Thank you. So grateful. A bit of optimism is a production of the optimism company. Lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford and Devon Johnson. Subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts and if you want even more cool stuff, visit SimonCene.com. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself, take care of each other.