Humanists Making a Difference: Humanist Chaplain & Celebrant Andrew Tripp
Humanists Making a Difference is our regular series highlighting humanist professionals and the communities they serve. Learn more about the work of celebrants, chaplains, invocators, and lay leaders–and find an endorsed humanist professional near you–at The Humanist Society.
What motivated you to become a celebrant? Why did you seek endorsement with The Humanist Society?
I am endorsed as a celebrant and a chaplain, and the vast bulk of my professional work is in chaplaincy, but I have rites of passage in my work.
In my work in health care chaplaincy, I saw a recurring trend that items of existential concern were of far more significance to my patients’ lives than items of an explicitly religious concern. That was true for my religious patients as well as my nonreligious patients. Lived experience, meaning, purpose, legacy, regret, hope all took up far more space in their minds than the desire for support with religiosity. My awareness as a clinician to their locations of both meaning and pain helped shape my clinical focus to broader understandings of spiritual and existential care and counsel that better met their needs.
The person-centered approach and custom plans of care meant meeting people far more where they are. Additionally, working in a part of the country with a significant and public history of clerical sexual abuse, there was a lot of religious-inspired trauma and anger in my patient population where a culturally and religiously literate knowledge is necessary but a humanist approach offers a better fitting therapeutic alliance.
Is there an event you officiated that stands out as rewarding and significant?
I officiated the memorial for a man in his mid thirties who essentially worked himself to death. At the memorial when we opened the mic to the gathered community, three people made Star Wars references while a fourth made a Star Trek reference. At the graveside the funeral home had a portable CD player with songs like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and ” The Rainbow Connection” played, but several of his friends gave a CD to the funeral director to play and an anime dance number played. A group of a dozen thirty-somethings gathered in a group hug and sobbed. The deceased had been part of their anime con community and that dance song had been the first song this group of friends saw the deceased dance to when he was the best man at one of their weddings. Their cultural and existential references weren’t found in organized religion, but being present and holding the space so they could ritually process their grief, memory, and hope was deeply meaningful and healing for them. They didn’t have to conform to a religious standard to honor their friend in an inauthentic way. I have a lot of professional pride in giving them that space and that opportunity.
Have there been challenging moments in doing this work?
I remember a time when I was working in a hospital, and a patient was wearing a Superman t-shirt, ball cap, and had a Superman ring on his finger. He was visibly middle-aged, so I asked him about his attire. He shared of his love of Superman since childhood, how he used to buy two copies of each Superman comic – one to read and one to put in a protective bag and save. He worked construction so he put his comics in a storage unit while traveling to help with the Hurricane Katrina cleanup efforts. While he was there, his daughter sold his comics to pay for her substance use problems. When he returned and saw what happened it broke up his relationship with his daughter. He became emotional saying how he wished she could get over her guilt and shame just so they could speak again. Forgiveness, relationship, estrangement, all deeply connected to the human experience were present in that encounter but only because I entered the room looking for his frame of reference instead of superimposing my own and missing out on the emotional and relational wounds he carried.
The majority of my chaplaincy career has been in hospice, and part of end-of-life care is seeing if we can make any last wishes come true. I had a patient who was living in a nursing home who was planning on selling her car to have enough money to pay for transport and private nursing aides to bring her to a casino for one last hurrah. I contacted the administration of that nursing home about her wish and instead of her having to pay for the transit and private aides, they scheduled an activity trip using their transport and their aides for their residents to go so she could have that hurrah with some of her friends. That nursing home was a kosher facility, and another patient I had in the building missed a specific restaurant in the town’s lasagna. If I kept the take-out container in the courtyard, he could have his lasagna without bringing it inside the building and violating kosher rules about meat and dairy. Our visits involved him eating the take out lasagna amidst his life history review and anticipatory grief of his decline.
How does your nonreligious worldview impact your work? How do people (coworkers/clients) respond (if at all) to you being a humanist?
Recognizing that our hopes, dreams, desires, relationships, and purpose are tied to our lived experiences helps me navigate these situations because I don’t need to conform to a religious or traditionally spiritual mindset. I can freely meet people where they are at, physically, emotionally, existentially, and respond in a way that shows they are observed and validated.
As a chaplain, I try to avoid self-disclosure about my background to patients. The relational dynamic isn’t about them understanding my worldviews but rather me witnessing theirs authentically. Some push for it and then I explain how I see the world in a very this-worldly lived experience sense and say I find belief to be unhelpful as a term or category. Plenty of people believe plenty of things, but more importantly, how are they living their lives, where and what are their strengths, and where and what are their hurts.
My hospice’s VP went to seminary for a semester only to realize he did not have a religious calling and fell out of touch with organized religion writ large. When we redesigned the initial spiritual assessment form and the subsequent spiritual visit form in our electronic medical record, he was all on board with my edits to remove the very clear Christian bias in the original questions and reconfigure the assessments to capture existential and relational concerns, and provide interventions that may include but not only be confined to the religious sphere for our chaplains. My fellow chaplains extend professional respect and courtesy just as I share it with them, so I can’t say I’ve experienced stigma as a result of my endorsement.