The Rev. Verlyn Hemmen remembers the days when a hospital chaplain wore a clerical collar, carried a Bible and visited the bedsides of Minnesotans who were overwhelmingly Catholic and Lutheran.
Today roughly a third of patients are something else, estimates Hemmen, who oversees spiritual care at Twin Cities Allina Hospitals. They're Muslim, Jewish, another faith or nothing at all.
His chaplain closet still holds Bibles and a minister's stole, but there's also a stack of Qur'ans, Muslim prayer rugs, a "singing bowl" for Buddhist meditation, Jewish menorahs, and a soft leather pouch holding tobacco, sage and an eagle feather for American Indian rituals. The hospital chapel below his office — which already has a sign pointing to Mecca — is being remodeled to embrace diverse spiritual practices.
"We've moved away from words like "religion" to "spirituality," said Hemmen. "Now we work more with the spirit or the soul. This population has called us to broaden our approach to people, to meet people where they are at."
More than 520,000 patients checked into Minnesota hospitals last year, carrying religious baggage that wasn't as neatly packed as it used to be. One in four Minnesotans now identify as either unaffiliated with any religion, or not-Christian, according to Pew Research Center, a trend that has dramatically changed the world of chaplains and the spiritual care at Minnesota's hospitals.
A couple of factors are at work. Minnesota's growing immigrant community, which made 50,000 interpreter requests at just two Twin Cities health care systems last year, have injected new religious traditions that require more than a recital of "Our Father." One in five Minnesotans, particularly those younger, have an undefined or no faith, according to Pew Research.
Minnesotans may be particularly open to meditation, guided imagery and other spiritual practices because the state is a national leader in recognizing the mind-body connection in medicine, chaplains say.
Chaplains today are trained to work in interfaith ways, looking for spiritual or emotional connections that go beyond religious creed. Hospitals can, and do, still contact on-call Catholic priests, Protestant ministers or Muslim imams for patients who request that. They're also working to diversify the face of chaplaincy to include Muslims, Jews even nonbelievers.