Jenan Taylor
13 August 2024
The Reverend Stephen Delbridge showed God’s love to patients and families in spinal injury units, cancer clinics, intensive care rooms and other hospital wards across Melbourne for 22 years.
Healthcare chaplaincy offered him the chance to embody God’s presence as he sat with them in the moments of their greatest need.
“Whose work was I doing? God’s work. Whose hands and feet? God’s hands and feet. Where is God to be found? With the poor and the suffering,” Mr Delbridge said.
He was devastated at having to stop providing this care when the diocese ceased funding the hospital chaplaincy program at the end of 2023.
Mr Delbridge reflected on his work after a thanksgiving service was held in July to formally farewell him.
He said hospital chaplaincy was the emphasis of his ministry life.
It enabled him and other healthcare chaplains to help the suffering and the poor know that God cared for them, Mr Delbridge said.
Read more: We are ‘with’ as God is with us: Serving at St Vincent’s
He remembers first becoming involved in ministry at Cabrini during his curacy at St George’s Malvern, and becoming captivated by the chance to sit with people who were in difficult spaces.
“I’ve had some significant losses and struggles within my own family, and sitting with people in hard places just really motivated me,” Mr Delbridge said.
“I was parish priest for five years and enjoyed it, but organisation of the parish ministry never captured my sense of what my ministry was. Whereas when I did hospital ministry, I felt fully alive. I felt really engaged, and just wanted to do more of it.”
A passionate storyteller, Mr Delbridge’s tales of those he spent time with tumbled from him.
There were the distressed patients and families with whom he shared heartfelt conversations, every encounter uniquely important, he said.
“It was a privilege to be allowed into that space to sit with them in those circumstances, whether that was in a cancer ward, or intensive care with someone who had a bleed on the brain.
“It might be a young person, or an old person, it didn’t matter.”
There were the half dozen or so weddings he performed while in hospital – each one both beautiful and distressing because someone was dying, Mr Delbridge said.
A highlight was how the medical staff he and chaplaincy colleagues worked alongside saw them as honorary staff members for their caring efforts.
Read more: Chaplain’s honour bittersweet, as future uncertain
Yet Mr Delbridge struggled to find language for one of the most powerful experiences of his time as a hospital chaplain, the pandemic.
COVID upended everything, he said.
“Many people died alone, and it was beyond dreadful. There are very good reasons to have conversations about it, but it is actually very hard to do so,” Mr Delbridge said. “We pray to God that we don’t go back into that place again.”
The Reverend Dawn Treloar described Mr Delbridge’s ministry as touching the lives of innumerable people.
“People who have been facing the death of loved ones, people adjusting to new ways of living and understanding their lives, people who are struggling to see any light in their current situation,” she said.
“Stephen has gently walked into their lives, journeyed with them for a time and shown them God’s love by being present with them.”
Read more: Thanksgiving service for hospital chaplains as wind down begins
Mr Delbridge hoped to see hospital chaplaincy valued because it showed that people’s spirit was valued and cared for.
Hospital chaplaincy was not always about their faith, but rather about their spirit, he said.
This spirit or sense of self needed to be cared for so patients could get better faster, and in a better way.
“There is scientific and medical evidence that when people feel cared for spiritually, they have better medical outcomes,” Mr Delbridge said
“When people are lonely, lost, abandoned, or have no sense of being cared for, they can have worse outcomes even if they get the best medical care in the world. If it doesn’t come with human care, the care of the human spirit, then that’s not holistic. Holistic care cares for the person, not just medically, but spiritually.”
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