https://www.faspe-ethics.org/2022-journal-tara-deonauth/
As a hospital chaplain, my work also brings me into communion with people at the end of their lives, though lives affected by illness, not the US justice system. In many of these encounters, I facilitate a life review: reflecting on significant moments, exploring related emotions, and supporting meaning-making. Some of these life reviews uncover confessions of wrongdoings or hurtful actions, expressions of guilt, shame, or regret, and utter confusion about the meaning of these realities. Only through the practice of a ministry of presence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic attention, do I find that these conversations can deepen into spaces that allow such revisitation of past suffering (“past” insofar as it has happened, but by all other accounts, viscerally present in their emotional and spiritual toll). My patients—in ways not unlike death-row inmates—have difficulty accepting the possibility of compassion, often on account of a system that disallows expiation and forecloses forgiveness. As a result, I wonder what it might mean to encounter and treat them as capable and worthy of full redemption, or even as already fully redeemed—to witness attentively the being of another and experience the oneness that binds us.