One of the final reflective practices at the end of a BSVM year is for Ministry Volunteers to sit with some prompting questions and write a Closing Reflection that they share in our farewell services. You’ll read the Closing Reflection from Julianne Esteves (BSVM ’22-’23) in this month’s blog post, which was also featured in our Fall 2023 Issue of The Companion. Julianne served in the Emergency Department at Richmond Community Hospital, and reflected on how her ministry site impacted her spiritual growth as she allowed the stories of patients she encountered to transform her heart in new and beautiful ways.

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Closing Reflection: Heart Broken Open
By Julianne Esteves, BSVM 2022-2023
A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross

Across my meaningful experiences as a student at the College of the Holy Cross and now as a volunteer with Bon Secours Volunteer Ministry, I have returned to one particular element of Ignatian spirituality: desire. My understanding of desire has transformed over the year as I have engaged with patients to live out the Sisters’ charism of compassion, healing, and liberation in my encounters with patients in the Emergency Department, staff at Richmond Community Hospital, my fellow community members, and the broader Church Hill community. I frame my reflection surrounding desire with an image I love from poet Mary Oliver. In the poem “Lead,” Oliver recounts the ways that her heart has been broken open. She writes, “I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open.” The image of a broken open heart, as opposed to just a broken heart struck me. Not a heart breaking apart but breaking open. In my experience, that openness of heart can lead to even more compassion, a greater ability to hold suffering and, hopefully, reach healing. This notion has pointed me to the truth that my most meaningful experiences this year — those that have “broken open” my heart — are what guide me to uncovering the desires most deeply planted within me.

In the Emergency Department (ED), I was welcomed so generously by a team of caring, hard-working, and fun staff. As someone who is often shy at the beginning of a new experience, I was surprised by how quickly my shell was cracked (open!). Staff started asking me questions about BSVM, my college or my family life; nurses invited me to group outings; techs explained procedures and the many ED protocols. My heart broke open when I was lovingly received as my authentic self by a group of people in a new environment. In return, I have tried to offer that same warmth to patients in the ED, a place where it is often hard for patients to feel seen. As a ministry volunteer, I have done that by checking in on a patient who’s been in the ED for hours, offering a blanket to a patient (and sometimes their visitor!) because ER rooms are notoriously cold, or wheeling a patient down to the pharmacy so they can grab their prescriptions.

My heart expanded when I held the hand of a woman who was nervous getting her finger sutured after jamming it (as the Nurse Practitioner did her work, the patient and I let the time pass by sharing stories about our beloved dogs.) My heart delighted when I colored with a 4-year-old boy as his mother was taken to get a CT scan. My heart swelled as I listened to individuals struggling with depression seek treatment. My heart even trembled a little when a nurse asked me to join her as she transported a patient to the MedSurg floor; she was scared of elevators, but little did she know I was also scared of riding the service elevators (they say misery loves company right?!).

In these moments, I don’t mean to suggest that I don’t ever feel heartbreak, feel sad, or wonder if pain and suffering will ever go away. At the end of Oliver’s poem, she hopes that the broken-open heart that I have been talking about will “never close again to the rest of the world.” This year, I have let go of the fears, preconceived notions, and biases I at times would carry as I approached situations out of my comfort zone – all things that may have kept my heart “closed.” Moving to the South, living with strangers (who are now lifelong friends), serving in a busy hospital after being in school for 19 years, and even entering the unpredictable, often chaotic Emergency Department each day are just some of those unknown, unfamiliar situations. Not letting my open heart “close” was true when the police officer in the ED surprised me by reaching out for my hand to hold when he was receiving his flu shot, or when I saw the human story behind those struggling with addiction in our community. Perhaps those elements of love, open presence, and reciprocal sharing with others have been what I and God have been desiring all along for me.

This year of accompanying those who walk through the doors of Richmond Community Hospital and growing my spiritual practices while living in community have been other significant ways my heart has been broken open to a deeper relationship with God. As I began the service year, I often felt pressure that I had to “get something” out of each prayer time. I felt that if I could follow a set agenda and tried really hard to listen to God’s voice (as if that is always clear or what we might expect it to sound like), I could “receive” something. And, even further, maybe receive something new and different each time.

But then, I noticed a shift. I tried to let go of my expectations going into prayer and found that even if I didn’t come away with a new major revelation, I still felt consoled, loved, or grateful. Thus, the moments that I thought I wasn’t “getting anything” from prayer, or that God was seemingly absent, God was actually very present to me. Through this year, I have come to appreciate having a God who just wants to be in my presence. Just as if I was watching TV on the couch with a friend. Or the many times I have sat with patients and listened to their story. Don’t get me wrong, being caught in the stillness with God is still not “easy,” but I have found it to be another avenue of my heart breaking open; open to God’s constant, abundant love in my life and helping me to uncover those deep desires within me. Just as God wants us to be people of “being” with others, God also wants to be with me.

Reflecting on the times my heart has been broken open, as a catalyst for pondering what I and others desire of myself, has influenced how I want to spend my time going forward and what kind of healthcare provider I want to be. This year of service and spiritual formation has inspired me to ponder how I can be a physician who brings preventative, holistic medicine to children who are born into systems that have disadvantaged and denied their families access to equitable healthcare. At the root of this, though, I desire to be a caregiver who deeply listens, advocates, and journeys with her patients to all forms of healing and liberation. I feel extremely grateful for all I have received this year that will serve me well as I serve others. And, I hope that, as Oliver ends her poem, my broken-open heart “will never [be] close[d] again to the rest of the world.”

“Lead” – by Mary Oliver
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.
(in New and Selected Poems: Volume Two, 2007)