Movement Chaplaincy Visioning Projects
Windows into students' and staff members' spiritual care work
In Winter Semester 2022, a cohort of eight McGill students and two MORSL staff members underwent Faith Matters' Daring Compassion: Movement Chaplaincy Training Course. What is a chaplain? A spiritual care provider who supports individuals in a secular setting. What is movement chaplaincy? Spiritual care workers supporting people doing all kinds of social and environmental justice work. This field has historical roots in the Civil Rights Movement, in which Black churches provided activists with resting places to recover from the emotional tolls of their work. Today, movement chaplains come from all backgrounds and belief systems and meet people with diverse faith identities, social causes, and needs where they are at. In the course, participants learned a variety of skills to help them relieve the exhaustion, discouragement, and emotional distress that often comes with justice work. This included creating relevant and inspiring rituals, leading spiritually centering activities, diffusing tension, and witnessing others' experiences to help heal emotional pain. Toward the end of the course, they created final "visioning" projects, in which they presented a conceptualization of the movement chaplaincy work they imagined doing in their own lives. Below are links to several visioning projects the McGill cohort and staff created.
