Dresden. Perhaps Christoph Behren’s office is the smallest in town. He can sit there at a minimum distance from a single visitor. But the desk is neither his real field of activity, nor do people come to him. The priest goes to them. His church is the sick and the handicapped, the suffering and the dying. In these weeks and months more than ever.
As a hospital chaplain, Pastor Behrens has been at hospital beds for five years, previously in Leipzig, now for a year in Dresden. Patients call him, relatives ask for his support, and he follows doctors and nurses into the hospital room. Whom he encourages there, in staying or in going, has reasons for showing himself to be deeply vulnerable to a strange man.
“Most of all people of the Catholic faith call me very specifically and ask, for example, for the anointing of the sick,” says Behrens. Since the Catholic Church is underrepresented in this country, there are not too many. But like the four pastors who stand by the patients, their families and the clinical staff of the Dresden University Hospital, he lives the ecumenical movement.
Just as every sick person is the same in front of a doctor, Christoph Behrens also provides his support to every needy person. It’s not always about Christian ceremonies. Often he lives his job as a priest in togetherness with someone who feels alone without him.
Disinfected Bible and protective gear
Corona and loneliness have merged into one unit over the past year. People experience loneliness in the prescribed contact block, spend days and weeks of illness without visits from their relatives or die alone in the intensive care units. Pastor Behrens experiences almost every day how elementary his role as mediator between this and the hereafter can be.
Because everything that goes on beyond a frosted-glass door to the intensive care unit is beyond the view and influence of any worried relative. As before, visits to hospitals are strictly prohibited to protect against corona. It is true that doctors, nurses and therapists inform family members about the course of the disease. But in the weeks of their hard work in the fight for thousands of corona patients there was no time for in-depth transmissions.
“The relatives quickly understood that I can do what they are not allowed to do: look after their relatives and find out how they feel,” says Christoph Behrens. To be able to send someone who cares for the salvation of the father, mother, husband or wife who is struggling with death, remained an important consolation for those left behind on this side.
When the clinic management asked him at the beginning of August last year whether he was ready to visit corona patients in the intensive care unit, the priest had no doubts. Of course he’ll take on this task. He was not without fear. But the initial fear of infection soon took a back seat to a routine hygiene procedure. Instead of putting the stole over his shoulders, Christoph Behrens puts on a smock, slips a mask and visor over his face and pulls two pairs of rubber gloves on top of each other: “In my protective gear, I am outwardly indistinguishable from doctors and nurses.”
Pastor Christoph Behrens in the room of silence at the Dresden University Hospital. Church services and devotions can only take place here on a small scale to protect against Corona. © Sven Ellger
Facing dying people who seem already removed from this worldly life, and from whom Christoph Behrens separate many layers of plastic, is also a borderline experience for him. Soothing, relieving conversations are no longer possible when the coma keeps the body calm. “I came to a woman before she was going to be sedated and ventilated. She cried so much with fear.”
But the priest went to her not to administer sacraments other than what is literally called the last unction. “The anointing of the sick should be strengthening and encouragement,” says Behrens. He has his Bible with him, which he has to thoroughly disinfect, and a tiny metal jar. “I ordered a lot of these on the Internet,” he says. He needs them for the oil with which he ritually anoints the sick man’s forehead and hands. “The can is not allowed to leave the sickroom, I have to throw it away.”
Manage death instead of healing and nurturing
The pastor does not only give compassion to the sick and dying. “I think of all the many clinic employees who actually heal people and nurse them back to health, but who could only manage death for weeks.” They too called the priest when they saw that a patient needed assistance – regardless of faith.
The most important thing about the corona virus in Dresden:
Most of all, people are concerned with things that they allegedly did wrong in their lives. And the fear of punishment for not believing. But Pastor Behrens can comfort her: “Believing in God is not an obligation.” He does not see lost souls in people who do not believe in God, he says, “I am in awe of every plan of life. God thought something.”
Pastor Behrens was in the corona wards of the university clinic several times a day when the number of cases exploded. He is now called once, twice, or three times a week. But it is not only there for corona patients.
Most recently, he spoke to parents whose severely disabled child died. “You loved it so dearly and I have no answer either as to why something like this has to happen.” But the priest can still fulfill the wish of baptism in such cases, and it is not uncommon for him to be asked to attend the funeral service.
Anyone looking for Christoph Behren’s name on the Internet will find an explanation for the question of how a person can endure so much grief. The pastor paints. “Light from above” is the title of his homepage. It guides and strengthens him. But the earth man has to help a little.
Since he has been a hospital chaplain, painting and drawing have become a compensation for contact with the borderline situations of human life, he says. Despite all the difficulty: “I have a good feeling because my work makes sense.”
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