The Tentmaker

"And when Paul found they were tentmakers of the same trade as himself, he lodged with them, and they worked together."

-- the Acts of the Apostles 18:3

by Victor Judge

The gnawing originated in the emergency room.

She and the physician tried to resuscitate the 15-year-old boy lying on the gurney, but the energy in their hands could not contradict the paramedics' words, "dead on arrival." The absence of blood and lacerations on his body summoned the cliché, "He looks as if he is sleeping," but such speculation was silenced by the irrefutable diagnosis of broken neck, severed spinal cord, and massive brain hemorrhage. He had jumped from a moving wagon during a hayride with the church youth group, and the witnesses reported that he had landed on his head.

Thwarted in their efforts to revive the teen-ager, the doctor and the emergency room nurse, Kaye Nickell, entered the waiting room to inform the parents that their son had died from the effects of the fall. As the horrific news was conveyed to the boy's relatives and peers, the youth minister assumed it was incumbent upon him to render an interpretation of the tragedy. Detaching himself from the circle of mourners, he approached the parents and uttered a statement that elevated the most hackneyed expression to a level of originality. He confidently told the mother and father, "It is God's will that this boy died."

Although Nickell was not introduced formally to the minister, she acknowledges him as the catalyst behind her decision to enter the Divinity School whenever she remembers how his shallow, conventional rhetoric inspired a paralytic anger and sadness within her. "When I overheard the youth minister tell the parents that God had willed the boy's death, I became mad from my toenails to the roots of my hair, but simultaneously, I was saddened by the parents' acceptance of such an illogical reason," explained Nickell, who exercised restraint and did not challenge the minister's pronouncement. "I had no right to speak because I was not a member of that community, but that remark began to gnaw on me and ultimately set me on the path to disciplined theological studies."

As Nickell recounts this experience from her vocation as a nurse, she leans forward, folds her hands, and casts her eyes downward to the scuffed tiled floor. By her posture, one infers that the gnawing never ceased.

Bedside Lessons in Chaos and Grace

After she was graduated in 1980 from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Nickell worked for 20 years as an emergency room nurse at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Saint Thomas Hospital. Her experiential wisdom of the vulnerability of human nature allows her to speak about suffering with the authority of a Greek tragedian. "As you blow your breath into a person's lungs until the respirator can be connected, or when you put your hands into a person's chest cavity and squeeze the heart until the surgeon arrives, you realize how fragile human nature is," she said. "In the emergency room, you meet the unexpected chaos within the world; you encounter individuals who have made willful, horrible choices for themselves; you witness the suffering inflicted upon innocent people because of another person's selfish actions; you are introduced to the properties of evil, face-to-face, but you also meet grace and a life force that is incredibly strong."

While wearing nurse's scrubs, Nickell gained early experience in the pastoral duties that a divinity school education eventually would prepare her to assume. "Each critical moment in the emergency room involves touching someone whose mortal nature is threatened, so you pray silently that God will help you to be the best nurse you can be for each patient because in the next waking moment, you may find yourself commending the patient's soul into the hands of God," she said. But Nickell also perceived her role as nurse to include serving as a presence for a patient's family, a presence in the context of the Greek noun, theraps, an attendant.

"Medical care also involves attending to the fears and questions of others who are affected by a patient's suffering, and when you can't provide conclusive answers, you strive to be a calm presence in a room that is cold and sterile where people believe they are enveloped in hopelessness, and you pray that you can mediate the grace of God. There are times, however, when the simple gesture of touch communicates as effectively as words."

An Insatiable Hunger

In the fall of 1998, Nickell declared herself a "seeker" and decided to begin a serious inquiry regarding the questions that had developed from the bedside lessons in chaos and grace. Five years before she walked through the John Frederick Oberlin Divinity Quadrangle, she had been the primary provider for her husband, Mark, a financial planner and assets manager, and their children, Susanna, 12, and Thomas, 9.

"Mark resigned from the Big 8 accounting firms to establish his own company, and we agreed that when he felt secure in private practice, I would consider whether or not I would apply to a master's program in nursing. I was turning 40; I had been promoted to a management level position in the ER, but I did not enjoy the administrative responsibilities as much as I did bedside care."

Nickell, however, was deriving significant enjoyment from her work in religious education at First Presbyterian Church (USA) in Franklin, Tenn. An ordained elder, Nickell taught an adult Sunday school class and offered courses on Wednesday evenings. "I had always been interested in reading church history and studying the Scriptures, and I privately thought of myself as a tentmaker -- someone who serves a congregation but whose primary income depends upon another career."

Nickell arrived at VDS with the conviction that a relationship with God is foundational for life's decisions and with an appreciation of the Bible as a narrative about people struggling to maintain that relationship. These two tenets of her religious sensibility may be traced to her Baptist upbringing in the small West Tennessee town of Fowlkes, near Dyersburg. "As I reminisce about the church of my youth, I realize what an ecumenical, inclusive foundation was laid by my parents and the ministers," said Nickell. "And from that foundation emerged a respect for questioning and trying to discern the part we played in the narrative of salvation."

The Floodgate Opens

To help her family adapt to her new role as graduate student, Nickell elected to enroll at VDS on a part-time basis. "I returned to the classroom at the time my son was entering the first grade, and like a first-grader, I had to be initiated into the role. I began by taking only two courses because I knew if I were to become fluent in the language of theology, I would have to immerse myself in the classes, and I could accomplish that immersion by taking only two classes. I read every assignment -- diligently -- and I read the marginal comments on my papers graded by Professors Paul DeHart and Dale Johnson with the same seriousness as I studied a textbook because their critiques always revealed a method or strategy I had not considered for approaching a question."

The confidence she gained from her academic success was slightly eclipsed, however, by her uncertainty about the particular ministry she should pursue. "Whenever I was asked if I were seeking ordination, I was reluctant to say I felt a calling to pastoral ministry because that direction seemed so different from my only vocational reference as a nurse. I imagined myself as a chaplain for a hospital or a hospice; I thought about integrating pastoral care with public health because I couldn't conceive of dismissing the past 20 years of hard work."

But in an unexpected moment, Nickell received the encouragement she needed for envisioning herself standing in the pulpit. As one of the Divinity School's Presbyterian students, she was invited to participate in a mock pastoral interview at Southminster Presbyterian Church. The church's staff felt slightly inexperienced in interviewing candidates because their pastor had served a long, successful tenure and there had not been a reason to recruit candidates until his retirement. By rehearsing with students, the staff hoped to develop criteria for interviewing prospective candidates.

Sitting before the panel, Nickell was asked questions ranging from visiting the sick to praying for a pet's welfare: If a neighborhood resident who did not belong to a faith community were hospitalized, would she go visit the individual in the hospital? Would she use formal prayers during the liturgy or ask the congregants seated in the sanctuary to offer their concerns and petitions? Would she be comfortable visiting members of the church who had been admitted to a nursing home? How would she respond to a child who asked her to pray for his sick dog?

As Nickell was leaving the interview, a member of the panel remarked, "From your answers, you sound as if you are not afraid to touch people."

Hearing that comment was comparable to opening the floodgate. "I wept privately when the interviewer made that statement because she unknowingly articulated the connection between pastoral ministry and nursing."

Pitching Her Tent

In February 2000, the student in ministry ascended the pulpit of Central Presbyterian Church (USA) in Culleoka, Tenn., and preached to the 13 members who comprise the congregation.

"They always sit in the same place, and they know who is not in attendance for the service," said Nickell. "When they nod their heads and smile, I know they're engaged in the sermon, and by the inquisitive expressions on their faces I know I've confused them or prompted them to consider another meaning of the Scriptures. Yet as I look at them from the pulpit, I am reminded of a communion of saints who come together to make a confession -- not out of a sense of obligation -- but with joy because they believe their confession matters."

As Nickell, 44, awaits the day she will be called to ordination, she thinks of how her views of God have changed since childhood. She remembers the Baptist church in Fowlkes where as a 5-year-old girl she sat and stared at an idyllic mural of the Jordan River painted on the wall behind the baptistery. "I imagined that if I could enter that scene and look into those stylized clouds, I could see God, but I also had a rather sacrilegious thought," she laughs. "I also imagined how soaked the choir would be if the glass panel of the baptistery broke."