In this episode, we talk with Luke Lorentzen and Mati Engel about their intimate documentary, 'A Still, Small Voice'. The film features Mati as a hospital chaplain during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The conversation delves into the emotional impact of chaplaincy, the challenges of burnout, and the importance of human connection in end-of-life care. Luke and Mati explore themes of witnessing, trauma, and the struggle to maintain presence and empathy during a healthcare disaster.
This podcast is produced by Larj Media.
Transcript:
Sarah: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Sarah Kavanagh, and this is Peaceful Exit. Every episode, we explore death, dying, and grief through stories by authors familiar with the topic. Writers are our translators. They take what is inexpressible, impossible to explain, and they translate it into words on a page. We're doing something different with this episode.
Sarah: We usually talk with authors about death, dying, and grief. And my guests today are Luke Lawrenton and Matti Engel. They're going to discuss their documentary, A Still, Small Voice. In the film Luke created, Mati and others dive into the experiences of chaplains during the COVID 19 pandemic. They cover the intense emotional labor of chaplaincy, the impact of burnout, and the human connection in end of life care.
Sarah: What is remarkable about this film is that because of [00:01:00] COVID 19, All the characters are wearing masks and you perceive their emotions through their eyes and their body language. It's amazing. Would you mind both sharing just how you came to this project in, in your thinking about death and whether this project and interacting with these patients has changed that for you?
Mati: I actually remember that, um, I did a mushroom ceremony. You COVID began. I was trying to figure out my next steps after graduate school, and while I was, you know, on this psychedelic experience, I felt summoned. Like the movement wasn't away from death, but rather towards it. And it's interesting because like, when I think about like now, like what's happening in the world, like, I do feel like there's a movement away versus towards that, like it's coming up again, almost.
Mati: Um, but in that [00:02:00] moment, like my body, my, uh, my sensory experience, my heart, I don't know. I mean, this is a question for what's happening on psychedelic mushrooms, but I was like, let's go towards that's, that's where we need to go. It felt like the biggest thing that was happening in the world. Like, it was just like, I couldn't even imagine that more world events would happen.
Mati: That would be potentially more important, unraveling, I don't know, morally engaging. But this seemed like the best thing to do with my being. And I couldn't explain it, and so I just listened. It's like the closest thing that I could say I've have felt to like a calling. I mean, it sounds like I'm a hippie woo woo.
Mati: I'm sorry. It just felt like a calling that kind of we maybe both had in different ways that brought us to the same place, which is, I mean, another level or dimension of just chance, [00:03:00] let's say. And I think in terms the second question you asked is almost like more difficult to answer. I think When you're a chaplain, you're going through so many different encounters, especially full time, especially as a resident, especially during COVID.
Mati: Like how much of the encounters do you retain, like both in a memory wise and then, um, like physically, like your body, I think stores memory as well, even if like mentally it's harder to access. And so when I think about, you know, if I saw, let's say six to 12 or six to 11 patients a day, how much of that do I actually recall?
Mati: It's, It's hard to say, but I wanted to get as much information sensorily in my body about how people interface with like the end of life or the last scene, if you will. And I think almost some of it was from a creative or artistic perspective of like, maybe even like philosophical, like this is [00:04:00] the, the creative act.
Mati: The last scene, how much agency do you have? Like, what do people think about? Like how much bandwidth is there actually to like engage with it? Like as like something that. Um, can be acted on that. I'd be curious, Luke, what you, how you would come around on this.
Luke: I do feel there was a calling of sorts or some pull towards this subject matter that I think I'm, I'm still trying to figure out it fully.
Luke: I, what Makti said of like, this is what was happening in the world at this time. really resonates with me and being a filmmaker and looking for my next film and wanting to make something that mattered in this moment where it was so hard to figure out what was happening. I had just come off a film before it that [00:05:00] dealt with death in a really different way.
Luke: It was about a family run ambulance service in Mexico City. And it was like a car chase thriller. It was like very high adrenaline interacting with patients in tiny ways. Um, but feeling these tragic moments in their life. And I think there was a part of me that was craving reflection. a space where the questions that couldn't be asked in that space could have a bit of time.
Luke: But I, I think even to this day, like, framing this film as a, as a sort of a, a story about death makes me really uncomfortable. I think there's a part of me that doesn't want to, admit that that's what I was sort of drawn to. And I think much easier ideas of human [00:06:00] connection, um, relationships, walking into the room and putting yourself into somebody else's shoes.
Luke: These were all sort of ways of thinking that I, as a filmmaker, really wanted to learn. And being with Mati and her cohort was just like a real, Masterclass for me in terms of those sort of trust building skills. But I think chaplaincy at its core, as I experienced, it was a way to understand some of these bigger human questions of how we relate to one another.
Luke: And the piece of the film being in these moments of, of loss, it, it's hard when that topic is talked about so generally. And I really wanted the film to. Be really specific about a few people and not try to make some sort of claim about how these processes are done [00:07:00] broadly. And that sort of elevated it out of a scary place into a human place of, okay, these are people I, I interacted with and met and learned from.
Sarah: It's beautifully represented in the film where everyone is wearing a mask and I'm thinking about that scene where you're passing around aromatherapy and iced tea and those small human kindnesses, how you represent kindness and communication through the eyes and the body language and the tilt of the head.
Sarah: I mean, there's just some beautiful moments that are quiet. How did you navigate people's emotions so well because they were wearing masks when you can't really see what they're thinking or feeling?
Luke: Yeah, I would also say that some of the first patient visits, like it, it took a bit of ice breaking and a bit of, you know, trying it with in situations where the stakes felt lower and, you know, Making the time to really talk about what worked and what didn't and, and then getting to [00:08:00] a place where we were really solid and really collaborative and trusted one another.
Sarah: That makes so much sense because by the time you walked in to a patient's room, you're like a unit. We talk a lot about caregiver burnout. We saw what that looks like on a daily basis. Um, and you're being asked to hold so much as a chaplain. How did you come to it yourself in terms of the logistics? Like, were you working five days a week, 12 hour days?
Sarah: What was the COVID schedule? Because it was a six month residency, is that right? Twelve months. Oh, 12 months. Okay.
Mati: And I also like to joke that residency is quite literal. Like, there's an element of like, really taking residence in the hospital. You know, you have on call shifts, so oftentimes that means that you're required also to give your, um, your services like during weekends or evenings.
Mati: I mean, we would pass it around in terms [00:09:00] of like, the team and who would take up those on call shifts, but it wasn't a seamless nine to five necessarily. Um, but yeah, it was 12 months. Um, I was also coming straight away from doing eight months, um, at Northwestern. So I was in the trenches just at a different hospital and in New York city.
Mati: I mean, you're also interfacing with public transit, a busy city, navigating like a move. in the U. S., um, navigating changes, like, relationally, like, what your support system looks like, at least, uh, during, you know, that residency that was the case for me. So I would add those things as well. Um, but yeah, it was nine to five, and then some on call shifts as well.
Mati: So that's weekends, evenings.
Sarah: It feels like facing kind of an impossible task and an impossible medical system. Yeah. [00:10:00] What about you? You were there for a year.
Luke: I was probably in the hospital for like seven months and it completely wrecked me. Like, I am still In some ways, recovering from it, it was something I think I went into very openly.
Luke: I had, again, just come off this other project that was really heavy in a different way, and for some reason that one didn't have this effect on me, or maybe what I was feeling at the end of both was cumulative, but there's something about that. The work of a chaplain that is so, so heavy, just on a, on a basic level, being in a space where everybody around you has this sort of weight on their shoulders, the patients, all of the employees, it compounds over, over time.
Luke: And. That's sort of, [00:11:00] yeah, what the film is, is trying to show in, in a lot of ways, but it was definitely my first experience with sort of ending a project and knowing that there was no other thing to do other than try and slow down. It's the first time in my life where I would like felt a certain like cynicism or sort of, uh, doubt if I wanted to keep making films, which was like very disorienting for me.
Luke: And After some time to just move more slowly, that sort of like, love for, for storytelling has, has come back, but it's, it's been journey.
Sarah: What do you think the role of the witness is? You're a journalist, a documentary filmmaker.
Luke: I mean, I think this, this, what is witnessed is paid attention to, and what is paid attention [00:12:00] to becomes, becomes.
Luke: meaningful. I see my job more and more as paying attention to moments, details, people, stories that others aren't, and delivering it to the world in a way where you can't look away, where you are sort of called to pay attention through, through the film. It's very powerful stuff to, to, to sort of look someone in the eye and pay attention to them.
Luke: There's nothing like And I think when done with the right people in the right ways. Documentary filmmaking can sort of offer that, that light
Mati: mate, do you have anything to add? Well, it's interesting 'cause like when people ask me what, what does a chaplain do? Or what is chaplaincy? I often refer to like the role of a witness.
Mati: like almost stripping it of religion. And maybe that's like where [00:13:00] I came to with that profession. After the burnout that it seems we both experienced pretty intensely, I spent like two years in Germany studying collective witnessing as an intervention to both kind of like prevent trauma, or disrupt trauma from lodging into the body.
Mati: And attunement and witnessing and being with, maybe being with would be like the supplication for like witnessing. It's like to be in relation with another person or to have, Awareness on emotional experience and like processing of an event in your body allows for things to like kind of move as opposed to like lodge inside of you and be stored as memory that can't be processed.
Mati: And so therefore it remains inside of you as like residual information and maybe we might even call trauma frozen memory that can't be [00:14:00] processed. And so this, this act of witnessing, it's like, What is love? Love is the quality of attention or attunement. I think that's what we were being led to practice as chaplains.
Mati: Um, and what I've come to know is like the antidote or like a part of the antidote or like the, the, um, medicine bomb for preventing trauma. I I've come to just, I guess, accept that trauma is part of all of our lives and experiences, especially in the world that we live in now. And when you have so much information like overload and you're not able to like actually.
Mati: digest or be with the experience, um, it does a disservice. So I think what we're doing is just like really slowing down and, and allowing like the information to kind of just like download into the body and like move. Uh, so doing that in relationship is quite different than doing that by yourself meditating.[00:15:00]
Sarah: Let's talk about David for a minute, another character in the film, who isn't here for this conversation. Um, was the crux of that conflict that you didn't, neither one of you seemed to have gas in the tank? It's another example of what burnout looks like. Um, I had a, I had some sympathy for him too, which I know is a deliberate choice.
Sarah: Talk a little bit about that. piece of the film.
Luke: It was my job to really care about everybody and to get to know everybody and what they were experiencing. And I believe pretty deeply that if you can put yourself in somebody's shoes, it will make sense. And everyone has their reasons for why they feel the way they do and how they act.
Luke: It's not random. And so with David, it was just the process was sort of figuring out what. I needed as a filmmaker to have his part of the story in, in the film [00:16:00] and really give him credit for welcoming me into those sessions with his supervisor and pulling back the curtain into, you know, what was going on in his head as he was trying to do his job.
Luke: And it was really important to me that the film didn't have an antagonist or, uh, sort of a good side and a bad side, but that it was. multiple people struggling with the experience of doing an impossible job and hitting a point of not wanting to keep doing it.
Sarah: Yeah, it was beautifully done. The, the revolving empty chair after he just got up left.
Sarah: The silences in the film were very powerful.
Luke: It's so hard to make a hospital quiet. It's, you know, sound design for a film is so often And, uh, this [00:17:00] one, it was mostly taking sound out so that people's voices were heard. lifted and clear and that you weren't hearing just like humming air machines, but it is a quiet film in a way that I think pulls you into the screen.
Luke: It asks you to also be quiet and sort of pay attention.
Sarah: It absolutely does. it calls you to pay attention. So what would you two like to talk about in terms of, are there questions that you've been asked in screenings? Are there things that you really want to convey with this film?
Luke: My sort of gut reaction is that the film really speaks for itself and I think people bring their own life experiences to it and see it in sort of so many different ways and trying to, um, talk about it too much might take that from [00:18:00] people.
Luke: So I, I love talking about the process of how it was, was made and less so the sort of meaning that it has for, for me.
Sarah: Are there any scenes that you two loved that didn't make it in the film? I remember producing a film that had so many themes in it and so many threads, we kind of had to choose whether it'd be a climate film or whether it'd be a crossing difference film or were there choices you had to leave behind?
Luke: Yeah, I shot maybe five or six hundred hours of footage and the film's 90 minutes, so. It's so much. I think the immediate thing that comes to mind is I filmed with all of the residents in the cohort and believed for sort of until halfway through the edit that the film was going to tell everybody's story and sort of weave multiple experiences of the residency into one and it [00:19:00] became clear that that was Just too much for one film and that focusing it on Mati was, was the better sort of cleaner path.
Luke: And that was a really hard decision for me to let go of that material and to communicate with the others that had put a lot into the film. that this had changed to communicate with Motty, that she was now a much bigger part of this film than she believed at that moment. So that, that's the biggest thing that was hard to let go of.
Mati: You're nodding. Yeah, no, I love that question that you asked. I don't think that question has come up yet. So I'm really appreciating the generosity in it. There are three scenes in particular that came to mind when you asked that question. One is like, um, a young, young kid who was shot in the gut and then had to get a transplant and then an X [00:20:00] transplant and just like following them over like a long duration of time.
Mati: Cause that's kind of rare with chaplaincy. Like you rarely have a long term relationship. It's always Another is, um, we're actually a priest that had a, a patient call and I was on calls. I wasn't in the hospital, but I was supporting him like on the phone. And I thought that I was being called to support the patient.
Mati: And this is the tricky thing with this work. Sometimes you're actually called to support the priest. And the priest was like, um, scolded for walking into the room and kind of felt like, Just yeah, the patient had like their bed sheet like all over their body and like was like yelling and like kind of coming at the priest and I think when he called it was just like I could use like just some reinforcement or somebody else in the trenches and I think that that to me was like just like such an important moment of like Chaplains and priests are people.
Mati: We're not gods We're people and like we need to be humanized. Um, and if [00:21:00] there's anything that this film accomplishes is it's also that the shortcomings of being human.
Sarah: What's it like for you as a chaplain performing rituals from traditions that are not your own, because I think that baptism scene really stood out to me and the fact that you were willing to share that you were nervous about performing that.
Mati: What immediately comes up is just. What I now know, being with the film overseas, so being in Germany, I found that that scene has actually been a topic that has come up. more often than not. And almost like, uh, who gets to perform what ritual, which I really appreciate as a question and like, uh, an observation and maybe even something that gets triggered when watching the film.
Mati: Yeah. And the last, uh, Q and A that I did live, uh, it was in Berlin, actually, [00:22:00] this question came up again. And I think like, I've come to a different place with it in a way, like, like in the moment it felt like absolutely the right thing to do. And I do think it was a good thing to do. Um, and we, we did get like the patient's consent afterwards also.
Mati: So like there in terms of being in the film, uh, for that scene in particular. But in retrospect, I would say, you know, it's always, it's always nice to have somebody who could perform a ritual that comes with the richness and the history of that tradition. More specifically, obviously there's a depth of knowledge that's lost when you don't come from a certain tradition.
Mati: And one of the best moments I've had after Q and A was when a friend of mine, who's some relative was a Romanian priest. He said, actually the baptism, like we put a lot of stress on the, on the patient's name or like the baby's name. And that [00:23:00] was just something I didn't know. And that's because like, I didn't, I didn't come from that tradition.
Mati: Um, And so I think that there's a layer of reflection around like, actually, there is something like quite unique when you're able to offer, and I do think it's a gift to be able to offer a ritual and to be invited into ritual, crossing religious boundaries, like being invited into another religious world is a gift.
Mati: And there, I, I do think that there's something quite profound when you have a certain history or depth of knowledge within a religion. That said, humanism was quite important to me, like in terms of like practicing chaplaincy or practicing religious ritual and, and just, um, being with and also navigating, like, what does a person need?
Mati: So like, if I were to remove the orientation towards the. vertical plane towards, like, God and just be on the horizontal, like, what does a person need in the moment? I think it was the right thing to [00:24:00] do, but on the vertical axis, I don't know. It's, it's definitely a topic for conversation, like, theologically, and I think this is a very rich film for that, um, and that scene in particular, for sure.
Mati: But also chaplains are asked to do, sometimes, not always, multi faith work. So that sometimes looks like interventions that are rituals and crossing into other domains. I do think there was a part of me that was like, I mean, I come from like a ultra Orthodox Jewish background. Like I'd probably have grandparents rolling in their graves if they knew I did that.
Mati: Definitely something to reflect on over the years.
Sarah: Yeah, well, I love your intuition to say her name, Aurora, and you said it several times. So clearly that is part of the tradition, even if you learned it later, you know, it was, yeah, it was intuitive, you know,
Luke: I'll also just share that. It's easy to talk about what's ideal.
Luke: And chaplaincy is [00:25:00] so rarely able to offer what's ideal, but is making something out of a really impossible situation. And in that moment, Mati was available and somebody with a deeper history was not. And what I think was so beautiful about it is her ability to walk in and figure out
Sarah: I'm talking with Luke Lorenzen and Matti Engel.
Sarah: Their movie is A Still Small Voice, and it's available now on MUBI, MUBI. com, and also you can find it on Good Docs for private screenings. We will put a link in our show notes. The last question I ask all of my guests, I'd like to ask the both of you. What does a peaceful exit mean to you?
Mati: I was going to say like, you know, life well lived, choices well taken, agency, blah, blah, blah.
Mati: But I actually think grace, like being visited by grace. [00:26:00] I think there's a meeting in between of like yourself, your own actions, your own agency, but then also being met by grace. One could say the divine, I don't know. There are graceful exits, for sure.
Sarah: Thank you.
Luke: I would think of a peaceful exit as one full of love.
Luke: Okay, you know, ideally people who have, who have known and, and cared about me, witnessed my life, but it, it could be something much simpler than that. Somebody who, like Mati did for many people. is there and caring.
Sarah: Beautiful. Thank you both so much for your time. And I really appreciate it. It's a beautiful film.
Sarah: I wish it much, much success as it goes out into the world for a broader audience. And I think it's so [00:27:00] unique in how it represents a time. That some people want to forget, but I think we need to remember and we need to grieve COVID times. It's, uh, really important that we don't gloss it over. So thank you.
Luke: Thanks so much for your time and for your curiosity about our work and for helping us. Share it with people.
Sarah: Yeah.
Sarah: Thank you for listening to Peaceful Exit. I'm your host, Sarah Kavanagh. You can learn more about this podcast at peacefulexit. net. And you can find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at A Peaceful Exit. If you enjoyed this episode, please let us know. You can rate and review this show on Spotify and Apple podcasts.
Sarah: This episode was produced by the amazing team at Large Media. You can find them at larjmedia. com. The Peaceful Exit team includes [00:28:00] my producer, Katie Klein, and editor, Corinne Kiltau. Our sound engineer is Sean Simmons. Tina Ngo. is our senior producer, and Sid Gladu provides additional production and social media support.
Sarah: Special thanks to Ricardo Russell for the original music throughout this podcast. As always, thanks for listening. I'm Sarah Kavanagh, and this is Peaceful Exit.