Al-Hajji Imam Yusuf F. Hasan, BCC
By Petra Halbur
As a staff chaplain at the HealthCare Chaplaincy Network, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Winthrop University Hospital, Imam Yusuf Hasan encounters the joy and pain of life and death on a daily basis. For 23 years, he has specialized in pediatric spiritual care, ministering to young patients and their families “of all faiths and of no faith” – offering counsel and assistance, or simply “[walking] with people in places of fear.”
“It’s very frightening when you’re very sick,” he says, “so when [patients] pray with me I bring hope. I bring comfort and God’s presence.” Yet alongside this spiritual model of care, there are many secular, prosaic components to his work – it’s not all about faith or spirituality. Imam Hasan recalls, for example, a fourteen-year old Yemeni Muslim boy dying of cancer who wanted to pray with him, but most of all wanted to talk about basketball. Then, as his condition worsened, these light-hearted b-ball conversations took a back seat to the boy’s growing concern about his mother. He asked Imam Hasan to help her resolve her own crisis of faith, triggered by his fatal illness, so he could see her again one day in paradise. These are the issues at the heart of Imam Hasan’s chaplaincy – love and loss, sacred and secular, eternal life and last night’s game.
Imam Hasan has addressed concerns like these with patients from all across the spiritual spectrum, some of whom gain faith towards the end of their lives, and some of whom lose it. “The most common question I get is, ‘Why? Why me?’” He says, “I‘m truthful: we don’t know why. And I try to explain to them in theological language that we’re all going to face sickness . . . so, it’s not the illness that we actually fight, it’s how we deal with it, how we see it.”
Though his conversations with patients and their families aren’t always about religious matters, Imam Hasan has found that patients nearing the end of life often “allow people of faith in more easily than they will allow people involved in secular work . . . because, I think, we are the ones they trust at that particular point. My motivation is not to tell people what they should do but to help them find that which is innately built into them that will give them comfort.”
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To continue the conversation with Imam Yusuf Hasan, please join us on June 17th at the Social Work and Religious Diversity conference. Click here for information and registration.
