Steven Salido Fisher, MDiv ’21

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Steven Salido Fisher’s path to chaplaincy began while working for the Red Cross’s Disaster Services Unit in Alaska. As his team responded to destruction caused by fires, earthquakes, and winter storms, he often collaborated with chaplains and observed that when they were present at a disaster scene, the dynamic changed for the better. “Chaplains seemed to have the ability to give survivors the permission to be human again, whether that was letting them cry, or laugh, or just name the feelings they were experiencing,” he says, adding, “I wanted that skillset—to be able to help and connect with people going through pain.”  

In 2018, Fisher enrolled at HDS to pursue his master of divinity (MDiv) degree, noting that he chose HDS because it welcomes a broad definition of ministry and fosters a student community that has a diversity of both faith traditions and vocational pursuits. For Fisher, taking part in the HDS Field Education Program, a requirement for MDiv candidates, was a meaningful part of exploring his call to ministry. In addition to working in hospital field placements, he developed his own field education program, called “Gathering Historias,” an audio-illustration project that amplified the voices of Latin Americans and their experiences with nature. “From a Latino, Latina, Latinx perspective, our stories don’t get told very often,” he shares. “This is a key aspect of ministry—having an angle of advocacy and justice in the work that we do, ensuring that people’s stories are told, and becoming a conduit for those stories.”  This practice of listening closely and giving weight to people’s stories remains an important part of Fisher’s work today. 

Fisher is currently a hospital chaplain resident at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He works primarily with patients and families in the cardiac ICU, a medical surgical floor, and pediatric floors, helping them to make sense of their illness, whether that means drawing upon a traditional religious system or other sources of meaning they have in their lives. He also provides spiritual support to hospital staff. When connecting with patients, Fisher takes note of the details that help define them—from their favorite music to the foods they like cooking for their family—and conveys those characteristics in their medical chart. “Once those humanizing details go into a patient’s chart, they remind us that they are more than a diagnosis; they are someone who is loved and part of someone’s family,” he says. Fisher acknowledges that his work is often incredibly challenging and imbued with deep sorrow. At the same time, he is learning to find balance amid the range of human experience he witnesses: “To hold all of that—the good, the difficult, the painful—and to learn when to let go is essential.” HDS was foundational, Fisher affirms, in helping him develop this deeply empathetic approach to his work. 

—by Sarah Rubin