When Rev’d Dorothy Moore Brooks left her selection conference for ordained ministry in 1996, she stood on a railway platform and saw the news of the Dunblane tragedy on a billboard.
In that moment, she says, something crystallised.
“I thought, if God is calling me to be ordained, I have to be willing to go to difficult places. Places of tragedy and sorrow. Places where it feels like hope has left the building.”
Three decades later, that calling continues to shape her ministry as Lead Chaplain and Head of Spiritual Care at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH).
Ordained in the Diocese of London in 1998, Dorothy joined GOSH in 2002 after discovering healthcare chaplaincy through placements in hospice and hospital ministry.
“The moment I walked into Great Ormond Street, I felt this is a place where that vocation could find a voice,” she says.
Spiritual care in everyday moments
Today, she leads a diverse chaplaincy team serving children, families and more than 6,000 members of staff. While many people associate chaplaincy with religious services, Dorothy says spiritual care begins with something much simpler.
“We come with empty hands,” she explains. “We begin by asking, ‘Who are you? What matters to you? Because who you are and what matters to you matters to us.’”
Sometimes that care includes prayer, baptisms or Holy Communion. Just as often, it means sitting quietly with a grieving parent, reading a story to a child, playing Uno or Mario Karts, or supporting staff after an especially difficult shift.
“You have to be willing to inhabit the ordinary spaces,” she says. “When the highs and lows happen, people know us and trust us.”
For Dorothy, this ministry reflects the Church at its best.
“Chaplaincy isn’t an exclusive club. It’s for everybody.
“We have an amazing opportunity as the Church to be present in places where we encounter people who won’t be in our church buildings, but who are open to engaging with the big questions of life.”
Finding hope through children
It is the children, however, who continue to shape her own faith.
“The children we work with here are perhaps the most inspiring human beings I’ve ever met.”
She remembers one little girl who spent more than a year waiting for a heart transplant. Every time Dorothy asked what she wanted prayer for, the answer was simple: “To go home.”
Eventually that day came. Dressed as a Disney princess, the little girl sang a farewell song to staff before running joyfully towards the lift.
“She knew there was a better day coming,” Dorothy says. “That story gives me incredible hope.”
The Rev’d Dorothy Moore Brooks in St Christopher’s Chapel at Great Ormond Street Hospital
Holding hope without easy answers
Hope, she insists, is never about offering easy answers.
“The most meaningful work often happens when we sit with someone and show solidarity through silence,” she says. “We have to be careful not to present a God who chooses one child to have cancer over another. We represent a God of loving compassion.”
Years spent alongside seriously ill children and their families have deepened rather than diminished her faith.
“I have come to see that although God can seem to be silent, he is never absent.”
She often returns to Psalm 139, with its assurance that every child is “fearfully and wonderfully made” and that wherever we go, God is already there.
“There are days when my prayer is simply, ‘Lord, is this as good as it gets?’ But I believe in a good and faithful God who is present with us, perhaps most keenly when we suffer.”
Children, she says, have become some of her greatest teachers.
“They teach me to be really honest with God. They unclutter my prayer life. I don’t need clever words. I can simply pray, ‘Dear God, this isn’t fair,’ because that’s exactly what the child has just said.”
Looking back on more than two decades at Great Ormond Street, Dorothy says she has met royalty and world leaders, but those are not the encounters she treasures most.
“The children have shown me more of God, and more of what it is to be a person of trusting faith, than anyone else in my life,” she says.
“That has been the greatest privilege of my ministry.”
