The drive to Westmead is quiet at that hour. There’s a particular stillness to a Sunday morning that I’ve come to treasure — not the laziness of a sleep-in, but something more deliberate. I rise with a kind of quiet purpose. I shower, dress. There is some anxiety as the day can be mentally and emotionally challenging. But I gather myself and drive towards the hospital campus, rising ahead of me like a small city unto itself, lit up even before the sun has properly decided to show up. I still manage to get lost in the new building — it is massive.
I’ve been doing this for a little while now, volunteering with the Chaplaincy Department, serving as an Extraordinary Minister of Communion under the Diocese of Parramatta and NSW Health’s Western Sydney Local Health District. It is, without question, one of the most humbling things I have ever done with my time.
Signing In
We meet in the Chaplain’s office — or if you arrive early, there is a quiet reflection in the chapel before the day begins, a small gathering of volunteers preparing together. Then we pick up our security passes and the roster of patients who have asked for a visit.
But the moment I step beyond those automatic doors and into the wards, something shifts inside me. The antiseptic smell, the quiet hum of machines, the soft-soled footsteps of nurses on linoleum — it all signals a kind of crossing over. This is not the ordinary world.
I collect my list and I begin.
The Faces I Carry
The first room I enter belongs to an elderly Italian woman — Maria, perhaps 80-something, her white hair fanned out on the pillow like a halo slightly askew. Her English is limited, but when she sees the small pyx I carry, her eyes fill immediately. She reaches for my hand with both of hers. We don’t need many words. I offer the host gently, and she closes her eyes. Her lips move in what I assume is an old prayer from her childhood — perhaps from a village church I’ll never visit, in a language she’s carried across the ocean for 60 years.
I think: what a long way she has come, and how alone she must feel right now.
When I leave her room, I take a breath.
The next room holds a man in his 40s, let’s call him David — hooked up to more monitors than I can count. He’s been here three weeks. His wife sits beside him, red-eyed, a paper coffee cup long since cold in her hand. He is conscious, lucid even, and we talk for a bit. He’s a tradie from Blacktown, he tells me. Never been sick a day in his life. He laughs, but it’s the kind of laugh that has grief tucked inside it.
He asks if I believe God hears prayers.
I tell him honestly: I do. And even when I’ve doubted, I’ve come back to ‘yes’.
He nods slowly, like a man turning something over. He doesn’t take Communion, he says he hasn’t been to Mass in 20 years. But he lets me sit with him for a while, and I think that’s its own kind of sacrament.
Andrew
By mid-morning I have passed through oncology, surgical recovery, the neurosurgical and trauma unit, cardiology — ward after ward, face after face.
Then I come to Andrew.
I introduce myself and ask if he would like to receive the host with a prayer. He looks at me and says: “What do you mean, if I want to? I have been waiting, my friend.” We both laugh. A nurse comes in mid-conversation, removes the blanket, applies a new dressing. Both legs amputated within the week. He looks at me, often calling me Father — and I chuckle and say, “Andrew, I am just a volunteer.” He answers, ok whatever, you just seem like someone I can chat to…….”
He then says: “I don’t care who you are. You have made my day. You know, people don’t care anymore these days.”
All I could do was listen. That’s all he wanted — someone to talk to, someone to hear him. We speak for a while. He jokes with the nurse: “Rita, are my legs still there….then laughs?” And then he looks at me and says: “If we can’t have a joke and a laugh, I’ll be dead.”
I walk out of that room sad but uplifted at the same time. Andrew, who lost both legs in a single week, has not lost his spirit. I can only imagine what his life ahead will look like — but if anyone is going to face it with grace, it is him.
The Breadth of Humanity
This is what people don’t often understand about this work: the Chaplaincy at Westmead belongs to everyone. Faith, or the absence of it, is beside the point. What people want — what they need — in those rooms is presence. Someone who will stop. Sit. Look them in the eye and say ‘you matter’.
I am not a priest. I am not a counsellor. I am just a volunteer — a Catholic layman, someone the Diocese of Parramatta has trusted to carry the Eucharist and to represent the love of the Church in practical, human terms. Some days I wonder if I am remotely adequate to the task. Most days, I conclude I am not. And yet I keep coming back, because inadequacy has never been a disqualification from doing good.
A Difficult Corner
Not every room is peaceful.
There is one today that stays with me — a woman, middle-aged, alone. No family listed on the board. She has been here a long time. When I introduce myself and ask if she would like a visit, she stares at the ceiling for a long moment before answering.
“Does anyone actually care?” she asks. Not bitterly. Just… honestly. “I don’t have a family you know, I am all alone. Thanks for your time.”
I sit down without being invited to. I tell her that I’m here because I choose to be. That she didn’t have to be on any list. That even if I’m a stranger, I’m a stranger who drove across Sydney this morning specifically to knock on doors like hers.
Something shifts in her face. It’s subtle, the way tension leaves the jaw. She doesn’t burst into tears. She doesn’t thank me effusively. She just says: “Alright then.”
We sit quietly for a while. She tells me a little about her life. I listen more than I talk. When I eventually leave, she says: “Come back next week.”
I tell her I will.
What the Hospital Teaches
By midday, when I’ve completed my rounds and handed back my security pass and walked out into the car park back into a world of traffic and noise and people scrolling their phones at cafés — I always feel the same thing.
A strange, settling gratitude.
Not the guilty kind. Not ‘oh, I should be thankful for my health’ in an abstract, performative way. Something deeper and more specific. I have sat this morning with people who would give anything to be where I am standing right now: in the sun, with working legs, with a life ahead of them full of ordinary Sundays.
The hospital keeps me honest. It strips away every complaint I was about to make about traffic, about work stress, about the small indignities of daily life. It puts a human face on suffering, and suffering, it turns out, is universal. It does not distinguish between the successful and the struggling, the faithful and the faithless, the young or the old.
Everyone, sooner or later, ends up in one of those beds.
And as I walk out, I carry one more thought with me, quiet, but insistent. I don’t know, when I return, how many of the people I visited today will have recovered and gone back home. Some will still be there, still waiting. And some, I know, will be gone. That uncertainty never leaves you. But perhaps that’s exactly why each visit matters as much as it does because for some of them, today may be the only time our paths will ever cross. So, you show up fully. You sit. You listen. You pray. And you let that be enough.
Why I Keep Going Back
People sometimes ask me why I volunteer. It’s a reasonable question. I have a job, two beautiful kids, a life that makes demands. Sunday mornings are precious. And the work itself is not easy — emotionally, spiritually, it costs something.
But the answer is simple, even if it sounds a little grand when I say it aloud: because it makes me more human.
Walking those wards, carrying Communion, sitting with strangers in their most vulnerable hours — it connects me to something essential about what we are here to do for one another. It is not complicated theology. It is just love, made practical. Presence, made concrete.
The Diocese of Parramatta and NSW Health Western Sydney Local Health District have built something remarkable in the Chaplaincy at Westmead. It is a quiet ministry, largely invisible to the outside world. No headlines, no accolades. Just people showing up, week after week, in corridors that smell of hand sanitiser and hard news, offering whatever they have.
I am only one of them. I am grateful to be counted among them.
I drive home the long way. I stop for a coffee I actually taste. I call my family and mean every word.
It has been a hard morning. It has been a good morning.
That, I’ve come to understand, is how grace usually arrives.
Peter Sarju is an Extraordinary Minister of Communion and Volunteer Hospital Chaplain at Westmead Hospital. Learn more about our Hospital Chaplains on our website.
Volunteer Chaplains in the Diocese are an example of the Pastoral Plan priorities of Prayer, Formation and Listening, Dialogue and Discernment. Please visit Synodality to learn more.
