A MINISTRY OF THE HEART COMPASSION DRIVES CHIEF OF CHAPLAINCY

Shirlee Zane has a degree in divinity, worked as a missionary and runs

Sonoma County's Hospital Chaplaincy Services. But don't look for her in church

this morning.

''I'm not going to any church right now,'' says Zane. ''I have a lot of

church burns that need time to heal.''

That doesn't mean Zane has given up spiritual pursuits. She's just changed

the venue.

Her ''spiritual nourishment'' now is found swimming laps at Finley Aquatic

Center, painting landscapes and still-lifes, walking around Spring Lake.

And it is found in her job as executive director of Hospital Chaplaincy

Services, where her work provides her with the ''anticipation, surprise and

mystery'' she once found in church.

At 36, with a short skirt and long, curly red hair, Zane won't be mistaken

for a somber cleric.

''Well, you don't have to be a grandfather like me to do this work,'' says

Dick Marquette, president of Hospital Chaplaincy's board of directors. ''What

you need most is compassion, and Shirlee's got a real sincere compassion for

the people we serve.

''She's also dynamic and creative, with incredible energy and marvelous

ideas.''

Zane runs a nonprofit agency that depends on the goodwill of more than six

dozen dedicated volunteers and of a community that contributes some $80,000 in

operating expenses each year. Another $35,000 comes from contracts with

hospitals and nursing homes where volunteer chaplains work regular shifts

visiting patients. The job requires her to be a mix of minister, therapist and

promoter.

People within Hospital Chaplaincy Services wondered if Zane might be too

''flashy'' when she took over the organization about 18 months ago, says Linda

Lampson, a former president of the board. But Zane quickly changed their

minds.

''She makes things happen,'' Lampson says. ''Our program was in a real

tailspin. We were in a downsizing mode, our existence was very, very

tenuous.''

But Zane was able to re-establish a valuable contract to provide chaplain

services for Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa and successfully

negotiated another deal with Health Plan of the Redwoods.

''Within six months she had us to the point where we could bring salaries

back up and even add some office help,'' Lampson says. ''Shirlee has been

remarkable.''

Zane's route to the job has been circuitous: a degree in speech pathology

from Chico State, ordination as a minister in the conservative Evangelical

Free Church of America, work with the poor in the inner cities of Chicago, Los

Angeles and Caracas, Venezuela, and, finally, a stint as a bored housewife in

Santa Rosa.

She became acquainted with pain and suffering long before signing on as a

hospital chaplain.

A love for inner-city life

''I had loved the inner city,'' she says. ''When we were in Chicago, we

lived in Humboldt Park, the most violent neighborhood in the nation. Yet for

every war story, there's a flower in the crack in the sidewalk. That place was

filled with resilient, lovely people.''

Zane gets emotional talking about it. Tears come to her eyes as she

remembers her Puerto Rican and Honduran friends from Chicago and the

Salvadoran and Mexican women who immediately appointed themselves her son's

''grandmothers'' when he was born in 1988 in South Central Los Angeles.

But Zane left inner-city church work in 1990 when she and her husband, Greg

Herrick, moved north so Herrick could manage his family's Sonoma County

vineyard.

''I became a restless mother staying home with my son,'' she says. ''I got

involved in a white, middle-class, conservative church, leading a women's

group and talking about feminism and minorities, but I was just pissing people

off. I didn't fit.''

While Zane prominently displays her master's of divinity degree on her

office wall, she downplays her connection to conservative Christianity.

''I always felt like I had one foot in and one foot out,'' she says. ''I

liked the spiritual aspects, but at the same time I disagreed with other

parts. I could not be ordained in my church because I was a woman.''

Zane was raised by ''die-hard liberal'' parents in Southern California. Her

mother taught high school, her dad worked in the aerospace industry and both

were active in social causes.

'''Republican' was a dirty word in our household,'' Zane says.

At Chico State, which had a well-earned reputation as a ''party school,''

Zane concentrated on her studies, first in psychology and later in speech

pathology. She became active in a Christian campus group, volunteered for a

summer doing missionary work in Honduras and began thinking about the

ministry.

She married Herrick the week after graduation in 1982, then stayed in Chico

while he finished school. In the mid-1980s, Zane studied theology in Chicago

and she and Herrick worked in the Evangelical Free Church in Humboldt Park.

''It was conservative in theology but very liberal in practice,'' she says.

''It was as much social work as church work.''

Immersed in Latino community

She became immersed in the city's Latino community, becoming fluent in

Spanish and accomplished at playing maracas during loud, joyous church

services.

Zane says Protestant denominations are making deep inroads into

traditionally Catholic Latino communities both here and in Latin America. She

attributes it to a shortage of Catholic clergy in Latin America and a

fundamental difference in approach:

''Protestants offer an aggressive, masculine approach that you can change

your life, while the general philosophy of the Catholic church is to tell

people, 'If you're born poor you'll die poor -- accept it.'''

She and Herrick worked for 18 months in Caracas before visa problems and

Zane's pregnancy convinced them to return north. They landed in South Central

L.A., where as part of her church work she taught English and helped illegal

immigrants through the bureaucracy of the federal immigration amnesty program.

She wouldn't find out for several years, but her work in Chicago and Los

Angeles prepared her to be a hospital chaplain, Zane says.

''Normally in middle-class America we don't let anyone know how much

trouble we're in. No matter how bad things get, on the outside we put out this

message that everything's fine,'' she says. ''But in Humboldt Park and South

Central, you're forced to deal with pain and suffering. It's right there in

your face. You have to learn how to deal with it as a part of life.''

Life lessons

Zane says people in pain ''are our best teachers'' because they reinforce

the lesson that life includes both gains and losses, no matter how hard we try

to fend off the losses.

She says she has learned to embrace the pain rather than run away from it,

which in turn makes times of pleasure even more enjoyable.

She says she would have been content to stay forever in Los Angeles, and

quickly found herself dissatisfied in Santa Rosa. She returned to graduate

school at Sonoma State University for a counseling degree and went to work

again in the Latino community in Healdsburg and Cloverdale as a counselor for

Social Advocates for Youth. She still spends one afternoon a week counseling

Spanish-speaking teens and families at the Alliance Medical Clinic in

Healdsburg.

Eighteen months ago, she became exec utive director of Hospital Chaplaincy

Services.

She spends most of her time doing administrative and fund-raising work, but

Zane also serves as an on-call hospital chaplain -- available in the middle of

the night or on weekends when families in crisis need a steady hand to hold.

''I realized that I had to seek ways in my life to avoid getting cynical,

to be able to speak from my heart and to practice humility -- which isn't easy

for a redheaded Sagittarian.

''This job gives me the opportunity for all three: I get a constant dose of

humility by being able to share a sacred place for a time with people in the

hospital. I get to speak from my heart when I describe those moments to people

outside of the program. And the passion of the volunteers I work with keeps me

from becoming cynical.''

A call for compassion

She does her preaching now on the lecture circuit, constantly hammering

home the point of bringing compassion back to a health care system that

increasingly focuses on the bottom line. She finds her spirituality in the

fear or suffering or loneliness or boredom of hospital patients and their

families.

''I think I'll always have the drive to go back to the inner city,'' she

says. ''But for now, I'm content to be here. I think I have enough pain in my

life.''