Where Love Has Room to Breathe | J.S. Park Centers Dignity Online as the Internet’s Chaplain

J.S. Park did not set out to become the internet’s chaplain. In fact, he didn’t plan to become a chaplain at all.

Growing up in an interfaith household with an atheist mother, Christian father, and Buddhist grandmother, J.S. identified as an atheist for most of his life. His journey to Christianity and chaplaincy were both unexpected turns in his life as he figured out his faith and his vocation.

Long before he became a chaplain, J.S. Park was a writer. Starting in his teen years, he began writing as a way to process his parent’s challenging divorce.

He started a Tumblr in 2007. After months of zero viewership, he slowly grew to have over 20,000 followers. His writing about his doubt, faith, and his mental health struggles with depression resonated with his readers. When he started his chaplaincy journey in 2015 and wrote openly about his experiences of grief and dying, his writing and social media platforms began to take off.

“When I wrote about depression or dying or grief or doubt, I thought, oh, these are heavy topics. Who even wants to hear about this?” J.S. shared. “But people just started commenting and messaging me and asking me questions. And I realized over time people are ready for this conversation.”

Park’s voice now reaches far beyond Tumblr. With over 100,000 followers on Instagram and a recent book, As Long As You Need, he has become a spiritual presence in the digital landscape. His reflections and poetry on grief, love, and loss offer a unique platform built not on sensationalism but on humanity.

An Advocate for Grief in All Forms

J.S’s rise on platforms like Instagram is no small feat. Social media algorithms reward provocation. They’re designed to elicit reactions, often prioritizing content that polarizes and inflames. Personalized feeds can create echo chambers, reinforcing existing biases and disconnecting people from humanity.

Against this tide, J.S. built a space centered on dignity, vulnerability, and honest storytelling. It is countercultural, challenging, and deeply courageous.

What sets Park’s work apart is his vulnerability, openness, and consistent refusal to dehumanize even when discussing taboo topics or personal failure. A suicide survivor, he shares his mental health journey to ensure others don’t feel alone. In recounting his winding path to Christianity, he honors not just the inspiration he finds in Christ but the many times he lost and rediscovered his faith while sitting beside the dying in the hospital.

Most importantly, he is an advocate for grief in all its forms – from the visceral screams to the silent anguish – and works to challenge the narrative that grief has a timeline or a “right” or “wrong” way to navigate through it.

“I’m not trying to always write in affirming, positive ways,” he reflected. “I got to talk about the hard stuff and call out the things that aren’t right. But I hope to do so with some measure of gentleness where somebody feels at the end they can unclench and relax a little bit or [relax] the shoulders that they’ve been holding up that they didn’t even realize were tense and coiled. [I hope] they can breathe out. Writing does that for me. And I hope it does it for the reader too.”

A Beacon for the Future of Social Media

J.S. Park’s chaplaincy impacts not just what he chooses to share but also how he chooses to be present online. He considers the principles and ethics of his faith and of being a chaplain as foundational for how he creates content. They are integral to how he chooses to engage online.

“I realized, even years before becoming a chaplain, I’m ‘chaplaining’ online,” he shared. “I have all these little rules for the way I write online. I don’t like making anyone a punchline. I don’t dehumanize. I try not to name-drop. I don’t try to dunk on anybody. I never want to punch down. I never want to make fun of anybody.”

The impact of J.S. Park’s work online can be seen in the hundreds of comments under each post. For healthcare workers, especially chaplains, his platform is a beacon of what social media could ideally become.

Anica Leitch, a chaplain in the greater Los Angeles area, started following J.S. Park on Instagram in 2021. She reflects on how his words have inspired her to find her own voice as a chaplain.

“[His content] feels different to me than engaging with a medical-themed TV show because it feels deeply reflective and invitational for me,” she shared. “As a fellow chaplain, I can reflect on my own experience, as someone bearing witness to suffering, with how it’s touched my own life, my own experience, and the ways in which I’ve seen people supporting each other through the midst of pain. By way of his sharing, I feel like I’ve been invited into a greater connection with my own experience. It gives me hope which sustains me.”

The Toll of Having a Platform

While J.S. Park recognizes the privilege of his platform and the positive feedback he receives, being so visible online can take an emotional and psychological toll. From threatening messages to hateful comments, he’s learned to cultivate healthy boundaries around his presence. As he has gained experience, he has also chosen to share more cautiously. Even with these boundaries in place, it still isn’t easy.

“There was a time that I felt like I owed people an explanation when I got pushback and feedback,” he said. “I’m naturally a bridge builder and I’m always seeking to understand. I get messages or comments that are angry – the anger is fine with me. But when it’s abusive or dehumanizing is where I draw the line. But even with those comments, I would really try to understand where they are coming from.”

Sarah Warren, a nurse and storyteller who co-founded Don’t Clock Out and has a similarly large Instagram platform, echoes Park’s challenges with centering your values when you have a platform of that size.

“There’s just an immense moral toll that’s happening,” Warren reflected. “When you’re online as much as it’s required to have a platform of our size, it’s hard to escape the reality that there are institutions and people with such a vested interest in dehumanization. It’s an isolated experience until you get to talk about it with someone else. It’s not fair to say individuals deserve this kind of harm or rhetoric, because they’re putting themselves out there online.”

Social Media as Sacred Ground

J.S. Park’s spiritual practice is his guiding light for how he chooses to engage online. He has been open about wrestling with Christian identity, disillusioned by the rise of Christian Nationalism and its direct harm to marginalized communities. He most recently removed his Christian identity from his Instagram biography – a controversial move for many of his followers. Even if he may struggle to call himself a Christian, J.S. Park is inspired by the love and compassion shown by the life of Jesus Christ and uses these principles to guide how he shows up in the hospital and online.

“One non-negotiable value of my faith is to hold grace, that is, I assume that each person has layers of stories they are carrying and so I choose not to judge them for what I cannot see. Often when I have tried to stay an extra minute, for one more sentence or question with my patient who is labeled “non-compliant” or “combative,” I usually find they are afraid, anxious, overwhelmed. This cannot easily excuse their harmful actions. But it gives us enough story for me to approach a different way.”

These principles come into play in the conversations J.S. Park holds online with people across the political aisle. He recalls a story about an atheist follower “James” who reacted harshly to a post several years ago about faith and church. J.S. Park agreed with his criticism and asked his permission to message. They began to engage online and the conversation was challenging from the start.

“He did not mince words. He couldn’t believe that I was still holding onto faith. He essentially called me a church abuse apologist. That I was complicit in the entire history of church scandals if I was working anywhere near spiritual ministry. He was angry. And yet his anger did not scare me. As a chaplain, I am regularly in rooms where patients and families grieve angry.”

Even though it was difficult, J.S. Park continued to engage in dialogue with him, validating his perspective and not making excuses for the direct criticism James had with the church and J.S. Park’s reflections. Their relationship shifted over time. Last fall, J.S. Park got to meet James in person at a speaking engagement. He was blown away by his kindness and left with a deep sense of admiration and humility.

“James was one of the kindest people I got to spend time with. I know not every story ends this way. And if anything, I give myself no credit here. I credit James and people like him, who are willing to be open to share, to speak their hurt, and to trust someone like me even past their pain.”

Despite the ups and downs of his journey, J.S. Park is grateful for the people who have supported him on this journey and for the stories he gets to tell. He takes his platform seriously, reflecting deeply on what he shares and how he shares it. And for as long as he can, both at the bedside and online, he will use his stories to ensure everyone feels permission to grieve, especially in the face of injustice.

“Even though the oppressor tried to get rid of grief in every culture, grief was still kept through storytelling and through culture,” he said. “It was still preserved. You can’t stamp it down because grief is a way of saying something is wrong here, especially injustice. I’m glad to be a part of that dialogue and online, people really want to talk about it.”

In a time of deepening polarization, Park’s work is a reminder that social media can still be sacred ground, where dignity is not only possible but vital. Through his writing, presence, and unwavering commitment to humanity, J.S. Park invites us to show up online with the same care and reverence a chaplain would offer at the bedside of a hospital patient. He ends with this beautiful analogy of how he imagines his role in an online world.

“I enter a hospital room and I want to establish safety in my patient’s most vulnerable condition. This is how I enter the online world. We are bombarded. We are inundated with vitriol, disinformation, extremism, and violence. It is simply painful now to scroll online. The music of the world is hurt and hate. I want my space and words, and page to be the equivalent of synthwave lofi.”

By Anu Gorukanti