Revisiting parallel process – a “hidden curriculum” in pastoral education?

One of the all-time most popular posts on this blog is one I wrote in 2006 about something called parallel process. It's one of the most mysterious and yet most powerful concepts we have in pastoral education. Even though it's not part of our official educational outcomes, I think it's so central to our field that it's impossible for our students to understand what we do without having some kind of idea what parallel process is. Yet, we only rarely try and explain it to beginning students. I'm starting to wonder if that's a huge mistake that explains why our students sometimes find pastoral education to be so mysterious – or sometimes even intrusive and

hurtful.

Let me explain. As Kathleen Pakos-Rimer points out in her excellent 2005 study of a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program, our students know from the moment they look at a standard CPE application that self-awareness is an important value in CPE. The application, for example, asks them to write essays that “provide a reasonably full account of your life, including important events, relationships with people who have been significant to you, and the impact these events have had on your development” (pg. 48). And, the student, if they should read our official, hoped-for educational outcomes for CPE, might even learn that we in CPE think that the reason it's important to build this self-awareness is so we can understand how our background and key life events affect how we act with patients and other suffering people. But what the student could never figure out from the written standards alone is why we think building self-awareness – and being able to share that awareness in the moment with others – is so important that we spend more time on it in the seminar room than anything else, and we evaluate students on it (we call it, “being present” or “being engaged”) when they appear before committees. This is where parallel process comes in.

On the broadest level, parallel process simply means that what happens in one relationship in a person's life gets reflected somehow in other relationships. Think of the old story about the man who gets yelled at by his boss and then comes home and kicks his dog – the abuse in the boss-man relationship gets acted out in the dog-man relationship. This doesn't just happen with bad things like abuse. As Care Theorist Nel Noddings argues, children who are treated in a truly caring way by their teachers and parents tend to grow up to be caring and moral adults.

In CPE, we use parallel process to assess some of the pretty demanding ideas we have about how our chaplain-students should act with patients. That is, supervisor-educators like myself want our students to take on the incredibly demanding task of forming deep relationships with patients amid the challenges of encountering the scariness of death, suffering and pain, as well as the challenge of having limited time to form those relationships. And we think that some of the toughest issues students have with forming relationships with patients will also show up somehow in their interactions with us, their teachers – that's parallel process.

It's also something that might be called part of a hidden curriculum of CPE – things about our educational process that our students might not be fully aware are a part of this game. That's unfortunate because students who feel like we're involving them in a game where they don't know the rules are likely to feel that they are being treated unfairly and that the education we are offering is not serving their interests. Worse, they may experience us as a bunch of intrusive emotion voyeurs – who just want them to share the most intimate details of their lives because it entertains us.

So, it's imperative that we raise our awareness about what parts of the CPE curriculum might seem hidden to students – and to find ways to explain those things so they are no longer hidden (assuming, that is, that we decided we want to keep these once-hidden things as part of CPE).

Parallel process may be one of those hidden things. But, unfortunately, it's not the only one. Pakos-Rimer identifies five implicit – or hidden – outcomes in CPE including the “ability to engage the person in the patient without violating professional boundaries.” But what does that mean to engage the person? We who are steeped in the hidden curriculum of CPE have a fairly well developed idea about what engagement means, but do our students share this? When, a few years back, I was sitting before a committee of veteran supervisors for an hour asking to be allowed to begin the first steps towards joining their ranks, I was nervous for many minutes and was desperately trying to give them the 'right' answers to their questions. If I had stayed in that nervous, desperately-trying-to-say-the-right-thing state, the committee would have failed me for sure. But, then came a time of dramatic shift – I started to talk about one of the greatest fears in my life and tears came to my eyes.

In another field, showing emotion in an interview-type setting like this probably would have been a disaster for me. But in CPE we value engagement in an interview (because we understand that good pastoral care is about true engagement and because the doctrine of parellel process tells us that if a person can engage before a committee he or she can also probably engage with a patient). I knew about that value when I was before the committee shedding tears, so I realized in that moment that I had moved from failing this committee appearance to succeeding at it – not because of the tears alone, but because I was no longer afraid of what these people would think of me. I already then knew enough about the CPE hidden curriculum to know how the committee would experience this – they would see my as engaging them with my genuine person.

Parallel process is why this makes sense – if you believe in parallel process than what the committee saw happen between me and them in that moment tells them something about what I was capable of being with students and with patients. That is, if I could show them I could experience intense emotion with them – and yet still be able to retain enough control and self-awareness to be able to rationally discuss with them what was happening for me – than that indicated I could also experience intense emotion with patients, but still have the control of a skilled professional. (This is closely related to something that Pakos-Rimer calls well-bounded empathy – where you can, to paraphrase Carl Rogers, enter the experience of the patient as if you are in his or her shoes, without ever forgetting the as if condition.)

Of course – as many a student has complained – sitting with a patient is not the same thing as sitting before a committee of veteran professionals. But we supervisors in CPE – rightly so in my view – believe that the basic issues of entering into and maintaining relationships will be largely the same wherever the student finds opportunity for relationship. And, most importantly, we believe that the essence of pastoral care is about entering into relationship with the person we are caring for – genuine relationships that are deepened because we are able to share some fundamental part of our core being amid them.

But it's not enough to just tell the student that this is just the way it is and get used to it. We have to explain for them as best we can how we believe our educational process works. And before we can do that, we need to be able to be able to explain it to ourselves. Here is the opportunity – and need – for research. We need to define our terms in a disciplined way. Pakos-Rimer has contributed to this by exploring, for example, what we mean by empathy and why we might think it needs to be well-bounded. Another excellent work – Judith Ragsdale's 2008 study of the education of CPE supervisors like myself – made another important contribution: providing support for why a program of continuous spiritual and professional self-examination might be particularly important in our field.

And other terms that we professionals in the field throw around as if they are clear need to be more carefully defined (like integration). We also have expectations that may be culturally determined – like our expectation that chaplain-students develop a greater sense of autonomy and personal/professional authority so that they are more able to engage in what we call self-supervision, self-assessment and self-care. When students come before us for evaluation, we expect them to be able to demonstrate a strong sense of their own authority – and to be able to even take charge with us in discussing their learning. We might even expect them to resist being interviewed – to resist just providing answers to our questions – and to, instead, engage us by sharing their own deepest, unanswered questions about their own work and to try and use us as resources in wondering about how those questions might be answered.

Not everyone believes that all the self-examination CPE professionals engage in is actually necessary to become a skilled spiritual caregiver. I am not sure that everyone in the Jewish Healing movement, for example, believes in the necessity of the level of self-examination we do. And there are alternative training models in the Jewish world, certainly, for students to learn pastoral care. At Yeshiva University, for example, there is an emphasis on what is called positive psychology – an approach that does not call for either the chaplain or the patient to explore their emotional and spiritual wounds. If CPE is to remain the dominant spiritual-care training model we must answer the questions and challenges raised by these alternative approaches and perhaps, even, adopt aspects of them.

I believe that we can meet these challenges. And parallel process is at the core of what we have to contribute to the world of spiritual care and beyond. By forming model relationships of true caring and compassion with ourselves and our students, we can – through a giant chain of parallel processes – affect nothing less than every other relationship in the world. Like ripples in a pond from a single pebble, we can spread peace and wholeness one relationship at a time. This is what we hope to prepare our chaplain students for – not just so they can learn to minister to individual patients one at a time, but so that they can become forces for greater caring and compassion everywhere they go.

May it be the will of the Holy Blessed One that we shall all know peace, soon, speedily and in our days.

********

Parallel process, by the way, is not an invention of pastoral educators – but, rather, something we borrowed from the filed of psychoanalysis. One interesting question is why the concept of parallel process has remained so central in the field of pastoral education while it has become less important in the field of pscychoanalysis.

Bringing the holy to the hurting

One of the most interesting things we can do for our learning and spiritual growth is akin to making a deposit in a time capsule -- we can write something about who we are in our spiritual journey. Then, later, we can look back at it and ask ourselves what's still true about it -- what it says about the core of who we are -- and what's changed -- that is, what it says about how we've grown.

That's what I tell my students when I give them an assignment at the beginning of a chaplaincy unit to write a "Statement of Ministry", a statement that expresses what they think pastoral (or spiritual) care is about and what they think they're doing when the minister to a suffering person. Because CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) is so much about learning in a group process, I ask the students to read the statements they write out loud to each other, which allows them to start the process of discussing what is in common about their pastoral theologies and what differs (I learned a lot the other night about how my students have very different ideas about whether caring for others is draining or nourishing for the soul -- an important question I hope we have plenty of opportunity to explore in the weeks ahead!).

This time, during the reading out loud, I decided to also share with the students my own statement of ministry -- the one that I wrote in my first unit of CPE back in the summer of 2003. It was interesting to me to see how much my view then has in common with my view today -- it's still the same core view of what it we are doing when we try to offer comfort and healing to others. Here it is:

Alan Abrams June 16, 2003

Statement of Ministry/Spiritual Care

Parshat Va-Yeirah (Gen. 18:1) begins with the appearance of God to Avraham at the oaks of Mamre. The Medieval commentator Ramban, following his predecessor Rashi, understands this theophany as God coming to comfort a physically suffering Avraham. Significantly, neither commentator explains how God comforts the suffering Avraham; it is as if they are saying nothing could be more comforting than the simple presence of God. But the Ramban goes one step further than Rashi: he says this appearance of God's presence is specifically to reward Avraham for carrying out God's wishes.

So, too, when a spiritual caregiver comes before a suffering person, the primary thing the caregiver brings is his or her presence. But when that caregiver is a clergyperson (or clergy-in-training), he or she may bring something additional in the eyes of the suffering person -- a piece of the presence of the Divine, itself. And, if that suffering person does indeed perceive a piece of the Divine presence appearing along with the clergyperson, then the clergyperson is also bringing what the Ramban said God's presence brought Avraham -- a sense of being rewarded for following God's will. Or, perhaps a better way of saying it is that the Divine presence communicates God's approval to the suffering for how he or she has conducted his or her life.

Thus, my job as a spiritual caregiver is a) to be present to the suffering person, and b) to communicate the nonjudgmental presence of the Divine, if that should be something the person will welcome and benefit from. The first of these two sounds very simple, but, in fact, it is the greatest challenge for the spiritual caregiver. Learning to truly be present is a lifelong task. It involves careful listening with all the senses. It involves being able to put aside one's own prejudices, assumptions and fears to the greatest extent possible. It involves the courage not to run away in the face of death and unspeakable suffering. The presence of a fearless, but compassionate, face even in the places that inspire the greatest fear can send the comforting message that, on some level, everything will be all right.

The Torah (Gen. 1:27) says that God created humankind in "the image of God (btzelem elohim)". I am constantly amazed and awed by the thought that God would have graced each one of us with a piece of God's own unimaginable holiness. I seek always to be better able to see and accept that Godliness in each person before me. Part of this holiness means that each human is unique and distinct. While my training and experience gives me important tools that allow me to more quickly recognize problems and characteristics that many humans hold in common, I must always strive to use those tools with great care. May my training not blind me to the uniqueness and holiness of each human before me. May I always strive to see the tzelem elohim in each person before me. This is a huge part of what it means to be truly present.

I do not believe that I carry any greater piece of the Divine than any other human. But, I know that is not how many people will perceive me; they may see me as a representative of the Divine. As a spiritual caregiver, I must undertake a spiritual assessment of the suffering person that includes an assessment of how that person views me. I must do my best to present a compassionate and loving image of the Divine. I must accept anger at the Divine projected at me with that same loving face.

Part of projecting that image of Divine presence, as well as other means of comforting the suffering, will be developing a spiritual toolkit of prayers, psalms, etc. It will also sometimes be my job to refer the suffering to other caregivers, spiritual and otherwise, when the needs of the suffering person are beyond my means to address.

I expect spiritual care giving in a hospital setting to be deeply spiritually rewarding. I believe that God lives at the gates between life and death, gates that live especially strong inside the walls of the hospital and within the people who are found in hospitals. I look forward to the feeling of closeness with the Divine I know I will find. But I also expect spiritual care giving to be deeply exhausting spiritually, emotionally and physically. I expect the battle against burnout to be a continuous and difficult one. Part of being a spiritual caregiver will be finding others who can care for me; I must be willing to accept that care.

_________

As I said above, this statement still expresses much of the core of what my pastoral theology is about. But there are differences. In the statement, I gave a great deal of emphasis to the possibility that the patient might see the patient as a representative of God. While I still think this is true, I don't give it the same kind of emphasis I gave it in the statement. Specifically, I don't think I would today write what is in the statement about the presence of the caregiver communicating God's approval to the suffering person for how he or she conducted his or her life. I just think it's more complex than that.
_________

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted here -- over a month (and even longer since I've posted anything specific to chaplaincy and chaplaincy education).

There are a lot of reasons for that. One is that I am at a stage in my own education and certification process that is more about taking in (and introspection) than it is about being outwardly expressive -- I am working on researching and writing papers that express my particular approach to pastoral care and education about it. (I am seeking certification as a CPE supervisor, which is a person who trains others in spirituality and pastoral care.)

I am starting to get very excited about that work: I am starting to see a congruence between how I see chaplaincy education and how I've always seen the (Holy) process of Talmud study -- that it's fundamentally not about learning content (laws, techniques, etc.). Rather, it's about the learning process itself, a process that has the potential to stimulate the development of the individual into the kind of person -- self-authoring and self-differentiated -- that one needs to be to be an effective rabbi or pastoral caregiver. The work of Robert Kegan is really helping me here.

How do people learn?

That's the big question I need to work to express an articulate answer to in the coming weeks. . . . As I write this I am sitting at a table in an apartment in Jerusalem. I had the opportunity to come and live here for two months for personal reasons, but I made a commitment to my employer that I would use this time to work on the papers I need to write as part of my effort to become certified as a professional teacher of chaplains and other spiritual caregivers. The next paper I need to write is about my educational theory.

Back before the summer started, I made a stab at writing in a single statement what I believe about how people learn:

Through participation in a loving community of mutual caring, learning and personal transformation led by a teacher/role model(s) able to bless students and give them a balance 1) of structure (דין/din) with flexibility/compassion (חסד/hesed), and 2) of immediate presence with (progressively increasing) withdrawal (tzimtzum).

That statement needed work then and it still does now. . . . . Most importantly, I need to do some serious work reflecting on how the work I did leading a group of chaplaincy students this summer relates to that statement. Is that really how the learning happened in practice? If not, is that because I a) really believe something different about how learning happens, or is it because b) I just didn't get it right this time (and I can work to better implement my theory next time I lead a group of chaplain students).

I also need to work towards asking myself what educational theorists or models correlate with my belief. I need to seek out those sources and engage them -- asking myself how they enrich, or undermine, my understanding.

I am so grateful to be able to do this work while I am in Jerusalem. I have missed this holy city so much. I have not been back since my rabbinical school year (2000-2001). . . . It is certainly a frightening place to be, however. . . Although it might surprise people to know what it is that I feel fear about. . . . It is not so much terrorism (although that is a real concern). It's the challenge of being somewhere so foreign. . . . Where just doing little things -- like going to the supermarket, or crossing the street -- can be confusing and make me feel small and incompetent. . . . . Minna put it well in a conversation she had with her Hebrew language teacher -- Jerusalem is a place of strong smells: both the beautiful smell of the abundant flowers . . . and also smells that are a bit more like manure. . . . This is a city of contrasts. I love it for that. Those contrasts are part of what makes life feel so incredibly intense here. . . I feel so alive here!!! . . . So grateful to the Holy Blessed One for sustaining me and upholding me so that I might see this, again.

[X-posted to smamitayim]

Evaluation as blessing (a chaplaincy education summer comes to its end)

My first job after finishing rabbinical school was teaching Talmud and Rabbinics at a Jewish high school. There were so many things that I loved about that job, but having to evaluate students -- and assign them grades -- was not one of them. In one faculty meeting, I raised the question of why we gave grades at all. I remember the head of school being somewhat impatient with my question. In retrospect, I came to understand that we assigned grades at that school because that is what our customers -- students, parents and the colleges the students would be applying to -- expected us to do.

Of course, that's not what people like to say grades are about. They like to say it's about motivation -- "why will the students do the work if we don't grade them?"

That kind of thinking strikes me as being about a fundamental misunderstanding of what learning is really about and of what a person really needs to prepare his or her self for true success in the world. What the student needs most of all is to develop a love of learning and a basic curiosity about the world. In a world where the demands of jobs are changing and an ever-increasing rate, to be prepared students need to have learned how to learn. And, most importantly, they need to develop the values, independence and self-confidence needed to evaluate for themselves what is best for themselves and what success really means to them.

Grades serve none of these goals. Grades foster dependence. They stunt students' personal growth by encouraging them to look to others to tell them what is right for them and what success looks like. They are just very poor preparation for what students will face in the real world. In the work force, very few people are assigned grades. To be successful, we need to develop skills in evaluating our own work for ourselves in ways that will allow us to identify goals that will help us to continuously improve and grow. And we need to develop skill at identifying our accomplishments and articulating them to ourselves and to others.

All this is true for high schoolers, but it becomes more true for people seeking professional graduate education. And it is even more true than that for clergy and others in ministry. Most of the work for people like us is done without peers or supervisors present. Feedback from congregants tends to consist of only of the extremes of "great job, rabbi" or "I just don't like your sermons; maybe we should replace you with someone younger and cheaper."

So, a few weeks back, as we came to the end of our intense 11-week program of chaplaincy education for our four Christian seminary students and our one ordained Catholic Priest, I was left to wonder why am I writing these people evaluations?

In those final weeks, I started to realize how much anxiety some of my students were having about this. At first, I thought this was silly, but then I realized that they really did have something to worry about -- my evaluation would be read back at their seminary and could affect their progress towards ordination. This made me feel very cautious. Back in the high school, I could be fairly sure about how colleges would interpret the "A's" and "B's" I assigned. But, in the fairly arcane world of denominational ordination processes, I had no way of knowing how my words would be interpreted.

I also in those final weeks started to feel the pull from my students for affirmation. One student kept asking me, "are you going to miss us?"

It is natural to want to respond to such a request for affirmation. Who wouldn't you want to tell everybody else that they are wonderful and get back the gratitude for saying that?

But I didn't want to succumb to that temptation. I wanted to give my students something more than just affirmation. I wanted to give them a blessing.

What is a blessing? One model we have from scripture is the Priestly Blessing in the 6th chapter Book of Numbers where Aaron and other priests ask for God's blessing for the people. That is, the priests are there seeking to summon the Holy for the people before them and to connect the Holy with the people's well-being and success.

כד יְבָרֶכְךָ ה', וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ. כה יָאֵר ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ. כו יִשָּׂא ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם. כז וְשָׂמוּ אֶת-שְׁמִי, עַל-בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל; וַאֲנִי, אֲבָרְכֵם.

May HaShem bless you, and may He keep you.
May HaShem shine His face upon you, and extend grace unto you.
May HaShem lift His face upon you, and may He give you peace.
[In this way, they will put My name upon the people Israel, and I will bless them.]

This is a core part of what I think the blessing -- especially the blessing of the student at the end of a program in the form of the evaluation the supervisor writes -- should be for the supervisor in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE): We are summoning of the holy for the person and wishing for their success in partnership with the holy.

The important thing to realize about this is that this kind of summoning of the holy has to be something that is much more than the "feel-good" kind of "instant gratification" that would be giving the student the simple affirmation they may crave.

What I'm starting to understand is that what blessing really should be about is honoring the very place that has the most potential to access holiness in relationships -- that precious space "in-between" that is can be created by the interaction. There are many names for this space in-between. Levinas, for example, calls it the trace, "a memory of being-in-general, of the infinite".

So, the blessing that comes in an evaluation should be about honoring the interaction -- honoring what happened in the conversation between the supervisor and student about the student's work on the hospital floors. This interaction -- when it functions at its best -- is one where the two together tried to better discern the student's true path towards serving God by together examining the student's effort to serve people in pain (and bring something of the holy to them).

Honoring it means recording it. Recording it with love and care. . . . . Here I feel a need to make a digression and just say how affirming this summer was for me about the process of CPE, especially the potential for CPE to bring to light for a person the most important spiritual and personal growth issues that are before them. That may sound like the task of psychotherapist -- and it certainly is. But it seems to me that the psychotherapist is almost crippled next to the CPE supervisor. They psychotherapist only gets to see the client in the "closed container" that is the therapist's office. But a CPE supervisor like myself gets to interact with the student both in the "closed container" of weekly individual supervision and in the open container of the work setting -- a work setting (the setting of caring for people amid suffering and death) that naturally brings to the fore the issues of ultimate importance to a student. What an incredible opportunity to get to know something that is the essence of another human being. Holy work indeed!

So, what is honored and recorded as part of this process of evaluating/blessing the student is what has hopefully indeed turned out to be a holy interaction where something of the true essence of the student came to light. Where the supervisor was able to hold up that essence (I see an image of a ball of fire burning amid two upraised hands) and, for a moment, look at it together with the student. Where the two together can name what is true about it. Where the two together can wish and hope for the place where it can burn best.

What a gift to be truly seen, to feel truly seen. That is the blessing that I hope I gave my students in their evaluation. Only they can say whether they indeed received such a blessing. But that is the the number one way that I hope my written evaulations were a blessing for them -- in that they felt truly seen, seen in a loving way.

I also hope that I have given them a record of what they accomplished in those 11 weeks -- and each one of them accomplished quite a great deal. I hope what I wrote is something they will be able to look back on in the weeks, months and years to come and see something they can be proud of -- to know that they did something really important (even though they got no grade for it).

________________

One danger of this approach -- as some have warned me -- is that I will set expectations for myself and my students that are too high (and thus set us up for failure). What happens, for example, if I have a student who I really don't like or -- worse -- who I think is dangerous to the people he or she ministers to? How can I bless that student? I haven't faced that kind of serious challenge, yet, in my work. . . . Although I don't always feel that I have to like my students. But what is absolutely necessary is that I can find compassion for them . . . And through that compassion find a way to truly care about their learning and growth.

_______________

There are also some practical matters about how I do evaluations -- rules that have been passed down to me by my own supervisor -- that help serve the goal of the student being able to experience his or her evaluation as a blessing. The number one rule is that there should be no suprises -- there should be nothing in the written evaluation that was not previously discussed with the student.

When this works, the student will finish reading the evaluation and then look at the supervisor -- as one of my students did -- and say "that's pretty much what happened." That is -- when the relationship between supervisor and student has worked as it should -- there is a congruence between how the supervisor and student understand what happened. The evaluation should reflect that congruence.

_______________

One thing that I think would have suprised the "before-CPE" me is how much I use explicit God talk in these evaluations. I often talk -- especially in the final sentences -- about the student's relationship with God and how they do, or do not, understand themselves as loved by God. . . . I think this is a very important thing for most spiritual caregivers. The ministry that we bring to our patients and othes very often is just that -- to urge the person to feel God's love despite their suffering. This is not something that we can do if we do not ourselves feel God's love. . . That may be the greatest long-term challenge for the person seeking to make a life in spiritual caregiving. . . . And it is why spiritual self-care -- as I have written so often on this blog -- is so important.
______________

Blessing others is something that seems to have a much stronger tradition in Christianity than Judaism and many Christians expect their clergy to bless them. In Judaism the traditions and models for giving another a blessing are less clear. In terms of the Torah, we have the Priestly Blessing I mentioned above. We also have the example of Issac and Jacob giving blessing to their sons. In terms of modern practice, the strongest tradition is the weekly blessing of the children (which makes use of Jacob's blessing). There is also a strong tradition of Hasidic rebbes giving blessing to their adherents, but that tradition is rather foreign to me and my practice. This practice is something Jewish Renewal movement leader Zalman Schachter-Shalomi wrote about in his main academic work, Spiritual Intimacy: A Study of Counseling in Hasidism .

The core skill -- helping people find their way

Today I spent a few hours with a graduate student friend helping her think through some fascinating papers she's writing about the world of the ancient Rabbis. At one point -- as I was pounding my first on the table repeating something I had already said several times before -- I started to doubt myself. Was I really helping her? Was I being too harsh? Should I be gentler?

Then she cleared up all the doubt in my mind by suddenly saying, "you're a lot more patient with me than anybody else."

Clearly she was experiencing me not only as helpful, but as gentle. I know that my chaplain students this summer often experienced me the same way. And what really surprised me was that what I was doing with my friend felt so much like what I did with my students in my individual meetings with them -- what I did with my students is try to help them think through their work with patients and, also, how they understand their personal paths as people working in ministry. I tried to slow things down for them so we could think together. I summarized for them what I had heard about what they were thinking, and gently quizzed them when something was unclear to me. In visual terms, I tried to hold up their thoughts and experiences in the air in front of the two of us, so we could look at it and consider it together. In this way, I tried to help them find their way.

As I try to take advantage of the relatively quiet and reflective time I have before me in the coming weeks to try and work on finding my own way, it strikes me that helping people to find their own path may be the core set of skills I've been developing as I work towards full certification as a Clinical Pastoral Education supervisor. The number one basic component of that skill is also a core skill in the task of pastoral care to people in need -- listening. Listening with genuine curiosity and interest. . . . Wherever my path as a rabbi and as an educator may be taking me, I think that will be the core of what I will have to offer to my students and others who come before me.

I have to say it feels very good to be here. I thank the Blessed Holy One for leading me to this place where I have such an incredible opportunity.

Self-care as getting away -- my century, my spirit

With my chaplaincy students this summer, we paid a lot of attention to the issue of self-care. Taking good care of yourself is important for everyone of course, but it's especially important for people in helping professions where our work with people in need pulls on our hearts and souls. Call it burn-out or compassion fatigue or whatever else you like -- the bottom line is that people like clergy are at high risk for it.

My students had a lot of ideas about what self-care meant for them, but the most common theme was some form of "getting away". For one student that was a physical getting away -- she needed to get physically away from the hospital and be somewhere else. For another student, getting away meant nothing physical. Rather, it meant something that took his mind elsewhere, like reading.

During the 11 weeks of our summer program, I was the one trying to teach others about self-care. But when the program came to an end last week, the rubber hit the road, so to speak, for me -- how was I going to "get away" in a way that would be restorative to me after what was a great, but profoundly exhausting -- especially spiritually exhausting -- summer?

People who know me will not be surprised that I chose bicycle riding -- I went on a three-day bike tour this week (that started with a "century", only the second 100-mile bike ride of my life). But that might give you a false impression about how I understand self-care. You might think that means that I think physical exercise is the essence of self-care. Or you might think that I believe (as so many people do in our body-image obsessed society) that the essence of self-care is maintaining excellent physical condition.

But for people in a spiritual profession, maintaining the body is just not enough. Things that nurture the spirit are much more important.

So, for me, one of the most important things that self-care is about is the same thing my students cited -- getting away. I don't just bike ride; I bike tour. That means putting packs on my bike with my clothing and other gear. It means moving, under the power of my own legs, through physical space away from where I started. This gives that sense of physically getting away that was so valuable to my one student.

But bike touring also means the mental getting away that was so important to my other student, and, for me, this is much more important than the physical getting away. When, for the last hour and a half of my century ride, I unexpectedly found myself riding in heavy rain on a two-lane road with no shoulder as darkness started to fall, very quickly the only thing that mattered anymore for me was the task of riding (and doing everything I could to remain visible to the passing cars and to keep out of their path). All the things that had obsessed me in the closing weeks of the program -- all the painful and touching stories my students had brought me about the struggles in their lives and in their work with patients -- passed away. In those moments, I was able to get away in a profound way. That was real self-care for the caregiver.

I had another student who said that the essence of self-care was something a bit different than getting away -- it was to work to maintain a sense of inner peace and balance throughout everything he did. One of the deepest moments of inner peace I had in recent years came on another dangerous, rainy bike ride in the dark a previous summer. On that ride, I broke through the fear and focus I had on this week's ride to a place of freedom and joy. I was at peace with where I was, with who I am and what I was doing. I did not feel any need to question, only to be. That, in particular, is real self-care for the caregiver.

Even though I did not have such a deep moment of inner peace on this bike tour, there were many moments where I did experience profound peace. I felt free, and aimless.

I've written before about how an aimlessness can nurture our spirits and help restore us. What I wrote about is the potential for Torah study -- especially Torah study done for its own sake, or תורה לשמה/Torah Lishma -- to create this restorative aimlessness for us. It can allow us to get away in a profound way and enter the world -- and minds -- of our ancient Sages, people for whom finding the way of a proper service to The Holy Blessed One was their highest value. In this way, our spirits can be restored and we can find our way back to a new purposefulness in our efforts to best serve in the world in which we live.

May it be the will of The Holy Blessed One that you should find your own path to caring for your spirit and your body. And may that restore you in your efforts to find -- and walk -- your true path of service.

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By the way, here is the (approximate) route of my century ride, starting here in Reading and ending up in New Hope via downtown Philly.


View Larger Map

I took two days to get back from New Hope, ovenighting in Kulpsville before taking the final ride back.

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Self-care, of course, does not start at the end of an intense program. One needs to work to care for oneself along the way. For me, one of the biggest challenges in this kind of self-care is to pace myself. My pattern throughout my life is to get very excited at the beginning of a new semester or a new job and to ride that excitement to great accomplishments in the early weeks and months. But, as with all 'highs', that excitement eventually fades and then I find it hard to find the energy to just fulfill my basic obligations.

With my awareness of that pattern in mind, I didn't a better job this time of caring for myself through pacing. In the opening weeks of the program, I intentionally worked less in the evenings and on Sundays compared to my usual pattern. Bicycle riding did play a role in this self-care plan and I was able to get out on the bike for an hour or two most evenings in the first half of the program. As the program went on, however, I did experience something of a collapse. This wasn't as bad as in the past and I was able to do a very good job of having enough energy for my students and for my work throughout the program. Bike, riding, however, did fall off the plate and I did not ride nearly as much in the second half of the program.

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I was struck in the final minutes of my tour about how there was something of what you might call a parallel process between how my ride went and how the summer program went for me: In the first part of the ride, I had lots of energy and excitement for the task of doing a century (162 kilometers) that first day. I was so excited when I made it to the Philadelphia Art Museum at around 1pm (about 95 kilometers in). [The pic to the right, by the way, is of the "Rocky" statue at the Art Museum; there was an international crowd of tourists taking pics of each other there.] But soon I started to tire and the remaining 80 or so kilometers I did that day were largely a struggle, as were many of the kilometers of the two 'return' days. As I was doing the last 10 kilometers or so back to Reading, I noticed that I was passing some milestones -- like the last bridge over the Schuylkill river I would cross -- that should have been making me feel excited. I should have been able to feel a sense of accomplishment building as I passed each of those milestones. I should have been able to slow down and savor it.

Instead, all I cared about was finishing. I just wanted it to be over and to be able to get off that bike and get my sore muscles (and rear end, especially) into a hot bath. That was a little sad.

The summer program ended for me in kind of a similar way. In the last week or so, I had to do two all-nighters to finish all the written work I owed to students and others on-time. So, at the end, instead of being able to savor what a huge accomplishment the summer was to me and share that joy with my students, I just wanted it to be over. I just wanted to be able to finally stop working.

But, while I have some sadness about that, mostly how things went represents an accomplishment. I was indeed able to get my work done on time (and I never really faced the crippling dread that I would perhaps not be able to make my deadlines, a dread I well know from the past). And I was able to give my students what they needed from me in those final days; I don't think they were cheated in any way by my need to 'sprint' at the end.

This was my first time supervising a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) unit on my own. My supervisor told me I did an excellent job. I agree with that assessment, something that it is not always so easy for me to say. . . . . My efforts at self-care are a lot of what made it possible. I'm thankful to my students for their work and to my supervisor and my peers for their counsel and guidance. I owe them all a lot.

Torah as self-care

I was reading Pamela Cooper-White's Shared Wisdom: the use of the self in pastoral care and counseling, today, and was reminded of some thoughts I've been having lately about self-care. White (pg. 130) articulates a vision where self-care is not just about the caregiver preserving his or herself from burnout or overwork. For White, self-care is central to the practice of spiritual caregiving itself. And, for her, the most important element of self-care is not the things people usually list -- exercise or working shorter hours, or alike. Rather, she emphasizes paying attention to one's spiritual life and one's relationship to God:

Daily renewing of one's relationship to the Holy One puts one back in touch with the sacred foundation of all healing, all care. This, in turn, prepares us, again and again, for a use of the self in pastoral care that can be a channel of grace for both participants in the caring relationship.

White's approach, of course, has a more Christian focus than mine. She emphasizes the role of grace and the role of personal prayer in the God relationship. For me -- as for many Jews -- Torah, and the study of it, plays the more central role in maintaining that relationship. The lesson is that Torah study -- especially study for its own sake (Torah Lishma ) and the curiosity it cultivates -- is the ultimate Jewish approach to the kind of self-care we are interested in for spiritual caregivers. Its aimlessness renews us. It invigorates us and prepares us for the rigors of facing the pain and loss of others with an open, curious and caring heart.

Other non-Jewish thinkers whose works I have been reading, especially bell hooks and Parker Palmer, also emphasize the importance of self-care for the truly effective teacher or spiritual caregiver -- the kind of teacher/caregiver who can help people engage in the kind of learning that involves personal transformation and growth.

I also found this recently in reviewing Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer with my summer chaplain students. Nouwen (pg. 76) talks about a "promise", one that was first given to Abraham and later to Moses. This promise -- not any "self-confidence derived from . . personality, nor on specific expectations for the future," is the true foundation on which the spiritual leader must find his or her strength, Nouwen says. "Without this hope, we will never be able to see value and meaning in the encounter with a decaying human being and become personally concerned. This hope stretches far beyond the limitations of one's own psychological strength, for it is anchored not just in the soul of the individual but in God's self-disclosure in history."

Nouwen goes on to say that the spiritual leader who hopes to find satisfaction in seeing "concrete results" from his or her work is "building a house on sand instead on on solid rock."

If all I could do this summer is leave my students with an understanding of the wisdom of those last words I have quoted from Nouwen then I will have more than done my job. The work of a person in ministry -- whether he or she be a rabbi, like myself, or of some other faith tradition -- only rarely is manifest in concrete results that we will see with our own eyes in our own lifetime. We do not know how -- or when -- we truly touch the hearts and souls of others. Thus, we must have faith. Our faith has to be in our understanding of our task, of what we do, and in the authority of what we do. And we must renew the source of that faith regularly. Torah is our way.

Judaism meets the chaplain – the “House of Inquiry” at the middle

At the rabbinical school I went to, we had a place we called the Beit Midrash/בית מדרש. To the untrained eye, it might have looked something like a library. It had books on bookshelves. It had tables and chairs. But it was anything but a place of silence. In fact, when it was full the sound of study became nothing short of a roar. People had books in front of them, but they were not reading them alone. They read them to each other out loud. People were thinking and analyzing and debating and creating, but the product was not a typed paper, or anything written at all. Instead, people were speaking their thoughts to one another. This was a kind of live-learning that only happened if we were all together. If there was any end product of this collective endeavor, it was within the minds and souls of the participants, not something on paper with the name of a single author on it.

In that Beit Midrash – and in the ones at the other Jewish institutions that nurtured me on my way to becoming a rabbi – I learned to love a particularly Jewish approach to learning. An approach that valued learning being done in groups or pairs, instead of the individual-focused and paper-writing-obsessed model of academia. An approach that might have seemed aimless to the person unfamiliar with it. An approach that upheld, in particular, the seemingly aimless value of Torah Lishma/תורה לשמה, Torah study for its own sake (as opposed to studying to achieve any particular goal). But, it would not quite be accurate to say Torah Lishma has no aim. Its aim is about cultivating something in the individual – transforming him or her to be a better person, one closer to God. One who knows better how to follow God's will. One who knows better how to care for his or her fellows -- something like the aim of learning through personal transformation that we have in chaplaincy education.

This summer – my first leading a chaplaincy education program on my own – I've had a chance to figure out how I can bring the educational and spiritual forms I have learned on my Jewish path to the multi-faith sphere that is Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).

Last week we hit the middle of our program, a time when many programs do a mid-term review where the students take stock of what learning they have done, where they have been surprised and what they would like to do with the remainder of their time in the program. Many times this is done by each student writing a paper on their own. When I was a summer student, our supervisor asked us to express ourselves artistically by making collages that we shared with the rest of the group.

But I wanted to bring the model of the Beit Midrash – literally the House of Inquiry – into CPE. I decided that our learning should be done out loud and together. I did ask the students to reflect a bit on their own first and gave them some questions to think about. But most of the work was done out loud. We devoted about 25 minutes to each of our five students (mostly young, Protestant seminary students) over the course of one long morning and then spent 30 minutes reflecting on how we had been functioning and developing as a group. The students were very active in asking each other questions and most of the time I was able to do what I like to do most as a group facilitator – just sit back and enjoy how well the group is functioning on its own with only the slightest of interventions from me.

To be honest, it was only upon reflection that I realized how well what I had chosen to do fit the model of the Beit Midrash that I want to bring into CPE. I also realized that another aspect of how I had organized my summer program well reflected the live-learning and collective/group-learning values of the Beit Midrash – I have a minimum of ndividual writing requirements in my program. Most programs set an individual requirement for how many verbatims (detailed written reports on a patient visit) a student needs to write during the unit. Most of those get presented to the full group, but if there's not enough time in the group not all of them get presented. I, however, turned this kind of requirement on its head. I started with a group requirement for the number of verbatim presentations we would do (three a week, more than some other programs), and asked the students to set up a schedule on their own of who would present when. No verbatims would be written and not presented.

___________

Above I mentioned that when I was a summer student, we had done an artistic mid-term evaluation. As a person who personally prefers the written word as a means of expression (I can't even draw a straight line!) I hated this! So, I was surprised to see art playing such a central and effective role in our mid-term evaluation last week. Early in the week, an art therapist at our hospital had come in and done an exercise with our students. He gave them a simple exercise to carry out in clay – create a representation of a wall, of yourself and of the relationship between the two. I was stunned to see how the sculptures the students created reflected so well what I had assessed their learning issues to be. We were able to use the images from these sculptures during our discussions as a springboard for analysis and as metaphors for what the students were experiencing. It was very rich and helped make the mid-term evaluation the great success I believe it was.

I am so proud of my students. They are working so hard to engage the very challenging learning issues that the work of caring for people in an intense hospital environment brings up every day. I hope they find blessing – and much learning – in the weeks remaining!

It's about the grief, stupid

Congregational life can be fraught with problems. Factions form and feud. Some people like the clergy person and other people sharply criticize him or her. People become wounded and angry. Sometimes they leave the congregation.

All this can drive the clergy person nuts. He or she ends up running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, desperately trying to put out fires here and there by trying to appease this person or that person. He or she starts to suspect that maybe some of the congregants are a bit crazy. Clergy "burn out" soon follows.

But there's another way. It comes from recognizing that the fights and complaints aren't always really about what they seem on the surface. It comes from looking at things with a pastoral eye -- with the eye of a spiritual caregiver -- and seeing that many times people are expressing grief. Grief does not just come from death. We grieve about many things, about losses of all kinds. Congregations experience many losses, especially if they find themselves shrinking, as many older congregations do. Programs close. Beloved staff leave. Individuals suffer losses in their own lives that they feel were not addressed by the clergy person. Unresolved grief accumulates. Anger lies not far behind.

I was reminded of all this yesterday when one of the alums of our chaplaincy education program here came to speak to our summer chaplaincy students about how she uses her clinical pastoral education (CPE) experience in the congregational setting. She said that being able to recognize grief as the real problem is extremely helpful for her. Once she recognize it, she can address it in the ways she learned to address the grief of patients and families in the hospital. She can work with folks to help them name their grief. She can help them to feel heard and listened to -- to feel cared for. And, almost like magic, the conflicts and anger often just melt away.

She also reminded me of how relevant the education we do here is to the work clergy will be doing in their congregations. Sometimes our students complain about how transitory their contacts are with the folks they minister to. At our hospital, we send a chaplain to every death to offer support to the family. Often this is the very first (and last) time the chaplain will meet these people. The chaplain will often come back to his or her colleagues an complain -- "if only this was the congregational setting! Then I would have a relationship with the people first."

But our speaker reminded us that the reality for the congregational clergy person is often that they will have had little or no contact with a family before a death. There will be one meeting with the family before the funeral and then the funeral itself. Our speaker said having had the experience with those kind of "blind dates" with people in mourning in our hospital prepared her well for this kind of experience around funerals.

Other basic pastoral skills that we work on in CPE were also helpful to her in her congregational work -- developing a listening presence and developing an understanding of how people function in groups (group dynamics).

The other big thing she emphasized was the importance of getting honest feedback from peers, another big thing we work on in CPE. This is especially true when you are having difficulty with congregants or board members. Sometimes when we complain to our peers about this what we get back is something to the effect of, "poor, dear, your congregants really do seem a bit difficult. That must be hard for you."

Well, that might help you feel better in the moment, but it's not really helpful in the long run. What's helpful is honest feedback that helps you understand things like the group dynamics and even where your actions have contributed to the problem. With that in hand, you can actually go on to heal the wounds . . . . . . from grief and otherwise.

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By the way, the title of this blog post is a reference to "It's the economy, stupid" from Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign against George H.W. Bush.

Torah Lishma and the Living Human Document

Studying Torah for no other purpose than the study itself -- תורה לשמה/torah lishma in Hebrew -- is one of Judaism's most central spiritual practices, approaching a level that prayer has for many Christians. This practice is not one I expect Christians to be familiar with, or to be easily able to understand.

So I found it highly suprising -- and also deeply rewarding -- when our (Lutheran) senior supervisor turned to me during a lecture he was giving to our summer chaplain students and said that what he was telling them was really the same as the concept of Torah Lishma that was at the core of how Alan (=me) is organizing their program of education.

He then went on to beautifully and succinctly describe how I apply the concept of Torah Lishma to the task of educating people about pastoral care: Torah Lishma, he said, is developing a lifelong love of learning (or curiosity) about the human predicament/experience for the sake of nothing but the relationship itself (whether that be a relationship through the study of the "living human document" that is a hospital patient in spritual distress or whether it be a relationship with God through the study of the Holy words/text God has given us).

Actually, what he said was a lot more succinct and articulate than that, but that's the basic idea.

What he was lecturing about at the moment he said that, by the way, was about a pastoral attitude that creates the possibility of forming relationship with the person you are ministering to. There are four attributes that contribute to that pastoral attitude (and they are the same four that formed the basis for the lecture I wrote about here is more detail in a post about meeting certification committees):

• Authority and assurance in your role (offering authority with an open attitude and hand)
• Understanding (of the human predicament)
• Being non-judgmental
  
• Empathy (conveying it accurately)

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I, by the way, used the term Torah Lishma a little differently in the syllabus I gave my students -- instead of describing it as an overarching theory about pastoral care and education, I made it the name for a single seminar where the students would teach one another. Here's how I described it

Starting to get real? (Midpoints and CPE)

I surprised myself this morning when I found myself banging my fist down on the table during a meeting with my summer chaplain students. "No," I said. "I want to hear what it was like to sit here in this room with this person and listen to this" traumatic experience the person had shared with us!

It's actually a pretty standard part of how I work as a chaplaincy supervisor/educator to bang my fist on the table, although I don't think I've done so much of it with this current group yet. My normal demeanor with students -- especially this group -- is one of a quiet gentleness (imagine a cuddly bear). But I have this other side of my personality that I (carefully) share when I feel a need to make sure a point is heard. This time, I wanted this students to get real. I wanted them to stop avoiding what I thought was the heart of the matter. I wanted them to confront their own experience-- their own (sometimes difficult and painful) feelings.

I would explain later in the session that this is a big part of what we do in clinical pastoral education -- we try and get real by confronting our own experience and feelings. . . . .Because we believe that meaning arises not from thoughts or intellectualizing, but from starting in our guts with the feelings -- the ones we can feel in our very bodies -- that arise with the concrete details of our experiences. . . . . Because the real task of pastoral care is about forming relationship with patients and families. . . . . . And if we don't show a willingness to inquire into their experiences -- and face our own experiences -- we have no hope of forming those relationships.

Another way of characterizing my table banging is as what Pamela Cooper White would call a use of the self. That is, there was some genuine feeling -- in this case some anger and frustration -- behind my words and actions. But it wasn't an uncontrolled release. Rather, it was a very intentional use of what was going on for me genuinely in the moment.

I've noticed that I'm starting to do more of this getting real -- or use of self -- in recent days with my students. About a week ago, I first noticed myself doing it in a group session (I'm writing a longer blog post about my 'roaring like a lion' there that I hope to -- finally! -- finish and post soon). And I've been doing it in my individual sessions with them also, being willing to share things like "I feel pushed away by you just now". I feel that the sessions are now starting to go to a deeper level.

I'm not sure why that is happening. It might be my greater use of self. Or it might just be that we're now in the fifth week of a 11-week program. Maybe the students are just now ready to start getting real.

______________________

As I said above, I have a blog post (well, really more than a few!) that I have started writing that I have not posted, yet. With the intensity of leading this program, It's been really hard so far to find time for blogging and other reflection. For a person who is committed to a learning model that emphasizes action and reflection, this is obviously not a good thing. But I'm trying to be compassionate with myself about it. This is my first time leading a summer CPE unit solo and things have really been going well with the students. . . . Maybe my reflection (and the learning that comes from it) will just have to wait until it's over! :)

Keeping the frame, keeping your cool

I learned a lot in my first full week with my summer chaplain students (this past week). I had some anxiety going into the week as I had not really scripted out minute-by-minute exactly what I was going to be doing on each of the five full mornings of educational program that we had together. I knew that it is very important to give students some sense of a stable and predictable frame, especially in the early weeks of a program, and I was afraid that if I didn't have such a scripted program prepared for them there would not be enough of a frame.

But, in the end, I decided two things as we were entering the week:

• 1) More important than having a scripted frame for these students, was having a supervisor who was not wracked by anxiety (and who could therefore be able to be present for them and be able to listen -- and respond -- to their concerns).
• 2) That a frame could be set just by having predictable start and end times for the educational program.

So, what I did was throw away my the expectation I was putting on myself that there should be a scripted program. Instead, I had a list of important things I wanted to get to during the week. Each day, I decided which ones I would try and get to during our time based on what we had been able to do the day before. I think it worked pretty well and maintained for the students both a predictable frame and a supervisor who was able to be present to them.

It surprised me that I was able to do it this way. I had often witnessed my supervisor taking this kind of (relatively) unscripted approach, but I thought I would be different from him in this regard when I took on this kind of task on my own. It turns out I was more like him than I thought I would be. But, I was, as I wrote in my last post, different in one important respect -- I used the group, rather than individual setting, much more for the initial work of asking students what they wanted to do and how they hoped to do it.

The next two days are the holiday of Shavuot, and I will be unable to be with my students. This will -- in congruence with my theory of supervision -- give a good opportunity for much needed צי מצום/tzimzum from me for them.

I look forward to hearing from them about their experiences when I get back.

Exhausted . . . and having a ball!

We are approaching the end of our second week of our summer chaplain intern program (the first I am leading) and I am finding myself feeling quite exhausted. At the same time, I am very excited. This week, especially, has been fun for me. I decided to make this a week of special focus on the educational side of Clinical Pastoral Education, so we're are spending all of our mornings engaged in the business of an introduction to the ways we do learning in CPE. This is shaping up to look a bit different than I've ever seen CPE done before. For example, we're doing things in group (we have five students) that I've always seen done individually between student and supervisor in the past -- like, today, when we talked through the student's goals in the group.

I won't be meeting individually with my students in a formal way until next week. The first session is an important one because it sets the framework for the relationship. I believe it is important for that framework to be one characterized by mutuality. I plan on following a pretty standard agenda for that first session to try and make that happen:

• 1) Explain to the student what I think individual supervision is about.
• Here, I am going to base myself in large part upon the approach of my supervisor.
  
• 2) Tell the student that, for that to work, we having to have a mutual understanding (or covenant).
• By the way, I think this business of 'covenant' is particularly important to me in supervision. It relates back to how important I think the issue of 'consent' is in doing pastoral care with patients. We believe in not trying to care for anyone without their consent. This is partly for ethical reasons, but it is also about maintaining quality in pastoral care -- if the patient has not truly consented to be care for, then he or she will not truly share of themselves. And, if they don't do that, then the chaplain has not chance of coming to truly understand their experience, and thus be able to care for them. . . It is the same with the student, if you don't truly have their consent, then they will not share with you. They will hide their 'pastoral care dilemmas' from you, and thus you will not have an opportunity to help them grow and learn. . . . This really becomes an issue because their are many students who do CPE under a requirement from the denomination from which they are seeking ordination. . . Can a consent from such a student really ever be a true one?
• 3) And so, I need to ask them two questions
• How open and honest about your experience are you willing to be with me?
• How open and honest do you want to to be in my feedback to you (especially, about how I experience you)?
• 4) Tell the student they have a right to "I don't want to talk about that now."
• I think this relates back to the core issue of consent.
• 5) Conclude by focusing the conversation on the student's learning by telling them it's important to understand their goals. Ask them what you want to accomplish while you're here?
• This final question has the potential to transform an _involuntary_ situation (that is, of the student who doesn't want to be doing CPE, but is required to do so) into one that can feel voluntary to the student. That is, once you've both acknowledged that the student is going to be there even if he or she does not want to be, you can say, "ok, now since you're going to be here, anyway, what would you like to do with this time?"

I feel confident that I have a good chance of forming meaningful relationships of genuine mutuality with all of these students. The key issue at this early point in a program is trust. I think that these first two weeks have created an environment where trust is possible. We've done that by taking a team approach to orienting our students and getting them started in their clinical work. This is very different than the way I experienced my first unit of CPE. Then, the only people we had meaningful contact with during our orientation were our supervisors. But, our students this summer have had regular and meaningful contact from the git-go with our staff chaplains and our chaplain residents. I think that's hugely important and is the reason I assess our orientation -- led by our chaplain residents (thank you, chaplain residents!) -- as having been highly successful.

"Twice taught" -- me and groups in CPE

One of the challenging things on the path to becoming a certified trainer/supervisor of chaplains and other spiritual caregivers is that you need to do a lot of "book learning", but few training programs have classes on the things you need to learn. That means you have to do a lot of studying on your own.

For me, the best way to do this learning is to be what one of my old students called "twice taught". That is, in order to learn it for myself what I really need to do is teach it to others. Today, I did that with the theory of groups in our field of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE).

I used Google Docs to put together my presentation (below). It was mostly a discussion and part of it was very specific to the residency group I was teaching, but it might nonetheless be useful to some. I'm happy to share it!

Submission in CPE -- the power and the authority

I had a teacher in rabbinical school who insisted that if you wanted to truly become a rabbi you had to find somebody to be your rabbi and you had to submit yourself to that person.

I rejected that at the time (as a dangerous and perhaps even idolatrous practice), and I still reject it, today. But my experience as a person who supervises chaplain students and directs them in their learning has given me a different perspective on the issues of authority and submission to it.

There is one kind of submission to authority that is surely necessary for the learning process to work-- you have to accept the authority of that learning process. That is, you have to accept the potential of that learning process to teach you something and you have to buy into the method that underlies that learning process.

But getting people to buy into the potential of the process to teach them something is especially problematic in clinical pastoral education (CPE). That's because learning in CPE is unlike most kinds of learning that people have been exposed to in their lives. First of all, learning in CPE is mostly _not_ about the usual educational tasks of acquiring information or learning established techniques -- learning in CPE is about self-transformation. That is, it is about change. And change hurts. People resist it like crazy even when it's in their best interest. Kurt Lewin's force field theory is one of the many ways we have of understanding resistance to change.

And, because the change CPE offers the potential of is such a personal kind of change it can involve people revisiting some of the most personal and painful parts of their lives. For example, a person with a history of sexual abuse will have to revisit those experiences if he or she is going to be able to get to the point where he or she can minster to other abuse survivors without either closing his or herself off from the patient or, alternatively, becoming overwhelmed by feelings while talking with the patient. And who would want to revist such horrible experiences? No wonder people resist the authority of the CPE learning model!

The question, then, becomes how do you help students accept the authority of the learning model? My old rabbinical school teacher seemed to suggest that what's needed is kavod harav/כבוד הרב -- honor of the master or teacher. That is, she suggested that students must be more respectful of their teachers and submit to their authority.

But I think she had it all backwards. What's needed is not kavod harav, but kavod hatalmid/כבוד התלמיד -- honor of the student. That is, the teacher needs to honor the student. I don't mean giving the student everything he or she wants. I mean treating the student with an attitude of respect and service. I mean learning to love and accept the student as being made in the image of God and being able to feel compassion for them.

What kavod hatalmid does is create room for the student to find his or her way of accepting the authority of the process and the authority of the teacher/supervisor. That's when the learning can begin.

Stages of CPE -- Are we pushing our students too far?

At a recent chaplaincy conference in Dallas, the speaker laid out a challenge to the people who educate chaplains and clergy about how to care for sick and hurting people: Most of the people training to be clergy these days are no longer highly educated folks pursuing masters degrees and doctorates in seminaries, said Elizabeth Conde-Frazier (of the Claremont School of Theology). Rather, they're less educated folks (who generally have more conservative theologies) at Bible Colleges. And chaplaincy education -- founded by highly educated white, male (mostly Protestant) folks -- has a long way to go if it's going to be able to reach out to Bible College people and find a way to accept them into the world of professional chaplains, Conde-Frazier told the room full of the spiritual care educators of the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE) on October 25.

I was thinking of Conde-Frazier's challenge this week at a regional conference of spiritual care educators (otherwise known as CPE supervisors) I was attending (at a wonderful retreat center) in Stony Point, NY. The speakers there gave us a framework for helping us with understanding -- and with working with -- Conde-Frazier's challenge: the adult development theory of developmental psychologist Robert Kegan.

Developmental theory has been around for a long time, but it's mostly been applied to understanding the development of children. It has special application to the education of children. It helps educators understand when they are pushing a child too hard and when they are not pushing a child hard enough. If a child, for example, has not developed to the point where he or she is capable of abstract thought then you would be pushing the child too hard to demand abstract thinking from them and they will only become frustrated and discouraged. But, if you don't push them hard -- including making them feel frustrated sometimes! -- to make the leap to abstract thought when they have developed to the point that they are just about ready, they may never make that developmental leap.

Kegan, and others, have worked to extend developmental theory to adults. The conference speakers, who both studied under Kegan at Harvard, said that in CPE our official standards, in effect, ask us to push students to the highest level most adults are capable of ever reaching -- Kegan's stage 4.

The speakers called stage 4 "The self-authoring mind." Unlike people at the earlier stages, the person at this stage does not need an authority or institution to tell him or her what is right or wrong or what is the right thing to do. They don't think something is right just because the church says so or their rabbi told them so -- they can, and will, decide that on their own. Similarly, the person at stage 4 is not threatened when people disagree with him or her. They see such conflict and critique as productive. If someone says to them, "you're a bad person!" they might say, "oh, that's interesting, why do you say that?" whereas an earlier stage person would seek to defend his or herelf -- "no I'm not! How can you say that!?"

The problem with this framework is that some people might find it offensive in that it implies an implicit criticism of their beliefs. For example, for many Orthodox Jews, accepting the authority of a rabbi (and going to him for a ruling on whether something is permissible or not) is a central part of their belief system (which they understand as coming from God!). Kegan seems to be saying that such an Orthodox person would be intentionally hobbling his or her development, and thus an Orthodox person might find his theory offensive. Conservative Christians might feel the same way.

For spiritual care educators (like myself) the challenge put to us by the speakers in Stony Point is clear: If CPE really demands that people reach stage 4 in order to become certified chaplains or certified educators of chaplains than maybe we are walling off our group to the Orthodox Jews and the conservative Christians of the world. And can we really justify doing that? Also, since the speakers found a correlation between how educated a person is and how likely they are to reach stage 4, are we cutting off the less educated and people from less-privileged economic backgrounds? In other words, it's the diversity question. [And, are we valuing things that have little or nothing to do with patient care?]

One thing that is interesting to contemplate are the parallels between Kegan's theory and James Fowler's Stages of Faith. Here, side-by-side are Fowler's stages 3-6 and Kegan's 2-5 (as described by the conference speakers, Deborah Helsing of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Kathleen Pakos Rimer, an Episcopal priest):

Fowler	Kegan
Stage 3 - "Synthetic-Conventional" faith (arising in adolescence) characterized by conformity	Stage 2 - "The Instrumental Mind" Capacity for concrete thought Orients to explicit cause and effect Dualistic
Stage 4 – "Individuative-Reflective" faith (usually mid-twenties to late thirties) a stage of angst and struggle. The individual takes personal responsibility for their beliefs and feelings.	Stage 3: "The Socializing Mind" Capacity for abstract thought Authority is external Orients to inner states
Stage 5 – "Conjunctive" faith (mid-life crisis) acknowledges paradox and transcendence relating reality behind the symbols of inherited systems	Stage 4: "The Self-Authoring Mind" Authority is internal Conflict and critique as productive Responsible for and can regulate inner states
Stage 6 – "Universalizing" faith, or what some might call "enlightenment".	Stage 5: "The Inter-Institutional Mind" Orientation toward dialectical, paradoxical Underlying morals and values that precede social institutions The self as incomplete, in process evolving

Note that in both frameworks the understanding is that very few people ever reach the final stage. . . . . have you. :)

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By the way, the example the speakers used to illustrate the transition from a three to a four (under Kegan's framework) was Nora from Ibsen's A Doll's House, which is available on DVD in a version starring Anthony Hopkins. (#*#)