Authority from exposing our wounds

With the fast approach of the summer -- a summer where for the first time I will be "flying solo" in leading a group of seminarians and others through the intense full-time experience of learning and ministering to others (as a hospital chaplain) that we call a summer unit of CPE -- I am thinking a lot about where my "power and authority" come from. What is it that gives me the right to stand before these folks and present myself as someone who can aid in their learning?

As someone who might have something to give them? Paul Steinke -- one of the great fonts of wisdom that I have come across in my journey of becoming a chaplaincy and spiritual care educator/supervisor -- today gave me a new and challenging way of thinking about this. In a presentation at a chaplaincy conference at a wonderful retreat center, he said authority comes from telling our own stories to our students. But not just any stories. Stories about our wounds. Stories about out mistakes.

This is some difficult wisdom for me to hear. One of the first things we try to teach many of our beginning students is to not share their own stories with the patients they are ministering to in the hospital. We teach them that sharing their own stories takes the focus of the encounter off the patient, and that they should instead learn to elicit -- and listen to -- the stories of the patients. And we teach them that there is something profoundly healing for the suffering person in having the opportunity to have their story -- especially the story of their suffering (which friends and family often are just not up to hearing) -- heard.

But Steinke challenged me in my own work to grow to the point where I have the confidence to know when I am telling my story to distract from the other person's tale and when I am telling it to help them. He said that chaplaincy supervisors should model this kind of story telling for their students. And it is from that -- not from any title given to us by the hospital or anybody else -- that our most important source of authority, especially the authority to teach, emerges. Another important thing Steinke reminded me of about this is that these kind of stories need to be filled with concrete details and not be told in terms of generalities. It is in the details that something truly important unique comes to be, he said.

While I learned quite a bit from Steinke, today -- much more than I've had time to write about here! -- this is not the first time I've thought about or written about these issues. In December, I wrote about this from the perspective of submission. There, I was more focused on what the student needs to do for learning to happen in CPE (that the student needs to accept at least the authority/possibility of the CPE process teaching them something). . . . . Now, I'm thinking about what I, as the supervisor and teacher, have to do. I have to coax the authority from my students. And telling more of my own stories and struggles is one way to do that. So, one of my goals for this summer will be to start doing more of that with my students.

In that regard, I'd like to express my thanks to one of my students I worked with for the last six months or so. He constantly demanded that I share more of myself and compared me to former teachers who had done that with him. I resisted that as a challenge to my authority and position. But I now see that his challenging of me made me more open to hearing Steinke's message, today.

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Here are some of the stories from Steinke used in his presentation on Power and Authority

• The boy knows the truth, by I. Singer.
  
• The conversion of the Jews, by P. Roth
• The Management of Grief by Bharati Mukherjee
• from The Middleman and Other Stories
• Eudora Welty - The Worn Path
• Found in this collection.

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.