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.

_____________

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.

_____________

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.

_____________

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.

A pen that truly was mightier than the sword -- goodbye Solzhenitsyn

It's been so long now since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that we may have forgotten what an amazing achievment that event was. I know that I had long had little hope that the 10s of millions of people of Eastern Europe could ever be liberated from the Soviet yoke that fell upon the late 1940s in the wake of World War II.

But there were a small number of people who did not lose hope. They risked their lives to fight the mighty Soviet system. For the most part, they fought completely alone. They did not use guns or bombs, but words and ideas. Their weapons were hope and courage and righteous outrage. Chief among them was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died today.

As a teen his books consumed me, starting with the amazing One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, his chilling description of one person's day living in a concentration camp. Like Orwell's Animal Farm, this novella amazed me for how much it was able to do with the simplest of language and images, and how few words it used. It was as damning an indictment of the Soviet system that could be imagined. In Western Europe, many on the left had continued to idealize the Soviet system in the first decades after World War II, and considered American capitalism to be the greater threat to humanity. Solzhenitsyn almost singlehandedly crushed that terrible misconception.

And he did not just write short works. Cancer Ward and The First Circle were huge novels that deeply impacted me. Their images were rich. They were indeed indictments of the Soviet system, but they were about much more as well.

Aleksandr, I thank you for what you gave us.

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.

Finding the holy in the human -- this winter at Oraita

This summer of educating a group of young, student chaplains encountering the often inspiring struggles of patients against their illnesses and losses has left me with a deeper sense of the miracle that is the human spirit, a spirit that I understand as being a product of the fact that we humans were formed in the image of the divine.

So, I was so exited to hear that the focus of Oraita's next continuing education retreat for rabbis will be on this very subject -- the Divine Image (or btzelem elohim, in Hebrew). The retreat will be on January 12-15. There is generous funding available for the rabbis who attend. I had the priviledge of attending Oraita's first retreat last October and it was truly a life-changing experience.

If you'd like to know more, contact Rabbi Natan Margalit (nmargalit@hebrewcollege.edu or by phone: 617-559-8617). Or check out the Web page at www.hebrewcollege.edu/Oraita.

A rabbi starts packing

God willing, on August 25th I will be getting on a plane to Israel for a two month visit. What does a rabbi bring with him/her on a trip? Books!

To the right is my first cut of books I had in the office that I think I'd like to take with me. I have at least as many books at home that I've picked out. And I haven't even begun to think about the bibles and other holy books I'd like with me.

Now, in my defense, I've made a commitment to my supervisor to spend these two months doing the reading and writing I need to do for the next step in my certification process as a chaplaincy supervisor. Most of the books to the right are ones that might help me with writing the papers that are a part of that.

But, it will be quite an effort to winnow the books down. I'm limiting myself to 50 lbs. of books, which means maybe 40 or so volumes. . . . I just counted. There's 39 books just in the two stacks in the picture! . . Clearly I have a lot of work to do. :)

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.

___________

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.

Old man mountain sipping

One thing I always find difficult on long, summer rides is finding time to drink water. Once those two 22 oz. water bottles mounted on the bike are gone, drinking water means stopping and getting off the bike to get water out of my panniers. And I hate stopping while on a ride.

So, I've always admired those Camelbak's that let people sip water through a tube while riding without having to even use your hands. But, the problem is the the water has to be stored somewhere, and a Camelbak means carrying the water on your back. And I hate having things on my back while riding even more than I hate getting off the bike!

The obvious solution is to store the water somewhere on the bike and run a tube from there. I first experimented with this at the beginning of the summer on my Rhode Island bike tour. I mounted a low rider front rack on my bike and ran a tube from a water bladder in the left front pannier. From a drinking perspective, that worked really well. From a riding perspective, it didn't. I really didn't like having something heavy like water on one side of the front wheel. If I'm going to have water on the front of the bike, I want it centered over the front wheel.

The solution is a front rack with where you can put things on top of the rack, not just on the sides (as with a typical low rider rack). While reading Vik's Big Dummy, I saw he had a rack that looked like exactly what I wanted. It's made by a company called Old Man Mountain. I bought one and it came just the other day. It's exactly what I wanted. In the pic above, I have a 2.5 liter Platypus water bag mounted on top of the rack with a tube leading from it. I tried it out the other day and it worked great. . . . Now if I can only find the time to actually ride. :)

Google Docs offline is here!!!

I'm so excited. Now the very best way to edit and organize your documents no longer requires you to be connected to the Internet in order to use it.

The greatest advantage of Google Docs -- Google's free on-line word processor, spread sheet and presentation program -- is, indeed, its interaction with the Internet. You can just edit your documents from any computer (connected to the Internet) at any time. No more fumbling with discs or flash drives or time wasted wondering what directory or on what computer I stored a file (or, worse, wondering if you have the latest version or not).

But, unfortunately, there are still times when I'm not connected to the Internet (like when I'm traveling). It will be so great to know that, at those times, I will still have instant access on my laptop to every file I would need.

[I first wrote about the possibility of this feature in May of last year.]

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)

_______________

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

The death of the milk crate

I thought the New York Times' story on a new style of gallon milk jugs really missed the headline: It's not that people will have to learn to pour their milk a bit differently; it's that the change will lead to the disappearance of the milk crate -- that nearly indestructible construction of plastic that generations of college students and others have used (often after a creative acquisition) to create low-cost furniture and other useful things (note the pic on the right for one interesting example).

Of course, I'm sure we will still be able to buy milk crate-like storage crates at Office Depot and alike, but I will still be sad a bit for the loss of the real thing.

___________________________________________

Here's the Times's graphic explaining the change:

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! :)

Comedian as hero

I was saddened this morning to hear of George Carlin's death. I didn't always love his work -- there was just a bit too much bitterness in much of his stand-up comedy for my taste -- but I always felt deep respect for him as an artist. These words from the The New York Times' obituary express some of what's behind my feeling:

Although some criticized parts of his later work as too contentious, Mr. Carlin defended the material, insisting that his comedy had always been driven by an intolerance for the shortcomings of humanity and society. “Scratch any cynic,” he said, “and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.”

And that's really what he was -- an idealist. Comedy, for Carlin, was not just a way to make people laugh, it was a way to try and change the world. A way to expose injustice and the absurdity behind the bureaucratic systems that allow injustice to thrive.

George, we'll really miss ya.

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.

Summer self-care (and Rhode Island)

One of the greatest challenges for me this summer (of an intense 11 weeks of leading a Clinical Pastoral Education unit solo for the first time) will be taking care of myself, what I like to call self-care. My history -- when I have a challenge I am excited about -- is one of working myself into a frenzy and burning out before it's over.

That may happen, again. But I'm going to try and be conscious about maintaining more of a balance this time. Bicycle riding is an important component of self-care for me. We're only in the fourth day of the unit, but so far I've managed to go out for two after-work bike rides, both of about 15 miles. And I'm going to try and go for a longer one Sunday (instead of doing prep work all day!).

More importantly, I think, is that I started out with a bike ride. That is -- on the very wise advice of my supervisor -- I took a week's vacation before the unit started. My girlfriend and I went on a wonderful short bike tour in Rhode Island, starting in Mystic, CT, and going to Block Island and back. It was great!

Here's a map of our route:

View Larger Map

Trusting in the process, trusting in CPE -- a new summer begins

Trust is an issue very much on my mind these days. In the news, we have a former presidential press spokesman accusing his former colleagues of lying to him (and, in turn, they are accusing him of breaking his bond of trust with them). And, in the world of chaplaincy, we have a new article asking people seeking (as I am) approval as chaplaincy supervisors/educators to "trust the process". And, here at my hospital, I am asking five new students to trust me for the next 11 weeks of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) as their teacher and supervisor.

Trust has not always come easy to me. This time last year I certainly did not -- much to the frustration of my supervisor -- trust the process for becoming a CPE supervisor. It seemed highly random to me, and to involve inflicting a lot of unnecessary pain on people as they went before committee after committee that put their lives -- and their dearest hopes and fears -- under a microscope. But since then I was approved as a candidate by one such committee. The approval process now makes more sense to me and seems less random. I don't want to lose touch with the critique I had of it before, but I am closer to being able to trust the process.

Committee appearances will not again be a part of my process for some time now. The place where I am in my process now is to, for the first time, be the solo supervisor of a CPE summer unit, a unit that began on Tuesday. I say "solo", but I don't really feel alone in this task. It's been part of my life history to try and function alone. But, I've been more able to trust this time. I trusted the orientation of our new students to other students -- our CPE residents (who are with us for one full year). I've sat through many of their orientation presentations this week. Sometimes I felt my trust leaving me in those moments. I wanted to leap out of my chair and steal the lead role away from them -- to take over, thinking that I could do it better.

But I've been successful (mostly!) at continuing to trust and in staying in my chair. I've been able to feel the wisdom in that and to be able to appreciate how, in many ways, these residents are doing a better that I could ever do. They see things I can't seen. They know things about what it means to be a new student that I have forgotten. Also, my showing trust for them, demonstrates to the new students that I have a capacity for trust (and, perhaps, that I can be trusted).

My key task over the coming days will be able to find trust also in my five students (four of them young protestant seminary students and one a Catholic priest from Nigeria). I need to be able to trust them to know what they need to learn, how they need to learn and at what pace they can learn. It will be hard for me to do this, but it is important. For, if I do not show trust for them, they are unlikely to trust me. And, if they do not trust me, they are unlikely to grow in their trust for each other as a group.

That trust as a group is so important for the kind of learning we hope to do in CPE. We want the students to be able to use each other as a resource -- a resource for learning more about how other people experience them as a person. Do people know me as warm? Do people experience me as aggressive (maybe even when I think I'm being warm)? Am I pushing people away (even when I am thinking I am drawing them closer)? If we can get people to trust us enough to tell us the truth about these things we might even have an opportunity to grow to be able to eliminate these inconstancies. But, to do that we will also need to be able to trust those others enough to accept their feedback.

In the coming days, I will be working to foster that environment of trust between me and my students and between each other. There are two important things I will seek to do to help that along:

• 1) Emphasize the new student's strengths (naming them and helping them identify them for themselves).
• 2) As much as possible, make my feedback on a group level, as opposed to singling individuals out.

____________________

I feel like this post has been rambling a bit, but I am ok with that. The main customer I have always envisioned for this blog is myself. That is not to say that I don't hope other people will read it (and that I would appreciate it when they do!). It's that I write here mostly because it helps me. It helps me organize my thoughts and to discern between what truly is and is not possible. It helps me better focus on the things that are truly important to me.

I have been writing less here than I have in the post. Last year, between April and October I was averaging nearly 15 posts a month; this year it's only been around four a month, and many of those have been short.

There's a lot of reasons for the change. One is that I met a wonderful woman last October and that my 'real world' relationship with her has distracted me from this 'virtual world'. But, I think the answer is more complex than just that. Somehow, whatever it was that this blog was doing for me all those prolific months is no longer as important. Or, it is being done in other ways.

But I do wonder if the intensity of the summer to come with my students will reawaken my blog life. I was driven to contemplate that this morning by reading another chaplain's blog (Episcopal Chaplain at the Bedside) where he mentioned my blog along with those of of CPE students who are blogging about their summer experiences.

So, I am looking forward to this summer, and to finding out if blogging comes to meet my needs. And to finding out if I can indeed trust, and be trusted.

A caring community (Zalman’s legacy)

As the summer fast approaches, and I prepare to lead a group of chaplain students through an intense full-time summer of learning, I’ve had opportunity to consider how it is that it might be possible to teach people about how to care for – and about – others. One way I think it happens is through community – by joining and participating in a caring community of fellow caregivers. Caregivers who just don’t care for patients or their congregants, but who make it their business to care for each other as well.

This Monday, looking at all my fellow former rabbinical students who had come from around the country to be with a former classmate of ours who had just lost his teenage son, I felt affirmed in my sense of the importance of community. This is what we had learned in rabbinical school – not just about words of Torah, but about acts of caring. We knew that when Zalman lost his hold on life in this world – six months after his tragic and unexpected heart attack – it was time to get on a plane, something many of us did even before the funeral was scheduled.

But the real community of caring that I witnessed was not the one of us rabbi and rabbinical student colleagues who had gathered from far and wide. Rather, it was the community that Zalman himself had called together – the communities of people, friends and family, who had known, and loved, him during his too brief life. The people who had been inspired by his energy and love for life. And, the people who had cared for him these many months – most of them spent in the front room of his family home in Topanga Canyon. The people whose caring for him, even in the face of his inability to speak since his heart attack, had also brought caring for one another. The people in that community of caring that we saw gathered Monday up high on that hill where Zalman was laid in the ground beside running water and where his friends and family, as is the Jewish way, shoveled the dirt down onto his grave.

May his memory be a blessing.

_____________

One thing that one of my friends noted to me after the funeral was that, while many rabbis spoke, hardly any mention of God was made. In their words, none of these rabbis felt any need to explain how God could have allowed this to happen, or to urge people to keep their faith in God despite such a tragedy. To my friend, this struck him as a very Jewish thing.

I was grateful to him for sharing that with me and I found it very affirming. As a Jew who works in a hospital and ministers almost exclusively to Christians, I often struggle with the tension between how reluctant I am to engage in “Godspeak” and how much my patients, and chaplain students, seem to need that very Godspeak. I’ve learned to stretch myself quite a deal in this regard and, for example, to gain a good deal of comfort and skill in offering spontaneous prayers for patients and family members. I am indeed comfortable with that “stretching”, but it was good to be reminded of where I come from and who I am at my core. It was good to be reminded what it means to be a Jew, to belong to his incredible community that endures over the stretches of space and of time.

The wounds of our Sages -- the truths that bind us across faiths

One of the most striking texts I know in rabbinic literature is one where the Rabbis of some two thousand years ago ask an audacious question -- perhaps it would have been better for humans never to have been created in the first place?

When I first read it, this text really disturbed me. How could people of faith -- especially in a faith tradition that reveres life so much -- possibly even ask such a question? Hadn't God declared the life God created to be "good" at the beginning of the book of Genesis? Would it not be blasphemy to reject God's good creation?

In the years since, I have come to see this text differently, and, in fact, it has come to have deep personal and spiritual meaning for me.

Nonetheless, it was with much trepidation that I brought this text on Monday before a group of Christian and Jewish clergy who had come together for an interfaith dialog in New York. The topic of the moment was "Problem Texts", texts from our Holy literatures -- and there are many -- that can seem troublesome because they might appear to advocate hate or intolerance or have other problems. I was anxious about bringing it because, in it, the Rabbis do not just ask the question. They answer it. They say it would have been best for humankind not to have been created.

And so it was with much joy that I heard my colleagues responding with reactions similar to mine when I presented this text at the "Colleagues in Dialogue" meeting of the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding. One woman -- a cantor who is the spiritual leader of a Reform congregation in New Jersey -- said this text made the ancient Rabbis seem more human and more accessible to her. Another person saw in it a troubling existential question that bothers many -- why did God not create me perfect?

There are so many deep meanings for me in this text. I don't think the Rabbis were literally saying it would be better if God had never created us. Rather, I think they're acknowledging a painful and universal truth -- life, as beautiful and wondrous as it is, is full of suffering. You can see it in almost every room of the hospital. And so much of it is inexplicable. It's a mystery. Why would God create a world where a 40-year old woman gets cancer and leaves her children without a mother? Why would God create a world where even children can get cancer and suffer unspeakable pain and even die? What sort of loving God would do that?

And, in the face of so much inexplicable suffering -- whether it be our own, or that of others -- sometimes the person who has any kind of compassion or empathy in his or her heart is just going to want to give up. Just throw in the towel. Even -- if just for a fleeting moment -- wish one had never been born.

It's a comfort to me to know that I am not alone in having these kinds of thoughts and feelings -- that even the wisest ones of my Sages experienced them as well. It makes me feel less alone in my darker moments, moments that are unavoidable if I am to open my heart up to others who are in pain and be a chaplain and spiritual caregiver to them.

But the real comfort in this text comes at its end -- for the Rabbis do not just conclude with their decision that it would have been better for humankind never to have been created. Instead, they go one step further -- they say, well, now that we have been created, the thing to do is for us to focus on our deeds, to focus on doing the right thing before God.

This is the great message of Judaism for me -- do not give up, even in the face of the greatest challenges and the greatest wounds and brokenness you can imagine. Hang on to life with every fiber of your soul and try and make it a good life. A good life -- the kind of life that God would find good. The kind of life that follows God's way. The kind of life that is as full of acts of loving kindness as you can make it. There lies the "redemptive turn" for me.

---

Here is the full text of the source as I presented (and translated) it (I also gave it the provocative title "The Suicide of the Rabbis?"):

The suicide of the Rabbis?

Talmud Bavli, Eiruvin 13b

Our Rabbis taught: For two and a half years Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel debated.	ת"ר שתי שנים ומחצה נחלקו ב"ש וב"ה
One of them said it would be better for humankind to never have been created.	הללו אומרים נוח לו לאדם שלא נברא יותר משנברא
And the other said it was better for humankind to have been created.	והללו אומרים נוח לו לאדם שנברא יותר משלא נברא
At the end, they voted and decided that it would have been better for humankind to never have been created.	נמנו וגמרו נוח לו לאדם שלא נברא יותר משנברא
But now that humankind has been created, a person should examine his deeds	עכשיו שנברא יפשפש במעשיו
And others say a person should examine his future deeds.	ואמרי לה ימשמש במעשיו

After reading the text to the group, I asked them to ponder a couple of questions with a partner for five minutes before we discussed it as a group:

• What is your initial reaction to this text? Does it bring any image to mind?
• What does the story mean? What are the rabbis in truth trying to say here?

---

Redemption comes in many forms. Above, I said that, for me, this text inspires me to make the redemptive move from despair at suffering to focusing on my deeds that have the potential to do something about that suffering and bring healing to others.

The search for some kind of redemption through deeds is very much the stuff of what much of the interfaith conference was about. Some of my Christian colleagues made some striking Problem Texts presentations where they strove to courageously face up to how some of the texts of their traditions have been used in the name of violence and intolerance, and to seek solutions that involve anything but throwing those texts out. Two Catholic priests wrestled with a passage from Mathew (26:14-27:66) that has been used to blame the Jews collectively for the death of Jesus Christ, while a protestant pastor took on a passage from John (14:1-14) that some Christians use as proof that Christianity is the only path to truth.

I was inspired by their efforts, especially because both of their efforts very much involved preserving the sacredness and meaning of these texts to them. This is what I also seek to do with the troubling texts of my own tradition -- search for honest ways of understanding them that allow me to keep them close to my heart and my soul.

May it be the will of the Holy Blessed One that all your troubles and sorrows be transformed into sources of meaning and joy.

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.

_______________


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.

A place for rabbis to receive the Torah -- this summer at Oraita

As I write this, I am sitting at a beautiful retreat center in upstate New York where I have come for a chaplaincy conference. The beautiful setting -- along with the great fellowship and tremendous learning I have found here amid fellow clergy -- remind me of the great learning, setting and fellowship I found at Oraita last October. It was such an incredible time to reconnect with Torah and with colleagues. Great learning!

The folks from Hebew College are doing it again this summer. This time they're bringing in some of the most inspiring names in the Jewish world, including Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, along with the rabbinical school's rector, Art Green. And they've picked a particularly poignant time for pulpit rabbis to take an opportunity to renew their relationship with Torah among colleagues: the week after Shavuot.

Shavuot is the traditional time we celebrate the giving of the Torah itself. Rabbis who have just celebrated this great event with their congregants in the hall of the synagogue with prayer will have the opportunity to reinforce it again with great, in-depth learning among fellow learned peers.

Here is a letter from Art and Zalman about the retreat. I hope you can go!

PS This time, rabbinical students are invited, too! And scholarship money is available.

Are we really all free? (a post-Passover reflection)

This year I had the most wonderful privilege of having the first-night Seder and meal at the home of my talented former classmate Claudia Kreiman and her husband Ebn Leader, one of the key forces behind the exciting new rabbinical school at Hebrew College (which is getting ready to ordain its first class). I really felt free at their table and among their friends. But one thing has really stuck in my craw from that wonderful night. Someone said, "I think everybody at this table is free" and went on to contrast us "free" people with the many suffering people throughout the world.

Well, I wish this person had just asked me. How did this person know how free I was? How did this person know that I hadn't just suffered some terrible shock like -- as I'm sure happened to many people -- being told just before Passover that I had a fatal disease? Or how did this person know that one of us sitting at the table was not battling drug addiction or enduring the enslavement of being abused by a boss or a family member who it was not so easy -- or risk-free -- to break away from?

This all came into my mind this morning when I read the latest electronic journal entry from the wife of my old rabbinical classmate and dear friend Benny Katz. Some six months ago one of their beloved children suddenly collapsed in cardiac arrest. He survived but . . . well, I won't say, anymore. I'll just share the powerful words of Marlene's latest post about their experience of facing Passover for the first time after their son Zalman's collapse. I hope it will remind you of what it is that is so beautiful about this holiday, especially about how it can remind us about who might not be so free right next door to us. . . . how the unfree might be not just people far away suffering on another continent. They might be people who look and sound just like us. They might even be us. Here are Marlene's words"

We had no idea how difficult it was going to be to get ready for Passover this year until Thursday night when it was already too late to ask for help. I spent some time resentful that no one was offering to help us, recovered from that, panicked, again recovered, and finally with some effort adjusted my expectations and moved forward with a new idea of what was necessary and possible, and I began to look forward to it. As crazy as this may sound, it was difficult to give up cooking for days, and spending weeks cleaning and throwing things out. It was difficult to give up our tradition of moving all of our furniture out of the living room and having a huge Seder. I missed planning the meals and cooking with Zalman so I chose a complicated short rib dish that he would have been wild for, and invited him to join me in spirit in every part of the preparation. Kieffer also joined us in spirit. He was wandering with friends in the desert around Moab, Utah and didn’t come home for Passover. He told us tonight that he had a once in a lifetime Passover experience in Utah. There was a Jewish group camping next to him so on Saturday night he went with his box of matzah under his arm and asked if he could join them for the Seder but not their meal. They told him it would cost him $150.OO and turned him away!!! Our seder was intimate and lovely and lively. All of Malka’s Jewish education and singing lessons paid off. She sang constantly and beautifully. Malka and Ben ended the evening with a duet of Echad Mi Yodea (Who knows One?). It was one of the best seders that Ben has ever led. Now we are in the time when our ancestors were in the wilderness and it feels like we too are in the wilderness. We are quickly approaching the 6 month anniversary of Zalman’s heart attack. The medical world has told us that we can not really expect much improvement in Zalman’s brain function after that point. I can feel myself holding my breath. The medical world and the world of alternative practitioners continue to tell us different things. Zalman keeps looking better and better but all the improvements are very small. We are not sure what we are doing or where we are going. We brought Zalman home believing in the possibility of miracles, and in the possibility of his once again being the one in a million we have always known him to be. We still believe in miracles. We have been living one for the past 6 months as witnesses and participants in Zalman’s struggle for life. At times it is as if we can feel him weighing his options – what would life be like in this body with these limitations? We can feel him feeling and responding to our love and care. In the past week he has seemed less angry and less uncomfortable, but he has also seemed very sad at times. I am still struggling with separating his feelings and reactions from my own feelings and reactions. Last week I felt hopeless for a few days. It could have been me feeling hopeless or I could have been picking up on Zalman’s feelings. I can’t sort it out because at times it makes sense for either or both of us to feel that way. I thought this week about the trust and faith that it took for the Israelites to follow Moses out of Egypt, into the Red Sea and through the desert. We have been on a journey with Zalman for almost 6 months now. Our faith and trust is helping to guide us. Each one of us in our family has our own path that we are following and our own lessons to learn from everything that we are going through. I have to keep being reminded that Zalman is walking his own path in all of this and that though we may be able to care for him and support him it is not within our power to determine, control, or change his path. I have been listening to Zalman’s mix tapes all morning. As I finished writing, the music changed to “Screamo”. I was getting up to skip that track when I looked over at Zalman who seemed genuinely happy to be listening to loud angry musical screaming. That track has finished and now we are listening to 40’s jazz. Yep, definitely on his own path. marlene

"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!

Caring in Memphis – lessons from the African-American community

Not long ago in our hospital, a young African-American man died unexpectedly. A community pastor found herself in front of a group of his intensely grieving friends. She talked to them about their grief, but she didn't stop there. She took the opportunity to give these young men what one of my old rabbinical professors used to refer to as a “charge”. She charged them not to let their young friend's life be lost in vain. She told them to use this tragedy as an opportunity for themselves to “get right with God”.

I was deeply moved at the love she expressed by reaching out to these young men with the voice of a prophet -- at the hope she placed in them, in telling them she believed that they were indeed capable of choosing the right way and putting their lives on the right path.

I thought of her compassion today in Memphis when I was listening to a dynamic pastor and psychology professor from Virginia Commonwealth University speaking at a chaplaincy conference on racial and ethnic diversity. Our society tells men that they have three roles – that of provider, protector and procreator – said professor Micah L. McCreary. When some of these opportunities to “be a man” are closed to a person by that very same society the person can adopt other roles as compensation, including that of the “bad man” or predator, he said.

What really struck me about McCreary's talk was that it – like the words of the pastor in our hospital – had this fundamental hopefulness behind it. The prophet does not speak his or her words of warning to condemn, in my view. The prophet speaks in the hope that his or her words will effect real change and move people to turn to the right path.

Another thing that struck me about McCreary's use of prophetic speech is that his words were not directed at an individual, but rather to groups as a whole. That is, they were calling not just for individual change, but also social change.

Social change is something that has been, it seems, lost from much of our religious language these days. We live in an age where even our religious and spiritual lives focus on things like personal piety and personal transformation. One of the other speakers at the conference – the annual meaning of the Racial Ethnic Multicultural Network (REM) of the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education – reminded us that Martin Luther King was deeply critical of this emphasis on personal piety. Being a person of the church, in King's view, meant taking on a radical and costly discipline, said Lewis Baldwin, professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt University.

King understood the church as a prophetic witness and movement, said Baldwin. He wanted unity in the church, but the unity King wanted was not of liturgy or even doctrine belief, but rather “unity in prophetic social witness”. It was this lack of focus on doctrine that allowed King's message to be heard not only by a Christians of all stripes, but also by people of other faiths, including Jews, said Baldwin

I was so grateful to have some time with these inspiring people and all the people who attended the REM conference. It was a privilege to be reminded of the true power and possibility of faith, and to be witness to the profound call to service to God that others feel.