Tag / Clinical Pastoral Education

by Michael

In the morning

My most active clinical day is Monday, which is usually true given the structure of my weeks. I see more patients on Monday than other days and Friday follows. I don’t usually work weekends anymore.

I genuinely enjoy the ministry with patients. Always grounding, it reminds me of what my work is, why it is, and how it goes. There is preparation and surprise. I know some of what to expect, including the part of me that knows most of a conversation is, essentially, under the category of the unexpected.

I do not like this but it is true. In fact, most of me strongly dislikes the unexpected. The spontaneous and surprising. The things that you can only prepare for when cultivating a posture of relaxation and openness. If I can relax and breathe, if I can be open to what comes, I’m prepared. But that preparation feels different than memorizing or following procedures. You prepare differently when you know disruptions to plans naturally emerge.

Preparing for the unexpected, then, is not a procedural preparation. Earlier this year, I was in a training with medical providers and we were learning about difficult conversations. The training is built around treating those conversations as procedures. I found it both intriguing to learn for a week with physicians and nurse practitioners and also thought the approach confounding. I learned a lot about what can be done as a procedure and, perhaps, what cannot.

Surprises and their cousins don’t cooperate with plans and so preparing for encounters has to be generous, and this keeps me flexible in the work of spiritual care. When I saw a particular patient on Monday, we talked for a while. We were in the busiest part of the hospital and it was noisy. We spoke for a touch less than an hour, which surprised me, and a lot was heard and held. There were words and things.

I have told students are others that the universe is in an encounter, and that’s always true, in some form, when I sit with a patient in the hospital. I felt that when I was with this person. It reads as dramatic but I’m convinced that sitting with a person in a genuine encounter is absolutely sacred, that it connects those present with holiness. It’s all there. Even if we can’t appreciate it. It’s all present.

The next morning, my colleague saw the same patient who sent word back to me. This happens once a week or so. Our department is large and lots of chaplains can see patients who stay for days. This week, my patient’s message was, “joy comes in the morning.”

Immediately, I went over the encounter in my head, doing what I often do with students in verbatim seminars. I walked back through the main points and movements of conversation, reconnected with my emotions, listened again to the noises and shifts that helped me remember. I asked my colleague with my eyes what our patient could mean and she was stumped, even though both of us knew the biblical origin of the phrase.

It was funny, the exchange between us as we considered the phrase, pulled out and given. But I went to mental and spiritual work. I used the message in another message, in partial response to someone who texted me the next day, still working to place the phrase, to accept the message. I am still sitting with the gift.

And then, as it was and is still speaking to me, it occurred to me to, while in my particular searching to fit this gift and message, to hold the phrase. To do nothing with it. I’m trying.

I woke this morning, earlier than I planned, something I should plan since it happens half the week! You’d think I’d notice the pattern at some point. And as with all mornings like this, I heard how time occurs to me in the dark of pre-sun rays. The birds, as before, told me what time it was and how long it would be until I saw light.

I thought to my patient’s message, to the preacher’s message, to the psalmist’s message. The whole phrase, the part she relayed, the entire musical selection. I held and checked the impulse to do that interpretive work that seminarians are trained to do. I tried to wait and listen.

I tried to let the birds, in darkness, sing into me what the message could be.

by Michael

The Project of Identifying Yourself

My CPE unit is wrapping up with the residents and final evaluations always bring up some discussion around our relational or interpersonal dynamics. We talk about each other. They talk about me and what I do with them. I talk about them and what they do with me.

We broach subjects like the one I was talking about with Eddie, a friend and therapist. Me and Eddie have our own rhythm for discussing the world’s issues, so the conversation is one we’ve had in pieces before, even though that conversation wasn’t part of final evaluations in the fall unit of CPE.

Essentially, the conversation was about projective identification, a psychodynamic concept that has to do with another concept called projection. I’m not a specialist in psychodynamic theory so my views are imprecise. Nonetheless, projection is an unconscious process where a person extends, casts, or projects an unwanted image away from the self and upon another. The casted “image” can be a trait, quality, or part of the self and not only an image per se. I use image in my work because it connects with my pulls from Relational-Cultural Theory and relational images. Think of the projected thing as thrown, casted, and rejected.

The projected image, feelings, and traits are operative in the relational dynamics with the one projected upon. Projections are sent things. They indicate aspects of ourselves that we don’t accept for whatever reason. They may not be good parts. They may be socially unacceptable, contradictory to some ethic or value we hold. They are aspects of the self that are, on their faces, not acceptable. They must be sent away.

Projections are normal, frequent, and probably always happening in humans. Again, they are unconscious, which means they’re generally out of awareness. We know projections occur but we don’t know when ours are operating. They are, in a word, unavailable. They are unseen by us. They usually emerge in, through, or as part of conflict. Strong reactions are almost always indicators of projections.

I never read that verse of scripture because it feels offensive! Or, every time I meet with him, I feel exhausted. Or, we keep going over the same issue in my workgroup. Or, those two argue every time they talk. Or, he always finds a way back to such and such. Strong reactions.

The related concept of projective identification is where the other person receives and cooperates with the projection. The projections are evoked or created in the other. Think of the projection as a judgment, trait, belief, or image that’s sent and think of the identification as an acceptance of what’s sent. It’s identified with, accepted, enacted, and taken to be true. This, too, is an unconscious process.

A person doesn’t consciously agree to accept the meanings, opinions, and views sent over, but it happens as part of relating. And many of these dynamics make relationships between people shine. You think your clinical pastoral supervisor cares, and that thought impacts your willingness to open to him in a unit of clinical pastoral education. Projecting upon him, qualities of compassion and aptitude may enable you to trust that supervisor as you consider the difficulties of patient care in a hospital. That supervisor may take up that projection, embody care and concern for you as a chaplain. The relationship grows from the projection and the identification.

In the negative, how do you know these are working? One key is conflict. When an expectation is unmet. Every unmet expectation doesn’t eventuate into a conflict but those that do indicate these dynamics. When you’re experiencing the same interior, relational, or professional conflicts; when those conflicts emerge repetitively, these two dynamics are at work. They may not be the sole dynamics or even the primary ones, but they lurk and matter. Again, they are normal, common, even natural. Humans being humans means humans projecting upon and identifying with other humans.

It may be worth it to get consultation. In chaplaincy education, we consult with other educators in communities of practice. Those communities are professional circles of trust where we discuss our work with students and how those relationships are going. We get feedback. Sometimes the feedback leads to additional steps for reflection. Sometimes we finalize issues in a few pointed minutes of paying attention together.

All of this leads me to say that the project of identifying yourself is long. The work and service you bring to the world, when you’re at your best, is in locating who you are and committing to that person. Who you bring to the world has to be who you are and not who I’ve made you to be, thought you to be, crafted you to be.

As a pastoral theologian, I’d call that projective stuff a potential idolatry. It is potentially re-making a person who is already made. It is potentially requiring a person made by God to be re-made by me. So becoming aware of the dynamics is important. I don’t want to re-make people.

I’d rather help liberate people when they’ve been remade by people in their backgrounds. I’d rather cooperate with God and with God’s long work of making you and me back into who we were. Isn’t it God’s work to make us who we were, to return us to who we were when others have revised us?

I’m a certified educator and I work, in a biased way, toward the liberation of my students. I want them to come increasingly closer to themselves as they practice ministry so that what they offer in ministry is a beautiful expression of integrity. They offer themselves. They offer who they are rather than the person they are told – through projections or what not – to offer.

I want students in CPE to get along in the project of understanding who they are. I want them to get along in the work of giving and receiving sustaining grace while they’re in the process of understanding themselves. I want students to give who they are as part of their deep commitment to personal, social, cultural, and communal liberation.

I’m tossing images like anybody. Hopefully most of my projections are biased toward liberation and wholeness. That’s my hope. But when I do what we all do, one of y’all can bring me to better awareness or send me to my community of practice, point me to my pastor, direct me to my therapist or to my prayer room.

Or all of em.

by Michael

What You Should Not Say

Do not tell me

there will be a blessing

in the breaking,

that it will ever

be a grace

to wake into this life

so altered,

this world

so without.

Do not tell me

of the blessing

that will come

in the absence.

Do not tell me

that what does not

kill me

will make me strong

or that God will not

send me more than I

can bear.

Do not tell me

this will make me

more compassionate,

more loving,

more holy.

Do not tell me

this will make me

more grateful for what

I had.

Do not tell me

I was lucky.

Do not even tell me

there will be a blessing.

Give me instead

the blessing

of breathing with me.

Give me instead

the blessing

of sitting with me

when you cannot think

of what to say.

Give me instead

the blessing

of asking about him–

how we met

or what I loved most

about the life

we have shared;

ask for a story

or tell me one

because a story is, finally,

the only place on earth

he lives now.

If you could know

what grace lives

in such a blessing,

you would never cease

to offer it.

If you could glimpse

the solace and sweetness

that abide there,

you would never wonder

if there was a blessing

you could give

that would be better

than this–

the blessing of

your own heart

opened

and beating

with mine.

This is from Jan Richardson’s latest book, The Cure for Sorrow, a collection of blessings she wrote after the unexpected death of her husband. I’m thinking through an upcoming summer unit with new chaplain interns, thinking through a writing prompt friends gave me, and considering the integration of loss, of words, of self and of care. I commend the book to you if you consider such things yourself.

by Michael

Perspective Transformation

Perspective transformation is the change to how you see something. I think a lot about perspective transformation. I am sitting with an educational theorist (Mezirow) whose theory is about the power of perspective transformation. I’ve also found reframing to be a pretty nifty pastoral skill over my years. The two are very related.

When I was getting consultation on a paper draft last month, one of the supervisors scribbled something on the page. Now, I should back up to say that when we present at this particular monthly meeting, we get immediate verbal feedback. Your work is engaged and your person is engaged. It’s great but it’s labor. You get a massive amount of constructive, careful, powerful, and pointed critique from pastors who have been therapists, educators, and chaplains for years. I can’t live without the stuff in some ways. But, again, it’s work being in the room!

I bring all my papers to the hospital the next week and flip through my friends’ comments. I imagine that I also review the event, almost writing a verbatim in my head about the presentation and the feedback in particular. Of course, the presentation comes up in my own supervision with my training supervisor as a major conversation topic.

Well, one piece of feedback on my theological theory was to consider writing it as a devotion. We had been working through the expectation of me exhibiting “mastery” (something on the grid that tells you what you need to pass essentially) and how I thought about that. The supervisor knew I wrote devotionals and he asked me how my theory would come across if I looked at it similarly. “What if you wrote this as a devotion?”

He was offering me a potential perspective transformation. He used something I could relate to and employed it in what has become a change of my view. Not all changes of view are comfortable. And they always require work. But they can be gifts. They can be good gifts.

by Michael

My Blog: Connecting

I’ve been a student (through the text) of Parker Palmer for years. Scottie May introduced me to his book when I took a class on teaching and learning at Wheaton.

The book, To Know As We Are Known, was my first encounter with Palmer’s thinking. His work is foundational to the educational theory I’m developing for clinical pastoral education. He talks about prayer as a relational act. He nods to the explicit spiritual power of prayer. His subtitle is Education as a Spiritual Journey. Still, he lifts prayer as an act that can connect us to others.

It isn’t a religious act as he sees it but a relational one. Education is the same. We can relate to people and to ourselves in the learning environment.

Consider how you’ll connect to others today. What will be your prayers? The ones you utter and the ones you mutter. My sense is that we pray a lot more than we think, and in that prayerfulness may be the roots of what’s needed to relate to others.

by Michael

My Blog: Sparkling Eyes

When I heard your explanation of your new position, it made me leap inside my heart. I can see you being a chaplain over there, seeing your patients, pushing the borders of your pastoral identity. I could see you praying and preaching and leading.

Your eyes sparkled as you spoke. I noticed it even though I kept my listening face. I guarded the treasure of your brightened countenance. I thought of the other residents and students in our CPE program. I thought of my chaplain colleagues and the pastors I know who are open to call. I saw them and the fulfillment of their hopes in your sparkling eyes.

You weren’t entirely happy with everything–and who’d expect that given your description of the social climate of the place–but you possessed a vision of what could be. That’s what came through your speech, through your eyes.

The vision of your next days, the long moments with others where you’d have an impact, where you’d do some more good in the world. Good for you. Good for them. Good for us.

by Michael

Action, Reflection, Action

What we believe to be real comes through are words, but the better communication of our deepest understandings is our behavior. We live our beliefs more than we profess them.

I think there’s something good about saying what we believe. I’m a person who decides what I think by saying it and, in some cases, writing it. But when I want to know where the truth settles in me, I reflect on what I’ve done, what I’ve left undone, and how I’ve proceeded in life. I think most people are this way. We live into and out of life.

CPE calls this Action/Reflection, and I add another Action at the end because I do; then I reflect on what I’ve done; and then I do again. After all those moves, belief emerges clearly.

by Michael

Candidacy and Fatherhood (2 of 2)

Photo Thanks to Leeroy

Photo Thanks to Leeroy

I messaged Dawn after the initial interview. Then we talked. She was feeling fine and was headed to a planned prenatal appointment. I breathed as if for the first time.

We spoke about the interview but I couldn’t put more language out of my mouth. I had talked for more than hour and didn’t have the energy to rehearse much about it. An hour later she texted that she was having contractions. She was calling the midwife she had seen earlier. I was waiting for the report to come back at that time, waiting to hear if I passed.

After I passed and told her, we strategized and, for my part, to quell my fears. Then I got in the car to return home. I called her an hour later and couldn’t get her. I called back and she said she was going to the hospital which was 2 blocks away from her job. I was still fine, I was speeding by then in Wisconsin where they love out of state plates. Still, the hospital is there for that reason.

I had already told my coworkers that I might need them to intercept her and wheel her down the street. I had already asked Uncle David to be on notice in case I needed him. I actually introduced Dawn to hospital security for this very reason. I was going to have some notice, though, in my original vision. Dawn decided to pass by all that; she walked alone. Both of us, in two different places, getting ready for what was next.

I called her later and she was in the middle of a contraction and couldn’t speak. I drove faster, feeling an opening of possibility that I couldn’t be with her for the labor. She texted from triage. I was still too far. I called her mother and asked her to get to the hospital. Traffic stopped just outside of O’Hare. Literally stopped. Still, I end up beating my mother-in-law there.

That morning I had gone around, deliberating and then exhibiting how I am when the unplanned happens. That was a feature of my committee appearance. I talked about how nothing in pastoral practice is truly known ahead of time. I remember thinking about a practice of faith. True pastoral ministry is usually unpredictable. That truth was actually happening that morning and it was happening as Dawn walked to the hospital and while I sped to meet her.

I arrived at 4:50PM. I smelled of sweat from the whole day of meeting and waiting and driving and hoping. As soon as I walked in, Dawn says, she felt an intense contraction. She said that our baby knew it was safe to come. I looked at the clock and got to her side as she called to me.

She was laboring and had been. The posture felt familiar but it was different than with Bryce. It was bright outside this time, daytime. With Bryce I was there from the early signs and throughout. Labor started at night. I remember everything going very slowly. This time things moved swiftly, intensely.

Dawn held my hand, and I remember thinking that breaking all those laws to get back was redeemed in that moment. Especially if I would make it out of there with my hand bones intact. Our second son, Brooks, came at 5:37PM, and as you can imagine we were thrilled. It was the predominant feeling in the room.

I wasn’t thinking about the day when he came. Of course, being a part of a quick laboring process doesn’t afford you the space to reflect. That’s why I’m writing this now. Holding those two “moments” of preparing for and getting through candidacy, on the one hand, and returning to Dawn and being a part of the welcoming committee for our son, on the other.

They sit near each other as mirrors in a way. Two events full of potential and promise. Two events full of fear and hope. Two events with people who are involved to bring someone new forward. Two events that are, in different ways, destabilizing, constructive, constitutive, and reforming.

Candidacy and fatherhood are words that belong together. Of course, they speak to each other’s tentativeness and humility. They return to the other the truths of vulnerability and preparation and work and tirelessness and tiredness. They sit intently together, those words, like two brothers enjoying each other’s company.

by Michael

It Was Fear That I Saw

Photo Thanks to Matthew Wiebe

Photo Thanks to Matthew Wiebe

I’ve seen the look in too many people’s eyes. And I don’t say that as a pin of honor or badge on my lapel. It was a dreadful thing when I first started seeing fear so regularly. There’s nothing like the naked, bold, and startling fear in the eyes of a person who watched the slow-coming death of someone they love. Love makes us hold tightly. Love, often, is the enemy of surrender. And I thought about it when a woman asked me, in a way, about my own loves.

When I first started in ministry at Sweet Holy Spirit, my role was primarily administrative. Aside from some relatively small amount of pastoral care, I functioned the way an executive pastor functions, looking at costs, praying about meeting budget, managing operations, getting to know a staff, decreasing that staff, trying to compensate the staff based upon the unique and faithful expressions of ministry’s vocations. I brought an attorney on retainer, developed relationships with insurance agents, learned about wage demands from the IRS, and became a master at explaining differences between exempt and non-exempt employees.

Being an executive pastor who was in the seat when the pastor was away was more responsibility than I was ready for. It aged me. It still does in a way. And I remember seeing fear in those days. But it was a different fear. It was a fear of missing marks that were mostly set in the wide generous room of a large church. I had my own fears. But in terms of the real fears of others, I was hardly exposed to much. I was the person who kept at the overarching system so that the good folks in our church could come and hear the words spoken. But I hardly had enough time with those folks, those listeners. They would have taught me differently about different fear.

When I came to New Community, I came, in part, because it was twenty times smaller than my home church by my conservative estimate. I would be able to pastor in a classical way, and that vision is one that I’ve been able to live. I’ve been in homes, around tables, having conversations and not just at the office or even in my study at home. I’ve been able to search the lives of others at their leadership and invitation. I’ve seen more fears in the eyes of our people.

And still, my church is “relatively young” church. I find myself over the years putting up three or four fingers when I tell people how many times I’ve visited hospitals for the people of New Community. It’s relatively young, I tell them. People don’t ask the pastor to come to the hospital when a baby is born, and twenty and thirty-somethings don’t generally get hospitalized and require pastoral visitation. Where I preached twelve funerals a year (as part of a staff of ministers) at SHS, I’ve done almost as many weddings during some of my ten years at New Community.  Fear looks differently in those congregational contexts.

When I started working as a chaplain, I started seeing fear differently. In the medical center, I saw it all the time. I see it all the time. I can see it daily if I choose. Unfortunately, there is always somebody (perhaps a somebody in 900+ beds) negotiating with fear.

The good thing about being a chaplain who is also in the supervisory education process is that you’re always doing action, reflection, action. Always working in that CPE model of learning. In fact, you have to stop yourself from doing it. At home, in the congregation, in conversation with people who know nothing about this model of learning. Stop being shaped the education and be. Still, it relates to how you see yourself.

You become a process person, loosening your grip on content and becoming more interested in what’s happening, what’s taking place, what process we’re in, rather than the superficial and low-hanging surface of what’s merely explicit. Process is hardly ever explicit. And fear is the same. You have to see it even though it’s facing you.

That’s why relationships falter because it takes a therapist or a spiritual director or a guide who’s outside the dyad to say, “Hey, what’s happening here?” or “This is what I’m seeing.” or “If you keep in this direction, where are you headed?” These aren’t content statements but process ones.

You begin to see your own fears. You make friends with some of them. You give grace to them, gifting them with new understanding because the words behind and under those fears are understandable. They are real just like the fear.

by Michael

Stuff I’m Writing (3 of 3)

Photo Thanks to Aaron Burden

Photo Thanks to Aaron Burden

When I started the supervisory education program in CPE, I noticed that there were hardly any meaningful trails about the process on the internet. I decided to write through my process. So I have some “public process notes” on the blog in order to keep track of some of my experiences.

Related to that, I’ve been working on materials for a committee appearance in early April. While I won’t go into much about the appearance on this side of the meeting, I want to put up a few thoughts from the three papers I prepared for submission to the committee.

This is a part of my theology theory paper—a major paper for the supervisory process. I’ll get feedback and work on it until it sings and is ready for the subsequent processes. This portion is around the mini-section on contextual theology and the incarnation, a major second step in the paper after I talk about sources of theology which emerge out of the narrative tradition of my African-American experience. There are quotes from James Cone’s God of the Oppressed and Smith and Riedel-Pfaefflin’s Siblings By Choice: Race, Gender, and Violence.

My experience shaped how I arrived at scripture, how often I visited the Bible, and how basic encountering the passage has been to how I encountered the God behind it. In that sense, I’m a contextual theologian. In my pastoral theology there are roots of contextual theology. Having sources like experience from which to draw theological language eventually brings me to God, the content rather than the periphery. God is who we were singing about in my younger days.

Traditional Christian formulations of God are Trinitarian. They are more than that for sure because God cannot be captured by our formulations. As is true in the grand historical human experience, God has been disclosing God’s person in many ways. I’ve “met God” through conversations with an addict named Lawrence who talked to me about beauty while painting the church. I’ve met God through the silence of a person who was struck by a loved one’s sudden death. God’s come in those moments and come to me. Always sensitive to me, to us, to the audience, God meets us in our specific conditions.

The incarnation where “God becomes flesh” is the striking example of this. Thurman called the incarnation “the great disclosure.” Through the incarnation God is at work, revealing, disclosing, and opening to others who God is. James Cone reminds us that Jesus is not a theological proposition restricted to the conceptual. Jesus matters because he is matter, because he exists outside of our heads.

He is an event of liberation, a happening in the lives of oppressed people struggling for political freedom…Jesus is not simply a doctrine or even a particular event limited by time. He is the eternal event of liberation in the divine person who makes freedom a constituent of human existence. There is no existence apart from him because he is the ground of existence without whom nothing is.

I think of God as eternal, as essentially loving, as relatable. I think of the inextricable way that justice is the avenue whereby God’s loves. “In short, God is manifest to us through material means.” God expresses all that God is through particular means. We never is love without justice, mercy without reconciliation. One is the expression of the other, the explicit exhibiting the implicit. As Kelly Brown Douglas, a womanist theologian writing Christology, says, there is a compatibility between Christianity and acts of justice.

Spiritual care, then, as an incarnational act is an expression of God’s intention toward human beings, and that care is at the bottom of our work in CPE where we attend to our selves and our ministries. As an expression of love, our work is also an expression of justice. As necessary as people are to that theological articulation, the first actor is Divine. God acts, expressing love and justice—expressing God’s self—and people receive that action, respond to it.

People are created by God, and as created beings have a host of ways through which we interact with the world; we are emotional, intellectual, and physical beings. Each element of a person’s makeup is grounded in the Creator’s initiation and desire. Seen and unseen elements compose us. All of these avenues become vehicles through which God can reach, heal, teach, and transform us.

God touches the world through us, connecting with us—the incarnation, again, being an exemplary portion of this, a clinical encounter is another—and then connecting with the creation through us. God cares for creation in other ways which we cannot see. A chaplain’s role is to participate in God’s work in the world by, variously, cooperating with God to care for, protect, preserve, challenge, and observe the work of God through human interventions, through silence, and through the variety of ways we care. People are the means for and recipients of that care. Care is aware of the past.

In Siblings by Choice, the authors tell us the truth about the power of the past:

The past represents ways of knowing that emerge from struggle and can inform us today. The complex and ambiguous present is the result of the experiences, thinking, and struggles of our ancestors who were born and raised in civilizations and circumstances different from our own. Their struggles birthed the conditions under which our consciousness develops and our life narrative unfolds. From them we may gain wisdom for patterns of living that extend an otherwise limited perspective on the present.

Care isn’t beholden to the past. It honors the past, holds the past and present together, particularly as people struggle with the present crises of life such as death, sickness, loss, and change. But care is future-oriented, always looking for the right now connections between humanity and divinity.

by Michael

Stuff I’m Writing (2 of 3)

Photo Thanks to Peter Belch

Photo Thanks to Peter Belch

When I started the supervisory education program in CPE, I noticed that there were hardly any meaningful trails about the process on the internet. I decided to write through my process. So I have some “public process notes” on the blog in order to keep track of some of my experiences.

Related to that, I’ve been working on materials for a committee appearance in early April. While I won’t go into much about the appearance on this side of the meeting, I want to put up a few thoughts from the three papers I prepared for submission to the committee.

This slice comes from the section on my CPE pilgrimage. Using my experiences in CPE, this particular paper is a reflection on my learning issues, my process of professional development and growth, my evolution and personal integration, learning experiences, and self-understanding. My section here is essentially my professional development portion.

I see chaplaincy and supervision as expressions of pastoral ministry. When I serve in the church, that community is the context for my pastoral ministry. For supervisory work, the context is CPE. The work is still pastoral. To track my development in ministry, I draw upon a tool I’ve used in teaching. I’ve worked with students on developing rules of life as a vehicle for exploring and containing practices for development. When I think of my own process of development, I think about the rule which I include as a process of my development.

Included in the process is my intellectual, physical, spiritual, and emotional development; there is room for each. The elements relate to my growth, even if each is not happening while I’m in the professional setting. For example, if I’m not taking care of my body, which my work setting may assume I am, I’ll be no good for the work of spiritual care of patients or families.

I use my birthday as a time to reflect upon my work and life and how I can continually develop. I acknowledge and celebrate how I’ve developed and I spend time thinking through how to continue doing so. As I’ve gone along, other moments have emerged to augment what consideration I have during my birthday. These include an annual assessment from my denomination (March); the beginning of a semester for the classes I teach (late August); the ending of the classes (May); the start and end of CPE units will fall into this developmental plan. At a micro level “processing our process” is something that I’ve drawn from my training supervisor, and that is a constructive way for me to regularly attend to the work I’m doing.

In terms of content, the process of development includes 1) noticing areas of weakness or interest that I might address in an upcoming year; 2) getting some consultation from the people within my “venues of growth”; 3) listing ways for me to give room to my new or abiding interests; 3) locating strategies for addressing my areas of weakness; 4) implementing those ways and strategies; and 5) evaluating myself in a way that makes sense for the area of development. CPE has been a part of that process. I came to CPE because it was a way for me to respond to my needs for continued development. When I participated in my first unit and certainly since then, the process has been substantial for my growth (I’d point to my student evaluations to revisit some of those learnings).

I see chaplaincy and supervision as expressions of pastoral ministry. When I serve in the church, that community is the context for my pastoral ministry. For supervisory work, the context is CPE. The work is still pastoral. To track my development in ministry, I draw upon a tool I’ve used in teaching. I’ve worked with students on developing rules of life as a vehicle for exploring and containing practices for development. When I think of my own process of development, I think about the rule which I include as a process of my development.

Included in the process is my intellectual, physical, spiritual, and emotional development; there is room for each. The elements relate to my growth, even if each is not happening while I’m in the professional setting. For example, if I’m not taking care of my body, which my work setting may assume I am, I’ll be no good for the work of spiritual care of patients or families.

I use my birthday as a time to reflect upon my work and life and how I can continually develop. I acknowledge and celebrate how I’ve developed and I spend time thinking through how to continue doing so. As I’ve gone along, other moments have emerged to augment what consideration I have during my birthday. These include an annual assessment from my denomination (March); the beginning of a semester for the classes I teach (late August); the ending of the classes (May); the start and end of CPE units will fall into this developmental plan. At a micro level “processing our process” is something that I’ve drawn from my training supervisor, and that is a constructive way for me to regularly attend to the work I’m doing.

In terms of content, the process of development includes 1) noticing areas of weakness or interest that I might address in an upcoming year; 2) getting some consultation from the people within my “venues of growth”; 3) listing ways for me to give room to my new or abiding interests; 3) locating strategies for addressing my areas of weakness; 4) implementing those ways and strategies; and 5) evaluating myself in a way that makes sense for the area of development. CPE has been a part of that process. I came to CPE because it was a way for me to respond to my needs for continued development. When I participated in my first unit and certainly since then, the process has been substantial for my growth (I’d point to my student evaluations to revisit some of those learnings).

by Michael

Stuff I’m Writing (1 of 3)

Photo Thanks to Leeroy

Photo Thanks to Leeroy

When I started the supervisory education program in CPE, I noticed that there were hardly any meaningful trails about the process on the internet. I decided to write through my process. So I have some “public process notes” on the blog in order to keep track of some of my experiences.

Related to that, I’ve been working on materials for a committee appearance in early April. While I won’t go into much about the appearance on this side of the meeting, I want to put up a few thoughts from the three papers I prepared for submission to the committee.

This slice comes from the section on my religious development. The paper speaks to my history, my venues of growth, my strengths and weaknesses, my religious development and self-understanding, and my appropriation of culture and how all those things subjects relate to who I am as a pastor, chaplain, and educator.

My religious development has paralleled my own “human” development. I was raised as a participant in local churches, serving in those churches, and understanding my sense of self in relation to the activity of the church.

This is as much underneath my view of what it means to be a person and what it means to be created by God. The church was the place where I was first called, where I questioned my understandings of it, and where I was given opportunities to flourish as an academically bent preacher who critiqued what was said, usually constructively, and who was unafraid to bring his experiences from other places into the church.

The religious community was the place—complimented and inextricably connected to my family as it was—where I grew. It’s hard to imagine how I would have developed without the seam of the church.

Church (and I’d use “religious development” as a synonym) was tied to my expansive understanding of family since I had a biological and a church family. Both were able to guide, mentor, correct, challenge, and inspire me. Both families were means of development. Through my religious upbringing the following three values were instilled in me—again, not intending to split these from the other developmentally formative community of my extended family:

 1.      Hospitality is normal. My mother fed other people’s children and took people into our home. That was how people in our church lived, and the residential and ecclesial behaviors taught me that hospitality-as-caring was normal.

2.      Salvation comes in many forms. The church’s focus was Jesus, but the saving influences of the community came through the mundane practices of teaching children to cook, after-school tutoring, playing games, and singing. Each act of religious expression helped me understand the broad ways in which healing, change, and growth happen.

3.     Everybody was welcome. My home church boasted a sign that was a joke and a mission depending on how we felt. Of course, both were true. The sign was “Sinners and Rejects Welcome,” and it was a clear statement of the explicit (and practiced) theology. It sticks in how open I want to be in my teaching and ministry to people.