For whom was it “too traumatic” to disclose the truth? What is gained and lost by dissemblance or prevarication? If you were confronted with this tragic circumstance how would you counsel the father? His daughter? Their care providers?

I have had two experiences that inform my response to these questions. The personal heartbreaking experience was in telling my own son that his mother had died. When he and I last saw her that morning she was perfectly healthy. He was at work when I called him from the hospital emergency room. Though my beloved wife was dead already I instructed my son to meet me at home so that I could bring him to the hospital where his motherly was gravely ill. I prayed that he would drive hastily but safely. I could not imagine how I was going to tell him. All at once I knew I could not possibly deliver the terrible news nor could I possibly permit anyone else to do so.

My son was at our home when I arrived. I met him as he came down the steps from the master bedroom. I drew him to my breast, cradled his head between my hand and the crook of my neck and tearfully whispered, “Your mom died.” I felt what was left of my heart shatter into innumerable pieces. I can only begin to imagine how my news pierced my son’s tender heart.

I think—I do not know—that if I were Mr. Bakari’s chaplain I might have responded to his desperate statement, “I can’t tell her that,” in this way: “Oh! Such impossibly terrible news to bear. My heart breaks for your daughter and you. I wonder who is better able or could be trusted more than you, her father, to tell her.” Or, “If your were to trade places with Bahia, who would you trust most?”

In a professional experience (as if the professional is not personal) that preceded my wife’s death by many years, I was a neonatologist caring for an infant that had died suddenly and unexpectedly in the early hours of the very morning he was to be discharged home with his mother. I had to go to the mother’s room, awaken her from a sound sleep, introduce myself, and reveal that her precious newborn child was now dead.

After learning the child’s first name from my nurse colleague, I walked toward the mother’s room wanting to awaken from a bad dream, wanting the child’s private pediatrician to appear on the scene . . . wanting the child’s father to be there already. Perhaps I could tell him, “man to man,” what I surely could not tell his wife. “Dear God,” I prayed, please do not leave this cruel deed to me!”

I awakened this sleeping mother as gently as I could, held her hand in mine, told her my name, identified myself as a pediatrician, and said, “I am so very, very sorry to tell you that your precious son has died.” To this day I convince myself that she knew that something dreadful had happened before I spoke a word. Not only might she have experienced resonance with my own felt despair, why else would a stranger dressed in surgical scrubs arouse her from a peaceful sleep at that ungodly hour?
These things I do know. First, this remarkably courageous woman mobilized the wisdom and strength to call her husband and, as I would do years later with my son, told him to come to the hospital as soon as he could because their son was gravely ill. I stayed with her as she wept inconsolably. And when her husband arrived I stood witness to the two of them bearing together an unbearable grief. Second, I also know that something about my presence if not my truth-telling moved these parents to consult me about the well-being of the child they gave birth to nearly one year later. Though I had been a harbinger of doom earlier, with their new child and their new hope they could still trust me.

For either my personal or professional experience I cannot imagine that truth-telling could be any less traumatic. Truth is what it is. It is easy to imagine that someone else could have told my son or my patient that which they had every right to know—someone very, very dear to them was now dead. So, for me the question is not whether they ought to be told. Rather, the question is by whom, and when?

How would we, as chaplains, have served Bahia, her father, or her care providers in the midst of their travail?
______________
Ronald David is a pediatrician, Episcopal priest, chaplain, and recently certified Diplomate in CPSP. As a supervisor in clinical pastoral education at the Hospital of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles, California, he experiences chaplaincy as the perfect melding of clinical theology and medicine. Troubled by the distortions and misunderstandings of theological concepts as represented in medical science and care, Ronald is writing a book on the relationship between health, spirituality, and religion.

To contact Dr. Roland, click here.

Al Henager, UAMS staff chaplain, supervises the Shepherd's Staff program which was envisioned by Madge Brown a graduate of the UAMS CPE program. The UAMS Department of Pastoral Care encouraged the emergence of the program as a way in which individuals who have had pastoral care training with Community of Hope or Stephen Ministry serve the cancer center as volunteer chaplains under supervision.

Al Heniger states in the interview, "We want to be present and form relationships that offer patients the chance to talk about the things they want to talk about," Henager said. "We don't have an agenda, except to establish relationships."

The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy is a member of Believe Together: Health Care for All. This is a coalition dedicated to health care reform. It is comprised of many different faith groups and religious organizations, united by a concern about the failure of the health care system in the United States. This coalition seeks to promote reform in the health care system of the U.S. in order to establish a more equitable access to health care.

We in the CPSP are pleased to join forces with our colleagues in ministry to work for justice and reform in the delivery of health care in America.

Please go to the Believe Together website to become informed and to join the work.

-Raymond Lawrence

What does it say about the chaplain?

While providing pastoral care at the Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, New York the question is inevitably asked: “Pastor, where is your church?” I must admit that the question makes for an awkward moment.

Though not surprised, I genuinely understand that for most people pastoral ministry is associated with congregational ministry. It is common to think of most clergy serving as leaders in their faith groups and congregation.

The simple answer to the question is that the hospital is my parish and that ministry as director of pastoral care is my church-approved work. Although the hospital is not a congregation, nor am I the pastor of choice for each member of the hospital’s patient community and staff, it is my parish.

Comfortable with ambiguity

Pastoral care ministry beyond the congregation often comes with some degree of ambiguity and suspicion as suggested by the very question, “Pastor, where is your church?” Yet, it is precisely because of its ambiguity that chaplaincy is among the most challenging and rewarding ministries for the ordained pastor.

Usually when the question arises, it is accompanied by a sense of connection, appreciation, and gratitude by those for whom the chaplain’s ministry of presence, compassion and consolation met a need in a time of illness and crisis. Pastoral ministry beyond the congregation offers an unanxious presence of the Church’s witness where it is especially needed. Chaplains are ambassadors of the church’s pastoral commitment and affirm a compassionate presence to the vulnerable patient, as well to medical and support staff that care for them. Such ministry demonstrates the wisdom passed on from past generations to the present generation to empower and commission ministers for service in the world.

Unlike congregational ministry, pastoral care ministry in the hospital remains a 24 hour crisis ministry. A congregation can close its doors each day to open them again come morning, whereas the hospital never closes its doors and the emergency needs of others are attended to 24 hours each day of the year. Hospital ministry requires the chaplain to provide pastoral care on a moment’s notice.

The danger of overextending oneself physically and emotionally is always present. The chaplain maintaining a personal discipline of self-care becomes paramount for a healthy, dynamic, and sustainable ministry. It is often the case that hospital chaplains require and seek out congregational pastors for prayer, Bible study, and fellowship. As such, hospital ministry is shared ministry between chaplains and congregational clergy of many faith traditions. Congregations are in fact the life blood of hospital chaplaincies, and without them chaplains remain in isolation from their faith community.

Chaplains belong to the faith community

The question “Pastor, where is your church?” becomes all the more meaningful because it resounds with opportunity for chaplains to pause and examine their congregational connections. Moreover, this reflection is an invitation for congregations to pause and examine their shared ministry with lay and ordained ministers in non-congregational and specialized settings.

Although my parish is the hospital where I am called to a professional ministry, my congregation always remains a faith community that remembers me in its prayers and where I gather with the faithful each week to fellowship, study Holy Scriptures, and receive Sacraments as spiritual nourishment for ongoing ministry.

Community as survival is in our DNA

The question, “Where is your church?” is one about community and family. It is a about the inner longing to experience belonging in a community that cares for you. When I hear the question, it reminds me of the difficulties and challenges a patient and their loved ones face within the sterile cold walls of a hospital during sickness and adversity that can only be made bearable by the caring comfort of human compassion and community.

The question surges from our very DNA and the primal desire for survival and our basic human strategy for survivability as members of a community. Human beings seek out community for our very survival—it is no less important to the sick in a hospital to experience a supportive community that is accessible to them. It is often the case that a chaplain is the only representative of a faith community immediately available to the patient and their loved ones. The chaplain stands as a representative of the larger community of faith lending its support in a time of crisis. The ministry of a chaplain “bridges” the gap between the hospitalized and the faith communities that gather beyond the walls of a patient’s bedside.

The Chaplain has power to create community

So it is that from a simple question by a patient that more is at play than meets the eye. The chaplain is in a privileged space to see the patient through “clinical eyes,” to discern that what is being said is primal and often a visceral need for community. It is a cry for support by another human being in crisis who is cut off from their normal resources.

A truth of pastoral care ministry in a hospital is that often when a patient asks a question, it is an invitation to the chaplain to accompany and journey with patient in their crisis. The wisdom of faith is that the chaplain does not journey alone. The chaplain has the power to create the faith community and as its representative, accompanies and joins to the faith community the sick and vulnerable in their hour of need.
______________________________________________
Belen Gonzalez y Perez, M.A.R., M.Div., D.Min.
Director of Chaplaincy Services & Education
Long Island College Hospital
Brooklyn, New York

To contact Dr. Perez, click here.

Five books at one end of a shelf. A somewhat forlorn grouping to be sure, they are the only books left in my possession of a purely theological nature. All others have fallen away.

And this morning it occurs to me that I have never stopped long enough to look at why I have kept them, never risked asking: “You five there on the end of the shelf, why are you here?”

I might point out that clergy like myself , in their theological training, were expected, if not to have mastered the writings of various theologians, then to have at least some passing acquaintance with them. For most of us this meant that we sat through lectures and heard various names mentioned, all German it seemed -Cullman, Neibhur , Bonhoeffer, Barth(actually a Swiss) Pannenburg, Brunner (there were two of them) Bultman, -the list seemed endless.. We may have read a book or two by some of them. Occasionally something stuck.

And herein lies the origin of the five books, all of them by Paul Tillich –yet another German who had found a safe home in America. I have carried these books about faithfully for over 40 years.

1960. A new prof , Pieter de Jong by name, had arrived at the college that fall, a big, friendly bear of man, dressed neatly in suit and tie and speaking in a slightly Germanic accent. The story was that he had been involved with the Dutch underground in the war at considerable risk to is life. Whatever the case. it all combined to lend to him a kind of presence, an air of dignity. Gifted as a theologian he was to bring something of a revolution to the classroom, not to mention our social life.

The family had a new baby, weeks old, and rather than putting the child away with a baby sitter Mrs. de Jong brought the infant into the living room among the guests. When the child began to fuss she simply dropped open her blouse, brought out a breast let the child enjoy himself. So vivid was the description it was as if I had been there. But then the clincher.

Having satisfied his hunger, the child did what babies do next. And Mrs. de Jong, rather than leave the room, simply lay the child out on her lap, whipped off the wet diaper, fired it past a startled student into the nearby hamper in the hall, and pinned on a new one. Wine, boobs and diapers: never had anything like this been before in Saskatchewan. In retrospect, from a theological perspective, you would have to say it was a scene more liberal than orthodox, but never had liberal theology been so popular.

Later that fall de Jong did something that was as surprising as the wine and refreshing as his wife’s breasts; we would have oral examinations at Christmas rather than written. Unheard of and a little scary. How do you go in to the prof’s office and talk for an hour about issues that most days had been as intelligible as Sanskrit?

“Well, Ron, “How are things going?”

I can still hear the words, direct, tinged with that slight Dutch accent. And I can hear myself replying, why or how, I am not sure. Knowing I couldn’t talk about his lectures because I couldn’t understand most of what he said, I replied,

“Well, it was something you suggested in one of your lectures, a book that I have been reading.”

“Oh,which one was that.” It was as if his ears perked up and we were off and running.

The book in question was The Protestant Era, a book of Tillich’s essays which I found easier reading than his two volumes of theology. Only in later years was I to learn that Tillich had a bit of a reputation that accompanied his theology. In a day when such things were not mentioned, it was nevertheless known that any woman who rode more than three floors on an elevator with Tillich got off in some what different condition than when she got on. Whatever he may have done on elevators, however, does not detract from his theology, some might even say enriched it.

I had not read the whole of The Protestant Era, surely no more than two or three chapters, but in that brief encounter I had come upon some words which, while I couldn’t exactly explain them, I knew were somehow right, good beyond all measure. I compare them today to poetry. Like good poetry you don’t just understand it, rather it’s the sound and the rhythm that catches you, sets you off in all directions with a meaning that the poet may never have intended. Tillich may have been a bit of an old reprobate but he was also a poet and a theologian, one who gave life to words in a way that I had not heard before. Take a concept like sin.

Raised as I had been in Saskatchewan, and I have no reason to believe the situation differed greatly elsewhere, we knew what sin was. In fact, we had a list of them in our heads -don’t smoke, don’t drink, and even though we didn’t talk about it, don’t have sex until you were married and then be careful lest you enjoy it. A little exaggerated, I know, but the fact is sin became sins, a grocery list of do nots, one prophylactic placed upon another designed to make sure nothing happened.

Tillich began changing that perception. There in his book he spoke of estrangement, a word derived from a Latin root meaning to “treat as a stranger” or “not belonging, lost, one who did not belong to the family”. Tillich went on to say, or at least I heard him saying, that this is the condition in which we find ourselves as a culture, a people, and certainly as a 21 year old at college. It is not just the grocery list of sins that has beset us but rather a condition, a state of alienation, of being lost, wanderers in a foreign land without a home. I don’t know what that means to you but as a young man, fresh off the farm, who has made a decision to enter the church, and whose identity, although he did not know it, had been scattered like feathers in the wind, this was pure poetry, music. I didn’t understand Tillich but I knew he was right.

My sin was not just the grocery list, in fact I had always thought that if the items on the list were the worst sin had to offer it wasn’t all that bad. My sin was a state of being lost, estranged. Sin was not one of the items on my list it was the brine in which I was pickled, the condition in which I lived. No home in which I belonged.

But estranged from what? Family? Not really. They were still there, and for all my complaints were still good people. Friends? I had a few. Even had a girl friend. So what was amiss?

Tillich said I was estranged from “the ground of my being”. Again, without a word of explanation I knew he was right. Coming from a family where work was a given and to work hard was to receive honor and blessing, I worked. In my memory we never took off a July 1 to enjoy a sports day. It was a day when the kids were home from school and you worked. One year we splurged and went to the exhibition and stayed at the Bessborough Hotel for 2 days and enjoyed ourselves. Even that was almost a sin. In short, if you worked hard and kept the grocery list that was all that was required. You would surely get ahead, wherever that was. For my father it meant he could pay the interest at the bank. But something was missing. There was no point to it, no end, no beginning.

Tillich said it was to be a stranger, estranged from the ground of my being. The temptation is to try and explain Tillich but, like explaining poetry, something is inevitably lost. Perhaps a story will help.

At about the same time as I was encountering Tillich I began hearing about Alcoholics Anonymous. Although I did not drink, alcohol abuse in our home caused no end of difficulty; AA caught my attention. Later I came to know a number of AA members, never ceasing to be moved by their stories and by the affection they had for one another. There is nothing like going on a fishing trip with a group of recovering alcoholics and being subjected to a weekend filled with stories of their escapades, stories marked by pain but filled with gratitude. One particular man I came to know and admire, Angus by name, as an older man who had been sober for years, yet never ceased to display a sense of awe that somehow life had been returned to him.

It was from Angus I first hard it said that in the development of alcoholism in a person’s life the spiritual dimension that was the first to go and the last to be recovered and that if this recovery was not made sobriety would be a tenuous business at best. Surely a recovering alcoholic and Tillich were talking the same language.

I don’t know if I should have ever been ordained and sent out as a preacher or not. To-day, increasingly, I feel alienated from the whole process of whatever it means to be church, the estrangement more complete than fifty years ago. And old age brings with it its own loneliness, its own dimensions of isolation. One advantage, however, if I can call it that, is that at seventy three I have something I didn’t have at twenty three.

I have experience and with it a bit of memory that has accumulated. For one thing you know, even though you never quite get used to it, that you are a stranger. In youth you didn’t dare entertain such an idea. Anyone who thinks they have estrangement licked, old age will cure them of the thought. But it is this every understanding, this knowing, that lends to life occasions of solitude, moments saved from the work of being anxious.

Little things become important. Stories. The wisdom of drunks. Remembering sitting in a prof’s office, one who served wine at his parties and whose wife’s breasts were beautiful. Remembering a fall day reading Tillich’s books, books that have been with me forty years. A remembering that brings with it, sometimes as if by accident, the sheer joy of that first reading.

Estranged, yes, but someone knows my story.

____________________

Ron Evans is a CPSP Diplomate who now devotes his energy to writing. His book, Sakatchewan Remembered, was well received. One reviewer states: "...Evans will make you laugh. He takes subjects that once made us blush with guilt or laugh nervously, and makes them approachable and acceptable. He does this by using his humor to gently sand away the rough edges. I have a belief that if you pursue something to its darkest, quips Evans, there will be something bearable about it..."

Following the book's publication, Ron focused his creative energies to produce an audio version of his book. The words and voice of the author blended with the music of a gifted local musician makes it a must have CD for your collection, especially if you like to listen to books in your car and when on the move with your iPod.

Ron's most recent book, Letters from the Sourdough Bagel: confessions of a loner who likes company, has yet to make its appearance on AMAZON.COM.

Click here to email Ron Evans.

-Perry Miller, Editor

My daily work begins with visiting patients whose religion is unknown, obtaining their affiliation, and, if affiliated, making that information known to the appropriate chaplains. These patients especially provide examples of the spontaneous humanness one encounters as a hospital chaplain.

Like the older white male patient in an intensive care unit, whose religion was listed as “unknown.” I entered his room and introduced myself as the hospital chaplain making my rounds on the floor. He interrupted, “I can’t hear, and I had cataracts and can’t see.” I crossed the room, walked around to the upper side of his bed and said, more loudly, “I’m Rev. Alberts, hospital chaplain, making my rounds.” Before I could state the purpose of my routine visit, he shouted, “I don’t want any religious person in my room!”

The patient’s outburst surprised me. But my surprise was tempered by my belief that patients usually have a good reason for reacting negatively to a “religious person.” Moving away from his bedside, I replied, “You answered my question” [about whether he had a religious affiliation]. Then, reaching for something in common with him, I said, “I recently had cataracts removed from my eyes.” He replied, “I had one removed, and that is why I’m blind.” “I’m sorry,” I said, heading toward the door, and adding, “I respect your wishes very much.” “That’s okay,” he replied, his tone positive. Then he asked, “Could you do something for me?” “Sure,” I answered, surprised again. “Push that table [his over-bed mobile table] closer so I can reach that Ginger ale and cup,” he directed. He then commented, “These freakin’ people don’t know what they’re doing. I have a bum right shoulder and can’t reach it, and the table is too far away from my other hand.”

For another patient, it was about his needing access to a loving god. An older, terminally ill black man, the patient told a palliative care nurse that soon he would be “shoveling coal.” The concerned nurse shared his troubling words of self-condemnation with me, said he was dying of cancer, had difficulty speaking because of his weakened condition, and asked that I visit him. His doctor also told me “We’re in a muddle about his saying he’s going to shovel coal in the next life, not knowing how to handle it.”

The patient confirmed that he was “going to be shoveling a lot of coal” when he died. Why? “Because of the number of bad things I have done in my life,” he said in a weakened tone. I did not pursue the “bad things” he said he did because of his difficulty speaking. Instead, his being a black man, led me to ask if anyone had ever done “bad things” to him “growing up and in your life?” “Yes, a lot.”

Having researched and written about America’s white-controlled hierarchy of access to economic and political power, I assumed he probably had at least two racial strikes waiting for him when he was born. One invisible strike could be seen in a study that found, “Blacks Suffer Heart Failure More Than Whites . . . at a rate 20 times higher than did whites, even dying of it decades before the condition typically strikes white . . . researchers reported.” (The New York Times, Mar. 19, 2009)

The second unseen strike against this patient may be found in another recent study that showed, “Chronic stress from growing up poor appears to have a direct impact on the brain, leaving children with impairment in at least one key area—working memory.” The “bad things” here: “Children raised in poverty suffer many ill effects: They often have health problems and tend to struggle in school, which can create a cycle of poverty across generations.” (The Boston Globe, Apr. 7, 2009). In other words, a full stomach feeds a hungry mind. And a hungry mind is the pathway to a full stomach and a self-loving heart.

Sadly the patient had a self-loathing heart. A white-dominated hierarchy, with him at the bottom where “bad” economic and social and political “things” happen to poor people of color especially—and also to economically strapped white persons. “Bad things” legitimized by a theology of self-hatred, which was the third strike that apparently led this patient to believe he would be “shoveling coal” in hell when he died.

What seemed to reassure the patient was not so much that I said Jesus revealed a “god of love who especially loves you.” Nor my statement that all of us are human and in need of grace. Nor the fact that a lot of “bad things” had happened to him already. Nor even the prayer that I offered, though prayer is often a powerful way to affirm and reassure a patient.

What seemed to especially connect with this patient was my telling him, “Wherever you are I will see you there.” “You will?,” he asked. “Yes, I’ll be there. And neither of us will be shoveling coal.” “I hope you’re right,” he said. Before his discharge to a hospice I saw him again and repeated: “Wherever you go, I’ll be there. I’ll look for you until I find you.” “Okay,” he replied, “that’s a promise.” “That’s a promise.” The patient seemed to find reassurance in hearing someone not only voice caring about whether he lived or died but caring about him even after he died.

The humanness in front of us. The humanness inside of us.

____________________________
Bill Alberts is hospital chaplain at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Alberts is a nationally known writer and an occasional contributor to CounterPunch. In addition, he is convener of the New England Chapter of CPSP. He can be reached at william.alberts@bmc.org.

James Gebhart, Chair of the 2010 CPSP Plenary, provided the following announcement:

Start to plan now for the 2010 20th Anniversary Celebration in Columbus, Ohio April 10-13, 2010. This is going to be a special occasion, a time to honor our history and to have a festival in our community. Many special surprises are being planned. Join the celebration. Mark your calendars!.

Jim Gebhart, Plenary Chair

First comes love, and then comes the story, then comes the CPSP allegory . . .

I did not attend the 2009 Plenary in Virginia Beach and, therefore, feel like an interloper having eavesdropped on the dialogue between Barbara McGuire and Ron Evans. Still, their observations and declarations made public in the CPSP Pastoral Report invite me to comment. In particular, I offer a meditation intended to deepen Barbara’s reflections on love of self so as to (hopefully) allay Ron’s ambivalence on the matter.

I am struck, first, by the lack of clarity regarding two pivotal words used—“love” and “self.” Should one infer from Barbara’s reference to Oscar Wilde that romantic love, as commonly understood and misunderstood, is the love about which she writes? And is that experience simply “to feel positive about oneself,” as noted by Ron? And to whom or what is “the self” referential? Is the collective membership of CPSP that “self,” and/or is that “self” the individual person?

Allow me, then, to begin this story again with reflections on “love.” I would not choose the wild, not to say hedonist, Oscar Wilde as a spokesperson for love. Rather, I turn to the sacred texts of virtually any religion. I discern from these readings that love is akin to a gravitational force holding or drawing back into relationship the increasingly differentiated yet simultaneously integrated elements of the Cosmos. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described love as “the supreme unifying principle of life.” For me, God is that force or principle. God is Love.

Love is not an emotion but gives rise to a panoply of emotions both positive and negative; nor is love a romantic inclination though it may be manifest as such. Love, again, is a force field that holds all things in relationship, committing those “things” to differentiation and integration, autonomy and community. And the ongoing process of individuating and communing can be as discomfiting as it can be pleasing, as negative as it is positive.

The self is embedded in the relational context compelled by love. Karl Marx states the case plainly: “The self is an ensemble of social relationships.” F LeRon Shults says it poignantly: “My sense of self is called into being and formed through interaction with other persons within my particular set of overlapping communities. This mutual confrontation evokes an ambiguous transactional drama in which the boundaries of self and other are explored, negotiated, transgressed, or reified.” (Reforming Theological Anthropology, page 2.) Or, as expressed more poetically in the African idiom of ubuntu, “a person is a person through other persons.”

The words of an ancient admonish, indeed commanded; “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”. Interpreted in the context of the meaning I make of love and self, and with the hope of luring Barbara and Ron to greater agreement with less ambivalence, this verse might read as follows: Be embraced, informed, and inspired by the force field that holds you [plural] as relational, interdependent selves; resist living the narcissistic illusion of the individual, independent self.

Contrary to Ron’s assertion, then, I argue that love and love of self are the beginning and end, the ground and destiny of our being. The story is in the middle and accessory after the fact. That is, love is a given. We know this viscerally, affectively, and intuitively before we have words for its gravitational effect on us. It is the inchoate experience of love that gives impetus to “primary speech.” (I think that this is the experience about which Ann and Barry Ulanov wrote in their book of the same title.) Our most moving stories are those told about the tragedy and triumph of love. So, when Ron is “feeling down,” and when his story “seems like so much junk,” it is perhaps the feeling of anomie and/or ennui that gives rise to his “junk” narrative. But when he meets his sisters and brothers “in the flesh” he then knows love again—for when two or three are gathered in God’s name . . . well, there goes love in their midst! It is the remembrance of love in that relational context that impels him to articulate a narrative of redemption.

The history of clinical pastoral education generally, and of CPSP specifically, is one of wounding and healing, of breaking and mending, of love’s triumphs and tragedies. At this moment it is a history that culminates eloquently in our covenant and our proclamation (short stories!) in celebration of our differentiating/integrating selfhood. We are a model or metaphor for covenantal community. Said differently and succinctly—First comes love, and then comes the story, and then comes the CPSP allegory.

__________________________
The Rev Dr Ronald David
Department of Pastoral Care
The Hospital of the Good Samaritan
1225 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90017

To contact Dr. David, click here.

The 9th Asia-Pacific Congress on Pastoral Care and Counseling will be held on August 24-28, 2009 in Taipei, Taiwan. The brochure and online registration are at
http://www.mmh.org.tw/2009CPE/

The Asia-Pacific region of the International Council of Pastoral Care & Counseling (ICPCC) hosts this congress every four years.

CPSP provides significant leadership and support to ICPCC ever since it became a member over a decade ago.

Contact Richard Liew for further details at 718-869-7419. Email: liewr@aol.com

I welcome Barbara McGuire’s reflections on self love in the April Pastoral Report. It helps me to likewise sort out what I believe lies at the heart of CPSP.

I agree that to feel positive about oneself, to love oneself, is a vital piece of the equation. Most of us, regardless of tradition, can no doubt point to ways in which self has been negated, downplayed in ways that have been destructive. The alternative is to learn to love oneself. And this is where I become a little nervous. As vital as it is to come to a love of oneself I am not sure this is the starting point. Or the end either.

There is a story out of Greek mythology about Narcissus, the beautiful young man who in his beauty scorned the love of all admirers. A youth who Narcissus spurned in this manner prays that Narcissus might suffer a similar fate, that he might love unrequitedly. The god of retribution, Nemesis, hears the prayer and arranges that Narcissus stop to drink at a pool in which sees his own reflection. Instantly he falls in love with it. Unable to embrace the image in the water he lies there, unable to tear himself away, and dies.

I sense that, at times, CPSP runs the risk of lying by the water mesmerized by its own beauty. Again to love oneself is of critical importance, however I believe the staying power of CPSP, its origins and its beauty, lies further up stream.

I think that this is the genius of CPSP. When I am feeling down, when my story seems like so much junk, when I remember who I am and cannot bless it, my love affair with myself becomes difficult. How do you love the unloveable? Or, worse yet, as in the case of Narcissus, you become fixated on your own image. But then I go to a CPSP meeting and meet the sisters and the brothers. I meet them in the flesh. And I hear the story told, how the unwashed found hope, the unloved were changed.

At this past plenary in Virginia Beach I heard for the first time the details of how CPSP began, heard the story from Raymond of how he started a ratty little newsletter, how like minded folks responded, how it came to be that a few disgruntled brothers met and said let us be true to what we remember. I had heard a little of it before, now I heard it all again.

And behold it is the story I heard years before in Anton Boisen. It is the story I had heard from Jorjorian and Eichorn and Dollar and Madden. Each of you can name your own mentors, your own saints. I thought the story had been lost but 15 years ago I heard it recovered in CPSP and heard it again in Virginia Beach a month ago.

Luise Wienrick in the task force report on the future wrote: “Our unique history merits retelling and celebrating, and it is important that we keep telling our story and revisiting these roots, even as we continue to grow and change to embrace the future we are creating together.”

I couldn’t agree more and only suggest the task force spend more time elaborating on this statement as the very heart of what we are about and as a means of maintaining who we are.

I have no quarrel with the need to love oneself but I think it can be a deceptive image. So appealing you can stare at until you waste away. CPSP offers something more lasting, a story, one of brokenness and estrangement. But in the telling we hear our own story, a tale we can embrace as our own and feel again that all is well. That we are well.
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Contact Ron Evan by clicking here.

Dr. Christopher Swift, Past President of the UK's College of Health Care Chaplains (CHCC), is a friend and colleague of the CPSP. He was the Guest of Honor at the 2007 CPSP Plenary held in Raleigh, NC where he brought greetings from the CHCC and dialogued with the CPSP community. He sent us words of support and a prayer he had written following a shooting massacre at one of our universities.

Recently, Dr, Swift published his new book: Hospital Chaplaincy in the Twenty-First Century: the crisis of spiritual care in the NHS. The book is published by Ashgate.