The College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy is a theologically based covenant community, dedicated to "recovery of the soul" and promoting competency in the clinical pastoral field.
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With the selection of the 2010 Plenary theme as “The Recovery of Soul,” the Governing Council drew inspiration from CPSP’s foundational document we call the Covenant.
The CPSP Covenant boldly states that among our chief tasks as a community of pilgrims is the recovery of soul. We are on a journey together.
Explicit is that “recovery” means that something has been lost in the training of ministers
Perhaps the easy portion of this task is the training itself. The passing forward a discipline of values and depth of theological understanding concerning the human condition from supervisor to trainee. The context of our learning is often the human plight of crisis and moments of great distress and depleted personal resources of those to whom we offer pastoral care.
But “of the Soul:” Does a soul exist? What might the soul be a reference to in our Covenant? Is the soul an amorphous energy and entity invisible to the human eye? Even if you should be so inclined to believe, I am inclined to say that our clinical pastoral tradition would say no.
The “soul” that we are seeking to recover is the soul of meaning, the soul of meaningful community freed from the self-absorbed shackles that kill the human drive to be more than a commodity in our current consumerist and market-driven society. In some ways recovery of soul speaks to an emancipation of the minister from the herding mentality and cog-forming numbness of the institution.
In CPSP recovery of soul takes many forms. One is immersed in the giants that constitute the classics of clinical pastoral education. It is a journey to discover together the often displaced and forgotten pioneers of the clinical pastoral education movement like Anton Boisen and Helen Flanders Dunbar. These two human beings emulate and incarnate in their personal and professional stories the spirit and tradition we celebrate as the CPSP community.
Recovery of soul is the reclamation of ‘spirit’ in the process of clinical pastoral education and collegial professional chapters. As a community CPSP values the gift of the individual, the self, and the many individuals that discover the unique qualities they have, bring, and can share as persons in relation to others at work and play.
Recovery of soul is about being authentically present to self and others in our everyday living. It echoes something of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Polonius speaking to his son Laertes gives him advice for living and tells him, “to thine own self be true.”
The Governing Council’s wisdom for choosing the theme of Recovery of Soul for the 20th anniversary of CPSP was insightful and serendipitous. It remains for each of us to engage what recovery of soul means to our community, our work, and our vocation. I, for one, welcome the conversation and look forward to the healthy and dynamic exchange of ideas at the Plenary in Ohio.
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The Rev. Dr. Belen Gonzalez y Perez,
Director of Pastoral care and Education
Long Island College Hospita
BPerez@chpnet.org
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at April 10, 2010 10:40 AM
