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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The Wall Street Journal on December 6, ran an article “Bigger Roles for Chaplains on Patient Medical Teams, by Laura Landro. On the face of it the article strongly touted chaplaincy services in hospitals, and the reaction from a number of chaplains was quite positive. But they neglected to read the fine print, so to speak. No competent chaplain or pastoral clinician should be deceived by the hype in the Wall Street Journal piece. While it purports to promote pastoral services in hospitals, it actually discounts the genius of properly trained chaplaincies and pastoral services, however subtly the discounting was done. The article is in fact a damaging assault on clinically basis of pastoral care and counseling.
The blessing of cells and ‘positive spiritual guidance’, whatever that means, no doubt brings comfort to some people, but most competent well-trained chaplains will cringe at hearing their roles thus epitomised. Friendly companionship and familiar religious rituals, such as the blessing of this or that, undoubtedly bring comfort to some people. But such services hardly require years of rigorous clinical training that many health care chaplains have these days.
An unbiased and uninvolved reader of this Wall Street Journal article would certainly conclude that all those clinically trained chaplains who invested two, three, and more years developing their clinically skills in internships and residencies wasted a lot of time and money. They could have better spent a few weeks learning to say prayers and the art of friendly conversation.
Most competent clinically trained chaplains do not consider prayer a major therapeutic tool. Many, perhaps most pastoral visits by chaplains do not and arguably should not include prayer at all. The point here is that clinically trained chaplains offer a therapeutic ear for persons in trouble, an ear that is somewhat removed from the scientifically-oriented medical team, an ear that is trained both theologically and psychologically.
Anton T. Boisen, the man who in the early twentieth century inaugurated clinical pastoral training for clergy was not the proverbial prayer warrior. He did not promote prayer with patients as the central tool. What he did promote and emphasize passionately was that chaplains should be trained to listen to patients with a sensitive and psychologically informed ear. “It’s not what the chaplain says to the patient, but what the patient says to the chaplain.” And the corollary is of course, that competent listening requires a considerable amount of intensive psychologically based training. Boisen also taught that ministers must have a basic knowledge of psychoanalytically psychology, without which no competent listening can take place.
The Wall Street Journal has turned Boisen’s teaching and the clinical pastoral training movement on its head. In emphasizing chaplains’ prayers it is now claiming that what is important is what the chaplain says to the patient. Furthermore it is also highlighting the trivial or tangential dimension of clinical chaplaincy in its inflation of the benefits of prayer. And finally, the category ‘spiritual’ itself is a category yet bereft of definition. It seems to mean everything and nothing.
The kind of chaplaincy work touted by the Wall Street Journal can be done by persons with no clinical training. Such work would require only the ability to mouth prayers, remain friendly, and profess to know something about the blurry concept of spirituality, a concept about which everyone seems to be his or her own private expert.
Health care institutions across the country could save a considerable amount of money if they follow the Wall Street Journal. They could terminate their highly trained and well-paid chaplains and hire untrained prayer warriors to do friendly visits and by request pronounce their blessings on this or that. No well trained chaplain or pastoral counselor could be happy with such a prospect.
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-Raymond J. Lawrence, CPSP General Secretary
Posted by Perry Miller, Editor at December 14, 2011 7:18 AM
