CPSP Pastoral Report

ELEVENTH CPSP PLENARY MEETING REPORT TO THE COMMUNITY BY RAYMOND J. LAWRENCE, GENERAL SECRETARY

MARCH 15, 2001

An old woman in my first congregation used to say to her grown children, when parting, "Remember where you came from." Stories of where we come from are typically variable. The various gospels, canonical and otherwise, tell the same story of where Christians came from in various and sometimes quite different ways. The Apostle Paul tells the story of where he came from religiously in somewhat different ways each time he tells it.

I once heard a Swedish pastor say in a sermon that Swedes were Lutherans because a 16th century Swedish king decided in favor of Lutheran Church during the Reformation, which is not untrue. If the story of Swedish Lutherans is told that way, they should probably give up being Lutheran. Another truthful statement is that Swedes are Lutherans because Luther risked his life and honor to restore a biblical faith rooted in a change of heart to counter medieval Catholic scheme of salvation by works, specifically a system of indulgences. Yet another truthful recollection is that Luther demonstrated that a serious religious life could include an enthusiastic affirmation of sexual pleasure, and proclaimed that affirmation through his life, liberating nuns and marrying one himself, and teaching that sexual abstinence was an unnecessary and vain burden. In that telling one might actually want to be a Lutheran.

Where we in CPSP came from is a tale that can be told many different ways, and how we tell it will show whether we have anything worth committing to. A stranger phoned me several weeks ago to ask me about CPSP. "Are you the group that organized about ten or fifteen years ago, made up of rogues and misfits?" he asked. He sounded as if he might be smiling, so I did not take offense. I told him I was not sure we had organized yet. Ken Blank is still trying to get an accurate and official membership list. I looked up "rogue" in the dictionary after he hung up and it said that a rogue horse is one that won't behave, which is exactly the same metaphor that Tillich used, saying that the biblical meaning of "spiritual" is continued today only in the word "spirited," as when we say a horse is "spirited." In that case we should boast of being rogues. As for whether we are misfits, I'll be satisfied to have written on my tombstone, "Proud to have been a misfit." Anyone who is a good fit in the present order, even in the religious community, is, as they used to say in the old days, "unfaithful."

So where did we come from? CPSP was created abruptly on one week-end eleven
years ago when fifteen persons gathered in Roanoke, but that's not the best way to tell our story. For a decade or more previously a number of persons in our field had raised critical questions about the direction of the clinical pastoral movement, beginning most notably with Robert Powell who in 1979, in his last date with the ACPE, addressing the question, "Whatever Happened to CPE?" Several years of mostly verbal challenges to the direction of the clinical
pastoral establishment culminated in the publication of the Underground Report (UR) in 1988, a stinging critique of the direction of the clinical pastoral community. This publication was supported by well over a hundred supervisors and counselors. But the leadership was offended, and responded with a blind eye and a deaf ear. The movement whose life blood is the critical faculty was unable to accept criticism of its own actions and program. If a trainee in any clinical training program had assumed such a posture, such a trainee would have been labeled "unteachable."

Of the numbers who supported the UR, some fewer number were interested in creating a new organization. When finally only fifteen gathered to consider creating a new organization in 1990, our real interest was not in an organization, but in saving our professional lives. We experienced the established clinical pastoral community as capricious, controlling, driven by political agenda rather than a desire for competency, and posing a threat to our right to work, our ticket to a job.

A pattern of dominance and submission were the marks of our professional communities in those days. Fear and intimidation characterized the spirit of the professional gatherings that we experienced. The record is replete with cases of collegial knifings. We were finding far too many bodies by the side of the road, professionally speaking, victims of mean-spirited bureaucratic infighting and culture wars. Some of this is documented in the early issues of the UR. Weimagined that we as a community of professionals could do better than that.
We thought we could and ought to have a professional association that seriously attempted to be ruled by respect and care for one another, not by domination and submission. So we created CPSP, reluctantly.

It is rare for a large organization to foster respect and care for all its members, especially rare in the corporate, pyramidal structure of the rulers and the ruled. Somehow the bullies always seem to rise to the top. No one is immune to acting in a predatory manner. But we believe we have created the kind of community in which such behavior can be most easily addressed.

Concurrent with a pattern of domination and submission, we noted a diminishment of the self-critical, which is the life-blood of the clinical pastoral movement.

It is very rare in history that an established institution permits radical critique within its ranks. All institutions are pretty much like my favorite uncle, who says that there are only two kinds of criticism that he resents, constructive and destructive. The lesson here is not subtle. We will have to be resolute and diligent if we want to nurture a capacity for the self-critical in our midst. That requires conscious deliberation, more than simply a laissez-faire posture, because all the instincts for self-preservation and success point to killing off any serious internal critic. Our continuing vitality will be determined by our ability to nurture a receptiveness to criticism, and also by a continuing courage and audacity on the part of the membership. That is no small assignment. If we are in danger externally from controlling corporate structures, we are in more danger from our fear of taking the risk of being critical.

Some members of this community dissent from some of our current direction. We need to hear from such persons, and we need to help them be heard. We should have nothing to fear, and much to gain. The rationale for the Tavistock-style session here at this meeting is that it invites free association and spontaneity of communication---even some craziness—and thus hopefully offers a space for views that might not otherwise be heard. We will not hear all that needs to be heard unless we hear from the crazies, or that crazy dimension of each of us. Donald Capps makes the point that social phobics are giving testimony to the meanness and aggression in our social fabric. The neurotic and psychotic may be our very best critics. When we lose the capacity for the self-critical we will have become just another organization, and I hope I am not around to see that day.

CPSP was formed out of the memories of our own experience in clinical training. It was not formed around the corporate bureaucratic model, that by its very nature smothers criticism with public relations and undermines collegiality by promoting patterns of domination and submission. We remembered the redemptive process of our own clinical training, an experience that was marked by deep criticism and deep respect and care, an experience that we would never demean or trivialize by calling it skill training. We experienced our own clinical pastoral process as transformative. We sought in creating CPSP to rekindle the transformative process that seemed to be diminishing in our professional lives. We constructed the Chapter model out of our memories of the clinical training group as the best hope for fostering continuing transformation, individually and corporately.

Robert Powell often reminds us that transformation is the central goal of clinical supervision. Certainly anyone true to Boisen's vision of training would hold to that view. That transformation continues to slip out of view in the course of the history of the clinical movement is a curious phenomenon. I believe there are good reasons why this is so. Transformation is a problematic concept.

An applicant for clinical training came to see me some weeks ago and mentioned to me that she was unsettled by an interview in another center because the clinical supervisor had communicated to her, though somewhat obliquely, that he intended to change her in the course of training. I told her I thought she ought to be leery of anyone bent on such an objective, but I needn't have said that, because she was already leery. But even as I said what I did to her, I also knew that the process would indeed be transformative if it were successful.

We have a paradox here. The process is transformative, but the clinical supervisor, or in the case of counseling, the counselor or therapist, must not attempt to elevate herself into the role of director of the process. Supervisor as director becomes manipulator. Therapist as director becomes manipulator. We are surrounded by such manipulators. Some time back I confronted a supervisor-in-training who used the metaphor for her work with her group of pastoral trainees as of her making a movie. "But it's not your movie," I said. It is the trainee's movie, and you are at best a consultant to the process. Imagine acquiring a therapist who thinks of herself as making a movie of your life. Transformation must begin and end with the client/trainee, and loss of focus on this issue is destructive.

Furthermore, the supervisor must not to presume remove herself from the effects of the transforming process. As Jung said about his therapy, the therapeutic process changes both therapist and patient. The supervisor or therapist must avoid posing as the transforming agent. The supervisor must be servant of the transforming process, and as a willing recipient of it as the trainee, and in doing so must take a certain agnostic posture, not knowing quite where any particular supervisory or therapeutic process will lead. We all must remain permanently as advanced learners, maintaining our awe of the process that is not different from the awe that our trainees or clients bring, even if we bring to it considerable experience and wisdom and perhaps less anxiety. As supervisors and counselors we must enter the process with a posture of not-knowing. As Wilfred Bion puts it, aware of his hyperbole, we begin each session with no memory, no understanding, and no desire. Such is the essential agnostic posture.

We are all aware that one of our sister organization has adopted what it calls an "outcome" approach to the evaluation of training. In a certain sense we can all agree that a clinically trained minister looks different from an untrained one, and so outcome analysis is not entirely inappropriate. However, when we are front-loaded with a list of specific outcomes, we as supervisors begin to know too much, and we inevitably lose the serendipitous, transforming character of training in which both we and they, supervisor and supervisee, are changed by a process of exploration, analysis, and reflection. Even more bizarre would be the therapist with her list of specific outcomes. We know of course that many such therapists are practicing all across the land. They are working from their lists, and it is a painful fact of our modern world. The outcome approach in our work is the road to perdition.

When John D. Rockefeller in 1860s started refining crude oil to make
kerosene, to replace whale oil as the lighting fluid of lamps of the world, he dumped the waste product, gasoline, into the rivers of Ohio. But soon the internal combustion engine was invented and the by-product became more valuable than the product. Sometimes it is difficult to decipher what is valuable and what isn't. Most of the clinical pastoral field today has reverted to refining kerosine, and dumping the gasoline.

This is not a new issue. Since the beginning of the clinical pastoral movement it has been conflicted over this issue. The proponents of skill training on the one side, who knew precisely what they wanted the trainee to learn, and the (more agnostic) proponents of transformation on the other, who undertook explorations of the inner world, and in some cases the inner world of madness, not always clear what they might discover in the process, but always seeking the development of the self.

Among the triumvirate who created the clinical pastoral training movement, Anton Boisen, Helen Flanders Dunbar and Richard Cabot, the latter was quite clear of his position: he strongly promoted clinical training as skill development. He wanted skilled pastors who could assist physicians in their healing work. He held in contempt any dabbling in the inner world of the mind or psyche. An M.D. himself, he held to the view that psychiatry was a sick science. Very early on, in 1931, he took the position that Boisen, because of his recurring psychosis, and especially because Boisen regarded his psychotic experiences as learning opportunities, was unfit to be a minister, much less a clinical pastoral supervisor, and dismissed him from the movement. Dunbar then staged a coup d'etat, seizing the books of the fledgling organization, and taking both them and Boisen from Boston to New York City, where they established a new office. Were it not for Helen Flanders Dunbar, Cabot would likely have vanquished Boisen early on.

For the next 40 years, from the 30s until the merger of the Boston and New York groups in 1967, Boisen's spirit dominated the clinical pastoral movement. As the decades have passed since the merger, the Cabot philosophy has increasingly carried the day. When most of the clinical pastoral movement today claims Cabot as the principle founder, it is being quite candid. The later ascendancy of Cabot has meant that the transformative power of clinical pastoral training movement has been diminished, replaced by a more superficial teaching of skills, such as how to say a useful prayer. Such specific skill training is easy to peddle in the marketplace of the healthcare industry, as well as the churches. When the clinical training movement has finally boiled itself down entirely to skill training, it will have severed its ties entirely with Boisen and become the Cabot movement.

It is important that we define the transformation that clinical pastoral training seeks. For definition we must go back to our own early experience in training, when we were the trainees. I came into training like many of my colleagues, as a minister with almost a decade of experience, but basically on the rocks and unemployable. I was not entirely ineffective as a minister. More importantly, I had failed to find a mentor in my early developing years as a professional and I had failed to find a community that could engage, confront, and support me as I tried to shape my professional identity. I had been exempted from clinical training by the seminary because I had field work in a church, which shows how little the seminary understood the significance of that training. I remember being intrigued and somewhat unnerved by my peers’ stories of training with Pat Prest at the nearby Medical College of Virginia.

My first job in the Episcopal Church was as assistant at St. Andrews Church in Newport News. The bishop, to his credit, came to pay me a visit after six months at my job, to inquire how I was doing. I told him that the Rector I was working for wouldn't talk to me anymore, that we were in some kind of cold war, and that I felt hopeless. The bishop spoke only one sentence to me in response, and never spoke another word to me as long as he lived. He said, "No one before ever had any trouble relating to the man." And that was the end of that. I was fired about a year later, and moved to another congregation where I had similar problems. I am not presenting a mea culpa. I had my authority problems, but the authorities I worked for had their problems too. It was a lethal dance.

It should surprise no one that a senior pastor and a junior pastor should have authority issues between them. That is predictable. The shame was that no one in leadership understood that such problems are to be expected and are worth processing, and that in the process great wisdom is often discovered, wisdom about ourselves, about others, about the nature of human relationship in general, and that selfhood does not develop without such a mentoring process. Without a strong sense of self there is no ministry. And while I could have benefited from skill training, such training would not likely have penetrated the complexities of my authority problem and the delicate personal task that faced me of learning how to be an authority in a world and a church that does not welcome authority, but rather seeks to stamp it out before it spreads.

Some years and a job later, I entered a residency program and all these issues reasserted themselves. However, now the context was radically different. In place of incompetent functionaries in the person of the several bishops and senior pastors, I faced my first clinical supervisor, Armen Jorjorian. I thought I was entering a course in skill training, but what I came to was a salvific, redemptive journey into myself. The genius of Jorjorian was that he journeyed with me like Virgil with Dante into hell, not seeming to know where we would end up, and indeed I doubt he did. But he was wise enough to pose penetrating and often unnerving questions at certain points. He also cared about me. I dare say he loved me. I got a grasp on myself as a person and as a pastor. I got some skill training too, but that was a pale benefit in comparison. I also simultaneously received the benefits of psychotherapy, but the larger impact on my sense of self came from Armen Jorjorian who will remain the man who most showed me how to be a person and a pastor.

Two essential ingredients set the context allowing clinical training to be transformative: A person of heart and wisdom in the leadership position so that the enterprise is not derailed by political or public relations concerns, and one who doesn't know too much about where the process will lead. Armen kowtowed to nobody and nothing in his pursuit of wisdom, and he was appropiately agnostic. His leadership made the program possible.

The other element that lays the foundation for transformation is less complicated and is easy to create: a small face-to-face group that is committed to reflect on data in a serious manner, with membership that is willing to speak the truth come what may, is reasonably informed, and possesses a compassionate heart. There is virtual magic in such a group when the membership shares its problem cases of pastoral care and counseling. The transformative experience is almost assured. I continue to be astonished at how true this is. In Chapter life
and in clinical training groups, even when leadership seems a bit clumsy, the effectiveness of the process is almost magical.

I am a happy man today because I believe that together we have successfully created an imperfect but caring and self-critical professional community against all odds, nurturing the transformative power of the original Boisen/Dunbar movement against strong contrary trends, and I am confident that this vision and this work will be carried on after the present leadership has been laid to rest. We have yet much to do as a community, but we are keeping the covenant, and in the years ahead many strong and idiosyncratic selves will grow up among us and lead us forward. Like Abraham, who lived by faith, and was obedient to that ancient covenant, one not different from ours, I believe that our children will one day be more in number than the stars in the heavens.

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