CPSP Pastoral Report

We must maintain the value of our currency, which requires a thorough vetting of the persons we certify and the process by which Chapters make their decisions. This community has changed significantly since the days when we were fifty persons who all knew each other. We could cut corners administratively in those days and still have confidence in our decisions, the same way the old Council for Clinical Training certified the late revered Len Cedarleaf by phone. The committee members knew him already. Now that we are more than three hundred certified persons, and growing, we cannot all know each other. And we cannot rely only on say-so. We must see with our own eyes if we are to remain committed to upholding minimal standards.

The specter of us regressing into just another legalistic, imperial, soulless bureaucracy is a ghost worthy of serious consideration. But we have not become that beast quite yet, nor are we even close. We are a minimalist organization, but must not become minimal in our mutual accountability.

More important than the arrangement of our rules of accountability---the commissions and committees, for example---is the spirit with which we approach our Standards. Being serious about accountability is not the same as being legalistic or obsessive. If we come to believe that we are servants of our Standards, then all is lost. The Standards are made for man---and woman---not man for the Standards. We should ignore any Standard if being human in a particular context requires it. No standard is inviolate. Those of you who are Christian will recognize the echo here. It is the spirit that gives us life, and the Standards that confront us with our failings. But we cannot escape the tension between the spirit and the law, or when we do, we put ourselves in peril.

We must maintain a spirit of generosity along with seriousness about standards. When I began somewhat playfully referring the Certification chair as the Certification Czar many presumed that I was promoting authoritarianism and the use of autocratic power. I regret that the metaphor communicated such a message, although I should have foreseen that it would. I suggest now that when you think fo czar you remember that the last czar, when he failed in his leadership, was put against the wall and shot. We do not need to resort to violence, but we should remove any leadership that fails to attend to the needs of the community.

Let our Standards remain rigorous, or even become more rigorous, but let our spirit be informed by generosity, compassionate, and freedom, always alert to the exceptions to the standards, and alert to the emergence of the new creation for which no Standard has been written.

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We in this community can be very proud to have had so many persons of substance in leadership over the years. In key leadership positions we have had the likes of Ken Blank, John deVelder, Foy Richey, Perry Miller, Bill Carr, Richard Liew, and Jim Gebhart, and many others. We would not be what we are without the vision and energy of these person and others like them. But in this context I believe I should say a few words about women, a subject of mystification for all men. We need to bring more women up into leadership positions. We are much too heavily weighted with males, especially weighty males. When one gender dominates the other, creativity in inhibited. I urge Chapters to do what they can to train women for leadership. Leadership is not all charisma, but is in large part a matter of training.

I proposed in writing some years back that we adopt a Noah's Ark model, that we certify males only in tandem with females, so as to create a community of gender balance. You remember children's song, "The animals come in two-by-two, the elephant and the kangaroo." My proposal was a hair-brained idea that, were it subscribed to, would have meant a very small meeting room today. But it represents an objective toward which we should put our energy and efforts. Wherever a group of mostly men gather they are either angry and want to fight, or are depressed. I believe that is in the genetic code. I love the comment made by Karl Barth about women's and men's groups in congregational life. "Who commanded them to separate?" he asked.

I also want to make two cautionary comments. We must not thrust women who are unprepared into leadership just because they are women. We know this sometimes occurs in the culture at large, and it is counter-productive. Secondly, we do not need to carry personal guilt for the scarcity of women in our communities. We are paying for the sins of our progenitors. Our parents have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. We continue to be wounded by traditions of male prerogative, but self-flagellation will not cure, nor even male submission to female flagellation, a popular cure of late.

The reason we have no matriarchs like our patriarch, Myron Madden, is because no women were coming up through the ranks of the clergy when he was coming up. A couple of decades later I went to seminary with four hundred fellow male seminarians. Women ministers were almost unheard of even as late as the 60s. A wise old woman does not become such over a week-end. It takes a lifetime of experience and learning. With deliberation and forethought, let us nurture the women among us so that in years to come we will be blessed with some matriarchal versions of Myron Madden.

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I think I am required to comment on a phenomenon that many of you have inquired about, namely the surprising and seemingly irrational hostility that emanates from some quarters in the field toward CPSP. It is not imaginary, and it has two sources that I am aware of, one temporal and the other perhaps more serious.

One source of the hostility is me. I have practiced the art of polemics over the past two decades, and I have pricked a number of very large and unforgiving egos who have very long memories. As Harold Bloom says about himself, my Marxism has alienated many people. Not Karl but Groucho, whose philosophy was, "whatever it is, I'm against it." I make no apologies. Those who can't stand the heat should stay out of the kitchen. Most of my polemics are in the public record of Contra Mundum and the Underground Report where you may read them at will. Perry Miller has often said, and is probably correct, that CPSP will experience a surge in membership when I am finally put to pasture or laid to rest.

The other contributing factor is that the emergence of CPSP represented a breach in the clinical pastoral education guild. The guild idea in clinical pastoral education is that one organization should determine who can and who cannot work in the field. In the eyes of our detractors CPSP has ruptured the franchise, and thus leveled a narcissistic injury on the profession. (It is noteworthy that we did not have that sort of hostile response from pastoral counselors.) The end of the guild is a matter that our colleagues in the clinical pastoral field need to get over. The notion that one and only one organization should arbitrate as to who can work in the field in not a good idea in the best of times. If CPSP were to close shop tomorrow, another organization would be necessary, to rise up to take its place. Monopolies are injurious to the soul. They fester abuse. They spawn illusions of grandeur and self-importance. They quash diversity and inevitably become tyrannical.

We can imagine the abuses that would result if you could put all Christian churches under one central authority in the name of unity. The only time in its history that Christianity was situated under one single authority was for a brief period beginning in 325 when the Emperor Constantine adopted the Church. That was not a pretty sight. Christians then began a new Christian tradition of executing each other for wrongful beliefs. The existence of alternative certifying and accrediting bodies is good for everyone. And let us be careful to remember this when another upstart arises to offer an alternative to CPSP as well. We should respond with generosity of spirit.

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Hardly any event in the Plenary is as important as the Tavistock group. The label "Tavistock" refers to the work done by Wilfred Bion in group theory, the essence of which is the thesis being that all groups are shaped by hidden agenda and unconscious forces, many of which are resistant to analysis much less to remedy.

The Tavistock event is the once-a-year space in time for CPSP to reflect upon itself. Nothing is more important.

We have our detractors, but the enemy we most have to fear is ourselves. The propensity for any organization to become devilish can hardly be exaggerated. We have far less to fear from the malicious gossip that is passed around than we have to fear from losing touch with our own craziness and finitude. 1_ hours once a year is only a sample of the work we all need to be doing continually.

The Tavistock event in this conference is a token or symbolic effort to inoculate this community from self-delusion. We leave the entire session open for whatever anyone wishes to contribute with the object of attending to anything that may need to be broached. Such openness inevitably invites irrational and unconscious material, and it is good for us to have this out in the open, and good for us to make an effort to understand it if we can, and interpret it if we are able. Unconscious material percolates in any community, but rarely does a community possess the courage or wisdom to process such material. Attempting to do so is a way to make peace with our collective and individual madness rather than deny it and see it irrupting in unexpected ways. Let CPSP monitor its own craziness rather than nurture an illusion that we are as clinicians are above sin and madness.

I believe that the clinical pastoral movement would have done well to attend to covert unconscious forces in its first decades. Had it done so, someone surely would have noted that barely two decades passed before the father and mother of the movement were disowned. Helen Flanders Dunbar was forgotten, and Anton Theophilus Boisen treated with contempt. A substitute father of the movement was proclaimed, Richard Cabot, who in turn ruled that Boisen was incompetent by virtue of his mental health deficits. Boisen reached the nadir of his place in the organization when, in the late 40s, he made a request of the Council for Clinical Training for $3000 in order to do a research project, and was denied.

Let us use the Tavistock event to reflect on and examine the covert processes that are at work in this community in this generation.

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The nature of the corporate culture in which we are immersed is one which invites passive dependency. In the environment we live in success for most people requires lying low, following instructions, keeping one's mouth shut, aware that any innovation better be right. In such ambience creativity is a very tender plant. Too many persons among us are lying low and keeping their mouths shut, waiting for marching orders to arrive on their desks. I call for Chapters to be creative, and test the boundaries, and to act with courage and audacity.

Fifty years from now our grandchildren will look back on what we are doing here as horse and buggy days. God only knows what the world will be like. But neither CPSP nor the world at large will be the same. The future will be created by some of you who are not as long of tooth as many of us. You will not build much of a future if you wait around for permission slips from the principal's office or instructions from the central office.

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I also urge Chapters to be very cautious about feeling confident of our own judgments, especially when it comes to denying persons the license to work in the field. I hope we will work to make our embrace a wide one. Strong confrontation and strong feedback are bracing and promote creativity. Straight talk that can be experienced as painful must not be rendered unacceptable. But denying someone the right to work is a judgment that should be taken only with the greatest care and the utmost self-reflection.

The clinical pastoral movement has left too many bodies by the road in its long history, and some were left out of pure arrogance and grandiosity or political agendas of certification committees. In the late 40s Wayne Oates was denied certification as a supervisor by the Council for Clinical Training. Oates had enough personal authority and self-confidence to take another route until he reached the point where he was presented certification on a silver platter late in his life when he had already achieved status in the field. However, we have to wonder how many other creative persons were trampled under foot by the arrogance of little people with too much power. Let us take great care to be a different kind of people.

Foy Richey has written on the subject of what he calls process certification, meaning that the certification process continues as a lifetime process. That is the essential significance of Chapter life and the vesting of authority in Chapters. The process continues. I hope that would mean that in the Chapter context we would both know each other better and also be not to quick to deprive a colleague of the right to work, especially on matters that have more to do with political correctness than with authentic competence or morality.

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I commend to you a book by Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea and Joan E. Sarnat in The Supervisory Relationship: A Contemporary Psychodynamic Approach. I believe it is probably the best current book on clinical supervision. I call your attention to the last chapter. The authors conclude by contending that counseling and supervision are about voices, about finding a voice and expressing it, the voice not only of the client or patient, but also the voice of the therapist, and supervisor. Supervision, counseling, and psychotherapy are a mutual process of co-creation in which all parties find their voice. In this process, they argue, the sponsoring organizations assume a presence within the supervisory and therapeutic relationships.

Frawley-O'Day and Sarnat go on to say that all too often psychoanalytic training has been conducted within a milieu of power jockeying and competing claims of various schools of thought or versions of truth. The authors write of the "corridors of excommunication" in which dissenting or challenging voices are whispered about and discouraged. They contend that persecutory impulses in the endorsing organizations dampen the vibrant voice of the therapist, and the patients know it.

Frawley-O'Dea and Sarnat argue for more deliberate inclusion of new, vibrant, and questioning voices. They argue for organizations to tolerate variance, and even deviance from the dominant tone and tongue of a given culture. They call for therapists and trainers to learn to tolerate their own persecutory anxieties that inevitably are evoked in the course of this difficult work, and especially when things go poorly, without turning against vulnerable trainees or counselees or weaker members of our community. This sounds to me like a sermon for the clinical pastoral field.

The work we do is also directed toward persons finding their voices. We also do our best work when the organizational structure supports us to use our voices uniquely and creatively. The reliability and wisdom of the supporting organization is not optional extra. Its influence for good or for ill is felt in every aspect of our work. You need to know that this community of CPSP can tolerate variance and even deviance from the dominant tongue and tone of the ambient culture, even as we vigorously strive to maintain standards.

We must be just and tolerant, managing our own anxieties so far as we are able, not endlessly indulgent, but open and flexible. We must be attentive to our standards but unafraid of mavericks in our midst, who might show us something we never saw. We should rejoice at every new voice.

It does matter what kind of community we become over time. And we are continually in the process of becoming. It does matter how we treat each other. Nothing is more important than that we be gracious, respectful, tolerant, and playful with one another in CPSP.