CPSP Pastoral Report

We began as a group of specialists, clinical supervisors and psychotherapists. As the years have progressed we have evolved into more of a community of clinical chaplains and clinically trained congregational ministers. This is an evolution we did not anticipate, but it is a happy one. Instead of a community of specialists in supervision and psychotherapy, we have become a broad-spectrum community of religious professionals who are committed to clinical discipline.

When I was coming up in the 60s, pastoral supervision was seen as an elite corps of specialists very difficult to penetrate. Historically half of those who undertook two to three years of supervisory training failed in their attempts to be certified. Elitism marked the cadre, and the numbers of supervisors remained few. The quality of supervisory competence, one might argue, was maintained by such severe screening, but that argument was not sustained by experience. Elitism did have some value. Scarcity increases value, but it also tends to be self-defeating. The ACPE began is 1967 with an elite cadre of 400 supervisors, and 40 years later it has 500. When you factor in population growth that figure represents a net loss of personnel.

In CPSP we are moving away from elitism and toward a different vision: a vision in which every self-respecting religious professional is a clinician, not just a select few, and not just institutional chaplains. Every minister in whatever setting should be clinically prepared to do basic pastoral counseling or clinical chaplaincy. And the work of supervision, or of training the next generation, is now everyone’s business, not just an elite group. Every mature religious professional who is clinically trained should be helping in some way to bring up the next generation. Many very experienced working chaplains and congregational ministers possess wisdom through years of experience, wisdom that could be imparted to the next generation. Such person would never dream of dropping out of work for three or so years to undertake what has come to be known as supervisory training, and often has the character of hazing. These experienced ministers can learn the art of supervision while remaining in their current positions. The use of cyberspace helps make feasible. This is an invitation: For all experienced pastoral clinicians to rethink their obligation and consider joining us to bring up the next generation. This is not the obligation of an elite group. It is everyone’s obligation.

We must stand ready to assist all religious workers of every stripe to become clinically astute. My vision is every religious worker into a Chapter of peers where clinical material, material from the bedside, so to speak, is examined and explored and evaluated from the perspective of what makes for healing or therapy. I use ‘bedside’ advisedly. Clinical derives from the Greek word klini, bed, referring to giving attention to the body in bed, which is to say, the concrete condition of the person you minister. To be clinical means laying aside theories, programmatic agenda, organizational concerns, and attending to the specific predicament of the person before you. Such a person is qualified to be a minister. Ministers unwilling to learn the clinical process ought to find another kind of work. Thus the target audience of CPSP is every minister in this country, and beyond.

3. The Problem of Religion in CPSP

We as a community have some work to do on the subject of the multi-faith character of our life and work together. The clinical movement of Boisen was born in Protestantism. It remained within the Protestant sphere for a generation. Only in the 60s did non-Protestants begin entering the clinical pastoral movement. Curiously, there seems never to have been any serious thought given to the liturgical or doctrinal implications of incorporating non-Protestants in the movement.

Seems very odd to me that the clinical pastoral movement now close to a century old has been so slow to liberate itself from Protestant Christian triumphalism. I listened to a sermon recently by a novice pastor who had just completed a unit of clinical training. The preacher said that she learned from her clinical supervisor how to see the face of Christ in her hospital patients. I wondered if there were non-Christians in her training group. The clinical posture claims to be doctrinally and liturgically neutral. In practice it has become imperialistically Christian. The assumption that non-Christians will just have to put up with our Christian symbols is unacceptable. Offensive to open our doors to persons of all faith groups---Muslims, Hindu, Jewish, Unitarian, and others, and then confront them with Christian symbols and dogmas. This is unreflected upon aggression. It is predatory. Over the past 40 years I have been to countless meetings of pastoral clinicians, and I have witnessed countless prayers and religious services that were overtly and specifically Christian in language and reference, holding hostage non-Christians. This has got to stop. We must be more diligent in our self-supervision, and rid ourselves of Christian triumphalism.

We pastoral clinicians need to be more deliberate and self-conscious in reflecting on what we do with the fact that we come from extremely divergent, sometimes even antagonistic religious allegiances.

I propose the following two principles that should shape our actions in regard to our multi-faith posture:
1.We reject all assertions of the superiority of one religion over another
2. We promote a continuing critique clinical critique of our own religious symbols and practices, subjecting them to broad principles of love and justice, and we encourage others to do likewise

Religion is the reservoir of some of the highest achievements in human culture, as well as some of the most despicable achievements. Sorting one from the other is a burden that pastoral clinicians must take up along with others.

Having a clinical eye directed at religious symbols and doctrines does not rule our commitment or devotion to them. But if commitment and devotion neutralizes the clinical eye, then we are no long clinicians.

We must support the humane and just aspects in every manifestation of religion, and reject the inhumane and unjust aspects. And we must put to rest Christian triumphalism.

4. Chapter Life

The quality of Chapter life is the bedrock on which CPSP rests. A wide range of quality is apparent in the way individual Chapters go about their business of being a Chapter.

We ask Chapters to account for their life through annual reports, but the reports tell us only the bare essentials of Chapter life. Even more urgently we ask Chapters to make use of consultation. Perry Miller chairs the Chapter Life Committee that is continually available for consultation. The Chapter Life Committee is committed to empowerment, not policing.

In linking certification with Chapters we believe we have created a self-correcting process. That is to say, if a Chapter abandons its discipline, the Chapter is likely to fail. The failure of the Chapter means also the loss of certification for members of the Chapter. No one in CPSP has a warrant for automatic transfer to another Chapter.

This is a more effective and more humane approach to quality control. It is superior to attempts at quality control imposed from the top down. Policing from the top down, and policing by persons who are strangers, not known to us, is troublesome. It’s the way of the world, but it’s not the way of CPSP.

CPSP in another respect is unique in its quality control procedure. Most organizations load their quality control at the entry point, like the bar exam in the legal profession. They leave little or nothing in the way of continuing peer review. Once certified, one can go underground indefinitely, until a complaint is filed, after which one is typically judged by relative strangers. Baring a complaint, one is never placed in a situation where one is seriously engaged by peers. In CPSP we are rather more relaxed about controls at the entry point, but we are strong on continuing peer review and annual recertification. We think this is a more effective and more humane approach to certification.

And of course Chapters change through time, for better or for worse. I like to say that Chapter life is clinical training for life. Astonishing fact of history in the clinical pastoral movement that supervisors, once certified, never again submit their work to clinical scrutiny in any disciplined way. CPSP set out in 1990 to correct that lapse by emphasizing Chapter life as central to certification and recertification. Up to this point we are the only organization in our field to implement a serious peer review process.

5. Debate Between Pastoral and Spiritual

A trend has emerged in recent decades promoting the category ‘spiritual’ as a replacement for ‘pastoral.’ The argument usually made is that pastoral is too much tied to Christianity. I believe that to be a spurious argument. If persuasive, we should change our name to CSSP.

The word pastoral is rooted in the shepherding function. Shepherding is not specifically Christian. All religions have some kind of leadership role, creating flocks, groups, congregations, which require leadership, or shepherding – pastoring.

Spiritual has become the au courant substitute of choice for many recently. It is not an improvement over pastoral. Though spirit has good etymological roots in breathing and vitality, that source has been forgotten in modern usage. The current connotation of spiritual is too much tied to the other world, the world of spirits and ghosts, the arena of mental incorporeality, to cite Webster. The word spiritual in common usage has disengaged from the earth. Let’s not go there.

No language is ever entirely satisfying, and furthermore, language, like people, changes, but for now pastoral better fits better what we are up to than spiritual.

6. A Critical Note about History

The clinical pastoral movement began in 1925 under the aegis of Anton Boisen. (There were some unheralded precursors, of course.) But by 1930 the Boisen movement faced a philosophical rebellion, and a reaction against Boisen personally because of his second psychotic break. Thus the clinical movement was early on sharply divided in two camps, one in the Council for Clinical Training (CCT), centered in New York and led by Boisen and Dunbar, and the other in the Institute for Pastoral Care (IPC) centered in Boston, and led by Richard Cabot and Philip Guiles. Some may think this was a bad turn of events. But that’s not the case. The clinical movement prospered through splitting, following the example of Baptists who split to multiply. Furthermore, the debate between the two camps was a rich one extending for over a generation, and wisdom did not emanate entirely from one camp. The arguments were many: about the place of personal transformation vs. skill development; the differing ways in which psychology was embraced by theology, the use of the case vs. the verbatim (which is to say, seeking the whole story vs. attending to communication skills), the value of training venue, one group preferring psychiatric settings, the other general hospitals, and others.

From 1930 until 1967 these two camps competed and debated with each other, and the dialogue was rich and productive. In 1967 the two groups merged into one, in the creation of the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. Two things followed which were unfortunate. The tension between the two traditions more or less vanished, or went underground. The critical and controversial issues were no longer debated openly. Secondly, the ACPE began to reflect increasingly and officially the traditions of the IPC. That was documented in the 1990s when the Standards documents of the ACPE came to describe the clinical pastoral movement as founded by Richard Cabot and enlarged upon by Boisen. In fact clinical pastoral training was invented by Boisen, who was supported at first by Cabot, but who subsequently attempted to hijack the movement and dismiss Boisen. Cabot was a physician, not theologically trained, and his vision of clinical training was the preparation of chaplains to better assist physicians, whom he considered the authentic healers. Boisen held that ministers were healers if they knew their business, not handmaidens to physicians. The Cabot view is still alive and well. This revisionist history, asserting the preeminence of Cabot, also developed amnesia about the second most significant person in our early pantheon, Helen Flanders Dunbar, and her emphasis on the psychosomatic, virtually vanished from collective memory.

Ernie Bruder, George Tolson, Nick Ristad and others predicted the failure of the 1967 merger, but their voices were drowned out in the celebration of one united community of clinical pastoral supervisors. The majority could not see, or didn’t want to see that the merger led to domination of one voice, that of Cabot, and the silencing of diversity as a threat to unity. Division in the clinical pastoral world was cured, which was a desirable, but lost was the tension, dialogue and creativity that comes with them. It is not too much of an oversimplification to say that the agenda of IPC defeated the agenda of the CCT in the merger.

When CPSP appeared in 1990, it generally reasserted the primacy of Boisen side of the dialectic and it rediscovered Dunbar. CPSP reinstituted the creative tension and debate about the meaning of clinical pastoral training. The ACPE has been for the most part a reluctant participant in that debate, spending most of its capital on ignoring CPSP, or making public declarations about our inadequacies. We believe that is just a passing phase.

7. Collegial Relations and the Emergence of the Spiritual Care Collaborative (SCC)

Some of you are aware of the SCC, a recently organized group of six clinical pastoral organizations that are holding their first joint meeting in Orlando next Feb. CPSP has not been invited to Orlando, and in fact the SCC itself is not sure yet that it wants to sit at the same table with CPSP. Currently the member organizations are discussing whether to invite us some day to their table. We should not take offence at this. CPSP is a radically different model, and if we are going to be different, we should expect some suspicion to arise. Dialogue and collegial conversations can be enriching, and we will welcome them, but participating parties have to be ready, and it may just be that our prospective partners in dialogue are not ready. Meanwhile, we have plenty of other fish to fry, namely building our community into a more competent and effective force in a difficult world, and, for most of us, citizens of a nation that has come to be seen as a perpetrator of abuse on a wide front. We have plenty on our plate.

One aspect of the SCC that needs monitoring is its history of drawuing a circle around itself and declaring its members as the only legitimate clinical pastoral organizations. The SCC evolved in 2003 out of Council on Collaboration (COC), which in turn evolved from The Four Presidents (then Five) which was initiated by the ACPE in 1995. The purpose of the Four Presidents was allegedly to unite the various clinical groups, but the covert agenda was to circle the wagons against the emerging CPSP. When the Four Presidents evolved into COC John deVelder made formal and informal requests for a seat at the table for CPSP, and was refused. It remains to be seen whether this latest incarnation, the SCC, will maintain its earlier position of locking the door to CPSP. We are not holding our breath.

We should continue to present ourselves as gracious colleagues to all who work in the same vineyard as we work, and CPSP generally has good relationships with the individual organizations that currently make up SCC. Jim Gebhart and John deVelder have been our principal emissaries in relation to our collegial communities. They have each established strong diplomatic ties with the leadership of the several collegial bodies. We have good relations with JAPC where a number of our certified people are active. Foy Richey has been holding joint meetings in CO with AAPC. Al Heneger was very well received at the Association for Professional Chaplains (APC) meeting last month, and that’s gratifying. However, at the APC membership meeting Al Heneger said of a woman present that she “was easy on the eyes.” A firestorm erupted. Al was charged by APC leadership officially and in writing with unprofessional conduct. The APC representative to this Plenary cancelled her trip and served notice to us that Al must be disciplined. (As an APC officer, it would seem that APC has that burden itself.)

If we ever needed a clear illustration as to why CPSP exists, and must exist, this is it. I now ask you each to turn to your neighbor and say, “you’re easy on the eyes.” Now that you’ve done so, I must inform you that you’re guilty of unprofessional conduct in the ethical system of APC.

Now in some small part the APC is correct. Al was not paying attention. This hardly warrants official and public charges of unprofessional conduct. However, we do want Al to pay attention. At the APC annual meeting last year Marie Fortune was a highlighted speaker, and Al was in attendance. Marie Fortune’s mission is to rid the religious community of heterosexual innuendo of any sort. One of her principal arguments is that the first step toward sex abuse takes place when a male in authority tells a woman she is attractive.

The CPSP leadership is, therefore, referring Al to his Chapter with the request that he use his Chapter to explore the meaning of his lack of attention to his environment.

Finally, let me add that this action against Al does not mean that the APC as a whole is not our enemy. CPSP and APC established a collegial relationship in the early 1990s until the ACPE members of APC organized and forced a termination of our official collegial relationship.

ACPE is the one organization where we have encountered historically the most negative reaction to CPSP. We understand the reason. The emergence of CPSP 18 years ago, out of the bosom of ACPE represented the end of ACPE monopoly in clinical pastoral training. Some, but not all, in ACPE leadership are determined never to forgive us for breaking glass and ending their CPE franchise/monopoly. Human mortality tends to cure such well-nourished hurts. As the older generation dies off we can expect more collegiality. But irrespective of one’s assessment of ACPE vs. CPSP, monopolies are not good for anyone, and ending ACPE monopoly in clinical training was a step up for everyone. If CPSP did not exist, we would need to create something like it.

Let us say to the SCC: We wish you well in Orlando next year. We hope you prosper. There is more than enough work to go around for all of us. If we spend our energy fighting each other we will all be diminished. The entire clinical pastoral field is a mere drop in the bucket in the larger scheme of things.

And to the ACPE: Give up your dream of a restored monopoly in clinical training field. Monopoly is not good for you, and not good for the wider community. And join with us as colleagues, with our radically different models. We are each committed to promoting clinically trained religious leadership.

We will continue to seek respectful relations with all our collegial communities. But we will also respond forcefully if we continue to be denigrated or characterized as illegitimate in the public arena.

CPSP and all the other alphabet communities will disappear from history one of these days – not next year or the year after, but one day. All of us are mortal, and all institutions similarly mortal. CPSP will die, but the basic values CPSP stands for will never die as long as life continues.

Like any self-respecting community, we promote high standards of professional competence and ethics, but we also stand for certain values that distinguish us from others.
We stand for:
-Local Control: The balance of political power invested in numerous small face-to-face communities, not in some corporate office.
-Self determination: The spawning of small groups of professionals for mutual support and consultation, for reviewing their work, and to think new thoughts and dream new dreams rather than minding all the p’s and q’s of bureaucratic directives.
-Disbursed rather than a centralization of resources: With the most minimal corporate office, the most minimal bureaucracy, and the most minimal taxation (CPSP is the faster growing organization in its field, with dues that are a fraction of the others.)
-Attentiveness to every voice: The recognition that each person has a distinct and different voice, that needs to be heard, so that we are one community with many idiosyncratic voices.

8. Conclusion

We are a peculiar people when it comes to religion. We embrace all religion but remain critical of all. We endorse and support religion where it edifies and upholds those pilgrims in pain of body or soul and we disdain religion when it abuses and inhibits the human spirit. We happily support persons who on their particular journeys move from one set of beliefs to another.

Certain recent biographers of Robert Kennedy write about Kennedy’s religious journey in ways that give some clarity to this matter, this seeming ambivalence toward forms of religion that may be universal. They write that Kennedy in his last years, after his brother John was assassinated, moved away from the Roman Catholic religious beliefs and practice of his upbringing. They say that he turned to the classics, to the ancient Greek philosophers and poets, for religious comfort and sustenance, unreconciled as he was to his brother’s death. They cite some lines from Aeschylus that they say Kennedy took particular comfort in:

He who learns must suffer
And even in our sleep pain
That cannot forget falls drop
By drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair,
Against our will
Comes wisdom to us
By the awful grace of God. Agamemnon 1.1

I relate this story because I think that as Robert Kennedy moved more deeply into his own pain, his journey illuminates to some extent the kind of vocational burden we carry, the happy burden we carry. We don’t care whether a person is a Catholic or a Muslim, agnostic, loyal to the religion of their upbringing or striking out on new ground. We care only that our fellow beings enter deeply into their own particular experience, explores their own pain or suffering, and we hope, finds some way to say yes to life and love and justice. Apparently Robert Kennedy did this, whether with the help of another or not. Our vocation is to develop the kind of skill and empathy that prepares us to be ready to sit with the Robert Kennedy’s of the world when they need us, to be wise counselors who can also draw from the deep religious resources. But even more, to draw from the depths of our own souls, where deep calls unto deep.
_____________________________________
To contact the author, click here.