Friday, March 23, 2007

Berkeley in Bloom

“Tell me more about Vicki Joy,” Bishop Packard asked, when we discussed my proposal to go to the Chaplaincy Institute in Berkeley to see what they are about.

Vicki Joy had been my student since I arrived at ETSS to oversee their MAPM and MAC programs in 2004. She had come to see me several times to discuss her feeling of a call to chaplaincy and the possibility of being recognized by the Episcopal Church and adequately trained to serve in it. She was flummoxed by the lack of resources for training in our tradition, and particularly, the dearth of artistic and creative approaches. She was drawn to the Berkeley enterprise by their clowning offerings. Patch Adams has been a formative influence in their programmatic development.

“Vicki Joy is not very academically inclined, but she is hard-working, sincere, dedicated and bright. When she decided, after much thought and research to pursue the program in California, I felt the whole Episcopal Church was sharply rebuked by this turn of events.”

For anyone who knows Bishop George, you will recognize both his characteristic modesty and his openess to the movement of the Spirit. He responded, “I didn’t know where I was going when I asked the question, but I’m glad I did; she is our target population. Go to where she’s been.”

And so I did. Yesterday, I began a several day sojourn in Berkeley at the warm invitation of founder The Rev. Dr. Gina Rose Halpern. I'll file another report after I've digested what I've found, but as for background, here's what struck me from Gina Rose's and my initial conversation by phone last week:

All the instructors are artists, and their program is continually evolving. They are thrilled that the Episcopal Church has taken an interest in them.

Gina Rose herself converted from Judaism to the Episcopal Church at the time of the women’s ordination movement and was powerfully influenced by her membership in it. She drifted away some time ago when her own aspirations were not met with enthusiasm or encouragement; now, she is on the cutting edge and we are coming to her.

She was too modest to say so, but I imagined if I were she, I’d have a tear in my right eye.



Maggie Izutsu

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The worry I have about what happened to Vicki--yet the promise in the discovery with Dr. Halpern--is that the boundaries of chaplaincy need to be challenged. I'll bet we have a hospice/nursing home chaplain out there who thinks that their inclination to offer artistic stimulation in the dayroom, for spirituality's sake, is too light and inadequate for the critical stare of the bishop or the Commission on Ministry. How wrong that conclusion is and how much we are missing in the offering of healing!