Shelly's last spring post from ECC.

Yes, folks, I am headed out to the greenery of the Pacific Northwest on Sunday in order to do my first unit of CPE this summer. I am excited. And scared. And then excited again. And then terrified. This is how it's supposed to be, right?

I don't have a lot of experience doing pastoral care in official settings. I tend to "mother hen" my friends, and I take care of my family. But I haven't done Stephen Ministry or anything similar. I'm frankly more nervous about the small groups and the supervisors than I am about the patients. Entering a space of grief or shock carries its own charism, its own sense of being in kairos rather than chronos, and I like giving in to that. I do not particularly enjoy writing reports about it afterward! I may belong (happily!) to a particularly wordy denomination, but I do think some things are sacred.

I will be around blogging occasionally about the gifts and challenges of CPE. Who knows - maybe I'll get hooked and join the ranks! Any advice you all could offer would be much appreciated. Do you remember your first CPE? How did it go? What hooked you?

Getting mobile and networked with resources

I first met Janet McCormack, a former army chaplain, at the Yale Center for Faith and Culture’s second annual Workplace Chaplaincy Conference in November of last year. Her forceful presentation on the work of chaplaincy and Denver Seminary’s 9-year old program training chaplains which she directs grabbed my attention. I made plans to visit.

The plans finally came to fruition in April. I was warmly welcomed and my agenda skillfully crafted by Jan herself in consultation with my interests and goals. It began with lunch, at which she described movingly some of the more impressive scenarios on which she cut her chaplain teeth, including one in which she was responsible for removing the weapon from a renegade army recruit holding others hostage. She emotionally disarmed him first by breezing into the holding area, berating the hostile for having gotten her out of bed in the middle of the night. After the ordeal was over, she went outside and threw up.

Such raw courage and ability to do what the situation requires marks Jan and the people she’s trained. One of her graduates, Wayne Hall, was responsible for organizing the next-of-kin response at Ground Zero. Wayne wrote an article on his experience, praising not only the entire training at Denver Seminary, but Jan’s discipline specifically. He, in turn, was praised in an email to Jan by the chief relief officers at Ground Zero, who told her to send any of her graduates their way.

Episcopal chaplains would have much to gain by training at Denver Seminary. A hallmark of their innovative program is their “Teaching and Mentoring Program,” a labor-intensive, character-based pedagogical initiative involving concrete learning contracts crafted and executed in conjunction with faculty, lay leaders and clergy in forming the chaplain-to-be.

At a subsequent meeting Jan and I had during the Associated Professional Chaplain annual conference several weeks later in San Francisco, we discussed ways in which, short of enrolling in a full-time program there, Episcopal chaplains might avail ourselves of Jan’s tremendous talent and experience. She has graciously offered to “get mobile” on our behalf. With proficiencies in brief counseling and crisis intervention, she also offers a course in a compelling and critical overview of the chaplaincy profession in all its gore and glory. I look forward to the prospect of putting her on the road in modular instructive format to the benefit of our folks in the ranks.

Her colleague, the also impressive Naomi Paget, crisis interventionist to the FBI, and adjunct professor at Denver Seminary, has similarly agreed to go where the need is for training our chaplains. This approach, of going where the need is, interestingly corresponds with the very nature of chaplaincy work itself, a point that Jan and Naomi have made in their small but comprehensive book entitled The Work of the Chaplain. Readers will appreciate not only its direct style, its careful distinctions between the work of parish clergy and chaplains and many other insights, but also the appendices with synopses of important topics as well as supporting organizations as contacts and networking sources.

Also at the APC conference, Gina Rose Halpern (of the Chaplaincy Institute for the Arts and Interfaith Ministry; see earlier blogs) and I met with Kimberly Murman, an educational program official for the APC and received their pledge of working with us to provide continuing education credits for any of the programming we put together that they approve. This linkage gives our efforts added effectiveness on many levels, drawing future students from the ranks of the APC membership and conversely linking students in our learning venues with the large network of fellow chaplains of the APC.

In addition to providing stellar faculty for modular mobile units of education, the Chaplaincy Institute is also graciously considering taking on students from the Episcopal Church at their institution for less than what a full degree would require. This is an interesting opportunity that I hope will come to fruition.

This week, I am headed to a national training on reconciliation in L.A. sponsored by Reconcilers.net in response to General Convention’s citation of reconciliation as a key issue for our day. The presenters have traveled widely to dioceses in the U.S. and abroad offering their program which has been tested and honed over the past 12 years. I am hoping that they might be willing and able to join a growing cadre of individuals (in addition to the institutions I am visiting) qualified and dedicated to training our chaplains in flexible and adaptive modes. I look forward to filing my next report on the other side of this fascinating opportunity.

Until then,

Maggie Izutsu

Parabola interview with Bishop Katharine.

I liked this interview with Bishop Katherine very much, not least because she used scientific data to help think about spiritual life. Here's an excerpt:

P: You emphasize living the path and the truth that the scriptures are shot through with mystery. But isn’t the mystery closest at hand why it is so hard to get down to the essence of Christ’s teaching, to love one another and love God?

BK: Because we live in tension with selfishness. The question is always how can we get beyond our own narrow self-interest and see that our own salvation lies in attending to the needs of other people.

P: Is selfishness a biological inheritance? Is fallen-ness hardwired?

BK: A physiologist would point to some neuroanatomy and neurochemistry and say that when we’re threatened we retreat into our lower brain where the question is about survival. Our base instincts come from that. We defend ourselves against any threat. The human journey is about encouraging our own selves to move up into higher consciousness, into being able to be present in a threatening situation without responding with violence. That was the great teaching of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. They both said we will respond in a nonviolent way and it will change the world.

P: That’s faith in action.

BK: That is what practice is about. The scriptures say grow up into the full stature of Christian. Become less animal in the sense of instinctive response and more godly, more spiritual, not divorced from our flesh but capable of using it in service to a higher aim.



I thought that was pertinent to the ways chaplains bridge physical healing and spiritual space.

Alternative therapies.

I just ran across this organization that is committed to getting people together who do different kinds of healing ministries: body workers, pastors, chaplains, energy workers, etc. It's called CAMPaM: A Method For Ministry
Complementary Alternative Modalities of Healing & Pastoral Ministry, and their website is here. Has anyone had any experience with these folks? What has it been like?

Seminarian intern thinking about bishops on no sleep during the week before finals.

This has been a relatively calm week in the office. (I'm in the middle of finals, so my brain is shot and overflowing, but the office is quiet.)

This week Andrew has been drafting a letter to the people in our database, asking them to fill out a current information sheet to submit to their diocesan bishop. It's part of a larger project of trying to connect chaplains with their local bishops (really, trying to ensure that bishops are aware of the wonderful work done by chaplains within their diocese). It's so important for those connections to be made.

During Pastoral Care Week in October, we send out a letter to all the dioceses, asking for updated information on their diocesan chaplains. Last fall, we got a - what's a nice word? - underwhelming response. It demonstrated very clearly the disconnect between chaplains and the bishops under whose care they are supposed to be functioning.

I wonder about this. My bishop is a lovely lady, and I am profoundly grateful for her, but my relationship with my diocese and COM is kind of bizarre. I never received any kind of "Here! Here's what you do while you're in seminary - take these classes, do your field ed here, etc." I ran into this last winter when I was told by someone in my parish - not my diocese - that I should do CPE this summer. It was officially one week after everyone's deadlines, and the NY placements had huge waiting lists. I lucked out with a random last-minute opening in Seattle, but it means moving and storage and plane tickets and and and....Everything is so opaque, and it's really easy to feel forgotten. So I have a little sense of what it might be like to not be known by your diocesan office. It's not easy.

I'm wondering what could be done to better these relationships? Chaplains, what would you like to see happen? In what kinds of ways would you like your bishops to reach out to you and keep track of you? Bishops, what kinds of reports or meetings would you like? How could this office support your relationships with each other?