Depression and the Spirit: Half-day educational opportunity

Do you often come across depressed persons in your work as a chaplain? Would you like a place to think and learn about the relationship between depression and spirituality? Are you a bit stumped as to what there is to do to care for a depressed person?

Bishop Anderson House, host of a successful lay chaplain training program each spring (see earlier blog), annually holds a continuing education venue in the fall for its graduates and other interested persons. They have found in the course of their experience in training lay chaplains that a certain degree of psychological knowledge and training is essential to a chaplain's work. What follows here is the text of their brochure about their autumn event this year that goes some of the distance in providing that training. There's still time to get in on the second offering of this interesting, highly relevant topic. If you are in the Chicago area or will be passing through next weekend, check it out:

Depression and the Spirit…
The Lay Parish Chaplains’Training Program
Continuing Education Fall Seminars

Understanding depression is important for providing pastoral care for persons
who suffer from depression’s symptoms. Even more important is developing an
appreciation for their needs and how to respond. Often patients explain that they
know they need their doctor’s help, but more important to them is to have some-
one who can listen to their religious concerns. How does pastoral care provide
hope for patients with depression? What special skills are required?

Often patients’ religious concerns are directly related to and probably caused by
the symptoms of their illness. This session will look at some of those symptoms spe-
cifically, with suggestions for responding. It will also address the spiritual preparation necessary for this kind of pastoral care.

The seminar will weave together research and ten years of Sr. Pat Murphy’s clinical
experience. It will include a discussion of descriptions of spiritual darkness found in the scriptures and in the Christian mystical tradition. The goals of the session are to increase a sense of your own comfort in this work as well as to learn how to trust in the patient’s resources and the presence of God in providing pastoral care to this population.

Patricia E. Murphy, RSCJ, Ph.D., BCC is a Chaplain and Assistant Professor with dual
appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Religion, Health and Human
Values at Rush University Medical Center. Pat is a respected researcher in the field of spirituality and medicine and is a master teacher who has earned respect for her integration of psychiatry and pastoral counseling in her clinical work as a chaplain. Her research and clinical experience give her unique tools to share with us in the pastoral care of people with depression- whether in our work in congregations, in hospitals and nursing homes, or with those we love in our families, friendships and professional associations.

Join Chaplains, Clergy, Eucharistic Ministers and others in a morning of increasing our knowledge about depression and spirituality while adding to our skills as a pastoral visitor.

Each Seminar starts at 8:30 am, ends at 11:00 am, and is offered at two locations:

Saturday, October 13, 2007
at Bishop Anderson House
Located at: 707 South Wood Street
Rush University Medical Center Chicago, IL 60612-3833

Saturday, October 27, 2007
at St. Michael's Episcopal Church Library
647 Dundee Ave.
Barrington, IL 60010

For more information or to register, call

Bishop Anderson House
Rush University Medical Center
1735 West Harrison Street
Chicago, IL. 60612-3833
Phone: 312-563-4825


Let me know, if you go, if you find it helpful. And thanks in advance for patronizing our pastoral training venues.

Faithfully submitted,
Maggie Izutsu

From Across the Pond

I was invited to give a workshop at a National Bereavement Conference in Birmingham, England in September this year and this happily provided an opportunity for me to make a collateral visit to The Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education at the kind behest of my intrepid host, The Rev. Dr. Peter Hammersley. Peter and I met nine years ago when we combined forces to lead a seminar on the mourning for Princess Diana at Westminster Abbey on the occasion of the first anniversary of her death. Peter is involved in a number of intriguing enterprises, one of which is the oversight he lends to doctoral work at Queen’s.

Through Peter’s kind introduction, I spent a most stimulating and constructive hour and a half with the Dean of Queen’s, David Hewlett. In a wide-ranging conversation, we concluded with the Dean’s warm invitation to students from the states who might want to pursue some form of education under Queen’s auspices. The range of what they provide is vast, from undergraduate curriculum to independent research projects, and includes M.A.s leading to a Th.D., a new degree program that they consider to be a “professional practical theological degree” playfully abbreviated “DPT” (for “Doctorate in Practical Theology”), and a small but significant foreign student group pursuing courses in mission.

As we turned our attention to the topic of chaplaincy, I was interested in the Dean’s savvy identification of “mission” as the proper lens for undertaking (and providing) training in chaplaincy. He averred to the significant increase in students seeking training for chaplaincy, what he estimated to amount to a 25% increase over the past twenty years. He also candidly mused over the school’s reticence to really seriously deliberate over the nature of course offerings that would benefit a bona fide program to meet the needs of these students.

Dean Hewlett was not at a loss to suggest a program, though, and I pass on his thoughtful and comprehensive reflections here of what he would like to see in such an undertaking: education in spiritual resources requisite for sustaining the “eccentric ministries” of chaplains, training in how to productively connect with the secular institutions in which the chaplain may be called to serve, how to conduct theological reflection (with supervised support), how to work in teams (especially multifaith), the context of chaplaincy, with especial attention to ethnographic methodology, and the history of chaplaincy, and particularly in the specific institution to be served.

Among the research projects underway at Queen’s is a study of the effectiveness of participation in social protest as an aspect of transformative education, and in particular in the formation of the prophetic capacities of future ministers. Spearheaded by systematic theologian John M. Hull (who has written extensively on why it is difficult for adult Christians to learn!) in collaboration with my host, Peter Hammersley, the story of the courage of a group of students who went to the Faslane naval base, home of Britain’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet is most impressive. The results of their analysis of the research remain to be seen, but promises to make an interesting contribution to the pedagogy of ministerial training.

Finally, Peter gave me a tour of three separate prisons in the Birmingham area and invited a lay prison chaplain to join us for lunch. She had recently encountered a challenging situation which she spoke about at some length. I asked what in her training she had found effective in getting her through this episode. Not surprisingly, she said that a good mentor had been invaluable. I was happy to hear, thereafter, of Bud Holland, the head of the Office for Ministerial Development’s collaboration with a group of folks on an effort to create a network of mentoring or “coaches.” Clearly, the chaplaincy training project will benefit by such an effort and I am grateful to Bud for allowing me to participate in conversations about this initiative.

Since my trip across the pond, I’ve been to Bexley Hall in Rochester, NY, and there’s more to report from there, but I will close for now, with a promise to file another installment soon.

Faithfully,
Maggie Izutsu

More bubblings up, CPE-related.

A few more thoughts. I am trying to piece together a reflection for my COM, and these are a few more things that bubbled up.

I think about Sammie, an 87 year old woman who had suffered a stroke, who was on dialysis, who was curled up in the fetal position every day, whose family was full of Pentecostal preachers (her daughter told me, while also telling me "How great your job is - think of all the people you get to bring to Christ and save from hell!" Um. "Yes," I answered, "Well, um, I do carry the love of Christ with me wherever I go." It was some quick thinking on my feet.) Sammie couldn't speak well - I understood about 10% of the garble that came from her throat, but she always, always wanted to see me and hold my hand, and I discovered that if I said bits of hymns or Psalms to her, she would repeat them back. She wanted the TV emphatically off when we gave time to God. She also liked to pray in call and response, where I would pray and she would repeat it ("Jesus, you hold Sammie in love, and know her and keep her from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes." "...From the crown of my head to the tips of my toes." Which actually came out "...Froma...crowa...mahead...tipsssa mahtoess" but I got the hang of it after a while). It was a very intense experience of listening really, really hard with both my head and my heart, and a sense of joy and relief and release and glory when I found the shared holiness in our speech. I loved her. She gifted me.

I think about the fact that the entire staff celebrated the month's birthdays on the 2nd Monday of the week, with a morning of cake and fruit and ice cream. Everyone signs the birthday card. It's very fun. And I had a small hint of the intra-office tensions that resembled intra-office tensions at every single other office at which I've worked in my short life. A small, funny reminder that places where people are engaged in God's work don't necessarily make better, kinder workplace environments. I wonder how you all feel about this and deal with it? Are there ways that people try to say, "But we're chaplains...shouldn't we be better somehow at coping with disliking each other?" How are internal tensions thought about, talked about, coped with?

Joyous return!

Hello, everyone!

I have returned from one of the most intense summers of my life as a CPE intern at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, WA. Holy criminy, chaplains. I don't know how you do it folks, day and day out. I loved you all before, but my respect levels just shot through the roof.

Here's a few scattered responses.

Positive:
1. I learned that I can't fake it in ministry. I spent the first few weeks trying to be a "good" chaplain - more conservative theologically, more apt to use traditional language, more into polite Christian skirts and jackets. I was doing my darnedest to play the part of a nice Christian lady. Well. I'm here to tell you that that went nowhere. My visits were awkward, and I left work feeling icky, like I'd been lying all day. My supervisor gently told me that I was, in a sense, lying all day, and that the world might not end if I actually walked into rooms as myself, messy theology and all. Lo and behold, he was right. I had some great visits with people who didn't want to talk religion at all - I honored their spirituality of motorcycles and mountains. I also was able to find "common language" with people whose theological position was greatly different than mine: interestingly, drawing a lot of source material and language from the Psalms. Metaphors work for lots of people!

2. I helped someone have a baby (I helped someone be born). Boy, does that miracle never stop feeling like eighteen Christmases at once.


Negative:
1. Drive-by ministry is not for me. I am truly terrible at letting go. I like long-term relationships. I want to be in a parish where I baptize someone and then stick around to see them graduate from high school.

2. Ministry where sketchy amounts of power are just handed to random people freak me out. The fact that there wasn't any room for conversation about the fact that our task was essentially invasive: cold calling, marching into a room where someone is physically immobilized, is frightening. Anyone with experience of bodily assault and/or sexual assault knows that the loss of privacy, of ownerships of what happens to one's own body, is traumatic. Every day was a struggle to claim what I felt was opressive power over people in order to get my job done.

3. I also couldn't quite get a grip on IPR. It was...suppposed to be about each other? It was...supposed to be about patients? It was...very odd. Our group ended up having one conflict a few weeks in, essentially a conflict between me and my supervisor, in which I was challenging some of the power dynamics within the group. That day I had also initiated a "feelings check-in" for people, just as an idea because we seemed to be having a hard time getting going being honest with one another. Well, we were honest that day, and it turned into a fight, which left us all a little jumpy for the rest of the summer. It felt artificial (and I wasn't alone in this), like some big Skinner box, or a Milgram experiment. I don't cope very well with that kind of artificiality (which is also why I have a little bit of trouble with the discernment process as a whole - but I digress). I think this goes back to the desire for long-term relationships. I like how my friends at General talk about how they have to learn to live with one another, in a very close space, worshipping and eating together most days. It means that relationships must be forged in community over time, and that is an important skill. It's one that I appreciate about faith communities in general, and in particular within the Episcopal Church.

Training for Lay Chaplains at Bishop Anderson House

I am unbelievably behind in my blogging!

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting Bishop Anderson House in Chicago at the kind invitation of The Rev. James (Jay) Risk, their executive director. Jay approached me at the Association of Professional Chaplains’ Assembly of Episcopal Healthcare Chaplains’ banquet with the suggestion that I come take a look at what they are doing in the chaplaincy training effort.

A well-designed program for lay folks extending over 11 weeks each spring, the students are treated to a host of experts who offer for two hours each Wednesday evening didactic material ranging from psychiatric diagnostics to aging. In addition, students are paired with a field site and a field supervisor. The learning contracts for these sites are as clear, concise and constructive as could be—impressive.

I met with an outstanding array of people involved, beginning with the psychiatrist who offers in the program a thumbnail sketch of diagnostic categories, and ending with one student and her field supervisor. The latter was none other than Belinda Chandler, a member of the original steering committee for this project. It was wonderful to finally have a chance to talk with Belinda in person. Asking directions to her office at the hospital, the information clerk noted, “Nice person, Belinda Chandler!”

Not only nice, Belinda reflectively registered some of the trickier issues of employing lay folks trained in such a venue. Not the least of these is the legal issues of what lay folks can and cannot do. I was impressed with the dedication Belinda has demonstrated in making wise use of the human resources cultivated through the Bishop Anderson House training program. One of these uses is in helpful data gathering on who needs a visit by the professional chaplain.

At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, Jay and I mused over the prospect of involving Seabury in extending the program of Bishop Anderson House in line with the hopes and aims of this project. Watch this space for news of developments along these lines and others.

In the meantime, please know of my admiration and respect for the job Jay is doing with the program there now.

Thanks, Jay, for your congenial hosting of a lovely and informative day.


Gratefully submitted,
Maggie Izutsu

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