August 7, 2008, 2:30 PM
The Rev. Paul D. Steinke, CPE Supervisor, Bellevue Hospital Center, New York City
Any talk about clinical pastoral education needs to begin with Anton Boisen, the founder of CPE. He is the one who first called the patients “The Living Human Documents.” And because he did we do not look at patients as broken pieces of machinery – we look at them as our teachers with dignity and respect. CPE was born in the dark, shadowy halls of Worcester State Hospital where Boisen decided his illness was a spiritual journey – an exploration of the inner world.
Boisen left Worcester State Hospital for Elgin State Hospital in IllinoisHospitalwhere Anton Boisen decided that his mental illness was
. There he trained Clarence Bruninga (first generation) who went directly from Seminary to clinical training. Clarence Bruninga, who died this year, went from Elgin to Norwich State Hospital in Connecticut where he trained me and Ralph Ciampa (second generation). Many of you know Ralph as the CPE Supervisor at the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and also as the person who trained your supervisor Steve Dutton (third generation). And Steve Dutton trained all of you (fourth generation). So none of us are far removed from Anton Boisen.
Today we celebrate the CPE journey. What remains memorable is the journey itself- these weeks and months and years of ministering to suffering people at Christiana and learning from your experience with the guidance of Steve and Tammy and Timothy.
Eudora Welty wrote a short story about an old Negro woman, named Phoenix Jackson–not too subtle a name. Phoenix lived way out in a deep rural area of Mississippi near the Natchez Trace with her grandson. The grandson had swallowed some lye and his throat and esophagus were scarred with pain. Every month or so Phoenix would have to travel miles and miles to town to the doctor to get pain medication for her grandson. It was an arduous journey for an old lady in her 80s, wrought with physical dangers – battling undergrowth and thorns, wild animals everywhere, climbing barbed wire fences, struggling up steep hills. She battled onward. Occasionally she would meet a hunter. Finally, she arrives at the clinic to get the meds. The clinic personnel have obviously not taken CPE. They treat Phoenix like a dememented old lady and worse they relate to her like she’s a welfare case. No one in the clinic recognizes her long walk, no one validates her struggles, and no one listens to her. Phoenix picks up the medication for her suffering grandson and returns to the dangerous and difficult way back to her grandson. The title of this short story is “the worn path.”
To call the CPE experience “a journey” is kind of a cliché. Lets call CPE The Worn Path. It is my hope and the hope of your supervisors that CPE has become for you a Worn Path – indeed a Habit of Being. It is a worn path fraught with danger yet ultimately worth any danger in order to minister to suffering people. And Like Phoenix, we who trod this path over and over again, are renewed in ways that we do not anticipate. We can feel crushed by the burden one day and so competent in our skin the next. The irony and truth of Eudora Welty’s story is that the myth of the Phoenix, of life rising out of ashes, is no big deal – it’s not a big show, it’s not up in lights on Broadway – it is captured in the words from St. Matthew that precede the story’s telling: “Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” CPE is just a path, not a super highway. We are just folks struggling with our own wounds trying to address the wounds of suffering people. The pastoral relationship occurs when your vulnerability meets the vulnerability of your patients, peers and supervisors.
I want to remind you of three things you have done as you trod the worn path of clinical pastoral education this year and this summer:
- First of all you have defied the entropic vortex of the autonomous self.
Any writer will tell you that when you are too in love with a sentence you write, it probably should be discarded.. I must say I am in love with this sentence “Defying the entropic vortex of the autonomous self.” The word “defy” just appeals to my authority issues so much – it means “to challenge the power, to resist the status quo .” “Entropic” – that wonderful idea from Thermal Dynamics that things are sliding down and away. And “vortex,” which is the center of the whirlpool. And “autonomous self” which is the state of being an independent being.
I’m not condemning autonomy here. Achieving autonomy has probably been a goal of many of you in CPE. I’m not talking about all the discoveries you made about yourself, all the soul searching you did. What I am saying is that by delivering pastoral care to suffering people you have defied the dominant culture of the self in which we live, a culture that designates the weak and the infirm, the sick and dying as second-class citizens.
We live in a culture formed by the Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries in which the highest values are progress and positive thinking, youth and vigor, health and self-reliance. The self-sufficient are valued, not those who are suffering.. The rampant individualism of American culture leaves people in hospitals bereft of any community and little support. In a culture that avoids weakness and celebrates the strong. people in hospital beds who are not the strong- loose out.
You defied our lone ranger culture to provide suffering people with a fellowship unlike any other. You did this by providing community and companionship to the very people our culture isolates – suffering people.
The Duke theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes: “By its very nature suffering alienates us not only from one another, but also from ourselves.” You have attended to suffering people. connecting to them with a transfusion of care, of spirit, of life itself.
Gregory Orr, the Virginia poet, went hunting one Fall morning when he was 11 years old with his father and brothers. He accidentally shot and killed one of his brothers. Years later he wrote the poem, After a Death:
I heard the front door close
And from my window saw
My father cross the moonlit lawn
And start up the orchard road.
Then I was with him,
My mittened hand in his,
And Peter, my brother, his dead son,
Holding his other hand.
The way the three of us walked
Was a kind of steady weeping.
And so may we characterize the way we walk the worn path of CPE, the way we bring community to suffering people as “a kind of steady weeping.”
- 2. Your second accomplishment in CPE is that you have been emotionally gripped by your failures.
David Brooks in the NY Times in his June 6th column about Abraham Lincoln writes:
It would be nice to have a president who had gone to school on his own failings. It would be comforting to see a president who’d looked into the abyss, or suffered some sort of ordeal that put him on a first name basis with his own gravest weaknesses, and who had found ways to combat them.
You are now fluent in the CPE language of strengths and weaknesses. You discovered you are stubborn or that you couldn’t walk two steps without pleasing someone. Or you discovered you are a doormat for authority figures or that you hide under the table when conflict is brewing. You explored the intense fear you didn’t know you had or your defensiveness when your work was critiqued. You can see now that looking good was your first priority. Some of you may have found out you are like Father James in Graham Green’s play, The Living Room. Father James is speaking to a parishioner in dire crisis:
I want to help. I want to be of use.
I would want it if it were the last
Thing in life I could have. But when I
Talk my tongue is heavy with the…the,
The catechism.
Others may have discovered that your “voice is chained in your throat.:”
And writ large for all of us in CPE is our anger….unruly on the one hand and the bridge to reconciliation on the other hand.
I am sure you have discarded the grandiose Rescuer you and put on the garments of a more modest, realistic you. You came to Christianna Hospital to help people and all you ended up doing is listening to the cry of anguish of suffering people. You have toned down the noise of your own voice to hear the suffering of “maimed, the halt and the blind.”
You may also have been gripped in CPE with the failure of God. Robert Olmstead in his Civil War novel, Coal Black Horse, tells the story of a young man sent by his Mother to retrieve his Father from the battlefields.
He comes across a field where the battle has just ended:
It was a horrible scene to witness, replete with sorrowful pleadings for water and assistance, while the silent dead resided in strange repose, their stiffen arms reaching to embrace heaven. He decided that from that day forever after that there must live a heartless God to let such despair be visited on earth, or as his father said, a God too tired and no longer capable of doing the work required of him.
You have been gripped by your failures. And those failures, those weakness, your screwed up history, you,warts and all, are the best resource you have for pastoral caregiving. You minister out of your own suffering, your own failures. As a man mourning the death of his son said: “The tears of God are the meaning of history.”
- 3. And in CPE you have acknowledged the “restiveness of what it means to be human.”
The poet, Carl Phillips in his essay on the Psalms writes:
The trajectory-psychological, emotional- of the Psalms is that of restiveness itself…If we read the entire book, we cannot help but understand that the only constant (in the Psalms) is fluctuation – astonishment gives way to joy, joy to fear, fear to despair – and despair again – and temporarily to joy. This is the restiveness of what it means to be human and perishable. To be flawed, to be alive.
The word restive is defined as 1. refusing to go forward, balky like a horse. 2. hard to control, unruly. 3. impatient under pressure, restless, unsettled.
The human condition is not defined here as utter Calvinist depravity or the Lutheran original sin or the Anglican bad manners, like wearing white after Labor Day (that’s a low blow to get a cheap laugh) nor is the human condition equated with drinking and dancing and lusting as in the Pietist and Holiness traditions.
The human condition is called restiveness. This restiveness, this balkiness, this unruliness, and this unsettledness- you have discovered in yourself and in your patients and in your peers and supervisors. On the worn path of CPE you have seen what it means to be a human being.
- How ordinary people like us can connect to one another occasionally,
- How stubborn folks like us can change our minds,
- How religious people like us can set our souls in a different direction,
- How restive people like us can walk the worn path.
The poet says this is the restiveness of what it means to be human, to be perishable. And in CPE we discovered the perishable nature of the human in ourselves and in our patients. Elizabeth Spires, the Baltimore poet in her poem Now the Green Blade Rises remembers the recent death of her mother:
Sometimes, when the phone
Rings, I think it is you.
Three months, and I still believe
I’ll hear your voice at the other end
Of the line. But you’re dead,
And the world is ash. Your body
Words that used to live.
I had a dream, black and pictureless.
You were calling my name
Over a great distance. It hung
Suspended in the dark air,
But I could not move,
Had no voice to answer.
Mother, forgive me if I can.
Now, if I could, I would sit
With you in a simple pew
Somewhere quiet and dim.
To be there would e enough.
There’d be nothing we’d have to say.
The moment held like a book
Between us, a silent offering.
It would be midwinter.
We’d watch the slant light
Of late afternoon stream
Through high windows
To warm cool stones, warm us,
And fall on an open hymnal
To lines we’d read by touch
Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again that with the dead has been;
Love is come again like wheat arising green.
There soul to soul,
We would have forever
To finally speak again.
To be alive in the poet’s view is to embrace are humanity, our perishableness and in so doing we recognize our restiveness. And it is there where we all meet soul to soul – the green blade rising over and over again.
By now you’re saying – wow – CPE was a lot more fun than this graduation speaker has pictured it. We’re headed home or for the beach and a well-deserved vacation and this guy is plying us with all these accomplishments, which sound so serious, even bleak. And so I leave you with a song as the blessing this afternoon. I heard Sam Bush, the great mandolinist sing these words at a Bluegrass Music Festival earlier this summer:
- Take time for sunshine,
- Take a whole lot of time for love.
- Take time to thank and praise heaven up above,
- And take a little time for howling at the moon.
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