CPE Closing Remarks

Given at the graduation from Clinical Pastoral Education at UC Davis Medical Center, August 20th, 2010. -DM

Good Morning. So, I have to be honest with you, the graduation, at least for some of us, has been a long time in coming.

My name is Dominic Moore, I’m a student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Now, If you’re a seminary student like myself, you hear stories about Clinical Pastoral Education long before you ever encounter it for yourself. From time to time, you run into these upper class students in the hallways and you ask them about CPE and a far-off look comes over them, as if they’re recalling some distant and yet powerful memory. “Good luck,” they’ll tell you with a mischievous grin, “you’ll just have to find out for yourself.”

And I did find out for myself. CPE is everything that I had heard and more.

Now some of you are here because you know one of us, and others, well....  “Free Breakfast” right?  So what exactly is CPE, Clinical Pastoral Education, you might ask, and why is it such a target of both love and animosity from seminarians and pastors around the country? Why do my classmates talk about it as if it was one of the most difficult experiences of their lives, “the hardest thing I ever loved,” in one case?



Let me give you a little bit of context. A little less than a century ago some of the best theological schools in the country realized that they had a problem. They were turning out hundreds of graduates who had an utter mastery of academic material -- lengthy papers on the difference between Oriental Orthodoxy and Eastern Orthodoxy, reams of research on the historical development of the doctrine of Predestination; they could name drop Schliermacher and Turtullian with ease while balancing an armful of Karl Barth. 

If you’re confused at this point, GOOD! You should be, because while these graduates were coming out of the best schools in the country they didn’t know anything about real life. They were helpless, it turned out, to make use of all that book knowledge when the rubber finally met the road -- when they were confronted by real people with real, often agonizing problems. Who cares about the Athenasian Creed when your child is sick with a terminal illness?

And so these young, naive seminary students were rounded up and sent out into that real world, the world of mental health institutions and VA hospitals and places like UC Davis Medical Center, to make sense of their theology in the places that really mattered: With real people in real crises. I imagine that those first chaplains had experiences much like mine the first time I walked into a hospital room. They fumbled foolishly with whatever materials they had brought, they mumbled something about faith and they finally found an excuse to say a prayer and run out the door. After all, what really can we offer to the suffering, the lonely, the hopeless that the doctors and nurses and talented medical staff cannot already provide and provide better? Who are we to presume to help?

Hold that thought for a moment and let me tell you a story. In Zen Buddhism, a koan is a short illustration that a disciple will reflect on, puzzle out, try and interpret. It tells a kind of mysterious truth.

As it happens, there's a wonderful Zen koan about a monk who achieves enlightenment. He is a member of a small monastery, high up on a secluded mountain. And the news spreads through all the other monks in the monastery that one of their brothers has achieved nirvana. They run down the hallways to go and see him and knock nervously on the door of his room. "Is it true that you are enlightened?" they ask, voices hushed in awe. "Yes, it is" he answers. "How do you feel?" "As miserable as ever," says the monk.

It’s ok to laugh...   For me, like all koans, there are multiple levels of meaning here, but think about just this one. What does it mean to be both an enlightened monk and have more or less the same problems that you always did? Is it possible that we can be both spiritually rich and physically or emotionally miserable at the same time? The answer of course, is yes and It is the chaplain’s job to meet that person wherever they are, in whatever state of misery or bliss they happen to find themselves in.

What I learned in those hospital rooms, not in the first one I promise you, nor in the tenth, but in the hundredth, is that being a good chaplain is often about doing nothing at all, at least, nothing that can be packaged and labeled and sold in a box or in the pages of a book. Often, the best work of chaplains is about simply being present. It is doing the quiet and often invisible work of extending love, offering comfort, sharing suffering. In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that to love is to “weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.” I have had occasion here to do both.

The role of CPE then, is to take people trained in theology and philosophy, trained in the best book-learning available, and place them into the rough edges of the world, place them into contact with people in desperate situations of loss, grief and sadness. It challenged them, and challenges us, to make sense of pain, of death, of illness, or even to hold onto faith when all evidence screams that our persistence is a waste of time and our prayers will never be answered. That’s lived theology - it’s everything we know about the spiritual taken out of the world of books and illuminated by the bright fluorescent lights of a hospital unit.

Unlike a doctor or a nurse, the tools of the chaplain do not cut skin or heal it. They do not bind up wounds or bandage them. A chaplain simply gives what she can where she can, and while she may have shaking hands and a trembling heart, in our good moments, a chaplain find whatever tools are available to be present with empathy, listen with love and share suffering with compassion.

The work of a chaplain is human work, it is weeping with the losses of others and rejoicing at their gain, it is offering an arm of friendship to CEOs and the homeless alike, to children and grandparents, to Muslims and Christians and atheists and everyone in-between. Often it is simply being there, present, to the darkest valleys and terrifying nightmares of our shared humanity. Another human soul, caught up in the drama of this mystery we call life. Another walker on the road, willing to share a mile when the going gets tough.

So here I am now, on the other side of CPE, with all battle scars, and war stories to prove it. I can now look at my younger classmates in seminary with that thousand-yard stare and make cryptic comments about the life-changing experience that they’re in for. But if truth be told, under the surface I feel more like that monk in the monastery, not any better off than I was before, not any smarter, just more aware. Because life is a wonderful and terrible thing, a painful struggle and a powerful joy -- and all those colors that make up our days, the deep tones of sadness and loss, the hues of celebration and success, are all the richer, all the more profound, when we share them together.

Thank you, and God Bless.