CPE in Alaska: An Overview

Edited from an on my experiences in CPE that was written for The Trumpet, the monthly newsletter of Holy Trinity Parish in Decatur, Ga. (my sponsoring parish).

This summer, I am doing CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, Alaska. I chose to do CPE in Alaska because my husband lived here for nine years, but I had never been to Alaska. Spending a summer here would allow me to get to experience this area that was a big part of his life. It also helped that when I called last fall to inquire about CPE, I discovered that the program at Providence sounded like a really excellent program – and it is.

The CPE program here supports both residents and summer interns. There are five CPE residents who are here for at least one year each (two Catholic priests, a Baptist minister, a Methodist minister, a Disciples of Christ minister, and a Presbyterian lay person), and six of us summer interns.

The Spiritual Care staff at this Catholic hospital includes a Catholic priest, three Lutheran pastors (two ELCA, one Missouri Synod), a Methodist deacon, a Russian Orthodox priest, and a United Church of Christ minister. There is also a professional therapeutic musician on staff, who plays the harp for patients who are in pain or dying.

My CPE summer internship group includes four other seminary students (two Lutheran, one Methodist, one Presbyterian) and an Evangelical Free Church pastor who is considering making a career change from parish ministry to hospital chaplaincy and will continue after our summer unit to do a year-long residency. We are wonderfully diverse in our theologies and perspectives on life, and bring a rich variety of experiences to our group interactions. I believe I can speak for all my colleagues in saying that the experience has been a tremendous growing process for all of us.

Our CPE group and our supervisor, Fr. Al (far right).

Each of us summer interns is assigned to a particular floor that is our primary area of responsibility as a chaplain. I am on the first floor of the hospital, which is the maternity center: labor & delivery, prenatal care (for women with pregnancy complications), the mother-baby unit (post-delivery), and the newborn intensive care unit (NICU). I spend a lot of my days greeting new mothers in the Mother-Baby Unit and congratulating them on their new babies – a nice treat considering so many people are in hospitals for not-so-happy reasons! I also support families of babies in the NICU and women who may be stuck on our prenatal unit for months, every day another day closer to a viable baby who will be able to survive if born early.

In addition our floor duties, all the chaplains take turns carrying the spiritual care office’s main pager, where we get requests for chaplains and general pages about emergencies to the ER. I also work one overnight shift per week (Tuesday nights), when I am the only chaplain in the hospital from 8:45 p.m. to 7:15 a.m. and I must respond to any and all calls that come over the pager for a chaplain. So far, on my night shift I have done everything from sitting with a family after the death of their father to making a peanut butter & jelly sandwich for a 6-year-old boy in the ER (I happened to have PB&J in my office since I eat it for lunch every day). You never know what you will be called to do as a chaplain!

Additionally, since this hospital is an explicitly faith-based organization, there are daily prayers over the loudspeaker at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Chaplains take turns saying these prayers, and I have used many prayers from the Book of Common Prayer’s Daily Office over the hospital’s loudspeaker this summer. There is also an ecumenical worship service on Sundays at 1 p.m. that the CPE interns take turns leading. I led a service in mid-July in which I used the New Zealand Prayer Book and music from Taize and the Iona Community to create an atmosphere of calm, centering meditation.

Overall, CPE has been a wonderful learning experience for me. I had been a bit wary of CPE since I generally get queasy and anxious in hospital settings, but I have been handling it much better than I thought I would. The experience has also helped me develop my prayer life, and I have begun to say the Daily Office more faithfully than I have in the past. I find that this practice has increased my sense of calm and inner peace, even in the midst of difficult situations.

I am learning new communication skills for supporting and being present to people and am working on “taking myself out of the picture,” so to speak, and focusing instead on the patient I am with and their words and feelings and thoughts, and opening myself to God’s direction. Although I certainly do not feel a call to hospital chaplaincy at this point (bloody trauma in the ER is still not my thing!), this experience has affirmed yet again my calling to parish ministry and has helped me to develop skills and confidence for that calling.

I feel an inner transformation taking place, slowly but surely, as I am being molded and “formed” into a priest. As I reflect on how much has changed for me in the past year since I started seminary, I feel much more confident that the entire formation process as a whole (discernment groups, seminary, CPE) will guide and mold me into the priest God is calling me to be by the time I graduate from Sewanee in 2012.

Sermon: Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Year C

This sermon was delivered at the Our Lady of Providence Chapel at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, AK, as part of a Sunday afternoon worship service I led during my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education).

This afternoon, we heard the story of Mary and Martha. Women in the church often encounter this passage in Sunday School classes or women’s retreats in which we are asked to reflect on whether we are “a Martha” or “a Mary” – which is church code language for asking whether you are a “Type A” personality, organized and task-oriented, or a “Type B” personality, more carefree and process-oriented. The assumption is generally that both are equally valid ways of being, just different, and your task for the retreat is to find which type of woman you are.

But I don’t think that’s what’s going on in this passage at all. It seems pretty clear to me that Jesus is not saying that both Mary and Martha’s ways of being in this passage are equally valid. He says, “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).

The “better part” that Mary has chosen is to sit at Jesus’s feet (which was the position of a disciple) and to listen to his teachings. Martha, in contrast, is busily rushing about the house getting things done. She was probably doing all the appropriate things a woman would be supposed to do in that culture to prepare for a house guest. In the passage from Genesis, we get a glimpse into ancient Mediterranean hospitality traditions – preparing a meal, washing the guest’s feet, offering the guest a place to stay. There is a lot of work to be done to offer proper hospitality to a guest.

So is it bad that Martha wanted to do these things? Not at all. Jesus critiques Martha not because she is task-oriented, but because she is “worried and distracted by many things.” We have no way of knowing from this passage whether Mary was really a “Type B” kind of person; maybe she was just as task-oriented and organized as Martha at times. The point here is that Mary – whatever her habits or personality type – has not lost sight of the forest for the trees, so to speak. She has not gotten so caught up in preparing for Jesus’s visit that she forgets to actually enjoy Jesus’s visit and spend time with him – as her sister Martha has done.

Can you relate to this story? Have you ever found yourself so caught up in the details of what you are doing that you lose sight of the big picture? Are you so “worried and distracted by many things” that you forget to take time for God in your daily life?

The good news for us as Christians is that the spirit of Christ dwells in us and works through us – so we no longer have to carry the burden of feeling like we have to do all the work! As the apostle Paul writes in his Letter to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20). Paul is describing what happened to him at his baptism, when he died to sin and was born to new life in Christ and the indwelling of God’s Holy Spirit. Being a Christian is about allowing Christ to live in us. We don’t have to do all the work! Christ in us will do the work, if we simply allow him to. If we give to Christ those things that worry and distract us and allow him to work on them instead of us, we will be freed to worship and learn from him as Mary did in our Scripture reading today.

What things are you “worried and distracted by” today? I invite you into a time of silence to reflect on that question. During this time of silence, I invite you to write down things that are distracting you from spending time in God’s presence. After this time of silence, we will sing the words of Psalm 46:10 – “Be still and know that I am God.” As we sing, I invite you to bring your pieces of paper forward and put them in this bowl of water, symbolizing your giving them over to God. As you watch the water begin to dissolve the strips of paper, imagine your worries dissolving in the abundant waters of God’s love.

The adaptable cat

Doro having fun with his favorite toy, a paper bag, in our new (temporary) home in Girdwood, Alaska. This little guy made it all the way from Tennessee to Alaska (by way of Oklahoma), including a pretty long plane ride. He's such a good travel kitty.

The promise of new life

Sermon: Third Sunday in Lent, Year C

Sermon preached at Holy Trinity Parish in Decatur, Ga.

This morning, we heard the familiar story of God’s call to Moses, of God’s appearance in the burning bush. (Exodus 3:1-15)

I am in my first year of seminary at Sewanee, and with my fellow first-year students, I have been studying the Hebrew Bible in depth, through two classes in the study of the Old Testament with professor Becky Wright. One of the first things Becky taught us in class this past fall was how to recognize certain “forms” in the Old Testament narratives.

The story of the burning bush is a “prophetic call narrative.” Not all biblical prophets have the story of their calling by God preserved in writing, but for those who do, it follows a pretty standard pattern throughout the Bible.

There are four parts to a prophetic call narrative: First, there is a theophany. That’s a fancy scholarly word for “manifestation of God.” (As Becky always tells us, you can’t just say “manifestation of God,” because you have to use big words that nobody understands so you can prove you’ve been to seminary.) In the case of Moses, the theophany is the burning bush. The theophany itself is not the main point of the story, but serves as a means to get the person’s attention. Exodus 3 is not primarily about the fact that God can make bushes appear to burn without actually burning; God’s conversation with Moses is the real point of the story.

The second part of a prophetic call narrative is the announcement of a task for the human being. God or God’s messenger says to the person called, “I’ve got a job for you,” and then proceeds to tell the person what it is. In biblical call narratives, God never calls someone just to be a prophet, but calls him or her to a specific task. In the case of Moses, it’s “get my people out of slavery in Egypt.”

The third part of the prophetic call narrative is the person’s objection. The biblical prophets ALWAYS voice an objection in response to God’s call. Moses says, “Who am I that I should go to Pharoah, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Remember, Moses’s mother shipped him off down the river after he was born to save him from the Egyptian king’s intent to kill all male Israelite children, in an attempt to curb the Israelites’ population growth, since they were becoming more numerous than the Egyptians themselves. Moses was taken in by a daughter of the Pharaoh, and raised as an Egyptian. So although he was an Israelite, he was not recognized by the Israelites as being part of the people of Israel. Given his history, Moses felt he was not the most appropriate choice of a prophet to speak to the Israelite people.

And the final part of the prophetic call narrative is God’s answer to the person’s objection. God’s answer is almost always, “I will be with you,” which is what God says to Moses in Exodus 3.

As I listened to a lecture on this material in a classroom full of future priests, I saw heads nodding and knowing smiles around the room. Objecting to God’s call to us? Yep, that sounds familiar! “Who am I to do this?” is a familiar refrain among would-be priests.

But the part that was particularly interesting to me was the bit about the specificity of God’s call. According to the patterns we see in the biblical prophets, God does not call people to simply be a prophet, but to do some particular task. I wondered about the implications of this for those of us who claim to be called to the priesthood. We often talk about being called to “be” priests, as a role, as an identity. What does the biblical notion of call say to us? What if we are not called to be something but to do some specific thing in service of God? If God calls us to a specific task, to what has God called me?

If I ask myself that question, the answer has to be that I am called to serve people who are homeless or in extreme poverty. If I think about my own “prophetic call narrative” – or perhaps I should say “priestly call narrative,” it would probably go something like this:

“Tracy was traveling in Turkey, studying the religious history of the Mediterranean region as part of her bachelor’s degree in religion at Furman University. She came to Ankara, the capital of Turkey. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to her in the form of a young girl living on the street. The young girl approached Tracy and the other college students with her and pleaded with them for food. When the Lord saw that the students did not give the girl any food, he made the little girl to grab the leg of one of the students. When the Lord saw that the students still did not give the little girl any food, the Lord’s anger burned against them, and the little girl picked up a shard of glass from a nearby bag of garbage and held it up menacingly. Although she could not understand any of the Turkish words the girl yelled, Tracy heard the voice of the Lord speaking through her:

“I have observed the misery of my people living in poverty on the streets,” said the Lord. “I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them. So come, I will send you to speak to them on my behalf, and to tell them that I love them and to deliver them from their bondage.”(cf. Exodus 3:7-8)

But when Tracy heard the Word of the Lord, she was terrified, and left that place, and fled to Boston, away from the Lord. (cf. Jonah 1:3)

But the Lord found Tracy, and appeared to her again, in the form of men and women living on the streets in Cambridge. As she passed by them on her daily walk to class, the Word of the Lord came to her again:

‘If you love me, feed my sheep.’ (John 21:17) 

‘Whatever you did to the least of these, you did it to me.’ (Matthew 25:40)

Finally Tracy answered the Lord, saying, ‘Who am I that I should go these people on the streets? I don’t know what to say. I’m not good at this. I’m scared.’

And the Lord said to Tracy, ‘I will be with you.’”

Later, in the midst of serving the poor through the Outdoor Church of Cambridge, I sensed a call to explore the possibility of ordained ministry. When I served as a parish intern in Omaha, Nebraska for a year, I found that I loved the life of the parish; I loved preaching, I loved being in community, I loved leading study groups, and I loved being the center of attention. Wow, this job was really cut out for me! I moved to Atlanta, went through the formal discernment process, and now I find myself in seminary at Sewanee.

But somewhere in the midst of all the churchy formalities, I lost touch with that original sense of call. Is God really calling me to “be” a priest, or is God calling me to listen to the needs and concerns of the poor, and becoming a priest is merely a vehicle for me to pursue those ends? As nice as it is to imagine a life sitting in my parish office going about the daily routine of a parish priest, I know my calling is more specific, and that I am called to always be outside the walls of the church. I am sensing a return of that call in my life these days, and I hope to do the “field education” part of my degree at Sewanee with an outdoor church for the homeless in Nashville, called “Church in the Yard,” that is very similar to Church of the Common Ground here in Atlanta and to the Outdoor Church of Cambridge, Mass., where I first began to discern my call.

My time at Sewanee has been very valuable for putting my call in context. I am lucky to have many professors who constantly seek ways to make our classroom study relevant to ministry on the ground. For example, in the same class I have already mentioned, I am working on a paper assignment that asked us to write about how we would lead a Bible study on Isaiah in a hypothetical mission parish in Des Moines, Iowa, made up of people like those described in a New Yorker article on the working poor that we were assigned to read as part of the class. One of the reasons I chose Sewanee was because of its focus on training parish priests for the actual day-to-day aspects of parish ministry, for its way of making seminary education relevant to the “real world,” and it has certainly delivered in that regard. I am constantly reminded that I am learning not just for learning’s sake, or for my own personal edification, but because I have been called to a very specific task for which I will need the knowledge I am gaining during this period of study. At the same time, I have to acknowledge that none of the biblical prophets went to seminary, and I realize that a seminary education does not give me or anyone else a monopoly on understanding God’s call or God’s message for God’s people.

In fact, I believe that God calls all of us in the body of Christ to specific tasks in specific times and places. I believe God has called each one of you. Maybe some of you know for sure what God has called you to do, while others are less certain.

I invite you all to go home this afternoon, take your bulletins with the Scripture readings in them, and sit down with the story of God’s call to Moses in Exodus 3. Think about your own “prophetic call narratives.” How and where in your life has God called you to a specific task? Re-write the burning bush story, as I did earlier, putting yourself in Moses’s place and replacing the burning bush with whatever “manifestation of God” in your life has triggered your sense of call. What did God say to you? What did you say to God? Is God calling you to do something specific right now?

Whatever it is, take time to hear God’s response to the inevitable objections that will rise within you. “I will be with you” is God’s response. According to the Bible, it is always God’s response to our objections. Whatever it is that you feel called to do, whatever it is that seems impossible and out of your field of expertise, God will be with you. And if we believe the promises of Scripture, we know that “with God, all things are possible.” (cf. Luke 1:37)

Amen.

Snowwoman

Snowwoman my husband made for me while I was home sick yesterday and today.

Today's sketch

The mirror on the dresser in our guest bedroom. (Notice a "household theme" in my sketches so far???)

"I have called you friends."

From the Wednesday morning Eucharist today, the Feast Day of St. Matthias:

"[Jesus said,] ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name." (John 15:12-16)

Today's sketch

A confession

In the spirit of the season of Lent, I have a confession to make.

I have never really had a sense of God's abiding presence in my life.

Sure, I get flashes of insight from time to time; I've heard a "still, small voice" within that has guided me when I've prayed for discernment in my life; and there are moments when I truly feel a sense of God's presence: when I'm singing with a group of people and we finally hit that note at just the right pitch and in just the right tempo and chillbumps run down my spine; when I'm walking through the woods and I feel the wind at my back or my eyes are opened to new life sprouting forth from the earth; when a moment of deep pain turns into a moment of solidarity between fellow human beings on this planet. But I don't walk around on a daily basis feeling like God is right there with me, that God is my closest friend.

In college, I had a roommate named Susan who had a sense of God's abiding presence in her life. I could tell this just by looking at her and observing her on a daily basis. Each morning, she would wake up and read her Bible, and just the way she opened the book and fingered the pages exuded such love and devotion that I could tell that she was enraptured in a conversation with her Lord. Whenever something was really troubling me, I could go to her and ask her to pray for me, and in the deep sincerity in her voice I could hear her connection with God. When I asked her to pray for me, I knew she would do it. She was a true intercessor.

During my college years at Furman University, I was a part of some on-campus religious groups that I would characterize as "Evangelical." There were many people in these groups who had that same aura about them that Susan did. In fact, it was precisely that that drew me to them. I knew they had something I didn't, and I wanted it.

But I never got it. In fact, my feelings that I was lacking something in the spiritual department were a big part of why I had never even considered that I could be called to ordained ministry until others started to suggest it to me during my time at Harvard Divinity School (I'd gone there not to pursue ordained ministry, but with thoughts of being a religion reporter for a newspaper or a documentary filmmaker, or a high school teacher of religious studies). Compared with these people who seemed to be so in touch with God, I felt I wasn't a "good enough Christian." Certainly I could never be a leader in the faith!

Eventually I drifted away from the Evangelical communities, largely because I felt some of their views, both theologically and politically, did not jive with my understanding of who God is from the Scriptures. (Isn't that the age-old story of schism in the church??) To use the words of Diana L. Eck, who became my professor at Harvard Divinity School and my boss at The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, I did not feel I could live with "intellectual and personal honesty" within those communities.

Although I drifted away from many of the friends I'd made during those years, Susan and I remained close. Many years later, I asked her about this sense of God's abiding presence that she had. She responded that when she was growing up, she was the "odd one out" in school since she was a Charismatic and not a "normal" (for her hometown) Methodist or Baptist. Many of her friends did not understand or approve of some of her church's practices, like speaking in tongues. So Susan couldn't rely on a sense of "normalcy" or "givenness" in terms of her understanding of God. She had to turn to God as a personal presence. She talked to God and sat with God and was comforted by God. God became her friend, an "ever-present help in trouble."

Yesterday, I had a meeting with my spiritual director in which I explained to her the struggles I have had over the years with maintaining any kind of regular prayer life, and with my sense of a lack of God's abiding presence in my life. My spiritual director responded by telling me I should talk to God more as if God was my friend. "You develop a relationship with another person by spending time with them," she said. "You have to do the same with God."

As I listened to her, I was struck by how similar this advice was to what I had heard in the Evangelical communities, and realized how, despite some of our political and theological differences, we are really not so different as Christians. The bottom line is the same -- to get to know God, spend time with God. Spend time reading Scripture. Spend time in prayer.

In some ways, this similarity made me a bit uncomfortable. Here again, I was confronted with my lack of a real, deep, two-way relationship with God. I can hide this better in the Episcopal Church than I could in the non-denominational, Evangelical communities, because most Episcopalians don't walk around talking about the time they spent talking with Jesus this morning, but here it was, all the same.

To cover up for my lack of a sense of God's abiding presence, I had begun to scoff at people who said they had one -- especially if they used the "friendship" language. "Jesus is not your FRIEND," I would think. "He's GOD -- transcendent, majestic, etc." I laughed condescendingly at the lyrics to one of my favorite songwriter's takes on the Lord's Prayer -- "lead us not into temptation / and deliver us from those who think they're You," she sings. One of the verses pleads to God to "deliver us from the politicians / who drop your name in every speech / as if they're your best friend from high school / as if they practice what they preach!" The song is indeed very clever, and I think makes a good point -- but a lot of the reason I identified with that verse was the bit about "as if they're your best friend from high school." "Hummph. Please! Right!" I'd say condescendingly, thinking about "those people" who say God is their "best friend" and how "silly" that is.

But then I found myself in an Episcopal priest's office, confessing my lack of sense of God's presence, and she was telling me to think of God as my friend.

Um.... whoops. As usual, God was serving me up a nice dose of humble pie. Why does God have to be so good at that???

When I explained my background, a lot of what I have just shared here, my spiritual director backed away from the "friend" word. "If that bring up bad memories for you, don't think in terms of that language. Find an image or a metaphor that works for you."

So this is my task this Lent. How can I develop a deeper sense of God's abiding presence? How can I spend more time with God? How can I just "be" with God, have a conversation with God? I'm exploring ways that this might work for me. I hope to be able to share some positive results. Your prayers would be appreciated.