Poems from the E.D.

A friend pointed me to a blog post I'm profoundly glad to have read: The first four ED sonnets, a quartet of sonnets written by Susan Palwick about hospital chaplaincy work. If you enjoy formal poetry -- and especially if you have any connection with chaplaincy work, or its cousins social work, counseling, and medicine -- don't miss these.

The second sonnet in particular, "Emergency Trauma Family Consult Room," really moves me. The enjambment between the first two lines pulls me forward, right into the heart of the poem. As I read, I can feel everything in it unfolding around me.

The poems in chaplainbook, aside from one haiku series, are free verse. It's fascinating to me how Palwick's chaplaincy poems feel at once very unlike, and very like, my own. Anyway, I'm delighted to have found another blogging poet chaplain, and look forward to reading more of her work, in its various genres.

(I imagine most of you already know about chaplainbook, but just in case you don't: here's a link to the chaplainbook story, my post about how the collection came to be, and here's Tom Montag's tremendously generous review of the collection. You are, of course, welcome to purchase copies at any time -- I'm honored and delighted every time someone decides to pick the collection up.)


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Endings

Today was my last day of CPE. We gathered in the Alumni Room, the wood-paneled library where we met on our very first day back in September, and spent the first part of the morning speaking some final words in turn. I talked about how I can no longer access the feeling of looking around the room and seeing strangers. These men have become so dear to me, and so familiar. We've been through so much together. They are my brothers, every one of them.

I started to cry when I said I would have to make some kind of special plans next Monday; otherwise the day is going to stretch so miserably empty! It's been deeply sustaining for me to spend one day a week with others who are walking a road very like the one I'm on. Especially since my rabbinic program is geographically dispersed -- we come together at certain times of year, we study together in various ways, but I don't have classmates where I live -- it has been truly wonderful to have fellow-travelers.

Many of us said that this has been among the best experiences of our lives. I think everyone agreed that it's been life-changing. Most of us were there because we were obligated to be; our seminaries or superiors or ordaining bodies required it. None of us expected to love the work, and each other, the way we did. I certainly didn't expect to find holiness in the halls of that hospital. And I can still remember the day of my first on-call, a million years (or nine short months) ago. I met two old college friends for a soda in Albany beforehand, and we sat on the strip of grass outside the hospital. I was nervous, so afraid I might not be able to handle what would come...

My colleague Steve will be going on a pre-ordination retreat in the fall, and he spoke this morning about how someone told him that would be the most stressful time of his life. "Get real," he said in reply. "I've sat with parents who don't yet know that their child has been killed...Nothing I go through in the ordination process will compare with that." He's right. No matter what stresses lie ahead of me in the months and years to come -- and I can be pretty type-A, so I'm no stranger to stress -- the work I've done in CPE puts my petty stresses and frustrations in perspective.

Because here's the thing. God is present with each of us. God is present any time we meet each other truly. God is present when we are born and God is present when we die. I've had the profound honor of escorting an untold number of strangers through some of these passages in their lives, and I have come to know deep in my bones that God is with them, God is with me, no matter what. This work has been a deep, deep blessing. Ma nora ha-makom hazeh indeed -- how awesome and holy is this place, the place where we come together in our vulnerability and our commonality, our fear and hope and love.

The day seemed to speed up as it went on. I gave everyone copies of chaplainbook -- that was a pleasure, giving the work to the people for whom it was written. (It's rare that poems have so direct an audience.) Several family members arrived to join us -- as did Clara, the one other woman in our cohort, who had to drop out in January for personal reasons and who I hadn't expected to see again! (That was a joy.) We put on a skit that gently satirized the program and our relationships with one another, which elicited much laughter from the chaplaincy residents and staff. And then we gathered for lunch (glorious halal Pakistani food) and the awarding of diplomas.

At the little diploma ceremony, Harlan made reference again to the Wizard of Oz, which he'd used as a frametale for our journey on the first day of class back in the fall. I didn't realize then how appropriate a metaphor it is. Each of us is the Scarecrow, with more brains than we know. Each of us is the Tin Man, with all the heart in the world. Each of us is the Cowardly Lion, filled with boundless courage. And each of us is Dorothy, able to find our own way home when the journey ends.

Saying goodbye to my colleagues was hard. We'll try to connect again, but it won't ever be like this -- the common context of walking the halls together day after day will be gone. We'll relate in terms of what we did together once upon a time, through the prism of distance and memory. The tapestry of our togetherness is ending today, and it can't be replicated. Often when I leave a retreat at Elat Chayyim I feel like it will take me a while to really re-enter my ordinary life, and like I'm not quite the person I was before. I felt that today, but more so. At Albany Medical Center I've taken risks, had conversations, said prayers, walked paths I couldn't have imagined before. And CPE is over.

As I began to walk toward my car the enormity of that loss, of this change, struck me, and I started to cry again. On my way down the long hall a woman I didn't know saw me crying, and stopped me to ask, "are you okay?"

I thanked her, and said that I was all right. "Are you sure?" she asked. I nodded, and found it in me to really smile, and drove the hour home.

If you want to relive my journey, you can read all of my CPE/pastoral care entries here.


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Holy time

Being on-call at the hospital is like Shabbat, in certain ways.

An on-call shift begins in late afternoon and continues through to the following day. Vayehi erev, vayehi boker: and there was evening, and there was morning. This isn't the way we mark time on our secular calendar, but it is the Jewish way of marking time.

An on-call shift, like Shabbat, is a break from ordinary life. (This is true for me in a way that it can't be for fulltime hospital chaplains.) On other days I have my daily routine, but being on-call changes the tenor of time. During on-call shifts my regular obligations and to-do lists recede: the only important task is spending time with people. On-call time moves at a different pace.

I spend most of my on-call shifts praying, either overtly (offering prayer aloud for, and with, patients and families) or internally (repeating the words of Moses' healing prayer, "el na, refa na la," as I walk the halls.) On ordinary days I don't pray without ceasing.

I spend most of my on-call shifts trying to connect with people in a deep way. Hospital chaplaincy is about engaging with the embodied theology of (in Anton Boisen's words) "the living human document," manifesting the listening ear of God for people who need to be heard. It is the I-Thou impulse spun into practice. Being on-call offers continual opportunities to study the lived Torah of human existence. This kind of study sanctifies.

Being on-call, like Shabbat, requires me to make a havdil, a separation, before I can return to the ordinary consciousness of my week.

Of course, being on-call is not Shabbosdik in several important ways. My on-call shifts don't come every seventh day. When on-call I do not rest; being on-call is work. I'm on-duty, I'm expending effort, I'm "on." (Then again, congregational rabbis might say the same about Shabbat.) When on-call I do not gather with other Jews to pray. I do not celebrate sanctified time with a communal meal. I rarely sing, I do not dance, I am not lifted by joy.

Well, the joy comes sometimes. When a security guard blesses me in the middle of the night, or a family member hugs me at the end of a visit, or I see something that moves me in a patient's eyes. And I sing to myself sometimes, snatches of prayers and chants. One night I sat late in the chapel playing liturgical melodies on the piano, unable to verbalize my prayer.

I have never been on-call on Shabbat. Perhaps if I were, the resemblance between chaplaincy and Shabbat would dwindle, and I would resent the patients and staff for taking me away from my regular retreat time. But because I do this on weeknights, some weeks it's like getting Shabbat twice. Two installations of extra-holy time.

Maybe on-call shifts feel to me like Shabbat because I've grown to love them, and because I'm always a little bit sorry to see them go.

(500 words)

 


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Announcing chaplainbook!

Since I began hospital chaplaincy work in September, all of the good poems I've written have been hospital poems. This makes sense, when I stop to think about it; chaplaincy work has been profoundly moving, frightening, enriching, and sustaining, and my best poems have always come out of what shapes and changes me.

A while back I got the notion of collecting my chaplaincy poems into a small chapbook. These poems exist in dialogue with one another, and taken together I think they make something more than the sum of their parts. One thing led to another, and I got to discussing the project with several friends and fellow bloggers (many of whom shared the dream of starting some kind of small press), and, well...

It is my deep, deep pleasure to announce the publication of chaplainbook, a small chapbook of chaplaincy poems, the first offering from laupe house collective press.

***

chaplainbook, poems by Rachel Barenblat.

"Hospital chaplaincy work highlights the central commonalities of sickness, fear, grief, and loss...but also opens the possibility of a sanctified encounter with the sacred. These poems dance and wrestle with the difficult realities of embodied existence, seeking blessing."

***

One of the poems was previously published on this blog; the rest are new to the world, though a couple will appear in a future issue of The Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling.

We published the book through Lulu; I ordered a prototype to make sure I was happy with their work, and I am! so now it's available to you, too, should you wish to buy it. You can find it here; soon it will be available via Amazon as well.

This is my third chapbook of poems, and it came together faster than either of the others, maybe because these are poems of a particular nine-month-long experience rather than the top handful of poems from several years' worth of work. These poems arose out of the crucible of Albany Medical Center. I feel profoundly blessed to have spent these months working there, and profoundly changed by the experience of learning to find blessing in such a difficult place. I hope these poems will speak to people engaged in pastoral care work of various kinds -- clergy, chaplains, therapists and nurses and social workers and doctors -- but also to lovers of words, and to anyone who engages with the messy blessings of this embodied existence.

Uncork some virtual champagne with me, if you will. Help me celebrate the birth of these words into the world!


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This week's portion: encountering "impurity"

Parashat Tazria- Metzora is a doozy. This week we're reading about taharah and tumah, terms that can be loosely translated as "ritual purity" and "ritual impurity." Tumah is conferred by childbirth, by eruptive skin conditions and menstruation -- though garments and houses can be afflicted, too, not just human beings.

I used to find it almost impossible to connect with this part of Torah. But over the last year I've joined my shul's chevra kadisha (volunteer burial society), and done (most of) an extended unit of CPE, and those experiences have offered me a path in to Torah portions like Tazria-Metzora. That's what I wrote about for Radical Torah this week:

When I have spent a night ministering to a family in crisis -- children of a parent unexpectedly dead of an aneurysm; parents of a child incapacitated by a skiing accident; spouse of someone who is dying, or who is already gone -- I have come away feeling the same kind of wired exhaustion that arose after my first time serving on the chevra kadisha. Dealing with sickness and death leave me a little dizzied, a little fried, as though I'd stuck my metaphysical finger into a socket and gotten charged-up with an energy I can't quite describe. It's not a bad feeling, exactly, but it's not a comfortable one. It's the spiritual equivalent of looking directly into the sun. I come away with my vision temporarily blurred.

This, I think, is one way of understanding what tumah is all about.

Read the whole thing here: Meeting "impurity," and being changed.


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My theology, in one paragraph.

My extended unit of CPE is almost over. Nine months seemed so long back in August when I was getting ready, and suddenly I'm working on my final evaluation paper. It's going to be fairly mammoth, I think; there's an entire page of questions! One of those questions asks for my "statement of theology" in a single paragraph.

Poetry has taught me valuable lessons about concision, but it's hard to explain my understanding of God in brief. I've been working on a response, and I keep fighting the temptation to add more to it -- I'm afraid I might be forgetting something important.

For kicks, and because it might spark interesting conversation, and because I think it might be helpful for me to see the paragraph in a context other than my paper draft, I'm posting my draft of that theology paragraph here:

***

My theology holds that our world is imbued with God's presence, and hence with opportunities to encounter holiness. I believe that each of us is a reflection of God, created in the endless diversity of God's image. I believe that God transcends our understanding and our words -- and that even so, each of us in our finitude partakes of God's infinity, because there is a spark of God in each of us. I believe that doors to God's presence open both in our moments of greatest joy, and our moments of greatest grief. According to my theology, God manifests in the world in a variety of ways on a variety of levels (the four worlds paradigm and the schema of sefirot or divine attributes expressed by the Jewish mystics are two ways of understanding God’s unfolding). I believe that God is available to all of us. As we evolve, as we learn and grow, as we become more compassionate and loving, we grow closer to and we increasingly resemble God. I believe that God is present wherever two of us truly meet one another. I understand God as fundamentally unitary: the Oneness underlying all things, which can inform and transform our existence if we open our eyes.

***

(Draft, April 24, 2006 / erev 27 Nissan, 5766.) I welcome responses, of course. And if you want to tackle this question too, please drop me a link to what you write. I'd be tickled if "my theology, in one paragraph" became a meme.


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Penultimate

I arrived at CPE yesterday to the news that we were short a chaplain: my colleague A., slated to be on-call last night, had been called away. The question came right away: "Can you take his shift?"

I remember taking days to psych myself up for my first on-call at Albany Medical Center. I was petrified, afraid I might be thrown a curve ball I couldn't begin to field. My first time I armed myself with references and resources, in case someone asked a theological question or wanted a specific kind of prayer I might not know offhand. That first night, baruch Hashem, the pager never went off; in lieu of navigating crises, I spent the evening having gentle conversations. I remember especially the long visit with a man of eighty-nine -- in for dizziness and shortness of breath -- who blessed me at the end of our talk. It was just what I needed in those anxious early days.

I relinquished the knapsack of books by my second night. My feet and back ache badly enough by the end of a night without the extra weight! But I got into the habit of bringing an overnight bag containing a change of clothes, and my weekday prayerbook, tefillin, and tallit (I like to davven the morning service in the chapel, if I'm able.) And I typically wear my green fannypack when I'm on-call, packed with the things I've found I need while walking the floors: a small English-language edition of tehillim (psalms), a copy of the Mi Shebeirach prayer, a moleskine notebook and pen, cough drops, a diskette for writing verbatim reports, a list of emergency phone numbers, instructions for navigating the hospital communications system, Sudafed, Kleenex, lip balm.

Yesterday morning, after a split second of reflection, I offered to take A.'s shift. Since it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, my little green bag was resting neatly at home, an hour from the hospital -- too far to drive for the crutch of the habitual. I would have to be present to whatever needs arose with only the words in my heart.

As it turns out, I'm profoundly glad I was at the hospital last night. I walked the long night journey with the family of a child who had been in a terrible accident. I was with them as they got the news, as he was rushed from emergency room to operating room, as we waited to see if the bleeding could be stopped. We moved up to the pediatric intensive care unit, and waited some more. After a brief bedside visit, I showed them the chapel, where we all joined hands and prayed. Then we moved down to wait near the radiology lab (at the end of two long basement hallways I had never before walked.) Then, back up to PICU again, for more waiting.

As of this morning when I left, the boy's condition was precarious, but he continued to hold on. And I? I am so exhausted I'm almost dizzy, but I also feel blessed and honored by having had the chance to spend the night with this family, to sit vigil with them and to support them in their first nine hours of the crisis that will consume them now for God knows how long.

It's almost unthinkable to me that I have only one on-call shift left. In these short nine months chaplaincy work has come to feel definitional; the prospect of being a former hospital chaplain leaves me strangely bereft. In a way, taking A.'s shift without preparing myself felt a little bit like graduation. I've come a long way from my first cautious and tentative steps into the swirling waters of the hospital hallways. These days, like Nachshon ben Aminadav, I dive right in. I trust the waters to part and let me through, I know there's an important reason I need to reach the other side, and I try always to be mindful of the wonder of walking along the ocean floor, step after astonishing step.


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In sickness and in health

My last on-call shift at the hospital was ten days ago, and on the eve of that shift I was diagnosed with a minor infection. No big deal; I got myself some antibiotics and assumed that was the end of it. I wasn't contagious, so I figured I could still live up to my responsibilities as hospital chaplain for the night. As I drove the hour to Albany, I was aware of some discomfort. I told myself it would be good for me, would help me respond with full compassion to the patients I was there to serve. Being sick, I thought, could make me a particularly good chaplain.

I couldn't have been more wrong. By the time I got to the hospital, I was fighting off panic: ministering to others seemed impossible in the face of my own situation. I had a good cry in the bathroom when I got there, and resolved to pull myself together. I made my early rounds, and followed up on one request for a chaplain's visit. But by early evening the hospital's long halls stretched into infinity as I shuffled slowly from one wing to another. I spent most of that evening in the pastoral care office, drinking water and trying not to fall apart.

I prayed fervently for a quiet night. "Please, God, don't give me anything I can't handle," I said, over and over, as I made my way to U511, the little room where the on-call chaplain sleeps (if sleep is in the cards). My prayers were answered; the pager didn't beep, and there were no mid-night codes to roust me from bed. Still I couldn't really rest. I dozed, fretful, waking every hour to see if it were morning yet. When my supervisor arrived just before 7am for our meeting, he took one look at me and sent me home.

Continue reading "In sickness and in health" »


The longest night.

During my most recent hospital overnight, I did not sleep. During the early part of my shift I did my usual things: made rounds of the six ICUs and the E.D., visited a couple of patients who had requested to see the chaplain, spent my dinner break reading a back issue of the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling, made my second set of rounds. Just as I was getting ready to head up to U511, the little cubicle room where the on-call chaplain sleeps, my pager vibrated at my hip.

For the sake of confidentiality, I can't share the details of the call. Imagine that someone fell ill suddenly, and was unresponsive by the time the ambulance arrived. Imagine one family member after another hearing the news and descending into grief. Imagine a burly priest driving in at two in the morning to offer the Sacrament of the Sick. Imagine the difficult decisions of organ donation and life support. Imagine the long crescendo and decrescendo of goodbyes. Imagine that the night went straight through 'til morning.

At some point in the timeless interim between night and morning I had a conversation in the long disjointed hallway. The young woman asked how long I had been doing this work, and how I was able to do it without crying. The first question has an easy answer: five months. The second one is harder to quantify. In my usual life I cry at the drop of the proverbial hat. I cry at movies. Often I cry just listening to music that moves me. But when I'm doing chaplaincy work, I don't weep. I tap into something I can't quite name, and it strengthens and roots me. I still empathize; I still imagine how I would feel if I were the family member by the bedside. But I don't break. I don't know what it is, but I'm thankful for it.

It was strange and startling to feel the light in the hospital begin to shift as dawn broke. It was stranger still when the empty overnight halls filled back up with the bustle of daytime: doctors and nurses, orderlies and med students, administrators and visitors. At eight I ceded the on-call pager to the chief chaplaincy resident, and went to class. When I went back upstairs on my lunch break to check on the family, the day-shift nurses didn't know me.

At the end of the day I drove home. That night I got a long night's sleep, so physically I've recovered from the all-nighter. Emotionally, though, I feel it has changed me in subtle ways that continue to reverberate. A little bit like my first (and to date only) experience with the chevra kadisha. That kind of vigil is awe-inspiring.

I think I understand now why so many people say CPE is the most valuable part of their seminary experience. The things I'm learning sound stilted and trite, put into words: how to offer company in times of fear or sorrow. How to witness something difficult. That illness and death provide doorways into holiness and grace. That we have obligations to those who leave, and even greater obligations to those they leave behind. That sometimes there is nothing we can do to ease one another's pain -- but doing that nothing can be the most important work in the world.


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On-call prayer

Help me be present tonight
without fear or expectation.
Help me release the baggage
of my week, freeing
my shoulders.

Help me fold my ego gently
and tuck it in a drawer
where it will be safe
and unobtrusive.
Ride in my pocket, God.

Don't give me more
than I can handle.
Don't take it personally
when I crave excitement,
then change my mind.

Shelter this ship
through the longest night.
Remove the sorrows
of sailors and passengers.
Help us reach the dawn.


Edited to add: this poem appears in my latest chapbook of poems, chaplainbook, which can be found online here.

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Healing words

When I think about the intersection of poetry and medicine, one of the first names I think of is Richard Berlin. Author first of the chapbook Code Blue, then of the collection How JFK Killed My Father (Pearl Editions 2003; reviewed here), Berlin writes poignant, startling poems about medicine that illuminate something important about our common humanity. (He also happens to live in Berkshire County, as I do; we met some years ago when we both participated in a reading from Holding True, a letterpress anthology published by Mad River Press.)

Richard has smart things to say about why doctors need poetry. The Psychiatric Times graciously offers an archive of his poems which I recommend browsing at length. (They also offer a terrific annotation of his work, written by nurse and poet Cortney Davis, whose work is worth exploring in its own right.) As I prepare for my first on-call night at Albany Medical Center tonight, I'm finding his poems especially resonant.

Richard's poem Sleight of Hand always blows me away -- the tenderness of the encounter, the reverence with which the narrator treats the old woman's body, the turn of the diagnosis, the ending like a kick to the gut. I love, too, the spareness of Playing God at the Hospital, which isn't at all about what you might imagine. Hospital Food offers insight into our health and our hungers. Lately I've been struck by First Night On-Call, Coronary Care Unit, maybe because the CCU is one of the seven intensive care units I'll be expected to visit on my rounds.

The prospect of hospital chaplaincy work gives me a world of new respect for everyone in medicine: doctors, nurses, orderlies, technicians, the many people who confront the pitfalls of embodiment daily. Maybe the best poem of Richard's for me to read today -- since I seem to be looking for a poem to reread repeatedly, like thumbing a string of mala beads -- is What I Love, song of praise to his profession and his work. I take comfort in the lines

I love my patients, not as a group, but one by one,
each person teaching me the trials
of suffering and survival, every saga different,
even with the same disease...
...And they come with their own yearning
questions I answer by listening without judgment,
the constant miracle that listening can be enough.

Miracle, indeed. May my listening be enough for those who seek me out, tonight and every night.


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Hineni

Twelve people sit in a circle in a wood-paneled room balancing notebooks and styrofoam cups of hospital coffee. We range in age from thirty to sixty-five or so. We are ten men and two women. We are Lutheran, Methodist, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Seventh Day Adventist, Jewish, and a few other things besides. At least half of us are ordained clergy, or are somewhere on what one student called the "long and winding road to ordination." At least three of us are lay leaders in our congregations. At least two of us regularly offer pastoral care to prison inmates. At least two of us are juggling two jobs. At least two of us have driven more than an hour to be here. Three of us have been here before; the other nine are new. And at least one of us feels jazzed, eager, and overwhelmed, and will have vaguely anxious dreams about the hospital tonight...

Continue reading "Hineni" »


Preparing for chaplaincy

Albany Medical Center, it turns out, is enormous. They employ more than seven thousand people -- that's more than twice the number of people who live in Lanesboro. It's a teaching hospital, and it was constructed over a long period of time, one building glomming on to another, so there are a dozen different elevators and stairwells, a veritable abecedarium of buildings. It's kind of overwhelming.

Earlier today at Employee Services (U building, sixth floor) I filled out a sheaf of medical forms, and then gritted my teeth in a corner cubicle while the very pleasant RN tried to convince one of my arms to offer up a vein. (She succeeded. Eventually. I felt very stylish walking around the hospital with all of my gauze bandages.) Then came a TB test -- the first of two; I'll have to return next Wednesday for another. (This Friday, and Friday next, I have the option of returning to have the tests read, or convincing my primary care physician to read them. Given the cost of gasoline, and the fact that Albany is a solid hour away by car, something tells me I'll be heading to Williamstown Medical, instead.)

I'd never had a drug test before, and was intrigued by the proces of initialing a dozen different stickers, each meant to show that the vials containing my samples hadn't been tampered with and that they were really and truly mine. Then came a physical, and then a "fit test" (breathing into a mask attached to a chunky blue machine.) And then we started dealing with the paperwork. Volunteering at a hospital takes real advance preparation. I guess it's not something to enter into lightly.

Continue reading "Preparing for chaplaincy" »


Pastoral education

For some years now, I've been assuming that someday I would enroll in a Clinical Pastoral Education course. That timeline has been shortened from "someday" to "soon" because I've been asked to stretch myself and pinch-hit in a major way when my rabbi goes on sabbatical next year. Leading services, teaching Torah, and doing lifecycle events are within my current comfort zone; counseling people in an official capacity isn't. Yet.

So this afternoon I drove down to the Berkshire Religious Resource Center and met with the minister who runs the local CPE program. I liked him immediately: he has a clear voice, a strong grip, and that air of presence that one sometimes encounters in longtime clergy. He told me about the history of CPE and how it arose out of the Reverend Anton T. Boisen's convictions that we can interact with each other as "living human documents" and that religion can be brought to bear on medicine.

He also told me about the program, which takes 400 hours (of which 100 are structured group and individual education, and the other 300 are spent serving in a pastoral care setting, hospital or hospice.) There are two program options (a summer intensive, five days a week; or a September-May program that meets one day a week). Along the way he talked about personal and theological reflection, ways of listening, what we can learn from M*A*S*H, and why this work is so important and so fun.

Jeff said last week that his unit of CPE was one of the most useful parts of his seminary experience, as valuable and meaningful as it was difficult. Karen posted extensively last summer about her CPE rotations, and in the end gave me the impression that it was incredibly difficult and valuable for her, too.

On the one hand, this sounds pretty scary. What will it feel like the first time I sit down with someone who is terminally ill, or someone in chronic suffering, and seek to listen to them or pray with them? Who am I to offer these things? Then again, I know that even (or especially) the sickest and frailest among us are reflections of God; and who would I be if I let this calling pass me by? That Marianne Williamson passage is right-on, I think, even if Nelson Mandela didn't use it in his inaugural address. (Anybody out there know the source of that misapprehension?)

As much as the summer intensive appeals to me (I know it's what a lot of seminarians do; I can see the value in deep immersion, and I can imagine that a tight group bond forms between participants over the course of the three months) I don't know that I can commit to it. My summer calendar already involves a family vacation and a possible retreat, plus there's this small matter of my arts nonprofit to consider. So I think I'm likelier to apply for the fall, and do the one-day-a-week program through next fall and winter and spring.

The application looks like fun, too. The essay questions are nice simple ones, like "a reasonably full account of your life, including important events, relationships with people who have been significant to you, and the impact these events and relationships have had on your development." And "a description of the development of your religious life, including events and relationships that affected your faith and currently inform your belief systems." Maybe it's a good thing I'm leaning towards fall; this could take a while...