OK Patti, WHAT Are You Doing This Year???

For the next twelve months (until August 31, 2009) I will be doing what is called a "residency in Clinical Pastoral Education." What the heck is that, you ask? When I'm pressed for time, I simply tell people that I'm a hospital chaplain. It's simple and it's fairly true. However, I'm not pressed for time now. I'm on call tonight and am killing time on the computers in the doctors' lounge (to which we have access, strangely enough).

Those of you who have known me a while may remember the work I did at Hospice the summer of 2005. That was my first unit of Clinical Pastoral Education. Simply put, it's clinical (hospital, hospice, nursing home, etc) work combined with supervision, seminars, and reflection. You do pastoral care in a clinical setting, you reflect on and receive feedback regarding your work, and then you put into practice what you have learned. Most denominations either require or recommend a unit or half unit for ordination, and most people do that first unit and move on to bigger and better things.

So that's CPE in a nutshell. I love it, but there are times when it's really emotionally draining. As part of our reflection process (which is mostly done through "verbatims", or accounts of patient/family visits), we have to pinpoint any "hot buttons" that the visit may have touched. For example, if someone had a difficult time providing care for a dying alcoholic because his/her father was an alcoholic and the visit brought back painful memories. That sort of thing. With the right supervisor and the right peer group, CPE can turn out to be a very powerful and healing force in someone's life and ministry.

So...that's what I'll be doing until next August. I'll actually be completing FOUR units of CPE. It's a full-time program, so I work from 8:30-5:00 Monday through Friday, plus four on-call nights a month. I actually get to go home early the day after my on-call shift, so that's kind of nice. When I'm on-call, I stay at the hospital and take pages from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. I still have to be at work at 8:30, HOWEVER, I usually leave after our seminars are completed, around 10:00 or 11:00 a.m.

It's a paid position (although considerably less than I was making as a pastor) with benefits. Once I'm done, I can either return to the local church or seek a position as a chaplain somewhere. I don't know what I'll do yet...it's too early to decide. I really love it so far, although there have been some tough times. Example: last week a fifty-something man was brought to the ER in cardiac arrest. He was from out of state, and had collapsed while playing in a tennis tournament. I took the page, so first I had to comfort his three friends (one of whom had been his tennis partner for 20+ years), then return four hours later to comfort his wife when she arrived. I also got to act as a liason between the ER staff and the family, like finding out when and where they could view the body and stuff like that. It was pretty rough. However, it's also very rewarding to be able to provide care for someone and be "Jesus with skin on".