You cannot become a Master of
Divinity without undergoing the semi-dreaded Clinical Pastoral Education, and
so that is how I spent the summer of 1983: as a chaplain intern at UMass
Medical Center in Worcester. There were four of us interns. The other woman and
the two men were Roman Catholics: Bob and Tom preparing for the priesthood and
Elaine already a nun. Tom, our well-groomed Supervisor, was the Protestant
hospital chaplain.
We interns bonded as intense
experiences tend to cause: ten weeks of counseling training and education, also
supervision and also applying theology to the misery we were there to serve. We
had workshops on death and bereavement; suicide assessment and prevention;
theology of counseling; alcoholism diagnosis and treatment, and mental illness.
The schizophrenia classes took place at Worcester State asylum, that huge pile
of bricks across the road,
UMass Medical Center itself was
of newer brick than the asylum was; not so much a pile but a complex; the
typical modern arrangements of suites and atria and bridges to the other
building. That first morning, in a friendly-sized conference room with couches,
Tom’s introduction was also complex, vastly organized, and with plenty of
schedules, forms, syllabi, and explanations. The program was balanced with
observation, practicum, workshops, papers to be written, and supervisory
groups.
UMMC was a tertiary care
facility, Tom said, the kind of place where you went from bad to worse, the
place where they medi-vaced you in from the secondary or primary care place
when you had the most mysterious diagnosis and ultra-serious pathologies. It
was the teaching hospital of UMass Medical School and also of us chaplains,
probably the most expendable members of any medical team.
But that was part of what was
so great about it—the team approach where doctors, nurses, specialists, medical
interns, and chaplains gathered on a patient’s behalf to give one another
updates and ideas. It was at UMMC I first learned about medical teams; about
confidentiality requirements; about patient’s families; about the charts.
In the beginning I expressed
misgivings about the charts and also with these written exercises called
verbatims. You have a session with a patient where they confide in you and then
you’re supposed to write it in the chart for all the other medical people to
read it and also write up whole conversations “verbatim” so they could be
analyzed in your group supervision.
“When they sign in here they
are agreeing to all this charting and information-sharing,” Tom says. OK, I now realize, the supervisor cannot
sit in on every session, so they rely on the verbatim. Without charts, medical
personnel couldn’t know the patient’s history, vital signs, how they slept through
the night. I was just very new to clinical treatment and that is why you cannot
become a Master of Divinity without this chaplain internship.
One of the first tours we got
was the cadaver lab, where the med students learned anatomy by carving up those
who left their bodies to science. Coming across one of those glassed-in bridges
to the other buildings we abruptly encountered a freestanding preserved human
foot and ankle—in need of a pedicure I might add. I apologize to science. I
don’t mind donating organs, but no one is going to study my dead remains, not
even archaeologists! I’m going to
enjoy my life, then choose clean(ish) cremation (Ps 90:12).
Which brings us to the series
of classes on death education. A black-haired Doris or Darleen talked about
Kubler-Ross and read a poem by Robert Lowell: “no blood upon the ground, no teeth
about the place.” She showed us videos of terminally ill patients talking to
their counselors. (I decided not to let my final days be filmed.)
Then Doris-Darleen asked,
“Would you want to know?”
“I already…know,” I answered.
“You know you’re going to DIE,”
she said. “Oh.”
“Hang on to that arrogance,
Pat,” supervisor Tom said wryly.
Due to my own hang-ups
entirely—hopefully I’m mellower 30 years later—I disliked supervisor Tom. In
addition to good grooming, he had the most perfected latest theories of psychology;
faith seemed to count for less. I considered him shallow, and narrow, a sad
example of a semi-bright intelligence that had reached its full potential. This
happens when you supervise people; their hang-ups get taken out on you.
So who doesn’t have annoying
ways. Part of our study was the phenomenon of “countertransference.” Tom did a
good job with us.
The main learning from those
sunny weeks spent indoors came from the patients, the ones who gave their trust
to us interns with death stalking down every corridor.
The patients have been in my
heart all these years. Mrs. Berkowski was losing her leg to diabetes and
sobbing, “My retirement! My retirement!” It seemed as if people of retirement
age had a special vulnerability. As did teenagers. A young man in ICU—what was
“Danny” doing here? He looked fine—until I noticed with a somersaulting heart
that his left arm was missing. He had grabbed an uncle’s new motorcycle and
wiped out. The tertiary hospital had lots of tragedies.
Danny became the textbook
example for me of the grieving process Doris-Darlene had outlined for us. One
day I would see him and he would tell me, “I had an accident and my fingers
were cut off.” Soon it was, “I lost my hand in an accident,” until finally he
worked his way up to the reality. Our role, in addition to serving as the
person it was “safe to get angry at, safe to kick out of the room” was to
“find” them and be in it with them. Not in the sense of easing pain but of
bringing God’s presence into the pain, to represent the immanence of the
divine. As Tom said, “Don’t forget that you are a minister of the Gospel.”
Let us not be shy about
bringing God into the picture. Tom’s most important lesson, though: we work
with the patient’s faith. One woman cried as she clutched my hand: “I feel it,
I feel it, the grace pouring through you!” Too many to name: patients dying of things you never dreamed
could happen, such as Eric, whose body was just rotting from the fingertips
inward as he lay on a gurney, unable to speak but naked to anyone who passed
by. Amy, old before her time, had a tube that needed to be suctioned all the
time and took communion through her husband’s receiving it.
Yes, we brought communion to
those who wanted it, The Roman Catholic chaplain would bless the elements, and
we interns would take them out to any patient who requested it. I had explained to one patient that the
Episcopal Church was a “sister communion” to her Roman Catholic faith (they had
a lot of Catholics in that area). When I walked in carrying the little kit, she
exclaimed, “Here comes Sister Communion!”
We also gained experience in
designing and leading worship services, including preaching homilies Friday
noon. This is where I was first given the Psalms, which have been a long time
love. A homily on Psalm 116 seemed to appear in my brain regarding “precious to
the Lord is the death of his saints.”
Later on, the Psalms, along with the clinical counseling, would develop
into a whole ministry that was just starting by the time of CPE.
CPE meant a glorious summer
spent indoors (my husband had to go on our annual camping trip without me). It
brought intense emotion, anxiety, even anger, as the five of us, interns and
Tom reviewed verbatims, confronted each other with perceptions in role playing exercises.
I learned that my “fight or flight” reflex gets me to react, rather than
respond. I told one of the priest-interns, “You always have that smile, even
when you’ve just seen a dead body come into the ER. It’s creepy.” The nun Elaine
had to work—really work—on crafting a decent homily.
And that is how you get to be a
Master of Divinity. This was my day all day every day that summer. I would
drive home from handing a half-piece of juicy fruit gum to a 12-year-old
anorexic boy; from giving a backrub to a cerebral palsy victim who couldn’t
speak; from watching a cathether being JAMMED into the urethra of a naked heart
bypass patient; from praying the 23rd Psalm with a large family
gathering around a deathbed; from discussing his many reincarnations with a
former Lithuanian prince (“I would stomp around the castle saying, ‘Heads will
roll! But nothing ever happened.”) who in this lifetime struggled with multiple
sclerosis; from offering clumsy comfort to parents of a brain-dead teenage girl
who had ridden her bike into a bus (It was the braces on her teeth that got to
me). Tom said, Don’t bring them home with you, but I would. I’d sit there in my
living room empty of my own large family for the summer. I’d have two drinks
and (over)cook my fish. Then I would dream about them that night. And of course
as I said remember them vividly still.
One day towards the end of the
program, Tom handed me a note to call the daughter of a patient of mine who had
unexpectedly died in surgery. I started asking Tom, What do I do, what do I
say… then, “Oh never mind, Tom. I know what to say.” Thanks to this internship
and his supervision, I did.
I framed the CPE certificate to
display with other awards and diplomas. A few years later I would hit the floor
of a hospital to work as a chaplain and counselor to detoxing drug addicts. I
had CPE training, and that turned out to be enough.
Written June 25, 2013.
PCA
