Problems of Thought & Belief
The first few days of my CPE chaplaincy have been remarkably good. I am working in a level one trauma hospital, with a cancer hospital and a large pediatric ward. My peer group is entirely made up of fellow Lutherans from my seminary. My supervisors seem very professionally knowledgeable, but laid back all the same. The mentor I have been shadowing is a wonderful young Presbyterian minister named Phuk, who, like me, has almost been married a year. His deeply faithful ministry and presence are inspiring for me already.
For those of you unfamiliar with seminary jargon, CPE is Clinical Pastoral Education, which consists of ministerial work in a hospital, prison or shelter and supervised reflection on that ministry. So far, so good.
As far as I understand it, the impetus to begin this program was all very good.
Concerned (mostly Episcopalian) thinkers wanted to bring a modicum of experiential learning to what was largely an exclusively cognitive and intellectual seminary curriculum. I suppose that in this, they were right on. Seminarians need the opportunity to begin to reflect on actual ministry experience. They need to learn to think (and pray and comfort and give counsel) on their feet. They need to receive guidance from experienced supervisors, and feedback from their peers. They need to bring their theological resources to bear on people who are really and deeply in need and to test their own ability to do so effectively and sensitively.
However, it seems that much of this program is built on decidedly non-theological ground. For example, suffering was defined for us in a lecture yesterday as "a refusal or inability to accept change." Well, perhaps in some sense this is true. But I think that this definition is very problematic when viewed from within the Christian tradition.
What does this definition have to say about evil? Change itself is in some sense benign-- every thing within the world is subject to change. But what makes particular changes cause suffering? Christians answer that it is evil-- something lacking substance, that ought to be but is not, something incomplete or deficient. Evil is a lack, a gap & a decay in the fabric of the universe.
Evil comes in two varieties-- natural evil, which is when the good of one particular creature / thing comes at the expense of another. For example, a lion and a water buffalo. Or a common cold and human comfort. The loss of a water buffalo's life or the absence of human comfort during a cold is not the result of a moral deficieny, but rather the cost of one particular creature's thriving to another.
Moral evil is, however, the result of moral deficiency. When creatures make a choice to behave in a way that should not be, or when they ought to behave in a way that they do not, they cause others great pain. This kind of suffering should be protested. Can we not hope in a God who rectifies what is wrong?
The definition of evil is central to the Christian doctrine of creation-- God created everything, and it is called good. What is not good cannot have come from God. Therefore, God himself must have a stake in repairing and redeeming what is damaged and deficient. Christians trust that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are at work in the cosmos, redeeming it. While we see only part of what is happening through God's work, we place our hope in the eschaton and the fulfillment we will see & experience through the blessed Trinity.
Our ministry must grow out of that trust, and spring forth from that hope. Otherwise, we're trusting a different gospel. We're putting our hope in different fulfillment.
The definition we received yesterday is clever in the way that it elides the theological by locating suffering exclusively within the subject. However, I want to grant a person's subjectivity a proper space within the definition of suffering, because it obviously has something to do with the whole picture. (Think of hypocondriacs who suffer enormous anxiety over health conditions that are not at all really threatening.)
Presupposed in the definition of suffering that says it is refusal to accept change, and made explicit in our lecture, is a deficient corrective to suffering: coping with it. The subject who suffers should simply learn to accept those changes which underlie that suffering. Our job as ministers is simply to help people feel good and learn to accept change. I count this proposition as skubala (greek for "shit," used by Paul in Phil. 3:8, usually translated as "rubbish" despite the lexicon's insistence that it is slang for "dung" and was meant to be offensive).
Rather, we are called to proclaim hope in the God who has come to bind up the broken hearted and to set the captive free. This does not mean that we don't help people to cope at all, but underlying that work is an abiding trust that God is active and working for change. On our lips is a song of all that God has done, is doing, and has yet to do.
The first few days of my CPE chaplaincy have been remarkably good. I am working in a level one trauma hospital, with a cancer hospital and a large pediatric ward. My peer group is entirely made up of fellow Lutherans from my seminary. My supervisors seem very professionally knowledgeable, but laid back all the same. The mentor I have been shadowing is a wonderful young Presbyterian minister named Phuk, who, like me, has almost been married a year. His deeply faithful ministry and presence are inspiring for me already.
For those of you unfamiliar with seminary jargon, CPE is Clinical Pastoral Education, which consists of ministerial work in a hospital, prison or shelter and supervised reflection on that ministry. So far, so good.
As far as I understand it, the impetus to begin this program was all very good.
Concerned (mostly Episcopalian) thinkers wanted to bring a modicum of experiential learning to what was largely an exclusively cognitive and intellectual seminary curriculum. I suppose that in this, they were right on. Seminarians need the opportunity to begin to reflect on actual ministry experience. They need to learn to think (and pray and comfort and give counsel) on their feet. They need to receive guidance from experienced supervisors, and feedback from their peers. They need to bring their theological resources to bear on people who are really and deeply in need and to test their own ability to do so effectively and sensitively.
However, it seems that much of this program is built on decidedly non-theological ground. For example, suffering was defined for us in a lecture yesterday as "a refusal or inability to accept change." Well, perhaps in some sense this is true. But I think that this definition is very problematic when viewed from within the Christian tradition.
What does this definition have to say about evil? Change itself is in some sense benign-- every thing within the world is subject to change. But what makes particular changes cause suffering? Christians answer that it is evil-- something lacking substance, that ought to be but is not, something incomplete or deficient. Evil is a lack, a gap & a decay in the fabric of the universe.
Evil comes in two varieties-- natural evil, which is when the good of one particular creature / thing comes at the expense of another. For example, a lion and a water buffalo. Or a common cold and human comfort. The loss of a water buffalo's life or the absence of human comfort during a cold is not the result of a moral deficieny, but rather the cost of one particular creature's thriving to another.
Moral evil is, however, the result of moral deficiency. When creatures make a choice to behave in a way that should not be, or when they ought to behave in a way that they do not, they cause others great pain. This kind of suffering should be protested. Can we not hope in a God who rectifies what is wrong?
The definition of evil is central to the Christian doctrine of creation-- God created everything, and it is called good. What is not good cannot have come from God. Therefore, God himself must have a stake in repairing and redeeming what is damaged and deficient. Christians trust that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are at work in the cosmos, redeeming it. While we see only part of what is happening through God's work, we place our hope in the eschaton and the fulfillment we will see & experience through the blessed Trinity.
Our ministry must grow out of that trust, and spring forth from that hope. Otherwise, we're trusting a different gospel. We're putting our hope in different fulfillment.
The definition we received yesterday is clever in the way that it elides the theological by locating suffering exclusively within the subject. However, I want to grant a person's subjectivity a proper space within the definition of suffering, because it obviously has something to do with the whole picture. (Think of hypocondriacs who suffer enormous anxiety over health conditions that are not at all really threatening.)
Presupposed in the definition of suffering that says it is refusal to accept change, and made explicit in our lecture, is a deficient corrective to suffering: coping with it. The subject who suffers should simply learn to accept those changes which underlie that suffering. Our job as ministers is simply to help people feel good and learn to accept change. I count this proposition as skubala (greek for "shit," used by Paul in Phil. 3:8, usually translated as "rubbish" despite the lexicon's insistence that it is slang for "dung" and was meant to be offensive).
Rather, we are called to proclaim hope in the God who has come to bind up the broken hearted and to set the captive free. This does not mean that we don't help people to cope at all, but underlying that work is an abiding trust that God is active and working for change. On our lips is a song of all that God has done, is doing, and has yet to do.
posted by Vicar Lisa at 6/01/2006 05:19:00 PM
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