Foy Richey, Editor
"Committed to preserving the inductive method of Pastoral Education"
This newsletter is a periodic publication of
RMCET. 
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Foy Richey,
Editor
MARCH 2006
RMPCTA ENTERS A NEW ERA
Rocky Mountain Pastoral Care and Training Associates
(RMPCTA) under President Foy Richey, has turned a corner and entered into a new
phase of its development and mission. Not only has the name of the organization
been changed to Rocky Mountain Center for Education and Training (RMCET),
a new Vice President has been named, The Reverend Nancy Markham Bugbee.
Reverend Bugbee's presence with the new organizational mission and
structure is "an innovative and bold step into the future for
pastoral/spiritual training and CPE" says Richey.
Reverend Bugbee is a Health One Hospital Chaplain. She is a
mother of three, and she and her husband, Peter have been married for twenty
nine years. She comes to RMCET with
an MBA degree from Simmons College Graduate
School of Management and many valuable organizational skills as well as
an MA Degree from Regis University in Denver in Spiritual Formation.
Under the new leadership of Richey and Bugbee, RMCET will reach out into the community with an expanded mission to target the laity as well as clergy. Laity such as nurses, doctors, first responders, the military, police, fire departments, prisons workers, mental health facilities personnel, and homeless caregivers, will constitute the focus of the new mission. "Bringing Pastoral/Spiritual Care training to the underserved" will continue to be the goal of RMCET.
Some 70% of our students have been laity
in the recent past" says Richey, "but this time we will fine
tune the curriculum and training agenda to look more closely at the spiritual
component of pastoral development for laity." "This focus will add the
best of the traditions of spiritual vocational formation with the
clinical/pastoral tradition for which Clinical Pastoral Education has been noted
in the past”, comments Bugbee.
Target groups of specific health care disciplines will be targeted for training. A new focus on nursing training in the area of spiritual awareness and skill development will be a part of the CPE focus. "We are not trying to make chaplains out of Nurses," says Bugbee. " Rather, we aim to develop their awareness of spiritual suffering in patients and families.”
Another area in which RMCET will expand is in the area of
rural ministry training. RMCET has
been training clergy and laity on the Colorado
Western slope in Grand Junction and the Four Corners area for some fifteen
years. Many indigenous crisis
issues such as domestic violence and the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol take
their toll on families, children and marriages.
Clergy and first responders need to be trained to look at the
spiritual/pastoral component of this issue.
How to connect people to community service resources such a churches and
clinics will be a focus of the rural CPE training.
RMCET is also making new initiatives to members of the
professional Pastoral Counseling community.
Members of this community,
as represented by the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, a national
pastoral counseling certifying body, have already been working with RMCET for
several years as faculty members. The
role of these professional pastoral counselors will be expanded.
Pastoral Counselors bring both crisis intervention training to students,
as well as guidance in critical relational intervention skills.
RMCET is accredited by the College of Pastoral Supervision
and Psychotherapy, a National and International Pastoral Care body headquartered
in New York.
A THEOLOGY OF PROXIMITY
(Part II)
Cassandra, the feminine goddess turned the tables on
the conversation with Oedipus and Faust in a debate among the gods where Oedipus
was bidding for the lust for Power as the driving force behind the situation of
human hubris. Faust was arguing that the driving force was Passion.
Cassandra interrupted their conversation by averring that neither power
nor passion were the core-driving issues of life; rather the deepest driving
force within the human spirit was the yearning for Certainty.
All the gods want certainty; all politicians want certainty, all
scientist want certainty, religionist most of all, want certainty.
It is this lust for certainty in the contemporary technocratic culture of western civilization that drives us to the brink of near disaster over and over again. Only wars, plagues, storms and freaks of nature jar us into the realization that certainty is a sought-after illusion as fleeting as the wind. Post modern theologians and philosophers argue that even the lust for Truth in the Enlightenment Era has proved to yield no certainty in Grand and meta-narratives of contemporary multifarious world views.
We live in a time in which it is incumbent upon us to find ways to live, instead, with a theological hermeneutic of Proximity and not a theology of certainty. Time is fleeting; time is finite. Brian Childs reminds us that the raison d’etre for short term pastoral counseling is that time is finite and we thus must be good stewards of our time even within the economy of the counseling relationship. So what does it mean to embrace a hermeneutic of proximity in a time when the fearful tendencies would have us rush to theologies of eschatology and certainty? What does it mean for us to try to go against our cultural soothsayers who prophesy ends times theology and the need for the gathering of the flock into small circles of certainty?
Institutions
of certainty, standards, laws, and rules to guarantee certainty are in vogue. To
live in a time where we build walls to keep out foreigners and immigrants for
fear that the certainty of our economic and cultural purity will become
contaminated, what does it mean to embrace an hermeneutic of proximity?
Proximity as it is understood in the present day hermeneutic of non-certainty means these things: It means partialness, incompleteness, limitedness, now-but-not-yet-ness, unfinished-ness. Proximate pastoral/spiritual care means time-limited healing relationships; it means that the pastoral relationship is only a part of the whole constellation of relationships where the subject goes for healing; it means that all healing is not done in psychotherapy exclusively.
Proximity in pastoral care means not fixing, it means
living with the ambiguity of not knowing how much of a difference I have made in
my healing relationship with another at any given time. It means giving partial input. “I plant, someone else
waters, and the greater journey gives the increase.” Proximity means salvation
is a process and not an event. “Road to Damascus” salvation events are
markers along the way, but not the end result of a soteriological outcome.
Proximity is living with paradox and ambiguity; it is “being with” rather
than indulging in the Nike Theology” of “just do it.” Proximity means
courtesy to the tenuous stranger.
There is an important time/space issue in the hermeneutic
of proximity. The efficaciousness of a given experience is not always validated
just because given time lines are expected for something to come to fruition.
Take education, for example, some education programs insist that a give
“formula” of times lines be observed for the educational experience to be
efficacious. The Clinical Pastoral education, for example, some educators
believe that if one does not “do” a four unit (1600 hour) hospital
residency, that the validity of the learning experience is not adequate. Not
adequate in the sense that one cannot learn in a shorter period of time or
within another context how to minister effectively to hospitalized persons. This
is a false hermeneutic about the efficatiousness of education within a
predetermined time paradigm.
Long distance internet education, staggered seminar
education events are demonstrating that adult learning can be accomplished just
as efficaciously over a long distance learning paradigm model as it can with an
in-house residency. Such diverse
educational methodologies has proven to be even more economically feasible
for the learner.
Time/space issues differ culturally in terms of how time
and space make for contributions to good proximate learning.
Native Americans are oriented more toward space, places and land; Anglos
are oriented more toward linear understandings of time.
Time is not the primary criteria for the validation of human experience
for the Native American; rather space and sacred places are a more important
criteria: the Sweat Lodge, the Hogan, the Kiva are sacred community experiences;
whereas, for Anglos, it is the linear goals and objectives as demonstrated in
“outcomes” and assembly lines
of production that are important. So
what other proximate paradigms are there? Raymond Lawrence once observed that
contemporary outcome education “might better focus on establishing the
criteria that everyone become idiosyncratically different.”
In 1848, the great European Depression was brought about in
part because the rail system in Europe was overbuilt in response to increasing
industrialization. Industrialists rushed to accommodate the needs of conserving
time in getting their products and raw goods to the market and as a result
over-utilized the resources to build railroads, thus creating a crisis in the
marketplace. The rush to conquer
time, created a crisis of another sort.
A Theology of Proximity would be a corrective to the
Theology of Impulsivity so present in our contemporary culture.
It would be a corrective to the “Just do it” Nike
“theology,” the fix-it Evangelism theology.
Fix-it theology is fixated on the success-oriented epiphany experience.
It places abiding trust in the orgasmic transformational moment or
experience. Did you ever try to
talk a believer out of their salvation
conversion experience? Even to try
to talk about it, for some, brings on another “crisis of faith”.
When all religious experience is expected to be a “spiritual high”,
what happens to how we deal with
the dark night of the soul? Can
anything good come from the darkness? Can we stay with a person in darkness without growing
impatient to move into our problem solving, crisis intervention methodology?
So much of contemporary mega-church culture theology is
like Wal-Mart marketing. Everything
for everyone under one big airplane hanger roof.
130 programs for all. Take
your pick. No sacrifice.
Low cost. The ladies and
children go the sanctuary for worship and healing and the men go into a big
movie screen room to eat fried chiocken and
watch the Dallas Cowboys while
thewomen and children finish
worship.
Sound bite
theology. The purpose driven
life/church. One formula does it
all. Jesus is your personal friend, the spiritual cozy Other. Duc tape theology
replaces fear and trembling and sickness unto death. Everything can be taped back together with prayer and
fasting. Thomas Keating
commented, when he was young he could drink his friends under the table; now
that he found God he could fast others under the table.
Who’s got the most popular and accessible contemplative practice.
The wanna-be native American Buddhist, the
out of body experience seeker. Impulsivity
seeps it way into our quick fix culture. We
have instant coffee, instant credit, instant sex and why can’t we have instant
God and instant spirituality. Ask
the people who suffered through Hurricane Katrina. Quick fix solutions do not
work in some contexts.
So Proximity theology is a paradox for quick-fix approaches
to understanding the human condition.
With our CPSP bureaucratic community, a theology of
Proximity might look like our trying to become less anxious about forming our
organization around what others might think about us if we did not copy their
model. We might trust our
indigenous creativity, which is happening in our chapters instead of trying to
monitor everyone closely to make sure that we do not have certain “cream
puff” (Gibbs) chapters who do not
take their mission seriously. We
might go slow on creating standards which make a mockery out of our stated
intentionality of being an “international” organization. To draw up
standards to satisfy DOE and JCAHO when our international members do not adhere
to these organizations in their countries is ostensibly setting up a Western
Imperialistic paradigm for understanding the culturally diverse needs of all
members.
We further might want to take seriously our motto to “travel light”, making it more amenable to attend annual national conferences by spreading around the locations at which we hold these conferences. Proximate living is tenuous and tentative. As William James once said, faith is like that. “Faith”, said James”, is living with tentativeness, doubt and ambiguity.” Foy Richey
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