How is CPE going?

Everyone keeps asking me, "How is CPE going?" For those of you who don't know what it is, it is "Clinical Pastoral Education," a program designed to give an intensive unit of hospital chaplaincy and group processing and required by many mainline denominations before ordination. It is a great idea-- make sure that the people you are going to ordain have experience with the hidden and painful sides of human existence (and with their own hidden demons around that) before sending them off.


I am doing an intensive summer unit in Olympia, WA. On one hand, I had difficulty adjusting to working in a hospital environment. Not only is it a vast institution with little natural light and lots of activity, it is terribly impersonal. There is a vast system, in which everyone present is simply a cog in the wheel. Patients are numbered and checked, everyone has a specialized place to be. Chaplains are assigned to make sure that people stay calm during this loss of control, that they can find the inner strength to fight their personal demons. However, I have also met amazing people who do amazing work.

And I enjoy talking with patients. I’ve had wonderful conversations—some spiritual and some not so much. I have chatted with a cancer patient about his dogs, prayed with a woman who is dying, listened to a family’s midnight heartbreak when husband and father unexpectedly died, and played cards with patients in the psychiatric unit. I have fallen in love with people all over again. I have also been learning that my ministry style is primarily listening to people tell their stories. I do not come to rooms with a toolkit of advice, just with a listening ear. And I find Christ among those I talk with. This is a deeply spiritual experience for me. When I pray in the morning in the chapel, I often stand before the crucifix and pray to see the crucified Christ in the people I meet with. And, without fail, I do.

Class and Activists

The more I think about it, the more I realize how we will never build a real, effective movement for change if we do not recognize class differences. I have noticed my own struggles as a working class woman in middle class organizing situations. There are strong cultural differences that get in the way. Here are some that I have noticed…

•Middle class, especially young, activists are proud of their subculture of healthy food, scruffy clothes, and communal living. I understand this, and even participate in some of it, but it is still jarring for me to walk into a young college activist group. I grew up in a working class family, where cleanliness, good hygiene, and home cooked meat and potatoes or great enchiladas were the norm.

•Middle class activists are strongly anti-military. I am both a pacifist (and strongly anti-war) and have family members in the military. For working class and rural people, the military is a source of economic survival and many young people who feel they have no other options join. Middle class activists often don’t seem to understand this reality and can make blanket assumptions and cruel comments about military personal.

•Middle class radicals love the earth. They may even grow an organic garden on a city lot. As a rural farm girl, however, I am amused by the lack of practical understanding that urban, middle class activists have of rural living. For example, urban environmental activists won a great victory in the 90s when they were able to shut down national forests to logging. However, for the people of my hometown, that also meant that the local economy collapsed. Poverty has skyrocketed and fueled a mass exodus from the area. I grew up in the forests and love them deeply, but I also feel deeply for the people who lost their jobs. Isn’t there a way that rural people and environmentalists could have worked together to find a solution that would benefit all?

•There are a lot of stereotypes of rural, working class people. They are rednecks, homophobes, backwards… and the list goes on. Sometimes radical middle class activists use these stereotypes themselves. The reality is that working class culture in general can be rich in hospitality, acceptance, and community.

•The response of people on the left that irritates me the most is the insinuation that working class people are less intelligent, especially if they are more conservative. There is a crass elitism in these assumptions. The accusation that working people are simply stupid, brainwashed, and uneducated is insulting. Some of the most intelligent people I know never went to college.