Friday Retrospective

So, here it is, Friday finally.  When I went to bed last night, the news was full of developments from L.A.  When I woke up this morning, news of Israel bombing Iran.  It's the kind of news that might mark a true hinge point in history--or it might be a blip, bombings today, nothing tomorrow.

It's been a week of musical greats leaving us.  I drove home on Monday hearing that Sly Stone had died.  Yesterday morning I drove to the Asheville VA Hospital listening to analysis of Brian Wilson's genius.  In the pantheon of musical geniuses that provided the soundtrack to my youth, neither one of those was on replay at my house.  But they were on the radio and there waiting for me to discover them later.  I still haven't given Brian Wilson all the attention that he deserves.  Maybe some later summer I will.

It won't be this summer because my CPE training is going to leave room for very little else.  It's been an intense week, but a good one.   We have done much of our training by sitting around a conference table, day after day, talking about the best way to be a chaplain. Much of this is not new information to me, but it's useful to have a reminder. We are not there to preach but to ask meaningful questions and to practice active listening.

So, for example, if a veteran who is a patient says, "God hates me and I'm going to Hell because I killed so many people in combat," we wouldn't tell the veteran how wrong he/she is. We would say, "Tell me more about this idea that God hates me." Or perhaps, "Tell me more about why you think you're going to Hell." Or simply, "Say a bit more about that." It could lead to more meaningful conversation. Or it might not. It might lead the patient to have insights that will be more meaningful because of the process. Or it might not.

In our training, we've been talking about the best ways to do active listening.  We've talked about Bowenian family systems theory that will help us understand often unacknowledged ways that our families of origin and the families after those can impact the ways that humans interact.  We've sat in on verbatims, the way that CPE trains us to analyze our interactions with patients, to see what went well and how we can improve as chaplains.

--unfinished post--