Cherry Hill Seminary

A guest post from Cherry Hill’s Executive Director, Holli Emore.

Here in the United States we have an interesting legacy connected with the term “professional” as applied to chaplaincy and other religious service. The same spirit which drove many of our early European settlers to make that daring leap across the ocean into the unknown also inspired a new way of looking at religious clergy. At the same time that new Americans rejected the hierarchies of monarchy, they often embraced self-taught clergy. The similarities between institutional religion and institutional government must have been all-too-obvious in the atmosphere which birthed democracy. Also, trained educated clergy were not always available (this is sometimes the case in rural areas even today). Protestantism is nothing if not democratic, though like democracy, it is no stronger than the weakest link, which is often a well-meaning but uneducated minister/leader. We so strongly hold to the value of individual inspiration and vision that we too easily overlook what may be gained by educating our clergy.

At Cherry Hill Seminary we find ourselves in an ongoing examination of what it means to serve the spiritual needs of a community, what skills and education are beneficial, or even essential, to such service, and where we should either forge new ground or look at the successful models developed by other religions. Certainly, we could spend all of our time negotiating the maze of professional standards put out there by professional associations, standards for pastoral counselors, therapists, chaplains, prison chaplains, hospital chaplains, and more. The U.S. military has been very rigid about the education it requires of its chaplains, but then relaxed those standards when the Middle East conflict exceeded the numbers the armed forces were prepared to serve spiritually. Part of the CHS push for future accreditation has been to satisfy requirements which may now be negotiable.

Nevertheless, setting a high bar for those who serve, and, therefore, lead us, is a good idea. One need not look far to encounter spiritual leaders who have ranged from mediocre to pathological and even murderous. One of the first courses all CHS students must take is Ethics and Boundaries. Most people think that ethics is an intuitive exercise, and trust that the Rede or the Golden Rule will get them through a rough patch. Our course challenges a student in every way possible, and by the end of the course each student has produced their own detailed code of ethics. More importantly, those students are better prepared to face the real world, with its unpredictable, ever-changing barrage of issues, predicaments and gray areas.

And then there is the reality that hospitals, prisons and other institutional settings simply must establish some kind of standards for the people they allow to have access to their clients. Ultimately, they are held responsible for the standard of care, including spiritual, and so it is only fair that they ask us to demonstrate that we are up to the task. There are worlds of issues that the average individual has no way of knowing about operating in such an environment. We will be far better able to deliver something of value to those clients if we have had the proper preparation.

To some people, the word “professional” implies that they are paid a salary for the work. Salaried Pagan clergy are not likely to abound in my lifetime. Rather, we propose that “professional” in this context signals a level of excellence perhaps not found among the rank and file volunteers. Most of us have a healthy respect for the training and apprentice-ship required of a goldsmith or accountant or social worker. But we resist the idea that a spiritual worker may need specialized training, too. I look forward to a day, in my lifetime, when Pagan clergy command respect for their expertise, not just from the mundane world, but from our own.



ps - M. Macha Nightmare's interview with TWPT offers further background on CHS.

Managing the Urge to Professionalise

The urge towards professionalism builds up a rigid bureaucracy. Bureaucratic rules become a substitute for sound judgment.

Carl Rogers

When I was a student nurse on night duty there was an elderly man who was blind and hallucinating. He was distressed and spent much of the night yelling “Hold me tight, for Gawds sake!” We would go over and hold his hand and it wouldn’t make much difference, he’d just up the noise, begging for reassurance and containment. In the end he was prescribed sedation which brought him much closer to death but kept him quiet. One night, the registrar came on to the ward as the sedation was wearing off and the elderly man began his painful wailing. The Registrar went over to him, held his hand and asked, “What can I do for you?” “Hold me tight!” said the old man. So the registrar pulled back the covers, got into bed and shifted the old man to recline between his legs, back to chest, and held him tight. A good nights sleep was had by all. Now of course, he’d never consider doing something like this and would be disciplined if he did.

When I first began working with young girls who had been subjected to dreadful abuse and were considered dangerous, one or two of them needed to negotiate physical contact. The rooms we met in had beanbags and some of them sat on the floor cuddled up to me as we lay back, experiencing safe intimacy and basic human connection without which we all go mad. Now of course, I’d never consider doing something like this and would be disciplined if I did.

Chaplaincy is undergoing a process of professionalisation that will result in very well qualified chaplains and no certainty of high-quality work. The only positive result of professionalisation is that it’s easier to fire someone when they work outside of professional boundaries.

Time and again, history demonstrates that when a vocational group enters into the process of professionalisation what actually happens is gross standardisation and a parallel requirement for the individual to stop thinking for themselves. Employers, who may know and care nothing about the internal dialogue within a group of people sharing the same job title, begin to demand that employees have professional qualifications and a very vicious cycle is set up. Creativity is stunted, peer review becomes meaningless, relationship becomes defunct in preference to saying the right thing.

Here in the UK, this means that the most qualified, experienced but not accredited on principle psychotherapist is not as attractive to an employer as someone who has been qualified for 3 years if they are accredited. The less experienced psychotherapist has ticked some boxes, written the right words, perhaps made a few up and paid her money to the British Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists. Sound research demonstrates that BACP accredited therapists are more likely to have complaints made and upheld against them (1) but employers don’t care and neither do therapists who correctly perceive accreditation to be what employers (rather than clients) want. Two issues become plain here: employers want to reduce their feelings of risk of liability and people who feel strongly about being part of a professional group are likely to be status-led rather than client-led.

Chaplaincy is deep into the process of becoming professionalised. US hospital chaplains are required to have a Masters of Theology which demonstrates that they at least have an interest and background in their own belief systems. This requirement equips the chaplain with the theology she needs to serve her clients in terms of the relationship between deity and person. But a theology qualification doesn’t cover the ethics of the relationship between the chaplain and the patient, or the patient and chaplain with the institution. Various chaplaincy professional bodies are beginning to address these situations as an aside to the process of gaining professional recognition. To me, that phrase ‘gaining professional recognition’ is very telling: we want to be seen rather than ignored by important people. We want to join those important people as peers.

The model we have to guide us is a Christian one, and I have a lot of time for it. Christ was a very ordinary person who chose not to be a priest or to join the Jewish hierarchy or to work for the Roman hierarchy where he could have gained a great deal of power and influence. He visited the sick to bring them comfort rather than to offer an integrated holistic approach to healthcare and related to people as people rather than the relationship being dependent on which social group they were part of.

Meeting with administrators and chief executives is part of the work of the chaplain, as is report writing and collecting statistics. Studying the experience of other chaplains is vital, so that we can learn from their mistakes without having to repeat them and build on their successes. But desiring professional recognition - not because it allows us to deepen relationships, but because it highlights status – moves us away from humility, away from the position of liminality that is central to being a chaplain, and away from empathising with the vulnerable in preference to empathising with shareholders who need prestige to advertise their hospital.

The professionalisation of chaplaincy is inevitable. As we move through it, we would be well served to maintain a private store of cynicism, a way of being that isn’t fashionably sweetness- filled but which protects us from believing everything we’re told, in this case about how important professional status is. ‘Professional’ is very different from ‘accountable’ and the more professionally qualified a person is the more they are trusted to be left alone with vulnerable people: that equation alone should give us pause. The sad cliché of the pedophile masquerading as a Scout Master demonstrates that processes which bestow status facilitate people who want to abuse power.


ps - looking for a picture to illustrate this post I searched 'professional priest' and 'professional'. Google for yourself what comes up for 'professional': young, arms folded, mildly sexually alluring but essentially challenging. It's what we expect from the title, and aspire to.

1 Khele.S, Symons.C, &Wheeler. S. An analysis of complaints to the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy 1996-2006. Counselling and psychotherapy research CPR) 8 (2) 2008: p127

Professionalism.

Every job these days now seems to require some kind of qualificational (is that a word? It is now!) route into and through it, and the more organized these groups get the more some individuals will want to be recognized as ‘professional’. The professional counseling and psychotherapy association I belong to, the BACP, was created when individual counselors and psychotherapists decided that the public was suffering because counselors and psychotherapists had no accrediting body. They set up the BACP and approached the government to demand that only qualified counselors and psychotherapists be recognized as such. Today, people who are not qualified as anything can still offer their services as counselors. The government, who once took no notice of us, have now decided that they will only recognize psychotherapists and not counselors, which leaves a great many highly qualified counselors potentially out in the cold, and the BACP running about trying to catch up.

At the same time, the BACP created an accrediting scheme that can only be a box ticking exercise since it’s unworkable to have someone present during actual sessions to observe and assess. The BACP’s own research discovered that the greatest number of complaints are made against accredited practitioners.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a792952432

(please cut and paste, my keyboard has no wriggly line!)

Nevertheless, the larger, more prestigious and higher paying employers of counselors and psychotherapists demand that we be BACP Accredited, not because they understand counseling and psychotherapy or because they want the best people for the job but because they believe that qualifications mean they will be getting a better practitioner and because they want people who are content with jumping through hoops in preference to thinking for themselves.

It’s no bad thing to know that a person has completed and qualified from a particular line of study. Pagans want this too, we don’t want someone calling herself Lady BlueBottle, Hereditary Witch Queen of Atlantis to be involved with, well anything really, but particularly not vulnerable people or representing Paganism. We’re all tired of the fantasy-driven pronouncements of too many Pagans and their incredible claims, and we know that this behaviour is not limited to teenagers. In the non-Pagan world we also know highly qualified and experienced professional people who are untrustworthy. Indeed, the more prestigious their status them easier it is for them to be untrustworthy.

What links these things together, from a growing number of US chaplains demanding access to patient notes and counselors and psychotherapists becoming mesmerized and deskilled by professionalism, to the growing number of very honourable and simple jobs becoming dependent on qualifications is status. Pagans are still struggling to have our status as a bona fide religion recognized, and the starting point for many individual Pagan chaplains in hospitals and prisons was the demand that this corporate status was acknowledged. Those Chaplains who overstep meaningful boundaries by demanding access to patients who haven’t requested it and patient notes, are motivated by the desire to have their personal status recognized.

All of which has nothing to do with accountability. We know that human nature is likely to try and get away with what it can, there’s little can be done about that other than the blunt instrument of punishment, and rather than waiting for behaviour to become criminal it’s probably wise to have an agreed standard of behaviour for different professions. Standardised teaching can achieve something like that and yet . . . when teaching establishments have to fulfill quotas in recruitment and pass rates, which all come down to keeping the institution financially above water it all becomes a bit meaningless. But it does keep the money rolling in.

In the US the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education Inc seems to be the largest representative body for hospital chaplains. They talk about people as ‘Living Human Documents’ and have detailed manuals and standards and an accreditation process and bylaws . . . all the stuff that makes an organization look very proper, professional and acceptable – and gives the organization and its officers high status. This is the group that has encouraged chaplains to demand access to patient notes believing chaplains to have the same status as medical professionals. Presumably, therefore, they believe that doctors have the same status as chaplains.

I’d like chaplains to be accountable to their patients and themselves primarily, then the hospital they work in, then their own Pagan community and then the wider world. But I don’t have a Pagan community, I work entirely on my own and so I’m only officially accountable to the chaplaincy office and the hospital which is perhaps good enough. I would really like a chaplaincy supervision group, Pagan or otherwise - almost entirely the same as my psychotherapy supervision group where I could discus in confidence how things are going. But there isn’t one, there aren’t enough Pagan hospital chaplains to create one and UK chaplaincy groups aren’t organized in this manner.

Long manuals and documents and acronyms do little to protect anyone. Libraries filled with complex and weighty tomes of case law and precedent don’t stop people from breaking the law. What does go some way towards curbing the desire to abuse power is mutual respect and support, keeping organizations small and intimate without becoming incestuous. It can be done. And it’s inevitable that such groups will have lower status and less income.

It’s important to know what the law of the land is and what hospital policy is but this doesn’t stop individuals from working – entirely within the letter of their professional standards – in a callous and burned out manner. (Thank you, Mogg) It is infinitely harder to create, maintain and belong to a small group that actually sees you and hears you, is responsible for and to you than it is to hand over your cash to an organization and perform the tricks they require for advancement which gives you a passport to prestige and greater income.

And of course doing things the hard way requires the patience to explain to the people in suits and the people who have been conditioned to trust anyone with a string of letters after their name, that membership of a professional body is no guarantee of a better service.

Boundaries

What boundaries might we draw between spirituality, counselling and chaplaincy? I ask because I’ve just come across a series of leaflets offering ‘Tarot and Counselling’ ‘Spiritual Counselling’ ‘Voicework and Counselling’ and ‘Reiki and Counselling’. I was reminded of one of my teachers on a (post grad) counselling course who was tediously all too eager to talk about out of body experiences or the colour of our auras. She used new age nonsense to make herself feel uniquely qualified in the intangible and would become insufferably smug if anyone questioned the validity of what she was talking about, as if we were all too primitive to appreciate her special knowledge. As a bona fide, old fashioned, not new age Witch I found her abuse of power repellent and wasn’t inauthentic enough to schmooze or massage her ego. Our relationship was not good.

From that experience I learned to keep disciplines separate. When I’m a psychotherapist I’m a psychotherapist and overtly Pagan thoughts don’t really come into it. When I’m doing ritual then I’m not being a psychotherapist. When I’m being a Pagan chaplain I find myself flowing between states; patients need to find their own answers and they also need guidance and debate around Pagan beliefs and behaviours. When we’re in spiritual crisis we don’t need debate we need answers but those answers need to reflect our own way of being in the world. Knowing when to be more one way or the other is a subtle art in which I am by no means expert.

People desire direction, there’s a part of us all that longs to be told what to do and this is where things like tarot come in, they can offer guidance and structure. There’s nothing wrong with doing tarot or reiki or voicework but to attempt to combine it with counselling is unethical. The only thing that goes with counselling is counselling, and the only people who are competent to call themselves counsellors are qualified counsellors. UK trained and qualified counsellors find themselves in an invidious position and it’s why I favour the term psychotherapist for my own work, to distance myself from the very many people with no qualifications or even training who are free to call themselves (and believe themselves to be) counsellors.

The mystery of spirituality confers power on those who say they understand it. Shamanism needs a bit of showmanism but we have to be very clear about why we might choose to use it in our work. It’s one thing to put on a robe for ritual work, quite another to pretend (or actually believe) that we are having a clairvoyant moment which we must share with a vulnerable person who has come to us in need. Whose needs are actually met? Who has the power? As any Pagan knows, names confer power and the names ‘counsellor’ or ‘chaplain’ or ‘clairvoyant’ have enormous power. People respond to these names with trust and a lowering of their daily defenses. When we visit chaplains, counsellors and clairvoyants we do so because we are vulnerable.

I have moments of clairaudience and it’s never been useful to pass on a message from The Beyond ™. Something similar to clairaudience or clairvoyance might be called autheticity. I would propose that being consciously authentic is more important than learning esoteric skills. We don’t have to act on our authentic feelings – it’s seldom productive to scream and run away from a gathering of inauthentic people – but we can acknowledge those feelings and learn from them. The same is true for our work with patients, we can be aware of what we’re feeling, take honest ownership of our feelings rather than attribute them to anything supernatural, and weigh up the pros and cons of sharing the feelings with the patient. If in doubt, don't. Once the relationship is strong and trusting it’s more possible to risk being openly authentic but in a short-term relationship that involves no major crisis there’s little call for it. The relationship is about the needs of the patient over anything else.

It may be tempting, not least because a patient requests it, to do some kind of divination especially when someone is in crisis. Personally, I avoid it like the plague. People can become easily and unnecessarily upset and can hear things that aren’t said. It feels wrong on every level, not least tampering with an individuals power to decide for themselves. In PR terms, in my opinion, it belittles the professional nature of the role of Chaplain, something that is very hard won for Pagans. We are the instrument through which a relationship is made; cards, crystals and pendulums get in the way and act as a distraction. We need to be able to withstand the full force of anxiety, unanswerable questions and fear without diversion.

When a patient wants to do divination for themselves, however, I feel less strongly about it. Personally, I dislike the overt use of paraphernalia, it feels inauthentic to me, but if a person can't make an important decision that must be made urgently, and if they wish to use divination, that's their choice and one that I will witness and, if necessary, help bring a positive interpretation to. We all need something like that distraction when things get intense, but we still must take personal responsibility for the actions that may result from our understanding of it. To say "The cards told me to donate/not donate a kidney," is not taking responsibility.