Hello everyone,

My name is Aanya Ismail. I am a transfer student at UC Berkeley studying English and Education. After graduation, I plan to begin teaching as an Elementary School teacher for all subjects. In my free time I love to read, hike, and work on sewing projects. I am one of five siblings and have grown up around children, my youngest sister is currently 3 years old. I am absolutely looking forward to meeting all of your lovely children and can’t wait to talk and play with them!

Hi All Souls! I’m back in Berkeley, raring to go for my senior year of seminary and coming hot on the heels of a summertime away in Austin Texas where I did CPE — clinical pastoral education, a required part of the priestly ordination process. Some of you may be well-versed in the work of CPE, either for having served on discernment committees or for other reasons. CPE is a staple experience for seminarians and I want to share some of what the experience was like to you all, the congregation sponsoring me for ordination.

The basic form of the summer is Monday through Friday, 9-5 in the hospital. Thirty hours of the week are “clinical hours”, being assigned to a floor(s) and visiting patients. Another ten hours per week are spent in ‘class’ with CPE peers and educators, discussing our experiences with patients, sharing things about autobiographies and ministry experiences and senses of call, and learning some of the tools and language of pastoral ministry (family systems theory, grief, etc). This class time includes one of the classic CPE tools, presenting ‘verbatims’. The verbatim is basically an excerpt of a patient visit written as almost a screenplay, with dialogue between chaplain and patient (and any other actors, family members, medical staff, etc) and includes setting the scene and stage directions. The student group reads the verbatim aloud, like a table read of a TV show script, and then discusses the visit, giving critique and feedback and commentary to the student chaplain. It’s a dicey medium for learning — so much of chaplaincy feels like “well you really had to be there”. Scrutinizing a visit transcript as if it were a piece of literature is also a difficult (and vulnerable!) position for the student to be in, but that adds to the utility of the exercise, of course. On top of all of this was an about once-a-week ‘on-call’ shift, 18 or 24 hours spent in the hospital with the on-call pager as the only chaplain on-site, either from 5pm until 8am the next day (on weekdays) or from 8am to 8am (on weekends).

The hospital where I spent most of my time, then, was Dell Seton Medical Center, a downtown Austin non-profit Catholic hospital, part of a network of hospitals across the greater Austin metropolitan area under the banner of the Ascension Seton brand, including a children’s hospital, a mental hospital, and a number of rural hospitals. Dell Seton is the level-1 trauma center serving the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of the vulnerable, with the occasional helicopter landing on the roof throughout the day bringing folks in from as far as 100 miles away. I was assigned to two floors, basically to the ER and the floor where folks get discharged to from the ER.

Simply put, it’s hard work. Brutal work, in fact. Human beings are amazing and resilient even in the face of enormous hardship. But as I was so often reminded, the hospital is one of the hardest and saddest places in our society and this hospital specifically was one of the hardest one, just full up to the brim with chronic illness, traumatic injury, mental illness, poverty and homelessness, people in untenable or abusive home situations, people with no friends or family and who feel all alone in the world. The work of the chaplain, as I saw it, was simply to be present to those people, help them process what’s happening to them, and to remind them of their distinct humanness (in a place where all the markers of your humanness are stripped from you — hospital gowns and sterile rooms, impersonal visits from over-busy doctors, etc). Especially for a soft, porous piece of pumice like me, it was painstaking work not to simply soak up all of the sadness and carry it around with me like a heavy weight on my chest for the rest of the day (or the rest of the summer, even).

I could preach an entire sermon series for all I learned and saw in my ten weeks this summer, but there are a couple of main takeaways I’ve been chewing on in the month or so since I’ve finished.

First, It’s easy to judge somebody’s life circumstances from a distance. It’s hard to confront them up close (and believe them). Twenty-first century American politics is replete with hot takes about what homeless people, unemployed and underemployed, chronically sick, and disabled people really ought to be doing to manage their situations without simply accepting government handouts. Our society loves to demand shame of people who haven’t, pardon my French, gotten their shit together like the rest of us. These kinds of judgments are easy and inexpensive to make from a distance. It’s far harder a thing to sit in a room with a person and believe them when they explain their life circumstances to you. I had people explain to me how they used to have great jobs and how a season of homelessness followed them back into the workforce, a stigma that made it hard to secure the same kind of work again. I had folks explain that for reasons of chronic illness, they were simply unable to work and how they were left with no options. Again, it’s easy to decide what these folks have done wrong in their lives to land them in their circumstances —but guilt is harder to assign when you have to do it in person.

CPE, oddly enough, helped me like/accept myself better. One of the things that you talk about in CPE is how the entire life of both chaplain and patient follow them into the hospital rooms. For patient, that means that sometimes the presenting spiritual/emotional issue is not about the diagnosis or surgery but about some other facet of their life. For chaplain, it means that all of our insecurities and life experiences come into the room with us, not necessarily in the spotlight but certainly there to influence how the chaplain reacts to and interprets what happens in the room. Our priestly ordination process tends to use harsh metaphors for how we manage those insecurities — we talk about hammering them out, or sanding down those rough edges, or interrogating those weaknesses. I came into CPE ready to communally berate myself for my shortcomings, and what I found instead was a cohort of peers and educators and staff who were insistent in gentle affirmation of my gifts and call in spite of my self-flagellation. For example, I’m an exceedingly sensitive person — I joked about being a porous piece of pumice — and my sensitivity was on great display all summer. It was great triple jump of a leap to realize that sensitivity is not simply a liability, but maybe its just a thing — that makes some things easier and some things harder — and maybe it’s just a thing gets to be okay.

Finally, self-care is harder than we think and our bodies collect fatigue and emotions in ways that our brains don’t always register. CPE is hard and it’s a lot of work and it’s easy to come home and eat some cake and watch Schitt’s Creek re-runs until it’s time to go to bed. And that worked for me for quite a while! But I did not realize that there was a rain barrel inside of me where I collected sadness and fatigue until around week 8 or 9 of CPE when it was suddenly overflowing. Netflix is great, but it doesn’t open the spigot on the rain barrel for me. I hold no illusion that a CPE summer could ever be somehow “sustainable” in the long-term (it’s not designed to be sustainable) but as Lizzo says — self-care is about self-preservation in a brutal world, it’s not just spa days and face masks”. Sadness and fatigue don’t always feel like sadness or fatigue and it takes savvy and sometimes counterintuitive work to take care of ourselves in the midst of  travail.

There’s certainly lots more that could be said and there is certainly lots more processing to be done. A 1700 mile drive from Austin back to Berkeley (with intermittent crying to Sheryl Crow) sped the process along, but the big summertime experience will undoubtedly continue to unfurl itself well into my senior year of seminary (and probably forever thereafter).

With great faith and much love,
Ethan

Beloved Community Training Day

DAY OF DISCERNMENT– for those interested in exploring ordained ministries, or just thinking about discernment in general, the Day of Discernment has been broken up into 3 separate workshops that can be taken separately by anyone or taken together to fulfill the “Day of Discernment” requirement for exploring the ordination process. These workshops are highly recommended not just for those interested in the process but also for Local Discernment Committees and clergy interested in the new ordination process in this diocese.

MULTICULTURAL AND DIVERSITY TRAINING– for those seeking further education in Healing Racism and overcoming bias, there will be two workshops offered to help further skills and awareness — Intercultural Conversations; and Gender Equality and Beloved Community: Trends, Challenges, and the Future. These two workshops are offered as continuing education for clergy as well as being open to any lay folks who want to address these issues in the context of Christian faith and the church community.