Advanced 1 Pastoral Care Graduation

Happy 71st, dad!  See you on Sunday at your birthday party (and your 49th wedding anniversary)!

Today I finished my 1st advanced chaplaincy training unit.  It's been a long but worthwhile journey: 9 months of training, and I'm not finished yet.  I plan to do one more unit in May.  Along the way, I have learned a lot.  The program is tough, the learning is hard, often times in a "greenhouse lab" environment where we put ourselves and one another under increased scrutiny.  And while the results can sometimes be painful, so long as the endeavour is undertaken with a view towards mutual edification, growth seems to happen.

It helps that I have classmates and a supervisor that I can trust: without trust the whole exercise could be more damaging than helpful.  And while the approach to the entire progress is not ideal - focusing on the psychological rather than the theological - there is a lot to learn for me on the psychological front also, so it has been of significant value.  I have become more self-aware, I have become a better listener, and I think I'm better prepared to "broker differences" between myself and others, for example.

My reservations always have been, and still are, the nature of pastoral care given in a public secular setting.  It seems to me that we "dumb down" theological language to such extent that we are left with a "basic common denominator" of values that everyone can agree on, regardless of (faith) tradition.  For the post-modern secularist this may sound good and profitable, but for the committed faithful this is hardly satisfying, intellectually or spiritually.  It's not that the dedicated faithful don't want to look for commonalities with others - we do - but it's that the specificity of our traditions must be left at the wayside for a "greater good."

I am not convinced that leaving something as important as the nuances of our faith (ie - historicity: the fact that our faith is grounded in a God who revealed Himself in history, rather than in general, abstract, a-historical principles) aside is for the greater good.  It seems ingenuine.  It trivializes the quest for truth, because it assumes that truth cannot be found.  Plus, this approach entails that we compartmentalize our lives into the "secular" and the "sacred", the "public" and the "private", two dichotomies that are utterly unhelpful in the human endeavour to become whole.

Anyways, I celebrate the last 9 months.  I think God brought me to this place, and in terms of fulfilling His command to love Him and neighbour, I do sense that I am able to obey Him in a small and tangible way.  I feel affirmed: by my peers, by my supervisor, and by the staff.  And deep inside too, I get an increasingly greater sense of affirmation and belonging.  I pray that work opportunity will present itself shortly after finishing the next unit.  Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me (a sinner)!

The pictures below are from my graduation.  Our group "ritual"at the end of each unit has been to go for a meal together.  In my first unit, we went to Doña Cata for lunch; and the past 2 units we've gone for breakfast at Paul's Omelettery.  That's where the first picture was taken.  From left to right, we are: Linda, Edgar, Tom, and Phil.  Linda and Tom are my classmates.  Phil's my supervisor.

The second picture is of Chris and me.  Chris works in pastoral care at a local residential care centre.  Then there's Phil and me.  Finally, Lawrence, Kelly, Tom, Chris and Linda, during the ceremony.