Finishing CPE

So, here I am, one week to go in CPE. I'm glad it's ending even though it was a great experience. But . . . too many 70 hour weeks. It's not the physical strain. That I can handle. It's the emotional strain. My supervisor said the effect of it all is cumulative -- and she's right. I keep thinking of the song, "Blowin' in the Wind." Yes, "too many people have died."

I had hoped to write about this experience, but the need for confidentiality prevents me from saying very much about specific patients or my fellow students and staff chaplains. Of course, I wrote lots of verbatims (write-ups of conversations with patients or families) and reflection papers on any number of topics. I've saved them. I imagine I'll look at them in a few years and laugh at myself.

Before CPE started, I worried about having to pray spontaneously with patients more than anything else. I know that probably sounds lame, but having grown up Roman Catholic and then having become Episcopal, I am truly one of the "people of the Book." When it came time to pray, however, I did just fine. A couple of times I did forget the name of the person I was praying with, so there was a bit of "Lord, surround . . . surround this wonderful man with your love." I generally began my oremus with "The Lord's Prayer," which I called "The Our Father" for the many Roman Catholics at my hospital. I liked to begin with something I knew. Sort of a warm-up. For the RCs, I had to remember to end the prayer at " and deliver us from evil." If I slipped into the "Protestant ending" ("For thine is the power, etc.), I sometimes got quite the look from older RCs. I was immediately suspect and probably a dangerous heretic of some kind.

Almost invariably the patient would cry as we recited the prayer together. Almost invariably. Often the patient and I had been having a pleasant, harmless conversation before the prayer. No God-talk. No talk about sickness or death or dying. Quite a few were in the hospital for relatively benign reasons, so terminal diagnoses did not explain the tears. But they cried. I would like to talk with each of them to understand what touched them. Was it a specific line? Or was it just the act of saying it? Did it bring back memories? Of childhood faith? Of a faith abandoned? Or was it just the grace of the moment? Did they feel what I felt so often in patients' rooms? Did they feel that God was there with us? That something happened between us that had nothing to do with either of us? That when all was said and done, in moments like this only faith mattered. That, in truth, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ.