In the next few posts, I’ll share some reflections that I wrote during my CPE experience over the summer. Some of them will be adapted from spiritual reflections I had to do as a part of my verbatim assignments (edited to omit any details about patients or clinical experiences) and some will be more general reflections. My experience of CPE was helpful for delineating between the skills and struggles involved with pastoral ministry as contrasted to to those required by the role of social worker. The following essay is a theological dynamic paper, which was an attempt to summarize key features of my spiritual and theological worldview as applied to the Clinical Pastoral Education experience.

Once some brothers came to visit Antony, and Joseph was with them. Antony, wanting to test them, began to speak about holy Scripture. He asked the younger monks first the meaning of text after text, and each of them answered as well as he could. To each he said, ‘You have not yet found the right answer.’ Then he said to Joseph, ‘What do you think is the meaning of this word?’ He replied, ‘I don’t know.’ Antony said, ‘Indeed Joseph alone has found the true way, for he said he did not know.’

There is an icon that sits at my desk that I’ve kept there for several years– through various relocations and changes to my study space. The icon is called “Jesus, the Blessed Silence,” and it is, admittedly, a bit of an odd image. The symbolism of the icon is multi-layered and complicated, but the main points are that it is an image that emerged in the tradition around the 14th century during a period marked by a lot of controversy around the Christian practice of meditative silence– called hesychasm, from the Greek word ἡσυχία which means silence, quiet, rest, or stillness. On the one hand, this image is odd because it is something of a departure from “traditional iconography” that usually confines itself to depictions of actual persons or events— things that can be seen or observed. This icon is, in some sense, the depiction of an idea, or at the very least, a literary device– the personification of a concept. In typical Christian fashion, any personification of a concept inevitably leads to an identification with Christ, so the inclusion of the name of Jesus on icons of Blessed Silence is perhaps an example of a negotiation within the tradition.

In any case, the person of Jesus is depicted here, and in a very atypical way. Among the most obvious departures from icons of Jesus is the fact that he is rendered beardless and is given wings, likening him to an angel. This has its root in a particular interpretation of Isaiah 9:6, which Christians have taken to apply to Jesus. In the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures), this verse describes a messianic character as an “Angel of Great Counsel.” Christians have long identified the pre-Incarnate Jesus as the “Angel of the Lord” mentioned throughout the Hebrew Scriptures– a heavenly messenger and representative of God. An angel, then, is typically someone who has a message to share, some word from heaven that is meant to enlighten, encourage, or admonish the hearers. This is what makes this image so paradoxical– Jesus is a messenger (even called the Word of God in Christian Scriptures and theology), and yet, he is silent– or rather, he is silence personified.

Even though I don’t keep this icon in my prayer corner, I have kept it by my desk because it is the place where I do the most work with words– and is the place where I am most likely to forget silence. In academic theological work, it is very tempting to think that my use of words or skilled philosophical discourse can in some way help me apprehend the deep mysteries of God, as if God is some sort of problem that is begging to be solved. The Orthodox spiritual tradition, however, with its emphasis on silence, tends to prefer “unknowing”– the idea that God is actually encountered at the limits of discursive knowledge. As Metropolitan Kalistos Ware, of blessed memory, once remarked, “God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.” So, I keep this icon at my desk to remind me to not objectify God– reducing him to my intellectual puzzle. When I am tasked with writing a theological essay (much like I am doing now), I am accompanied by this image of the Heavenly Messenger, Jesus of Blessed Silence. And he just sits there, not offering any words of wisdom, just inviting me into silence, just holding presence; which is, after all, the whole purpose of any of this– some encounter with God.

As Metropolitan Anthony Bloom has said, if we hope to encounter God in prayer, we should probably keep silent at some point so that he can get a word in. In spiritual practice, silence is openness, an availability of the heart to God in the present moment. Very often, at least in my experience, this availability is crowded by noise– both literal and mental– and I’ve been profoundly confronted by my need to keep silence in ministry contexts like CPE. The classroom of the patient’s room, while obviously very different from the seminary classroom, nevertheless has the very same lessons to teach me– and I have found myself frequently brushing up against the same struggle to objectify patients or reduce them to problems to be solved. It is not entirely surprising that I should find some harmony between my relationship with God and those that I am tasked with serving. St. Maria Skobtsova, a Russian nun, emigré to Paris and social-worker-activist, commenting on Matthew 25, said that God “puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need.” The way that I struggle to be present with patients without “fixing” them is reflected in the way I struggle to be silent before God (and vice versa). Much like in my prayer life, I have had the most success with patients when I accept the limitations of my words and simply sit in silence. This outward silence, however, is but one (and perhaps the most superficial) expression of this spiritual silence in presence. The most profound and difficult practice of silence is interior.

In my attempts to be present with patients during my unit of CPE, I’ve been confronted by my seemingly endless stream of mental chatter– which is not pure distraction, mind you. On the contrary, most of my interior noise is quite attentive to the “data” of the moment. But I more often than not am “attentive” to patients in the same way that I am often “attentive” to God– as the object of my intellectual attack. I have noticed that even in my pastoral learning endeavors, I approach growth as a spiritual care provider as a primarily cerebral exercise. Somehow I think that if I simply acquire all the correct knowledge, remain open to critique and self improvement, that I will be able to master this thing by sheer exercise of will and mental power. The thing that I’ve learned about pastoral ministry is what I’ve known to be true about prayer– that is, while it involves skills that can be developed and improved, in practice, it is fundamentally ineffable. I’m not going to “get the right answer” to pastoral ministry any more than I am going to get it with regard to prayer.

I tend to pride myself on knowing a lot and being good at a lot. Ironically, I can even take pride in “being humble,” or knowing that I don’t know– if that happens to be a marker for competency. More often, however, I tend to cover up my unknowing and try to talk or reason my way to the “right answer.” My inability to acknowledge when I just don’t know is a major barrier to being present with God and with patients, and it is a profound expression of alienating pride. The icon of Jesus as a silent messenger is a very appropriate image for my experience in this work. I have often entered the patient’s room thinking I was a messenger tasked with bringing a word from God that would magically fix all the patient’s problems, culminating in some ecstatic and life-changing emotional catharsis. The reality is much closer to the icon– that if I am a messenger, it is a silent one that offers presence.

Perhaps on the opposite end of the patient encounter is the story of Anthony and Joseph from the beginning of this essay. In this equation, I am less the messenger and more so the decoder of the message. If I take the presence of God in and through a patient as a given, I can assume the role of the monks attempting to deduce the meaning of a passage of Scripture. The patient is again objectified— only now as the living (or dying) Word of God, just waiting for theological elucidation. And I, like some kind of sociopathic homilist, am hellbent on extracting meaning from the encounter. What is the answer? Like the monks in the story, I cycle through my knowledge and skills and attempt to provide a reply. The answer, of course, is simply silence and the acknowledgment that I don’t know. Although I feel as though I’ve learned a lot about pastoral ministry in CPE, I can really only say that I’ve begun to learn to say “I don’t know.” I don’t really know how to do this work, but as seems to be the case in prayer, I think simply admitting that, staying present and keeping silence is a step in the right direction. In both my prayer, in meetings with patients, and perhaps even in theological writing, if I make room for Blessed Silence, a real encounter with God is possible.