C.
P.
E.

Clinical.
Pastoral.
Education.

For the uninitiated: what is CPE?
The simple answer: a semester or more of hospital chaplaincy, for credit and (usually) no pay.

The more complete answer: hospital chaplain work, combined with individual and group supervision (read: therapy-lite), during which one works through the issues that come up during the CPE process and how they might impact one’s later ministry.

The glib answer that has some truth: CPE figures out what all your buttons are, then pushes them until they don’t work anymore. It’s ministry boot camp.

I did CPE three summers ago. I started May 29, 2002. Why do I remember the date? It was a strange day. The first day was not exactly a barrel of monkeys. It was little stuff. I found out that the hospital to which I’d been assigned had a slightly dressier dress code than I had prepared for. (Stockings in the summer make me grouchy.) I also found out that because I was planning to attend my denomination’s General Assembly later in the summer, that I would be on call every single weekend. No weekends off. Then the ID cards took forever.

Dumb, little stuff, but it all put me in a bad mood. I came home, snarling, and took a pregnancy test and got the two lines. Well, that would explain the annoyance over the little things, the feeling that I was being nibbled to death by ducks.

It also shifted my learning goals significantly. Before, I had hoped to develop and refine some pastoral skills, work through some grief issues, learn how to be direct and unapologetic about my faith without being a heavy-handed buffoon. When I saw the two pink lines on the stick, those goals disappeared. I accomplished some of those things, but they ceased to be goals.

Now, my goal was to survive the summer.

The mantra: 65%. That is, I put in 65% effort. I visited my patients slowly, with lots of breaks. I took long lunches. During overnight on-calls I did not make the rounds to all the units, as we had been commanded to do. Instead, I slept on the floor of the chaplain office on a makeshift bed of couch cushions. I provided competent and compassionate care to the people who needed me, and basically tried not to throw up.

I did get through it, thanks to:
-A rather functional group (ChicagoRev was there!)

-A wonderful supervisor who actively encouraged my half-assed performance and who CHEERED when I called in “sick” late in the summer

-A quirk of the universe that meant my only having to respond to five deaths over the 12 weeks (they’re traumatic, draining, complicated in terms of paperwork—and some people had dozens of deaths).

There were little things that helped as well—having been assigned to a hospital that had 12-hour on-calls, rather than 24-hour shifts like the other hospitals. I think 24 hours “on” would have killed me.

Also: having been assigned to the “old people’s” hospital, rather than the children’s hospital, which would have been difficult.

Also: having a handy ability to go mentally to Disney World whenever one of the group members assigned to the children’s hospital had to process the death of a child. Whee! These flying Peter Pan ships rock!… You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!

I have literally never felt so free as I did when I walked out of the hospital for the last time, at 11 p.m., Sunday, August 18. Yes, I remember that date as well. CPE was finally over, and with it the first trimester.

These last several weeks, though similarly queasy, have been a walk in the park in springtime compared to the summer of 2002.

Everyone needs an “If I can make it through X, I can make it through anything” experience. CPE was one of mine. Winter/Spring 2003 (though full of joy) was another.

What are your “If I can make it…” experiences?