Reflective Practice - Formation and Supervision in Ministry (E-Journal)

ARTICLES ON CREATIVE ARTS AND SPIRITUAL CARE FORMATIO

Wood, Nancy

202   SECTION 4 CREATIVE ARTS AND SPIRITUAL CARE FORMATION   Editor’s Introduction  “We have to write a lot for CPE.” I hear this often from CPE interns, and they usually aren’t offering a statement of gratitude. Students, particularly those who are entering into spiritual caregiving and leadership as a second or third career, often find all the prose writing in CPE to be a bit daunting and, at times, onerous. Certainly, the writing of essays, reflection pieces, and verbatims can offer some students plenty of room for creativity and, I hope, provides all of them valuable learning in their formation as reflective spiritual caregiving practitioners. Yet, as the authors who contributed to this section remind us, other creative means of expression can also offer students and educators new windows into our work. In this section we have examples of the ways colleagues sustain and expand their ministry through poetry, painting, and photography. In “Poetics and Reflective Ministry Practice: A Vital Exercise of Imagination,” Sean Gilbert shares with us how he uses poetry to teach his class on the Trinity. Students arrive expecting to be taught how to correctly understand a core tenet of Christian theology and, instead, Gilbert offers them “theopoetic pedagogy,” education that cultivates learners’ pastoral imaginations. He trusts poetry to “take us to ‘aha moments’ whereby settled life stations or perspectives are punctured by living, existential truths, enabling us to return to deeper places of seeing and feeling again as if it were for the very first time.”  Gilbert offers us the words of the poet Jane Hirshfield who understands that “[e]ach instant of a good poem provides the enactment of an unfathomable transformation. From the silence preceding the title’s first word to that first word to the second, everything is changed. . . . A good poem makes self and world knowable in new ways, brings us into an existence opened, augmented, and altered.” Hirshfield’s words offer a lovely segue into poems by Christal Bell and Sandy MacDonald. Both women use 203  poetry as a means of exploring the challenges they face in ministry and the faith that grounds them. Cathy Hasty’s article invites us to move from the written word into the world of landscape painting. In “Painting Supervision: Thoughts on Visual Composition in Plein Air Landscape Painting,” Hasty draws parallels between her work as a visual artist and her practice as an ACPE Certified Educator. She notices that supervision and landscape painting have a similar trajectory, including the “messy middle” when the artist and the educator must “search for a new version of the story and find whether that story is sustainable for the rest of the journey.” Cathy illustrates her piece with photographs of her paintings, inviting us to notice how images may communicate in ways words alone cannot.  Julia Prinz further articulates the way the visual arts excite and inform the pastoral imagination. In her essay “‘Give Me a Word’: A Spiritual Director’s Journey with Photography,” she writes with honesty, vulnerability, and wisdom of a time when she could neither “give” a word nor hear any word being “given.” It was then that she discovered that photography can communicate in an elemental, existential, and deeply spiritual way. The creative arts, then, are not simply a metaphor for understanding written and spoken language but, at times, offer a deeper and truer form of communication than our usual ways of speaking. It is important for me to note here that all the writers in this section are Christian. I didn’t intend this, but I also didn’t catch it until right before we were scheduled to go to print. I am sorry that we don’t have more religious and spiritual diversity (and more types of creative expression, for that matter) included in these pages. I hope future volumes of this journal can offer other voices and more examples of how the creative arts illuminate for us what we don’t readily see.  Nancy Wood Co-Editor  

English

SECTION 4: CREATIVE ARTS AND SPIRITUAL CARE FORMATION: Editors' Introduction

How Pastoral Imagination is learned. How is it taught. A ten year study

Campbell-Reed, Eileen R.

Scharen, Christian

The Learning Pastoral Imagination Project: A Ten-Year Overview

Author invites going beyond the classic scriptures and delve into the Fifth Gospel

MacAlpine-Gills, Susan

Moving beyond the Pages of Scripture: Journeying through the Fifth Gospel

Using Internal Family Systems as a tool doing work processing a verbatim

Naditch, Beth

More Than the Sum of Our Parts: Using Internal Family Systems as a Verbatim Processing Tool

THEME OF 2024 VOLUME OF REFLECTIVE PRACTIC

Floding, Matthew

LOOKING AHEAD: THEME FOR THE 2024 ISSUE

Year long CPE provided in an outpatient center - values and challenges

Barbour, Naima

Culbertson, Terry

Malcom, Eric

Mouncey, Perry

Mulrooney, Linda

The Emperor of All Maladies Meets a New Model in CPE Training: Creating an Outpatient Center Year-Long Unit

Author sets the stage for presenting her theory papers

Shulgina, Natalia

Forward of My ACPE Theory Papers

Personality Theory used in CPE supervisio

Personality Theory: Beauty in Brokenness

Poem about letting go and delve into life

Bell, Christal

    214  Diving In . . . Living Water   Christal Bell*  I dive into the ocean. The ocean is wide, but my faith is deeper.  As the water trickles down my soul, I am refreshed by the assurance of knowing that the waves though they ebb and flow, the one constant is The Almighty.    The Divine Creator of oceans and rivers, streams and brooks is the One who allows me to float. So I float.   I float above the negativity.  I float above the toxicity.  I float above the crashing waves that tell me to do more and more and more and not take sabbath . . . and just float.    To float. To be present with one’s self. To have peace in the midst of the storm. I float above circumstances.  I float above uncertainties.  I float above doubts.    I float above fears.  I then rise. I rise above . . . because when I broke forth out of Mother’s Womb, water came.    It is the same water that refreshes our souls when I am thirsty.  It is the same water that refreshes faces when they are spent from the day’s journey. This fresh water. This living water. This well of abundance.  I allow all of it to encompass my soul.     * Rev. Dr. Christal Bell is Pediatric Staff Chaplain and ACH Bereavement Coordinator, Mission and Spiritual Care Advocate Children's Hospital - Oak Lawn, Illinois. Email: revchristal@gmail.com  Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry ISSN 2325-2847 (print)* ISSN 2325-2855 (online) © Copyright 2023 Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry All Rights Reserved      215   With arms open, hands up, I welcome the refreshment of its bounty.  With arms open, hands up, I receive all the blessings from The Almighty.  With hands up, palms down, I release fears, uncertainty, and worry.  With hands up, palms up, I am thankful for the bounty that the Divine One has given me. With arms wide, hands down, I push down those things that are not for me.  Those things that are toxic and negative to my body, my mind, my spirit, I push them deep into the ocean’s current, never to be brought to my sacred space again.  With hands up, palms up, I give thanks to the Creator who uniquely crafted me and you for this moment and space in time.    I thank the Creator for this gift called life, broken forth from a watery womb.  Knees bent, head down, I bow in submission not because of patriarchy principles or misguided theological constructs, but I bow in honor to the One who created me knowing that the One has my best interest at heart.  The One to whom I bow never leaves.  The One to whom I bow created the water.  This is why I bow.    As the waves and ripples of life continue to flow around me, I will remember this sacred thought and moment.  I go down to the ocean’s edge and I come up.  I go down and I come up.  I am new.  I am free.  I am fearless.  I am refreshed.  I come up from the ocean. The ocean is wide, but my faith is deeper.  

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