Rabbi Naomi Kalish on the challenges of a multifaith CPE group

How to Meet the Person in Front of You

Two students of mine, a Jew and a Christian, walked on eggshells for much of the unit along with the rest of their group. They were cautious around addressing difference and afraid of offending. Finally, one of them risked bringing in a verbatim report about a conversation that he had had with a nurse about the movie The Passion of the Christ. First, the theological differences between the two students came to the surface. They realized that they simply disagreed and that that was not going to change. Then their emotions came to the surface: this particular Jewish student felt angry, hurt and scared. And this particular Christian student felt misrepresented, sad and defensive—as well as felt a religious connection to parts of the movie. Later the second student told the first that, in response to his taking the risk to be vulnerable and address a potentially controversial topic, she too felt inclined to risk sharing her own beliefs and feelings. In the end, the two students not only understood each other’s religions better, but also had deepened their relationship. This prompted healing between traditions and also educated the students in how to have a genuine engagement through potentially painful difference.

This kind of engagement in the difficult and exhilarating task of confronting diversity is, for me, one of the primary attractions of pursuing supervisory education at The HealthCare Chaplaincy. I remember my own experience during my first unit of CPE when I was praying with a woman from the Holiness Church about faith and healing. Though very different from my own theology, I heard her crisis of faith being attached to her physical illness. And at the end of my prayer, she prayed for me, for growth and guidance along my journey! My seminary education could not prepare me for this kind of pastoral care and learning; only by being confronted with the challenge of ministering through diversity was I able to have this seminal experience.

My student groups have been religiously and culturally diverse, as has been my own training group. Currently, my fellow supervisors-in-training include an African American Muslim imam and a Russian Presbyterian minister, in addition to me—a woman rabbi from the Conservative Movement of Judaism. The parallel process of being a student in a diverse group while supervising a diverse group helps keep the excitement and struggle of addressing diversity alive. The same questions that students ask, supervisors, chaplains, and community clergy also continue to ask: Can I pray with someone from a different religion than me? If so, what does that prayer look like? Will it be offensive if I bring in my own tradition? What do I do when the person starts saying something that is religiously contrary to my own beliefs? If I engage in multifaith ministry, what does it mean to my own religious identity?

The vast majority of interfaith dialogue programs seek to build on common ground. Often we have seen this through diverse groups coming together for common causes, usually social action and social justice. One interfaith dialogue program I was involved with had its starting point as difference, believing that focusing on similarities dismisses difference, stunting progress. In a pastoral care setting, the question for me is: how can two people (a chaplain and a patient) meet in a meaningful and healing way through both their similarity and the uniqueness of their difference?

In another CPE group, my students wrestled with leading a multifaith healing service for the staff and daily meditations for the group. They initially found the experience to be either too watered down to common ground that they felt little spirituality in it, or they found that it was too particularistic and exclusive. This raised their doubts about how to pray with patients from religions different from their own. At the end of the unit, the students planned a memorial service, to acknowledge their own sense of loss for the patients who had died during the unit. They worked together planning the service, bringing in prayers that would be meaningful to them and drawing on some universal themes and rituals that felt comfortable to all of them. At this service, I heard the sadness in their voices and saw tears welling up in some of their eyes. What made a difference in their service was the relevance of the service to their lives (their own sense of loss) and that they engaged in the process of planning the service together. This gave them an experience and model for engaging in extemporaneous prayer with patients: that if the prayer addresses the real concern of the patient and has been prepared together with the patient, it can be transcendent.

Ultimately the educational training that students receive in diversity assists them in all of their work. Even within specific religions and cultures, there is great diversity right down to each individual. CPE teaches students how to connect through similarity and to engage the depths of the uniqueness of the other. Ultimately, it teaches them how to meet the person in front of them.

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