Fr. Adrian Budica: Christ is in our midst!

Fr. Andrew Honoré: He is and ever shall be!

Fr. Adrian: Always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.

Fr. Adrian: Amen! We welcome you back to our podcast, The Wounded Healer: Visiting Christ, Visiting the Sick, Visiting Our Selves. Today we would like to continue the conversation that we had on the topic of grief, and I have the honor and the blessing to be here with Fr. Andrew, who will introduce himself in just a few minutes. As usually, we welcome your comments and your thoughts. We appreciate all the emails you have sent to us, and we encourage you to continue to email to us with your questions and your comments based on the episodes that we have recorded thus far.

But today, on the topic of grief, Fr. Andrew, because you have just completed your clinical pastoral education unit, and you had something to share, I thought that maybe we can talk of grief in light of this theme of abandonment, which again relates so much with the idea of grief and loss. So before that, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners? Say a few words about your background, where you are today, in your pastoral training, in your ministry, and maybe about your CPE most recently, your CPE unit.

Fr. Andrew: Yes, absolutely. My name is Fr. Andrew Honoré. I am a third-year seminarian at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, and I’m in a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese, and I’m currently serving as the interim pastor of St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in South Glens Falls, New York. Yeah, just this past summer I did complete my unit of CPE, of clinical pastoral education, back in California, at St. Joseph’s Hospital. It was really a wonderful Catholic hospital. They very much appreciated the work that the CPE students and their whole chaplain ministry really provides in the hospital, so it was a great experience to be able to do that there.

Fr. Adrian: Now, some of you listeners may know this already, or you may remember some of the episodes we recorded in the past, of the seminarians at St. Vladimir’s, the unit of clinical pastoral education is a requirement for everybody in the Master of Divinity program at St. Vladimir’s, and this has been a requirement I think five years now, since 2012, which I think is a blessing not just for seminarians themselves that complete this unit, but, because of their transformation, for the people that they minister to in the hospital setting and subsequently when they go in their other ministry in parishes. The training that they receive in that unit is of help to them. I believe, even though, again, maybe very few of them end up being chaplains full-time, that unit itself is of help to them.

So, how about you, Fr. Andrew? When you first heard about CPE as a requirement, you were at St. Vladimir’s and you probably heard quite early that you have to complete this core unit. Some of the things that you heard about CPE, maybe you expected, the folklore around it from people that were there before you? [Laughter] What did you expect, going into CPE?

Fr. Andrew: Well, in all honesty I was not particularly excited about having to complete my unit of CPE. It is… There is a degree of difficulty to it. It is over the summer, and it’s a very large time commitment. And I also had heard very mixed things about it from my peers. Some of them had incredible experiences; others not so much. I know a few people that I guess didn’t appreciate it very much. But I guess what I expected… I expected it to be—I don’t know if “cheesy” is the right word, but a lot of the things I had heard was that it was really touchy-feeling and vague—

Fr. Adrian: [Laughter] Yes.

Fr. Andrew: —and not… There wasn’t a whole lot of concrete things, like I, as a potentially future priest, there aren’t a whole lot of things for me as an Orthodox Christian to learn from CPE. But I was proved very quickly to be very wrong in that assumption, and it really ended up being a sort of boot camp for pastoral care, where you’re really just thrown right into the thick of things.

Fr. Adrian: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: And you’re not really given a whole lot. Frankly, you’re not given a whole lot of guidance up front. “Oh, hey, this is what you say when someone says this” or “This is how you deal with this sort of situation.” There were maybe a couple of lectures that were given about kind of speaking generally about being with people in the hospital and dealing with people who are going through loss or just through immense suffering. But at the end of the day, it’s us and the patients. It’s the student and the patient, the chaplain and the patient. And there’s no… There’s no key that someone can give you to learning how to speak to those, to people that are suffering. There’s no quick saying or lesson, like: “Oh, if you say this, this is going to solve this problem” or “This is going to get them to open up to you.” It really is, to a certain extent, trial and error. I feel like that’s not a good way of saying it, but…

Fr. Adrian: No, no, no, it makes a lot of sense, actually. In CPE, we talk so much about the clinical method of learning. So you know clinical terms: we call it action, reflection, and new action, but that’s yet another way of saying trial and error. Much of what is learned in CPE, much of what I continue to learn, is actually through this, through action, doing something, coming back and looking back and reflecting, I recognize: “Oops, I could have done that better. That worked well; that not so much. That was really not called for.” So learning from that, trial, error, looking back and doing something different now. That’s the hope for the education.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think another aspect of it, besides just the actually going out and visiting people who are sick and suffering, was our group sessions, and how important really those were to me. In fact, I feel like oftentimes those were the more impacting moments throughout CPE, because the sort of self-reflection and really the… really diving deep into yourself and having other people kind of dive deep into your past and your experiences and your thought process—it’s a really difficult thing, especially the approach that our CPE supervisor took was really… He referred to it as the pathological approach, really trying to get at what it is, what kind of things in our background, what kind of things in our past experience, is keeping us from being present to the patients that we’re supposed to be visiting; what’s keeping us from hearing them; what’s keeping us from giving them the space to be able to talk about their grief, to talk about their sickness, talk about their loss. Some of those, that family history, difficult experiences that we—that I’ve had in my past, sad, my own experiences of loss and my own—really, my own dislike of pain, and my own way I really tried to run away from that.

Fr. Adrian: Sure.

Fr. Andrew: And having to really confront that, one, it’s difficult. It’s exhausting. I just remember coming home, day after day, just utterly wiped out. It doesn’t seem… A Tuesday or a Thursday were classroom days, and half the day we’d be sitting in a room, discussing things. I just remember being just physically drained.

Fr. Adrian: Yes. Yes, it is.

Fr. Andrew: The emotional toll, really taking it, really being felt physically. It was really a unique experience.

Fr. Adrian: Yes. Yes, absolutely. There are several things. I really appreciate this discussion, Father. You know, you used the word “pastoral boot camp,” so in many ways it is very intense, and the way you described it, it makes perfect sense at the end of the day… Even you and I attempting to function at that acute level of even active listening, it’s a really intense kind of concentration, to be able to hear somebody, and not just the facts of it, but to hear their feelings and to empathize, it’s absolutely normal at the end of the day. Self-care is so important, but to come back and to recognize that all this is exhausting, emotionally and physically, at the end of a day of that kind of pastoral work.

The other thing that you mentioned other than the intensity of it, the way you described your group and your supervisor, it sounds to me like he, your supervisor, and your group together, you were able to find a place of connection, of trust to each other. You mentioned, for instance, the pathological approach is another way of looking at yourself. I think you described it as parts of me that keep me from being able to minister better to others. So with that approach, for you to be able to look into yourself and to allow others to be so intimately connected and seeing in yourself, it sounds like there was a place of really safety and trust in the group, where you could offer feedback to your peers, and they could also see in you things that otherwise, again, you might share yourself with those who got to know you and point to you. Is that kind of how you look back on it?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I thank God for the group that I was in. I know… I’ve spoken with some of my peers who maybe didn’t have quite the same experience with their group, and maybe they got… Their discussions got kind of side-tracked by political discussions or theological discussions. We… I think it was the first day of our actual group time, our supervisor said, “Hey, what are the rules for the group?” And everyone kind of said, “Hey, we don’t want to just give advice. We don’t want to get side-tracked by theological discussions.” We recognized that we were there for a purpose, and, generally speaking, we stuck to that purpose. Everyone became—if they weren’t open at the beginning, they became more open. And people who were not emotional whatsoever… And there were times in discussions where things got really intense and really heated between two particular people who had actually gone into the group knowing each other—they went to seminary together; they were from the same town. The other people in the group kind of thought they were really close friends, and then all of a sudden it kind of came out that they don’t even consider themselves friends at all! And having that whole discussion, it was really intense!

Fr. Adrian: Absolutely. And not to say that it’s denying one’s theology; it’s a matter of saying we’re not here to debate theological things. I like the way you described it: we’re here with the specific purpose of being, of learning how to be of help ministering to other people. So with that, putting that debate as: this is not what we’re here to do; we’re here to learn about ourselves as a ministry to others.

Fr. Andrew: And it helped that… I think in the group there were five of us—there were six of us Orthodox, and there were four Catholics and one Protestant. I feel like we all kind of took a similar approach to it. That’s the thing: we were all actually secure in our own theology. We didn’t have to… We didn’t feel the need to defend ourselves every step of the way. Whereas I think there’s a lot less… Some people tend to be a lot less secure in that and feel like they have to protect themselves.

Fr. Adrian: Yes. Yeah, that could possibly be a part of it. The pathological approach that you mentioned earlier made me think of… I mean, the title of this podcast and the theme that we explore so many times is “wounded healer.” It’s exactly this idea of visiting our own wounds. We called the subtitle “Visiting Christ”—Christ is visiting us and we’re visiting Christ. We’re visiting the sick, but we’re visiting ourselves. The way you described it: What are the parts of me—my experience, my life, my relationships—that may prevent me from being closer and a better minister and being a caregiver to others? Learning how those wounds, those parts of myself that are, you know, I’m a wounded healer, can be towards ministry.

So with that, I guess, of the many patients—my guess is that you’ve seen quite a few patients in your time there—any one particular that comes to your mind?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, there is. One woman I was able to visit—I actually did my final verbatim on this visit. There’s a lot of aspects about this visit that are still very vivid to me. It was… I go into this room. A woman had called… Actually, a nurse had called the spiritual care department and said, “Hey, there’s this woman who probably really could talk to a chaplain.” And the conversation… So I was on call that day, so I went to visit her, and the conversation actually got… kind of got a little bit of a false start, kind of got off on the wrong foot. It was a little bit awkward, but she was, this woman was just really hurting. She was in a lot of pain. She was suffering from an auto-immune disease that she had actually really struggled with for about 15 years prior to this and had gone through some treatment, and the symptoms had died down, but had really flared up again, and she was just suffering greatly from it.

And it turned out that her husband—I think they had been married for 25-plus years—when she started having some of those symptoms again, of auto-immune disease, he basically told her: “I’m not going through this with you again. If it turns out to be this same disease, I’m moving out and getting an apartment.” He said that he would still support her financially, but… They have kids. One of their daughters and their granddaughter lived with them. When—I think it was over the fourth of July, she ended up having to go to the hospital. They had all this testing done. The test results came back, and the doctor came in, started explaining what was going on. The husband was there, and in the middle of the doctor giving the diagnosis, just walked out and left, and went out and left her, that very moment.

She didn’t feel like she could talk to anyone about it. They didn’t really tell the granddaughter. Their granddaughter was like: “Grandpa, why aren’t you home during the week?” because he would come by on the weekends to see them, to see the granddaughter and his kids, but there was almost no relationship outside of just taking care of bills and things like that between her and her husband, the woman, the patient and her husband. So she was just really suffering from this abandonment by a person who should have been supporting her and should have been there for her during this really difficult time: she’s in a lot of pain and in the hospital quite often.

Fr. Adrian: Wow. What was it like for you, to be sitting there for her and to hear her say all this?

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it was heart-breaking. There was… I mean… Because it was just one thing after another for this woman, and she just felt alone, like… She told me things that she had never told anyone else before, and she was really suffering from that, and suffering from some of her own decisions that she had made. She was a devout Catholic, but was wondering: Do I just talk to my priest about this? Can I—can I be forgiven?

Fr. Adrian: Oh, wow. “Can I be forgiven?”

Fr. Andrew: To be able to be there for someone like that, and to have that sort of opening-up was really unique, for me, because even thinking back at the beginning of CPE through some of my earlier verbatims and some of my earlier experiences… I remember going through a verbatim with our group and getting to a kind of intense part of our conversation with a patient. And I didn’t even realize it, but I changed the subject. One of my peers said, “Hey, Andrew, why did you change the subject here? It sounded like she was going to really get into it at this moment and really talk about what really was bothering her, what was really at the heart of that loss.” And only really through self-reflection and through looking at my own family history and some of my own experiences, recognizing my evasion of pain and how if, when these painful situations come up, you just try to smooth them over, even just in my own family, in my own past, things that were difficult or… Since this is tragic, in order to deal with it, in order to stay sane, you kind of smooth things over, smooth things over in your mind. And I was unknowingly doing that with my patients.

Fr. Adrian: Mm-hmm. I recognize that about myself. It’s so subtle, and, again, unless I have a peer and people in a peer group and a supervisor that can help me recognize how subtly I might change the conversation, I don’t even know. And another way that I might do that, when it’s so uncomfortable, again, I avoid that pain. We discard it, Father, so well. I avoid that pain by getting to that higher ground of advice. Well, I’m not there any more, or it’s not a part of me any more. And in giving the patient something, I’m actually giving myself a pep talk, but it’s more unconsciously, about the pain that’s stirred up in me, that’s making me uncomfortable. So maybe the advice that I might try to give somebody else is more for myself, without even knowing it.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, so if… I mean, I can speak of it in terms of progress made over the unit. Really, the difference between my visit with that woman, who was really able to just speak freely and understood that I was there to be there for her and to listen to her, I don’t think that visit would have gone the same way had it taken place six, seven weeks prior to that.

I can even think about how the very next Sunday after that visit and after going through that verbatim, I had an encounter with a parishioner at the church that I was serving at, where she… I asked how she was doing, and she actually started getting into some… a fairly sad topic, and it was something I had dealt with in my own life. I just asked her, “Well, how are you doing with that?” And she was kind of almost surprised, and she went on to talk about it. I remember at the end of our conversation, she said, “Andrew, thank you for asking me. Normally, whenever I’ve brought that up in the past, people just try to change the subject or go on to something different.” It was kind of, again, one of those moments, like: “Wow. I don’t know if I would have done that two months prior to this. I probably would have changed the subject, too.”

Fr. Adrian: You may have. You may have, yeah, until you actually recognize: I have a place in myself. This reminds me of something in myself. And the more you’re aware of it, the more you’re able to ask that question of: How are you doing with that? Or to suggest this is not just a social-type of surface conversation, but what I’m hearing you say could be really something painful, is it? In different words, it’s kind of like giving the person… They heard it, and they eventually came back and said, “Thank you for listening.”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Adrian: Sometimes I will walk away with that sense of “Thank you for what?”

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I just asked how you were doing!

Fr. Adrian: I didn’t quite do anything.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah.

Fr. Adrian: Sometimes I’m even… The way you described the patient in a variety of suffering, and loss and grief that she was going through, I imagine myself walking away myself, maybe feeling regretful or guilty of abandoning her.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, I remember, in my verbatim, I presented it, and I was like: I don’t even know what to do with this. I was telling the group I felt like I didn’t do anything. My supervisor just kind of let me talk.

Fr. Adrian: Yeah, there you go. He also “abandoned” you, so to say: he gave you space.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, to have to kind of give my reflection on that visit. I was like, well, I didn’t do anything like that. She just had all these awful things going on in her life, and I couldn’t do anything for her. Then my supervisor was like: “You know what, Andrew? I think you need to keep this verbatim, because this is exactly what we’re trying to do here. She, this woman was able to tell you things that she couldn’t talk to anyone about, and how freeing that is for her, and how healing that is for her. That really is that first step for her.” And he’s the one who first brought up the idea of: “Hey, considering how your other verbatims went, you didn’t interrupt, you didn’t try and change the subject, you didn’t avoid the pain: you just sat there with it.” Yeah, so it was really…

Fr. Adrian: I want to bring this to a conclusion, and maybe reflecting a little theologically. So when I say “abandonment,” I guess the first thing that comes to my mind, Psalm 21 or 22, which is also the first verse in the words of Christ on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou abandoned me?” Sometimes when I sit with patients and I think about it, it brings me back to how I understand the presence of God. We say, “Heavenly King who fillest all things; Father, you are present and fillest all things.” So the paradox of both being true: God is everywhere and feeling abandoned by God in a place. And our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ on the cross, saying, “My God, my God, why hast thou abandoned me?” I don’t know—any thoughts, theologically, on how you handle that?

Fr. Andrew: Oh, yeah, absolutely, especially with that psalm. I mean, in my relationship with you, that psalm has been very important. I remember talking to you about, really, issues of… dealing with my own issues of doubt and my inability to really see God in my life, and my tendency to smooth over things that are difficult, and just to make, I guess, sort of the secularized… to secularize certain experiences that I’ve had. I remember you suggested to me, “You know what, Andrew, when you say your prayers, say this psalm every day.”

Fr. Adrian: Wow. I said that to you?

Fr. Andrew: You did say that to me!

Fr. Adrian: Ah, okay.

Fr. Andrew: And that psalm has helped me to… Despite what it’s saying, and the psalmist is saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” but that’s also an acknowledgment of his presence. And to see the way in which God works, even in difficult moments; to see the way in which, when Christ is experiencing that, says that in experiencing that abandonment, is also the very act by which we are saved, and by which salvation comes to the world.

Fr. Adrian: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: So in those moments of abandonment, it’s also potentially a moment for our salvation.

Fr. Adrian: Yes. Again, how beautiful! It brings me back again so much. I mean, I love the story of St. Silouan of Mount Athos and the idea of his moment of utter despair is also the moment when he receives the word from Christ: “Keep your mind in hell, but despair not.” And I heard again Archimandrite Sophrony used to say about St. Silouan that he was… I mean, in his struggle, with his simple mind in many ways, but he was able to hold that unity in both places, all day, maybe all night, struggling with God. You know, he has this memory: St. Silouan yelling at God, “You are inexorable!” Meaning that no matter what I do, I won’t change you. So this idea of “I feel abandonment; I feel completely alone,” and, a few hours later, going to vespers, going to vigil, and continuing that, and having the sense: “Okay, I’m continuing this and I’m going back into the cell and again struggling with demons.” So holding anyone in between the sense of “I am in the presence of Christ resurrected” and every once in a while the sense of abandonment is part of my spiritual life. There are some that I guess that we’ll mention. It starts with “Why has God abandoned me?” and the flip of the page, if you will, once that goes back to “but you are the God that trusted,” and it goes again into praise. So how can you and I find the place between abandonment and trusting God? It’s not an easy recipe. It’s never a recipe, but it’s not an easy process.

Fr. Andrew: Yeah, and I think one of the things you said to me was, in praying that psalm and in reflecting on that psalm, is trying to see, really: Where is my cross?

Fr. Adrian: Yes.

Fr. Andrew: And, again, that… the instrument of torture and death becoming the instrument of our very salvation.

Fr. Adrian: Yes, yes, the one that we trace and we say, “Rejoice, O life-giving Cross!” Thank you so much, Fr. Andrew. I really appreciate your vulnerability, your authenticity, in expressing how much this CPE unit, this continuing pastoral education, but also your own process of going through it. Any final words?

Fr. Andrew: Other than just thank you for the opportunity to talk about it… because it really has… even to be able to reflect on that time is… It really was a unique opportunity and a unique time in my life, something that I had never really done before. So to had the opportunity to continually look back on it and reflect on the things that I learned and the lessons that are really still there for me.

Fr. Adrian: Yes, wonderful. So, thank you again, with that, and we thank all those of you that are listening. Again, we welcome your comments. Our email address is woundedhealer@ancientfaith.com. We encourage you to be of support to Ancient Faith Radio through your prayers and financially as much as you are able. At this time we give glory to God for everything that he has given us, that we may be able, in our wounds and through our wounds, to be of support to others. And with that—Christ is in our midst!

Fr. Andrew: He is and ever shall be.

Fr. Adrian: Always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.

Fr. Andrew: Amen.