Spiritual assessment

Imagine that there are three Volkswagen owners who all parked in the “red zone” in San Francisco and received tickets for illegal parking.

The first owner’s reaction will be to be angry with the police. “Don’t they have anything better to do with their time then ticket law-abiding citizens like me,” he might exclaim.

The second owner will consider the lessons to be learned from the experience. “Maybe I should simplify and get rid of my car,” he might wonder.

The third owner will smack the palm on his hand on his forehead. “What an idiot, I am,” he will say, “I knew that that was an illegal spot. The poor police; I’m sure that they had more important things to do with their time then give idiots like me tickets.”

And so was the example of a spiritual assessment technique that my teachers in my “Introduction to Clinical Pastoral Education” explained on Tuesday.

Everyone, they say, when pressured by crisis will fall into these three categories: blaming others and feeling powerless in the situation, seeing every possibility and thus lacking clarity or the ability to prioritize, or not considering themselves as equal part of the human family.

And each one would need a spiritual counselor, or an adept friend, to counsel them that they have power and need to take a little responsibility for things that happen to them, that they need to prioritize in order to find meaning, or that undoubtedly there have been times that their contribution to the conversation has been useful and that they are equal members in the community.

Of course, we all fall into all of the categories, my professors said. But in crisis, we pick one.

When I think of myself, I think I fall into the second scenario of “What can I learn? and hence am often confused by the multitude of choices and lessons that I could make or learn. But when I was relating the teaching to my fellow seminarians as I was making a potluck dish for a departing seminarian’s last supper, my colleagues suggested that, from their standpoint, I was totally clear but was functioning in the third category of thinking myself unworthy.

Whoosh, it’s a tough call!

One professor had been self-deprecating about the system. “Maybe,” he said, “you will leave this classroom and say what a bunch of hogwash!”

“Maybe,” I told him on break, “We will find a useful tool that will serve us when we listen to anyone telling us the stories of their day.”