Personal story

The alarm rings and I immediately turn on the light. Yesterday, I fell back asleep for an additional 1/2 hour and felt a bit rushed to be out the door at 7:00 a.m. I have a window of about six hours to get done what I want to get done: spending time with my extended family, daily writing, practicing my harp and getting a bit of exercise. I have scheduled my daily writing for the morning. It might not be the most opportune time to do it as there is limited time between getting up and out the door.

This morning, I need to add the creation of one, two or three learning goals that I will be working on for the summer.

Yesterday we broke into two small groups and shared our personal stories. I started by saying that this is the first time that I was stepping away from my newspaper work, a vocation that I fell into some 32 years ago. There was a timbre of emotion behind all parts of my story as if all of the elements of my growing up were painful and unresolved. We had 20 minutes to relate our story and it wasn't until I got the three minute warning that I included anything from my recent past.

The experience has me feeling a bit vulnerable, although what others shared was equally as revealing. Perhaps it is just that I wasn't in control, that I demonstrated that I haven't created neat little boxes to put these essences of personal development. These are the fodder of our perception in the world, these intimate details, these formative stories. From these deep places, we connect to each other.

And it is in this fertile soil that I will work with my reflection group. With a compassionate supervisor, the five of us will help each other discern when our pastoral care work touches our vulnerabilities and colors our judgment or our action. We will hold each other accountable to work deep in these places of personal story.

The head of the Pastoral Care Department, Rev. Dr. Bill Baugh, spoke with us yesterday and explained the who, what, when and why of pastoral care and ministerial formation. He said the most important thing that we would be doing is musing and wrestling. It's not about pinning someone to the mat, he said, it is about considering a variety of ways to look at a situation: challenging ourselves and our assumptions, trying to discern an additional way of understanding something.

This musing, this wrestling, offers the possibility of an "aha" type of moment. A moment where pieces of story take on different meaning, become a different metaphor.

With that in mind, my storytelling yesterday provided fertile ground, well-tilled loose soil for me to work. I understand now that I will have a garden this summer, not my beloved patch of ground in the Upper Delaware River Valley, but the inner ground of my being.

I am the garden; we are the garden. This is the ground we tend.