A Forest Knows Things

“A forest knows things.  They wire themselves up underground.  There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see.  Root plasticity, solving problems, and making decisions.  Fungal synapses.  What else do you want to call it?  Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”

The Overstory by Richard Powers

I’ve always been drawn to the woods; the book The Overstory gave me a sense of why that might be.  Connection has always fascinated me and drives a theological sense of where the divine appears.  ACPE’s work is tied to internal connections that impact our lives in a larger spiritual care and education ecosystem.  

I spent last week with our strategic partners in Vancouver, British Columbia.  The Canadian Association of Spiritual Care hosted its annual conference and invited the National Association of Catholic Chaplains (USA), the National Association for Jewish Chaplains (USA), and the ACPE to participate.  We meet regularly by Zoom, but being together in person bore more fruitful discussions about the issues facing the ecosystem of spiritual care in the US and Canada.  Those discussions are a powerful reminder about how we cannot do our work in a silo.  Shared information, common goals, and similar adjoining interests are good reasons for attending to those relationships.   Obviously, they all are interested in our USDE work as they desire the best education for their chaplain candidates. It was good for all of us to converse about the dynamic field of spiritual care and education.   At the beginning of the conference, a powerful reconciliation council reminded us of our shared work in anti-bias and anti-racism work.

Strategic Planning

The ACPE Board spent most of its time in Atlanta working on the strategic planning process.   The board grounded itself in the strategy statement that grew out of the surveys and listening sessions in Phases 1 and 2 of the strategic planning process: 

“ACPE will strengthen its network of spiritual care educators and providers in the near term with a longer-term strategy to engage the network of members in increasing the value of professional spiritual care for individuals, families, communities, institutions, and potential spiritual care professionals.” 

From the board minutes:

The board agrees that defining our place in the field/ecology of spiritual care and provision and defining spiritual care as engaging in the elimination of bias in various systems should be priority number one in the implementation phase. 

The prioritization of internal outcomes included member experience enhancements, integration of and support for psychotherapists, integrated communications across committees and commissions, updated standards, curriculum, and tools, staffing structure and budgets, governance structure, and restoring the connections that the old regional model provided. 

The bottom line: the board heard and is integrating into the planning process the need to strengthen local connections.

Accreditation 

The Accreditation Commission brought several important pieces of work to the board for approval to move forward.  The impetus for the work might be seen as only coming from responding to the USDE’s requests for our re-recognition, but the work reflects changes that many see make us better in our clinical practice.  You have seen the work of the Outcomes Work Group.  This group, chaired by Maurice Applebaum and Liam Robins met three times a week for 2 hours from October 2022 into the spring to complete this work.

The members of the group included ACPE Certified Educators Julie Hanada, Amani Legagneur, Tamekia Milton, Judy Ragsdale, Matt Rhodes, Maureen Shelton, and Dr. Carrie Doehring, the Clifford Baldridge Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Iliff School of Theology, and Jana Troutman-Miller, former chair of the Board of Chaplaincy Certification, Inc. Please note the names of these folks and thank them for their dedication and time.   

The board affirmed their work, and these outcomes will be utilized in a pilot where centers will use a new process for evaluating students based on the new outcomes and the request by the USDE to reflect student achievement more clearly.    Along with the outcomes work group, the board would also like to recognize and thank the Accreditation Commission for its good and deep work these past months.

Change is hard and runs up against our brain’s way of operating.  We know that is daunting personal work as we challenge our students to do the same.   The USDE is a source of learning and growth for us and continues to make us a gold standard in Spiritual Care and Education.  Our strategic partners count on this recognition, and our educational competitors (the many new CPE programs nationwide) would toast our losing it.  

Annual Conference

We will gather in New Orleans for our annual conference in several weeks.   A great addition to this year’s conference is a gathering designed for our CECs.  As we all know, support in the certification process is key to success. We are setting aside time for CEC’s to connect, learn, and integrate these new aspects of their lives.

Along with celebrating being together, the board will provide a time for members to gather and process the changes and impacts these last years have brought to the organization.  This will be in addition to the member meeting. I welcome you to join the board on Monday, May 22, from 10:00am-12:00pm unique time of reflection on what has been lost, what has been gained, and what is beginning anew. 

While in British Columbia for the meeting with the strategic partners, I went on several trail runs.  The old growth of Cyprus and pines in Canada are, in the least, awe-inspiring.  One of the ways I connect to the experience of the run is to brush each tree I run by and say, “Thank you.”  If roots and psyllium connect the forest's undergrowth, it seems to me that the reverberations of gratitude will make their way to the rest of the forest.   The experience made me aware of my gratitude for being connected to a network of folks like you doing important, healing work.  Thank you.  I am grateful.