Most seminarians at some point in their schooling do a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE. The experience is a cross between an internship as a hospital chaplain and extended group therapy. (Some say that “CPE” actually stands for “Continually Painful Experience”.) It’s a time-honored tradition for pastors-in-training—which is why, in the summer between my first and second years of seminary, I found myself working in a hospital in downtown Atlanta.
About once a week we each took our turn sleeping in an on-call room at the hospital and responding to all the needs for a chaplain throughout the night. We would carry an emergency pager that would go off every time someone went into cardiac arrest, or a new trauma patient came into the emergency room, or a patient died. And, despite the fact that the beeping of this pager could wake Lazarus, I was scared to death that I would sleep through it.
I would put the pager right by my head while I slept. Or, I would constantly wake up and check it. Or, some nights early on, I wouldn’t sleep at all.
