Good Grief: Took just ONE unit of CPE and Look What Happened

Here is a reflection offered by one of our CPE alumni, Karl Paulnack. He’s had quite a spiritual journey. CPE was a part of that. Enjoy!

“Sometimes a non-profit will want me to come speak or work with their group, and they imagine my speaker’s fee to be enormous (emphasis on “imagine”!) and so they ask with trepidation. My response is often, “Look, I don’t do this kind of work for the money. This is actually a sort of “ministry” for me. I do it to try to make the world a better place, to help people. I’m 100 percent certain we’ll be able to agree on a fee.” I’ve never been wrong about that. 

Speaking and writing in public is, for me, a form of ministry, an effort to help people hold their experience and make meaning. The answer to the question I get so often, “why don’t you write a book?” is “because public writing is a form of ministry for me.” It is the forum where I try to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, one definition of ministry.

Shepherding and mentoring various men’s groups I am part of is a form of ministry for me. I avoid using this word, because so many people in those groups have religious trauma. They see religion, and therefore anything spiritual, as suspect and potentially harmful, and they have good reason to do so. I myself fell into, and escaped from, a Christian cult earlier in my life. I know the dangers and damages.

I try to help people when I can. I sit with people battling addiction or cancer, families in the ER when I am on duty as a chaplain, or men in retreat weekends fighting through shyness or insecurity to connect with others. I try to help all the people who carry music keep going. In my consulting life, if I’m doing executive coaching or conflict resolution, that’s the same work, it is all ministry, for me, but I fastidiously avoid the word. I have been a “minister in the closet” for some time.

As is so often the case, a variety of life circumstances have now conspired to blow the hinges off my closet door.

This weekend, in a beautiful traditional Quaker ritual called the Clearness Committee, on the shores of Lake Wisconsin, in Merrimac, I finalized a process of self- and group-reflection which unfolded over the past months. This process was completed yesterday with my being Recognized and Recorded by a consensus of the Clearness Committee as a Minister of Word, Deed, and Sacrament. 

I have never been attracted to ordination or legal status as a Minister. In fact, when this was first proposed to me I rejected the idea outright. I did not seek this. A piece of me doesn’t want it. It came for me, in the form of Truth appearing like a stranger pounding on the door of my conscience in the middle of the night, offering me two stark choices: admit Truth, or deny it. The only authentic response for me is to invite it in.

To wear the title “Minister” in today’s America is to invite endless opportunities to repeatedly disappoint other people, and I was already doing well there without the title. It is to carry all the baggage of living in a culture that has elevated spiritual hypocrisy to the level of performance art . It is to embrace humility which, inconveniently, comes from a process called “humiliation”. To be a minister today is, at times, to be subject to mockery and scorn which, ironically, builds the very muscles we use to do the work. 

I come out as a minister now because I have no other authentic option. It is neither convenient nor inconvenient. I am neither better nor worse off than I was the day before, neither holier nor unholier. It offers as many advantages as disadvantages, as many benefits as costs. It is simply True. It is who I have become. It is how I choose to live.

Quakers, like many other spiritual communities, do not ordain; they recognize. They understand the deep truth that all people are ministers; we all carry the divine spark, can all love each other, can all teach and lead each other. 

I am a Minister without a religion or denomination, without ordination, without a job, a position, or pay; a Minister without a church or an agenda to promote. 

I am genuinely and staunchly Interfaith. I am a clinically-trained Interfaith hospital chaplain, but my personal practice is also genuinely Interfaith. I am Buddhist, Catholic, and Shaman. I practice with Wampanoag and Shoshone and Mohawk and Anishinaabe people. My churches are AA and Rowe and Cayuga Medical Center and my Practice Group. My theology is two words: no “they”. All people belong. All are worthy of love.

A particularly dear and valued part of my practice is the space I hold for people of no faith practice, atheists and agnostics, and most especially, those who have religious trauma, who have been abused and harmed by religious systems. I undertake the practice of providing spiritual care for these victims as much as I do the fervently religious. My congregation is all the peoples of the Earth.

I don’t have any plans to change anything in my life. On one level, this weekend won’t change anything; on another level, it might change everything. I can’t know. The stole we wear, the “yoke”, is representative of the harness I put on my dog Mato when I take him for a walk every morning. It symbolizes, “someone else holds my leash.”

I accept this title and this calling. I will go where I am sent, to practice love and kindness as best I can, to be of service to others, and to aspire to live an authentic, vulnerable, deeply engaged, and public life.”

Thank you, Karl!