“Above all, trust in the slow work of God”. –Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

Farmers can teach us so much about the “slow work of God”. They till the soil, they plant, they water, and then they wait, they hope, they pray and trust for all the right conditions for new life to blossom forth. All that goes into the planting process mirrors our life’s journey! As we go from spring to summer we delight in the new life we see around us. It definitely has been worth waiting for.

We invite you through this newsletter to experience the fruits of Dr. Kevin Van Eron and Sister Beth Saner’s work and wisdom. Sister Lorrita Verhey, one of our newest staff members at Claret Center is our featured staff member and she shares with us a book she recommends. She is an excellent Spiritual Director and is available to journey with you.

Please go to our web site www.claretcenter.org to meet the whole staff and acquaint yourself with the “Resources for the Human Journey” we desire to share with you.

Peace !

Connection with ourselves and others often involves asking questions and seeking answers. Who are we? What are our strengths and our weaknesses? What resources are available to us? Where might hidden opportunities or talents lie? What obstacles can we anticipate and avoid?

For over a quarter of a century, Claret Center has offered psychotherapy, spiritual direction, complementary body therapies and educational experiences to individuals and groups in the Chicago area. Over the past summer, we expanded our services to include a wider array of psychological and educational assessments and consultation choices. With the addition of our enhanced psychological assessment services, we hope to provide even more resources to clients, their families, schools, religious communities, employers, and other groups as they seek to better understand themselves and the important people in their lives.

What are some reasons people seek an assessment? Students, whether children or adults, might look for testing to determine the presence of learning, attention, developmental, or other problems that affect their abilities to learn and succeed in school. Many times individuals have found school to be painful without realizing that their skills and abilities were not well served by the teaching approaches employed. Both private and public schools hope to support an ever widening diversity of learning styles through development of individual learning plans. Assessments are required to determine strengths and weaknesses, as well as to point students, parents, and educators in the right direction for promoting learning.

Employers, job seekers, candidates for religious life, and religious communities find assessments helpful in highlighting vocational interests, setting realistic objectives, determining leadership potential, and helping to guide people into life paths for which they are best suited. Assessments are increasingly required to determine goodness-of-fit for men and women being considered for ministry. Groups seek determination of leadership styles, personality types, or conflict resolution skills as a part of team building, role mapping, or succession planning processes.

At times, problematic emotions or behaviors surface at school, in the workplace, at home, or in the community that may point to the presence of more serious concerns or challenges for individuals and groups. When psychological interventions or medical treatments are implemented, assessment helps to determine effectiveness and progress through milestones toward healing.

Psychological and educational assessments are offered by a variety of professionals. Clinical psychologists, such as those on staff at Claret Center, assess and treat individuals with a wide variety of psychological, emotional, interpersonal, or behavioral problems. School psychologists test psycho-educational abilities of students and recommend actions to facilitate learning and overall school functioning. Neuropsychologists are part of a specialized discipline that focuses primarily on cognition—the ability to think, remember, or learn—often under the circumstances of organic brain disease or neurological damage caused by physical injury, exposure to toxins, stroke, substance abuse, severe neglect, or physical abuse. Social workers evaluate social resources and challenges, as well as their interactions with clients’ functioning. Medical personnel are concerned with organic, physical disorders or injuries. All of these professionals are likely to work with or be referred by one another as parts of a team depending on the needs of the people who seek out their advice and help. A comprehensive assessment considers the biological, psychological, social, spiritual, and academic/work functioning of people who arrive with the quest for self-knowledge, painful challenges, unsuccessful relationships, or vocational hopes and dreams.

The assessment process usually follows a standard format. An interview opens the evaluation with the person being assessed, as well as with parents/guardians, family members, peers, school or work officials, and other key observers who might be able to give a well-rounded picture of the person and her/his functioning. Physiological factors, if any, are identified, occasionally requiring referral for a medical evaluation. Sometimes the person is observed in critical domains, such as school, team meetings, community functions, or home environments. Both standardized and non-standardized tests, surveys, questionnaires, and other tools may be administered to help determine how well skills are developed or where deficits lie. Once all possible or relevant information has been gathered, the assessor formulates an answer to the referral question, writes a report of findings, and develops a list of possible interventions to promote improvement or further development of skills, knowledge, options, or opportunities. Finally, the report is presented to the person who requested the assessment and any other important people in her/his life.

Psychological, educational, and vocational assessments probe a wide range of abilities, including various types of intelligence, language skills, memory, learning styles, attention and executive functioning capacities, as well as emotional temperament and ranges of expression. Academic or vocational skills, such as reading abilities, math skills, oral and written expression, fluency and processing speed, listening and reading comprehension, and expressive/receptive language abilities are evaluated.

People being assessed have a host of rights and protections. They have a right to information about the nature and purpose of assessment tools or procedures that will be used. They have the right to accept or refuse evaluation. Assessment reports should be made available to individuals following assessment, and the findings, conclusions, and recommendations be thoroughly explained. Whether or not to participate, to partner with the evaluator, to determine the best and most accurate picture of their functioning resides within the purview of the person being evaluated. Finally, individuals being assessed have the right to confidentiality—to have their information protected to the fullest extent of the law. Assessors often start their processes with an explanation of these protections, as well as any exceptions to those rights that might exist, such as providing reports to referring agencies, schools, employers, or superiors.

Our assessment team is directed by Dr. Kevin Van Eron, a licensed clinical psychologist on staff at Claret Center. Dr. Van Eron has over 12 years of educational, psychological, emotional, and behavioral assessment and consultation experience. In addition to conducting assessments, Dr. Van Eron supervises a team of clinical psychology interns and post-doctorate practitioners. All assessment services are offered on a low-cost basis and, whenever possible, coordinated with insurance plans.

The next time you find yourself considering or in need of a psychological assessment or consultation about what connections these types of evaluations might help you or others form, please feel free to give Dr. Van Eron at Claret Center a call, 773-643-6259. We would appreciate the opportunity to discuss our assessment services with you or with others you feel might have an interest.

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What can be said about connection when the world seems to be coming apart at the seams? It is a question that has lingered on the edge of my consciousness all summer. The question has been nurtured as I read Radical Amazement by Judy Cannato, Radical Optimism by Beatrice Bruteau and Jesus and the New Universe Story by Cletus Wessels. Musings that began in the long light days of late spring must find fruition in words on paper now at harvest time.

In recent years many people have become familiar with the notion that every person is only six degrees removed from every other person on the planet. There has even been a television show called ‘Six Degrees.’ What an amazing reality – six degrees. It speaks to me of the deeper truth that the whole of creation, all that is, is rooted in connection. Recent discoveries in science suggest that “all creation has come about through a single cosmic event, often called the Big Bang. Creation is not a static fixed event, but a cosmogenesis, an ongoing act of creation and creativity. Because all life is part of this single cosmic event, all life is connected at its most basic level.” Cannato, p. 33

The implications of this idea are mind boggling. All the matter and energy to create an entire universe came to be in that initial moment. Not only are you and I within the six degrees of separation but all the matter that ever has been or ever will be is connected.

We literally are one with the stars and the planets, with the organic and inorganic matter that comprise the planet we call home, and with all the people who together make up the cultural and religious diversity of the global village we inhabit together.

Native Americans and other indigenous peoples around the world intuitively understood this radical and deep connection that is now being articulated by scientists. It guided their sense of oneness with their environment and shaped their reverence for every element that was part of the Great Oneness that surrounded them. At the core of our being we, too, know the connection. We long to live a kind of at-one-ment with all that is or at the least with each other.

What if all the messages telling us to fear, to mistrust, to be skeptical, to compete, to accumulate, to stand over and against one another and our world were suddenly turned inside out? How would we be in an environment that encouraged us to release our fear to stand together believing and accepting that others are not only trustworthy and willing to share but are co-creators of a new heaven and a new earth where all aspects of our environment are worthy of reverence because of our common beginnings? It is worth noticing our own response to even the idea of such a world. Do we lean into the idea with longing or does our internal wall go up in resistance? Do we feel an inner resonance with possibility or a cynical laugh at how ridiculous the possibility seems? Check out your own inner space and notice your response.
(The reader might pause to notice)

Belief in a fundamental interconnectedness of all that is, is a kind of turning things on their head. It does call for a new imagining of our place in the whole of creation. It invites each of us as individual human beings to look inward to our own inner connections. Are we living from a place of integration and wholeness? Are we allowing our full being to meet the world each day? Or do we find ourselves compartmentalized and/or fractured into separate inner pieces? Or do we even know how we live with ourselves? Addressing the question of how I am with myself is the beginning of knowing how I might be with and in the world outside of me, that world of ‘six degrees.’ (The reader might take a moment to notice their own desire to be with the question: How am I with myself?)

Claret Center is organized around the questions raised by noticing how am I with myself, with others, with my world and with the One who is the Source of it all. If your own wondering invites you to engage the questions more deeply over time, consider calling the center to investigate the many possibilities available where you could continue to wonder out loud with another. (Claret Center phone: 773-643-6259)

I am acutely aware that these few words barely scratch the surface of what is implied when we acknowledge connection as fundamental to our existence in the 21st Century.

I close with a poem suggested by the season of autumn.

Walking in September
I see flowerbeds overgrown
and trees letting go old green leaves
too tired to hold on for season’s turning.

I hear the murmur of silence
where summer bird song once warbled freely.

I feel on my face invisible threads of glistening spider silk freely spun
connecting tree to lamp post to park bench to…
only spider knows.

I see,
I hear,
I feel
a season slipping into new time –
unfolding Mystery.

It is the image of glistening spider silk connecting – threading together seemingly unrelated entities – that invites me to invite you to consider long into our collective future, what it really means to live fundamentally connected to ourselves and to all that is.

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