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C H A M I N A DE MAGAZI NE
Leaving a Legacy to Chaminade University: A N IN T ERV IEW W I T H DR. C AT HER INE BURTON DR. CATHERINE BURTON HAS BEEN PART OF THE CHAMINADE UNIVERSITY 'OHANA FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS AS AN ADJUNCT FACULTY MEMBER, STUDENT MENTOR AND ACTIVE PARTICIPANT OF THE CHAMINADE COMMUNITY. HER COMMITMENT TO BUILDING A POSITIVE FUTURE HAS LED HER TO MANY REMARKABLE EXPERIENCES AND RECENTLY CULMINATED IN HER BECOMING THE NEWEST MEMBER OF CHAMINADE’S LEGACY SOCIETY.
Chaminade Magazine sat down with Dr. Burton to learn more about her background, teaching and experiences, and about her heartfelt decision to leave a legacy to Chaminade. Dr. Burton, please tell me about your professional background, and about your education as a clinical psychologist. I am a clinical psychologist with a three-year post-doctoral training in systems theories and family therapy. As I began my career in the early 1980s, my great interest was in the burgeoning field of whole systems thinking. My interest was guided by the idea that everything is interconnected as part of a greater whole. This led me on a decadelong journey to discover how this thinking applied to individuals, families, communities, organizations, societies and to the planet as a whole. On this journey, I gained an understanding of the relationships between the new physics, psychology and the world’s great spiritual and religious philosophies, which seemed to provide a new way of thinking about the emerging issues facing humanity and the planet as a whole. It was a time of great enlightenment when many leadingedge thinkers were finding a language that could give voice to this new paradigm and its application to the field of psychology. Can you say more about what you discovered on your search? If I may, I would like to answer this by mentioning some of the new paradigm solutions I participated in with the hope that they might serve as a springboard for others in their own search for answers.
How does your background on the new paradigm relate to some of the experiences we are facing now? In the early 1980s, I encountered many leading edge ideas through my professional career. I taught at Antioch University in Seattle; I trained with Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture, at the Chinook Learning Community (now the Whidbey Institute) and I studied cooperative economic systems at The Schumacher Institute. Out of these experiences, I began researching and editing an EarthBank economic newsletter which became the EarthBank Guide to Sustainable Economics and included one of the earliest directories for socially responsible investing. As a result, I was asked to become part of a group to convene the first North American Bioregional Congress (NABC) with the goal of launching a non-political Green Movement. I was trained by a Native American elder and Quaker in consensus decision making to help facilitate the 200 attendees in coming to consensus on the principles and values of this movement. As my thinking expanded to finding solutions for planetary governance, my interest began to shift toward peace-making, and this led to my participating in a search for common ground intensive between those who wanted peace through armament and those who wanted peace through disarmament. The common ground that came out of that dialogue was the need for security and communication. This took place just before the birth of the telecommunications revolution. This intensive was part of the training I received to become part of one of the first citizen diplomacy trips to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s.
This trip became an extraordinary experience of recognizing our common humanity. Like many others at that time, I was becoming a global citizen learning to think globally and act locally, and experiencing and helping to birth a new world that was coming into existence. When did you start teaching at Chaminade? After living in Seattle and in the Bay Area, I moved back to Hawai'i. It was in the early ‘90s when I became part of the adjunct faculty at Chaminade focused on teaching graduate psychology courses in the Master of Science in Counseling Psychology program.
“Giving to Chaminade became a major way I could help build a better world.” Why did teaching at Chaminade interest you? From the very start, I could feel a sense of graciousness and community at Chaminade. I loved teaching at Chaminade, the smaller classes, the students who were—and are—so interested in what they were learning. I realized that this sense of community came from deeply felt values that informed both the educational programs and the Chaminade community itself.
