The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology

By Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

Through a series of essays contributed by leading experts in the field, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology presents an introduction to practical theology as a major area of Christian study and practice, including an overview of its key developments, themes, methods, and future directions. 

• The first comprehensive reference work to provide a survey, description and analysis of practical theology as an area of study
• A range of leading scholars in the field provide original contributions on the major areas, issues, and figures in practical theology
• Reviews an extensive range of methods for studying theology in practice, along with sub-disciplines in theological education such as pastoral care and preaching
• Covers developments in the discipline in a range of global contexts and distinct Christian traditions
• Shows how practical theology is relevant to everyday life

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 23, 2011
• ISBN: 9781444345728

Book preview

PART I: Way of Life: Shaping Faith among Believers in Home and Society

1 Suffering

Pamela Cooper-White

2 Healing

Susan J. Dunlap

3 Playing

Jaco Hamman

4 Eating

Dorothy C. Bass

5 Loving

Herbert Anderson

6 Consuming

Katherine Turpin

7 Blessing

Christian Scharen

CHAPTER 1

Suffering

Pamela Cooper-White

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

She refused to be consoled because they are no more.

Matt. 2:18 (NRSV)

Raquel did not know how she ended up at the creek.¹ It was the place she always went to be alone and to think. Today, there was no thinking, only raw, animal pain, and sounds coming from her throat and belly that she did not recognize as her own. Memory fragments pushed their way into her consciousness, and then dissolved again like the foam swirling around the rocks in the water: the phone shrilling in their bedroom at dawn, her husband Carlos’s ashen face and then his eyes, rolling upward as if he were longing to escape his body, and his broken voice telling her There’s been an accident. David is dead. Their beautiful son David broken, dead – no, that word cannot have anything to do with David! – the words terrible accident, T-boned, totaled, the other guy ran a light, a stranger coming off his night shift, racked with remorse, the police, I’m so sorry ma’am, hospital, blood, a pale green sheet over David’s-not-David’s face, an undertaker. There were the terrible places they had to go, people to talk to, a sense of incomprehensible urgency, impossible things to see and do. There was the feeling of icy numbness, an emotional and mental hypothermia – hearing, but not comprehending – refusing to comprehend. Then came the stumbling out of the house, across the yard and half-running, half-sliding down the bank, branches whipping her arms and legs. The falling to her knees, here, on the rocks at the edge of the water, keening: Where is David? What are they doing with David?

Suffering is the starting point for all pastoral and practical theology – in Jürgen Moltmann’s words, the open wound of life in this world (1993: 49). My method, in common with most practical theologians’, is inductive, beginning with experience, rather than deductive, deriving propositions from abstract theories of human nature (either philosophical or psychological) or from doctrines of God, evil, and salvation. Therefore, the steps that I will take begin with the concreteness of human experience: (1) What is happening here? What is suffering? How do we make meaning of such pain (using both social-scientific and theological perspectives)? (2) Deepening our theological reflection, what are the theological problems raised by suffering? What might be understood in the presence of this suffering person about the nature of suffering and its relationship both to the problem of evil and to what we can discern about God’s activity in the midst of suffering? As Christian theologians, (where) do we find an answering cry of hope and redemption to the groans of suffering? (3) Turning more explicitly to praxis, what healing and liberative responses might grow out of these reflections? How might hope and redemption, love and justice, be conceived in this situation?

Binary divisions between Christian tradition and human experience, or theology and practice, are false dichotomies. Theology and the lived situation cannot be pulled apart, except as an exercise of abstract thought. The aim of practical theology is not speculation, but liberative praxis. Practical theology is not merely the application of systematic theologians’ abstract conceptions through a refinement of pastoral skills. I would also argue that it is more than critical theological reflection upon practices of the Church as they interact with practices of the world (Swinton and Mowat 2006: 5). Practical theology is a constructive theology in its own right, in which all categories of scriptural exegesis and doctrinal formulation are open for ongoing consideration and critique. As a feminist theologian, moreover, I embrace the idea, along with other feminist/womanist/mujerista, liberation, and postcolonial theologians, that human experience is an authoritative source for theology (e.g., Gutierrez 1987; Cone 1997; Lartey 2003; Isasi-Díaz 2004). For criteria, I assume that good theology must inform and be informed by both healing and liberation, and therefore must be relevant to and ultimately grounded in Christian practices of community (e.g., Lartey 2003). Guided also by my Anglican identity and formation, I take scripture, tradition, and reason and experience as valid sources for theological reflection – but as a practical theologian I begin with experience, then scripture and tradition interpreted by reason, for both ongoing theological reflection and the creative shaping of personal and communal responses to suffering.

What Is Suffering?

The English word suffer defines itself by onomatopoeia: the s a wincing intake of breath followed by a sibilant sound of pain, squeezed through the teeth … the uh – not the ah of pleasure but the truncated moan/grunt/groan of an ache or a kick in the stomach … the fff of surprise that the pain goes on, deflation in the face of its continuation … the er a sound of depletion, running out of air, of life, of hope. Suffering is sometimes listed as a dictionary synonym for other words: pain, anguish, distress, misery, agony, torment, affliction, and it belongs to that family of words which signal a deep wound or dis-ease. But suffering, to suffer, conveys something the other terms do not – an ongoingness and a bearing-with entwined with the passage of time or the subjective experience of time slowing down as s-uh-ff-er-ing swallows the hope of a speedy end to pain. Its ongoingness is revealed in the popular wisdom after someone has experienced a quick death: Well, it’s a blessing that she didn’t suffer.

In addition to its ongoingness, suffering conveys a level of symbolization, of expressiveness, that pain does not. Pain may be mental, physical, or emotional, but the word pain itself merely denotes a phenomenon. Pain simply is. It can be described (acute or chronic, here but not there) or even measured (6 on a scale of 1 to 10), but it does not convey any meaning in and of itself. Some pain is even necessary to survival – for example, the burning sensation that causes us to take our hand off a hot stove. But pain is registered at the most primal level of brain function, and does not register in the thinking part of the brain (the prefrontal cortex) before we have already yanked our hand away from the source of the burning.

Suffering is the meaning that we make, or attempt to make, of our pain (Cassell 1991; Sulmasy 1999). Indeed, suffering requires consciousness, and with consciousness, symbolization and a rendering of pain into some meaningful articulation – a word, a cry, a narrative, even a pleading look into the eyes of another. For healing to take place fully, we must make meaning in relation to our pain, incorporating our values, spiritual beliefs, hopes, fears, anger, sorrow, and a narrative sense of what has happened, is happening, and is going to happen. So pain – especially pain that exceeds transient physical pain – must actually be transformed into suffering for holistic healing of mind, body, and spirit to occur. And for pain to be transformed into suffering, there must be communication of that pain to another living being. Pain is mute, but suffering speaks.

While Raquel experiences the normal shock, numbness, and confusion of acute grief, she is not cut off from expressing her pain. As we imagine the sharpness of the rocks under her knees, hear her deep wailing, and share her memories and images, we receive and recognize her suffering. We can connect it to our own memories and narratives of suffering and our hearts go out to her. This is pain that is told, and in the telling draws us into an intersubjective relationship with her sorrow and our own. As the intersubjective sharing of pain, suffering actively elicits recognition. In fact, it is when recognition is withheld or refused by another that suffering collapses back into unarticulated pain.

Certain forms of pain by their very nature remain encapsulated, unsymbolized, and unexpressed. When pain is too overwhelming, threatening, or incomprehensible, it is dissociated rather than fully experienced and expressed. This is the definition of trauma – not simply any injury, but one that threatens physical or psychic annihilation – akin to what theologian Wendy Farley (1990) calls radical suffering, which cries out for justice even if healing is impossible. Traumatic experience is walled off, broken into its different aspects (e.g., bodily sensation, emotion, and thought), without normal narrative links to make sense of what happened. Traumatic experience is therefore unformulated (Stern 2009), inexpressible, and therefore unrecognized by another.

It is precisely this absence of recognition that prevents pain from becoming suffering – as when an abuser who loves the child becomes the unseeing, unempathic monster who uses, beats, or rapes him; or when there is a collective shock such as the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, or the massive earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, and the normal holding function of society temporarily breaks down. There is a rupture in the capacity to know. When our pain, particularly intense pain, is not received and understood by an empathic other, the body-mind reacts to trauma through the mental process of dissociation, in which knowledge is kept out of awareness as an unconscious defense against the terror of being totally overwhelmed or annihilated. Nonverbal enactment then becomes the only mode by which this unformulated experience can communicate.

Enactment, in the words of relational psychoanalyst Donnel Stern, is the interpersonalization of a dissociation (2009: 86). The lack of symbolization and conscious articulation prevents suffering (the expression of pain and its associated meaning) and hence healing of the original wound. As dissociative processes outlive their usefulness and create new problems, they set in motion new forms of suffering, which can be understood as suffering, but as incomprehensible suffering that never seems amenable to healing, unmoored from any obvious cause. So an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse does not understand why she cannot seem to sustain a meaningful relationship; a war veteran cannot understand why the long-anticipated homecoming is not a source of joy; survivors of a natural disaster cannot understand why they can’t seem to settle back into a routine years later; Raquel cannot understand how the loss of her son is wreaking havoc in her family. Dissociation creates new suffering because it is disconnected from its traumatic origins and remains incomprehensible and unhealed.

When suffering is fully connected to the original source of unbearable pain, it is tragic but comprehensible. It may be expressed best by this paradox: nondissociated suffering is to bear the unbearable. Because suffering is the expression of pain that leads to meaning-making, it allows us to bear up under unbearable pain without negating or denying the reality that we are doing so. Through symbolization, reaching out, and retelling, pain becomes more bearable because, as new meanings are constructed in relationship, the burden is shared and God’s compassionate presence is experienced. This can connect individual experience to the larger social context in which suffering occurs, and to action for justice and change.

Theological Dilemmas: The Problem of Theodicy

The very existence of pain and suffering raises particular challenges for theology in its search for meaning.² Why must we suffer at all? Is suffering ever redemptive? Two tropes have been especially problematic: first, the logical or philosophical contradiction between the belief in a good and all-powerful God and the existence of evil as the cause of all suffering; and secondly, especially for Christians, the ethical question raised by the crucifixion and by theologies of atonement in which suffering is framed as salvific.

There is a logical contradiction, laid out historically in philosophy and theology, between three mutually incompatible axioms: divine goodness, divine omnipotence/sovereignty, and the existence of suffering/evil. The eighteenth-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz used the term theodicy – literally, the justification of God (theós, God + díke, justice) – to describe efforts to grapple with this problem. But the question is as ancient as humanity itself, and appears in the Bible most poignantly in the Book of Job. Any attempt to resolve this triangle must resort either to weakening one of the three points (usually by strengthening another point) or to leaving the contradictions as an ultimate paradox in which logical explanations dissolve into an appeal to mystery.

Early church formulations tended to emphasize the fullness of God’s goodness and perfection (following Plato) and to de-emphasize the power of evil. At the turn of the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo framed evil as an absence of good (privatio boni) rather than an opposing malicious presence – a tear in the fabric of God’s harmonious creation caused by humans’ willful turning away from God (Gen. 3). Even earlier, in the second century, Irenaeus of Lyon viewed suffering as a necessary corrective to bring an immature creation to perfection (Hick 2007). In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas further codified Augustine’s view, defining evil as the absence, disproportion, or misuse of the good order of the universe ordained by God through natural law. This view has remained foundational for Catholic doctrine.

In the Reformation, theologians turned to the sovereignty of God as the strong point of the triangle. They qualified evil by redefining it as a part of God’s ultimate plan, beyond finite human knowledge. Especially for Calvin and later reformed theologians, God’s goodness is preserved through confidence in God’s providence. Evil becomes a temporary experience of suffering that will ultimately be healed and even forgotten (Volf 2006) in the final redemption of all creation. Twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth described evil as das Nichtige (Nothing), which appears to have power but has already been objectively defeated as such in Jesus Christ (Zurheide 1997: 35–48). Lutheran theology is similar in its focus on eschatology, but places particular emphasis on the cross as a sign of God’s sharing in the suffering of creation (Marty 1983: 59). Luther also emphasized the hiddenness of God, the unknowable aspect of God in which God uses suffering and even evil for purposes beyond human comprehension (Hummel 2003: 28–34).

In the twentieth century, process theology, derived from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, took a different logical turn. For process theologians (e.g., Suchocki 1988; Griffin 2004), it is God’s omnipotence that is qualified, leaving God’s goodness and the reality of suffering and evil undiminished. God refrains from coercive power in order to grant freedom to the creation, while at the same time exercising persuasive and restorative power for transformation toward the greater good. Marjorie Suchocki (1988) emphasizes the relational implications of process theology, with its concept of a cosmos that is fully interdependent.

Today, many theologians question the very premise of theodicy, arguing for a turn from abstract, logical arguments to justify God toward a more complex, practice-oriented approach to evil and suffering (E. Farley 1990; W. Farley 1990; Cooper-White 2003). Some have turned to the tragic in response to evil, emphasizing ambiguity and mystery, hearkening back to Job. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, for example, argues for an unsettling reading of an unsettled God (2000: 71) over against conventional settled views that maintain the economic status quo.

Some contemporary theologians argue against theodicy altogether as a destructive discourse (Billings 2000; see also Surin 1986; Tilley 1991; Swinton 2006), a mis­directed search for answers to why evil exists, rather than focusing on how it might be confronted and overturned. These theologians advocate for practices, not merely arguments, that resist the social structures in which evil actually inheres (Tilley 1991: 238ff.). This view finds a parallel in liberation theologies in which theology and praxis are intertwined:

Only if we take seriously the suffering of the innocent and live the mystery of the cross amid that suffering, but in the light of Easter, can we prevent our theology from being windy arguments (Job 16:3) … As such, the question of theodicy remains open and anomalous rather than answered and (hence) forgotten.

(Billings 2000: 8, citing Gutierrez 1987: 103; emphasis mine)

The Problem of the Cross and Atonement Theology

A second problematic trope in Christian theology exalts suffering as redemptive, particularly in doctrines of Christ’s passion and crucifixion as atonement for Adam’s fall (Gen. 3:1–24). The cross meets God’s perfect demand for justice by substituting God’s son to pay the ransom owed by humanity for their infection with original sin. This doctrine of substitutionary atonement, articulated most clearly in the late eleventh century by Anselm of Canterbury, became the dominant doctrine of atonement adopted by the church by the end of the Middle Ages. It remains a powerful theme in traditional theology and liturgies.

Feminist theologians critique this understanding as a glorification of suffering, even divine child abuse (Fortune 1983: 197). They repudiate the idea that suffering for its own sake is ever redemptive. The cross should not be interpreted to sanctify victimization, which reinforces submission to violence by women and other oppressed groups. Rather Jesus’ passion should be understood in liberationist terms as his refusal to back down in the face of oppression and evil, and his willingness to stand for healing, mercy, and justice for the least and the outcasts – even at the penalty of torture and death. From this perspective, God’s own self enters via the incarnation into human suffering, and the cross becomes a symbol of God’s eternal solidarity with all who suffer (Solberg 1997; Thornton 2002).

Meaning-Making toward Hope and New Life

What then can we discern about God’s activity in the midst of suffering? If suffering is more than sheer pain, but is the meaning made of pain, what alternative redemptive meanings might be brought to bear? A liberationist theology of the cross understands God’s solidarity with human suffering as an expression of God’s ultimate receiving of the creature’s pain and suffering into God’s own being. Healing/salvation is the recognition of our cry of suffering, even the incarnate, embodied receiving of our pain as God’s pain, and through this recognition and receiving, the transformation of our pain into new life. The narrative shape of the paschal mystery, a human-divine journey through torture and death to risen life, gives new meaning to our own terror and anguish, both personally and as oppressed communities. The resurrection becomes a sign of the new life that is possible beyond both pain and suffering (Moltmann 2005), a redemption not only or primarily from sin, stain, or fault, but from all creaturely grief, victimization, and affliction.

Implications of Suffering for Practical Theology

What healing and liberative responses might grow out of these reflections? What are adequate, appropriate, and empathic Christian responses to suffering? How might hope and redemption, the goods of love and justice, be conceived as possible?

Stern uses the term witness to describe the role of the therapist. In relationship "we are called into being by acts of recognition by the other (2009: 110ff.). Drawing on infant observation research, he argues that the mind itself is brought into being by acts of recognition by primary caretakers. When this process is lacking or damaged by abuse, the person’s sense of self and experience cannot unfold in an ongoing narrative of self and others. We need a witness for the events of our lives to fall into a narrative awareness that is eventually internalized in our minds as our partners in thought." Without this, there can be no formulation or renewal of experience. Instead, experience is continually interrupted by dissociation and re-enactment of the original trauma.

The practice of witnessing is sacred. By serving as witness to another’s suffering – perhaps the first genuinely empathic witness that individual has ever experienced – we may facilitate this process of deep recognition of the other’s pain. Furthermore, this process of witnessing, once initiated, can gradually shift from an interpersonal recognition to one that can be internalized by the person in pain. As suffering is truly recognized, new images, symbols, words, narratives, and meanings emerge in the context of a relationship where both partners can truly be seen and known. This process in turn promotes inner transformation – what Stern (2009) has called the reinstatement of witnessing between states of self within the self of one who suffers, enabling a renewed and continued productive unfolding – new life!

The appropriation by psychoanalysis of the term witness is striking because of its resonance with theological language. The term witness in English is the translation of the biblical Greek word martys, or martyr. I do not want to suggest that as pastoral counselors or practical theologians we sacrifice ourselves in an unhealthy way or lose our healthy boundaries in ministry with survivors of trauma or those who suffer. However, there is an unavoidable cost – a kind of martyrdom or giving of one’s self – to the work of witnessing to another’s pain. By being willing to be witnesses, we commit ourselves to a costly walking alongside those who suffer.

The good news of the Christian life is that this solidarity need not – and should not, at least exclusively – be practiced alone. As Jesus sent the disciples out two by two, our empathic sensitivity and pastoral imagination are sustained by our sense of being held both by God’s empowering love and by Christian community as the body of Christ.

We are called to solidarity with Raquel, broken with agonizing grief. We are not called to try to rationalize her pain, fix it, or talk it away, but in the words of theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff, writing after the death of his son:

If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help. What I need to hear from you is that you recognize how painful it is. I need to hear from you that you are with me in my desperation. To comfort me, you have to come close. Come sit with me on my mourning bench.

(1987: 34)

As the word patient comes from patiens, or suffering, the very act of empathic witnessing – or recognition – is one that demands patient co-suffering from us. The effort to keep seeing when we wish we did not have to see (at both personal and societal levels), to know what we might prefer to split off from awareness (like some survivors of trauma themselves), and to be with others in their suffering rather than to collude in sealing over the most horrific sources of pain – all these point to practical theology not merely as a theoretical discipline, but as a calling to be in solidarity with those in our care, to face the horror, and to help birth new levels of consciousness at the level of individuals, families, and the larger society.

Such practical theology includes not only pastoral care and counseling, but all forms of public theology as advocacy for justice. Solidarity is not only interpersonal but cultural and political. How do aspects of Raquel’s position in society – including racial, economic, and political realities – impact her ability to grieve, and her community’s capacity to support her and her family in the crucial transition from early shock and horror to deep grieving and meaning-making that can promote healing and new life? How do we embrace our role as witnesses not only of individual sorrows and traumas, but of the societal and political structures that obstruct expressive suffering and perpetuate dehumanization? In the words of trauma specialist Judith Herman, "in order for individual victims to be heard and to be met with justice and restitution, it takes a great deal of effort from the widest possible circle of bystanders [witnesses!], a social context of belief and action" (1992: 7).

The cross and resurrection stand as narrative reminders of this practical theological call to witness the suffering of the world. As creatures made in the image and likeness of God, we too are called to be witnesses, martyrs in the sense of not shrinking from one another’s cries of pain, but entering into the costly but godly vocation of being-with. By standing as witnesses who offer deep recognition of one another’s pain, we participate in a holy process of transforming mute pain into expressive suffering. Through the shared comprehension of such suffering, transformation becomes possible – healing and renewal for a broken world!

Notes

¹ Fictional vignette. Thanks to Carrie Doehring, Mark Douglas, and John Hoffmeyer for feedback on this essay.

² Thanks to my students in Pastoral Theology of Good and Evil at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, and at Columbia Theological Seminary for stimulating discussions on theodicy.

References

Billings, T. (2000). Theodicy as a ‘Lived Question.’ Journal for Christian Theological Research 5. At www2.luthersem.edu/ctrf/JCTR/Vol05/billings.htm (accessed May 2010).

Brueggemann, W. (2000). A Fissure Always Uncontained. In T. Linafelt, ed., Strange Fire: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust. New York: New York University Press.

Cassell, E. J. (1991). The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cone, J. (1997). God of the Oppressed, 2nd edn. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Cooper-White, P. (2003). I Do Not Do the Good I Want … Journal of Pastoral Theology 13: 63–84.

Farley, E. (1990). Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Farley, W. (1990). Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Fortune, M. (1983). Sexual Violence: The Unmentionable Sin. New York: Pilgrim Press.

Griffin, D. R. (2004). God, Power, and Evil. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Gutierrez, G. (1987). On Job, trans. M. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.

Hick, J. (2007). Evil and the God of Love, 2nd edn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hummel, L. (2003). Clothed in Nothingness. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Isasi-Díaz, A.-M. (2004). En la Lucha/In the Struggle: A Hispanic Women’s Theology of Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Lartey, E. (2003). In Living Color: An Intercultural Approach to Pastoral Care and Counseling, 2nd edn. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Marty, M. (1983). Health and Medicine in the Lutheran Tradition. New York: Crossroad.

Moltmann, J. (1993). The Trinity and the Kingdom. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Moltmann, J. (2005). Eschatology. In R. Hunter and N. Ramsay, eds., Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling, rev. edn. Nashville: Abingdon Press, pp. 360–362.

Solberg, M. (1997). Compelling Knowledge. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Stern, D. (2009). Partners in Thought. London: Routledge.

Suchocki, M. (1988). The End of Evil. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Sulmasy, D. (1999). Finitude, Freedom, and Suffering. In M. E. Mohrmann and M. J. Hanson, eds., Pain Seeking Understanding: Suffering, Medicine, and Faith. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, pp. 92–93.

Surin, K. (1986). Theology and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Blackwell.

Swinton, J. (2006). Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Swinton, J., and Mowat, H. (2006). Practical Theology and Qualitative Research. London: SCM Press.

Thornton, S. (2002). Broken Yet Beloved: A Pastoral Theology of the Cross. St. Louis: Chalice Press.

Tilley, T. W. (1991). The Evils of Theodicy. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Volf, M. (2006). The End of Memory. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Wolterstorff, N. (1987). Lament for a Son. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Zurheide, J. (1997). When Faith Is Tested. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

CHAPTER 2

Healing

Susan J. Dunlap

Church people get sick. They may suffer from irritants such as chronic skin ailments, or they may suffer from a more life-threatening chronic illness such as diabetes, which requires regular monitoring several times a day. Some live for decades with cancer in remission or with cancer rapidly metastasizing. Others live with the ever present threat of a debilitating migraine headache or a sudden flare-up of Crohn’s disease symptoms. Still others are watching signs of their multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer’s disease progress. Some live with the day-to-day knowledge that they may fall yet again into a debilitating depression, while others struggle minute by minute to keep excruciating anxiety at bay. What is remarkable is that, all over the world and from the very beginning, the advent of any sort of illness in the body of Christ has never been just about the body of a sole individual. It has always simultaneously been a call to respond by the company of saints with whom they worship. Ecclesial responses of care and compassion surround and adhere to illness in churches.

In this chapter, I briefly consider definitions of healing, its place in Christian history, and methods for understanding healing as practical theology. Then I examine the responses to illness in two churches in Durham, North Carolina, lifting up through example and analysis the beliefs embedded in and reformulated through practice. While the forms of brokenness and suffering are legion in human life, this chapter will focus primarily on the healing that happens in bodily rather than mental illness. For each congregation, care for the physically sick is a way of life, a habit woven into the fabric of everyday practice in the church community. The advent of illness or injury is a call to respond in ways as varied as private prayer and exorcising demons.

History and Definition

Following Jesus, who healed the sick in both body and mind, the church has responded to illness with rituals, care, and institutions such as asylums and hospitals. Peter and John healed the man lame from birth at the Beautiful Gate (Acts 3:1–10), and Basil the Great established one of the first hospitals in 372 CE. The medieval crusaders, the Knights of St. John, founded the Knights Hospital in Jerusalem in the twelfth century (Miller 1978: 709), and medical missionaries fanned out in China, India, and various nations of the continent of Africa in the nineteenth century (Grundmann 2008: 188). The eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, John Wesley, saw healing of physical and spiritual ills as a central part of the Christian ministry and published a popular book on curing disease (Wesley 1960). American-born Pentecostalism has always regarded healing as a central part of worship (Thomas 2005: 88–89). Healing responses to illness is a well-worn path for Christian believers.

Healing is one of the key places in which theology has been concretely practiced in the history of the church. In their classic book on the history of pastoral care, William Clebsch and Charles Jaekle list healing, along with sustaining, guiding, and reconciling, as one of four primary avenues of congregational and pastoral care (1964: 4). For them, healing is more than mere restoration, for it includes a forward gain over the condition prevailing before illness; it enables the person to advance beyond his previous condition and become integrated on a higher spiritual level than before (33). They catalog various healing methods and instrumentalities, such as anointing with oil, contact with saints and relics, charismatic healers, exorcism, and what they call the use of varieties of herbs, salves, and incantations for healing, magico-medicine (34–40). They note the modern loss of healing to biomedicine in many, but not all, faith communities, where the power to heal is often relinquished to the physician and hospital.

Contemporary understandings and definitions of healing vary. For some, it necessarily involves a physical transformation or a cure. For others, healing certainly may include physiological cure, but they do not see the body as the only place where healing occurs. The human being includes spiritual, psychological, interpersonal, and societal realms. When a person finds peace, courage, hope, or vocation, there is healing even when illness remains. Or healing may occur in the psyche, when a person is relieved of depression or anxiety, or when the ruptures of the self that occur in childhood trauma begin to heal. There are interpersonal aspects to healing, such as when a parent and child are reconciled, individual and congregation reunited, or a marriage restored. Some speak of nations healing from generations of oppression, such as South Africa, or from the legacy of genocide, such as native peoples in North America.

Healing intersects with caring (Williams 2002: 97). Transformation toward wholeness in any realm often happens in the context of compassionately administered care. Caring may include practical help such as food, transportation, and housework. Or it may mean emotional and spiritual presence to people suffering ill health. Some call for a de-emphasis on healing and a focus on caring. South African theologian Nico Koopman says that the headlong drive for cure can devolve into an optimistic modernistic attempt to cure at every price, and to free from tragedy and suffering (2006: 43). Rather than pressing for cure, he calls instead for caring amidst suffering [and] tragedy. He refers to an understanding of healing as caring, suggesting that the caring practices themselves are healing (43). Important insights about healing, curing, and caring have come from the hospice movement. Through the work of hospices, people who have no chance of avoiding imminent death can nevertheless know wondrous soul healing. For many, caring and healing cannot be decoupled.

Healing as Practical Theology

Basic to any practical theological method is the hermeneutical circle, which has mutually interpreting nodes, such as scripture, theology, and human sciences, and a node that has been variously construed as practice, context, situation, problem, human condition, and other terms referring to lived human phenomena. For example, Don Browning’s influential fundamental practical theology has four movements, including the formulation of a descriptive theology which arises out of thick descriptions of situations (Browning 1991: 77). The method in this essay construes that node as dense detailed descriptions of specific local communities and practices that include placing them in both social and historical context. In distinction from Browning, however, I reject universalized construal of core human tendencies, such as practical reasoning, as formulated in philosophical traditions (Cahalan 2005: 69). Furthermore, I refrain from privileging certain practices as particularly characteristic of faithful Christian life (75).

Questions may arise about the usefulness of such highly specific and dense renderings of the practices of particular congregations. In her detailed description and theological reading of a single congregation, systematic theologian Mary McClintock Fulkerson demonstrates how such study honors the worldliness of an incarnate God and testifies to transformations that are attributable to God (2007: 231, 237). Pastoral theologian Mary Clark Moschella’s study of the devotional practices of a California community of Italian and Sicilian Roman Catholic immigrants provides another example of ethnographic method used to make a convincing theological argument for renewed sacramental practice and imagination, practices that relax the barriers between heaven and earth (2008: 200). Others attempt to discern theology as practiced, particularly in the midst of pastoral care and counseling (Maynard et al. 2010: 1 ff.). Such detailed studies make significant contributions to both theological discernment and ecclesial practice.

This kind of work provides at least two further elements to the larger practical theological enterprise. First, it demonstrates the creative edge of practical theology as it morphs, creates hybrids, and constructs new forms of practice, material religion, and nuanced beliefs in response to suffering. As such it is an example of practical theology that is performed by those who thoughtfully seek to embody deep convictions about life and its ultimate meaning in the midst of ordinary and extraordinary circumstances (Miller-McLemore 2010: 1741).

Second, the mutually interpreting nodes on the hermeneutical circle provide for the accountability of practices to norms and beliefs distilled in doctrinal and sacred texts. It also holds interpreters of doctrinal and sacred texts accountable to the wisdom embodied in congregational practice. Detailed work on specific ecclesial practices pushes practical theology as an academic discipline to regard faithful ecclesial practice as a node of accountability on the hermeneutical circle. Dense accounts of practical theology as an activity of a variety of believers, including the disenfranchised, provides a source of critique for practical theological judgments.

To illustrate a practical theology that incorporates rich descriptive material, I offer renderings of two congregations below. I use the term belief-practice to overcome the inability of standard English to express the interconnected relationship of theory and practice. We have difficulty expressing the unity of theology and visible action. We split these, and have no word for theory-laden practice and practice-laden theory (Browning 1991: 9). Therefore I suggest the term belief-practices:

Beliefs, which are connected (in some way) to a past preserved in texts, rituals, and symbols, are also connected to present day practices, such as caring, teaching, preaching, serving, worshiping, discerning and praying … In other words, beliefs carry with them attendant rituals and habits which give them their specific content, and practices acquire their impact as they are linked to beliefs. Beliefs and practices are linked inextricably as each gives the other its particular force or meaning, and so for that reason, I refer to particular belief-practices.

(Dunlap 2009: 9–10)

Yet even the coining of a new phrase fails to capture the richness of congregational life. The term belief-practices refers to a present-day snapshot of a congregation. Any understanding of healing in particular congregations also requires knowledge of its theological, historical, social, and liturgical context.

Healing Waters Apostolic Holiness Church

The bishop was dying, a woman with the title of evangelist told me, and he needed help leading worship. So she went to lend a hand. Here is her account of the bishop healing a worshipper in an African American Apostolic Holiness church in Durham, North Carolina.¹

There was this lady came to the church that night, and she was spitting up blood … and a little bit came out of her nose. And the Bishop had his wife to read her that [a text from Ezekiel]. He said, Keep reading. Read that scripture. And he told the lady, Look at me. If you can repeat what she’s saying to you from the Word of God, we are going to see a miracle. And after a while, she would repeat it, and she would act like she was going to pass out or something of that nature, and he said, Repeat it. Just keep saying it over and over. And the Lord stopped that blood flow right in that church. The church just went up. The folk began to just yell.

This congregation of about 200 people connects spiritual healing and physical cure. It is known as a place of healing the sick. The pastor is a healer, along with other church leaders. Below is an interview excerpt from one of these leaders:

My daughter had called me and told me about this little boy. She said, Mama, I’ve used the medicine that they have given me for him, and he has open wounds on his legs or his arms. I just don’t know what to do. So I said, Well, OK, I’ll be over there. So I took my bay leaves and I went over there, and I took my oil with me, and I prayed and I anointed his body with the oil and I took the bay leaves and placed them over the areas on his body and I took white gauze and tied it up, just laced it and tied it up. And I went on home. And my daughter called me the next day. She said, Mama, I took the thing off, and Mama, it’s gone! And I said, Well, to God be the glory.

This story starts with a declaration that medicine from doctors had not worked. So the mother called the healer, who administered a traditional healing element, anointing oil, and bay leaves that God gave her to use. The next day there was concrete evidence of complete healing. The healer praised God. In telling the story, this healer has already acted as a kind of everyday practical theologian, interpreting this event according to biblical codes and cadences engraved in her heart. The bishop also drew facilely on scripture as an ally and example when he healed in worship.

Acts and speech on healing in this context are embedded in a particular theological world. Though no unbroken historical thread can be established between contemporary healing practices in African American churches and care for the sick among slaves, we see echoes of that earlier tradition in the use of bay leaves. While slave masters had an economic stake in the health of their labor source and provided some medical care, slaves also cared for each other with materials at hand (Gooden 2008: 150). The herbs, roots, poultices, and teas used in medicinal practices were hybrids of African and New World traditions. This woman’s use of anointing oil also rests on her reading of scripture, originating in Christian and Jewish traditions, with James 5:14 explicitly calling for anointing the sick with oil. Oil also has roots in the twentieth-century Pentecostal movement, which began in the Azusa Street Revival in 1906 (Wacker 2001: 109).

Socially, this healer is middle class, and the congregation in which she worships is a mixture of middle, lower middle, and lower class. The boy with the sores clearly had access to health care. African Americans in Durham have better than average access to health care because of relatively high rates of access to health insurance and a clinic that provides affordable care to anyone in the county (Durham Health Partners 2004: 3). However, many African Americans harbor a justifiable suspicion of the health care establishment, rooted in such memories as the Tuskegee Institute medical experiments, in which African American men were deceived and denied adequate treatment, and ongoing racism in the current administration of health care (Townes 1998: 88–100). Not surprisingly, church healers continue to have a role and members call upon them.

This healing event embodies Pentecostal theology. In many Pentecostal circles, the doctrine of entire sanctification is proclaimed, meaning that by Jesus’ stripes we are healed in both soul and body (Wacker 2001: 26). The salvific work of Jesus on the cross is not just a spiritual matter, but a physical one too. Illness is the devil’s work, and thus healing is a matter of doing battle with cosmic forces of evil. Both the healer and the person in need of healing are engaged in spiritual warfare against Old Slewfoot, as the pastor said, and they need to be prayed up and fasted up before entering the fray. Pentecostals practice what is called prevailing prayer during which the person at prayer believes that God has already answered their prayer. By contract, God is then obligated to heed prevailing prayer, which "would automatically bring healing to the body (Wacker 2001: 26; emphasis mine). Many of these theological elements are seen in another mother’s prayer for her infant son during painful sickle-cell anemia attacks, recited to me in an interview. In the name of Jesus, I plead the blood of Jesus, I bind every evil attack, I curse every attack of the enemy, and I believe God for your healing in the name of Jesus." It is Jesus’ blood that will save her son, whom the devil is attacking and whom she believes God will heal.

Acts of healing outside the church are deeply connected to and always carry with them accretions of healing within the church. The climax in Pentecostal worship is the moment of healing. From the time a worshipper enters the sanctuary, they are aware of entering a liminal space between the mundane and the sacred where anything can happen, including great transformations of body, mind, and soul (Albrecht 1992: 116–120). In this particular congregation, some speak in tongues, but the primary form of ecstatic expression is the shout or holy dance, which is primarily a form of praise. Praise of God is the central context for God’s healing response. The word healing itself then carries connotations from this context of liminality, transformation, ecstasy, and praise. Just as the seasoned churchgoer in many traditions cannot hear references to the bread and wine without sensing its liturgical context, so also the word healing invokes particular liturgical meanings for those in this tradition.

In this congregation there are at least two areas where practical theological reasoning is visible. The first is when the faithful do not have prayers for healing answered, and they remain ill. Given the robust and deeply rooted theological claim that the faithful will have their prayers answered, this is particularly challenging. But people find ways to understand this that display their facility with theological reasoning. The devil often attacks people who are particularly faithful. People who are doing God’s work with great effectiveness are prone to be afflicted with illness by the devil. When prayers are not answered, illness is an instance where God may be manifest. The faithfulness displayed during the trials of illness is a witness to God’s power and a source of great encouragement to others.

A second area that provokes theological reflection arises around modern medicine and medical care. Congregational members do not hesitate to use modern health care. Yet if God is the one who heals, isn’t turning to doctors and medication a sign of faithlessness? People offer a variety of theological reasons. The pastor put it most succinctly when he said, about the believer’s use of medical care, You have to have common sense. Others lift a pill or prescription up to God and take it as a point of contact because God works through medicine. Finally, healing can take forms other than what is precisely asked for. A preacher told a man facing a leg amputation that his leg was well. But he had the surgery anyway. He interpreted well to refer to the speed with which his wound healed after amputation. When theological affirmations meet the realities of non-cure and use of modern medicine, practical theological reasoning produces a variety of responses that allow for the continued practice of prayer for healing.

First Downtown Church

Other congregations decouple healing and curing. They do not attempt to incorporate physical healing into worship practice. First Downtown Church, a mostly Euro-American, liberal church that made a conscious choice to stay in the center of Durham, was home to a man living with prostate cancer. During an interview with him, this man spoke about when he first came upon the notion of healing and not cure:

For me, what’s important is healing. It is a strengthening, a sense that it’s OK to have prostate cancer. I’ve got it, I go on living, and there are lots of things that I can do. Healing my prostate cancer is not something that I pray for. My own prayer for others who are sick is really in terms of healing for them, for the comfort of being aware of themselves and of others around them.

This church of roughly 400 members lives by the banner words, Downtown by history and by choice. It is well known for its commitment to addressing urban poverty. Many members work for social service agencies, public schools, and nonprofit service and advocacy organizations. Its membership also includes a member of the city council, a judge, and many faculty and administrators from area universities.

When I interviewed congregational members, I heard no healing stories. In fact, there were few stories at all. Rather, people offered prose descriptions of God’s presence, and the primary mode of God’s presence in the church was not healing, as at Healing Waters Church, but support through the community:

If you were to look at the whole picture [during this illness], where was God? Everywhere. The support from individuals, and from the church as a whole. I knew that she was in people’s prayers, I would get emails and phone calls from people that I didn’t know very well, that were pleasant surprises to us. Cards and notes. I really felt like people were praying for her.

This congregation resembles what sociologist Nancy Ammerman calls Golden Rule Christianity, often found in mainline Protestant contexts. Faithfulness is defined in the practice of care, not in assent to a set of doctrinal tenets. This category of religious persons is best defined not by ideology, but by practices. Their own measure of Christianity is right living more than right believing (Ammerman 1997: 197, citing Hoge et al. 1994).

When asked about a theological basis for their care, people most often cited following Jesus. One woman said, I think your job as a member of the body of Christ is to embody as much of Christ as you can with your actions … and this is what I would rather do, is just embody in my actions or my attitude what I think Christ teaches. Another man said that that’s what Jesus did, Jesus took care of people.

This congregation demonstrates in its practices themes of theological liberalism. Jesus is an example of how we should live rather than a person with whom the believer has a personal, salvific relationship. In contrast to a more socially activist or liberationist perspective, where Jesus’ example would be described as solidarity with the poor, the liberal stance has traditionally been construed as service to a neighbor. In contrast to the traditional evangelical emphasis on personal transformation and the liberationist emphasis on changing social structures, the traditional liberal emphasis is on the duty to work for social good through existing human institutions.

Modernist views of healing and theological liberalism are evident in one woman’s words:

I see it as a gift from God that there are physicians that help us get well. Maybe that’s why I don’t pray as much when I get sick because I’m thinking, I’m going to the doctor and God’s already answered my prayer that I can afford to, that I have health insurance. I’m not in a country where there isn’t adequate medical care. God has already answered my prayer … There are things you have to build in society.

This woman does not pray for healing because she believes God works through giving her access to medical care, not through answering such prayers. Her theological liberalism is apparent in her desire to build in society access to health care for all people. God is present not through direct supernatural intervention into bodily disorders but through social structures that Christians are called to build here on earth. Confidence in human knowledge, modern medicine, and the capacity to build a just society are characteristic of classical theological liberalism of the turn-of-the-century social gospel.

Practical theological dynamics are visible in this congregation as well. While the Healing Waters Church showed how theological reasoning occurs at the ideational level, practical theology in First Downtown Church occurs at the level of practice. This congregation subtly creates practices that disrupt its otherwise deeply rooted iconoclastic Calvinist beliefs. Its members have a thin sense of God’s presence in the material world, a stance consistent with Calvinist suspicions regarding human idolatry. They do not believe in the healing effects of artifacts, such as prayer cloths, anointing oil, icons, candles, or other traditional forms of material Christianity. Nor do they speak of God’s spirit working through the bodily touch of healers or moving through the materiality of their sick bodies. This profound reticence to identify the created order with the creator is reinforced by the powerful influence of modernist thinking, evident in this congregation’s assent to modernist disenchantment with the world (Weber 1998). Explanations of illness and healing are largely biomedical, with only rare invocations of the divine.

Yet theological engagement occurs at the level of practical improvisation within the material world. Members improvise alternative material ways of mediating the holy. Get-well cards and letters, for example, are very important, and some carefully save the mail they receive, storing it in a special box or wrapping it in a ribbon. A prayer shawl ministry has emerged in the last few years, and members bring flowers, make quilts, and create other novel material forms for mediating their care. This congregation, in the most iconoclastic of the Protestant denominations, a denomination deeply influenced by modernist thinking, is casting about for ways to establish a relationship between the sick body, practices of community care, and the material world. Practical theology as an activity of believers is evident in this congregation’s groping to re-enchant the world through practices constructed out of novel forms of material religion.

Congregations, as a generative site of practical theology, use the beliefs, behaviors, and artifacts at hand to construct responses to illness. Whether that response is a massaging of strongly held beliefs about the power of prevailing prayer to provoke God or an improvisation of a material culture that mediates God’s presence, these congregations attempt to embody deep convictions in the midst of life. Practical theology is evident in their multiple discernments, appropriations, and creations in response to illness, a condition that has been a part of life since the church’s beginning, and has always invoked healing as a response.

Note

¹ The accounts are from interviews conducted for Caring Cultures: How Congregations Respond to the Sick (Dunlap 2009). They have been somewhat modified for ease of reading.

References

Albrecht, Daniel E. (1992). Pentecostal Spirituality: Looking through the Lens of Ritual. Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 14: 107–125.

Ammerman, Nancy (1997). Golden Rule Christianity: Lived Religion in the American Mainstream. In David H. Hall, ed., Lived Religion: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 196–216.

Browning, Don S. (1991). A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Cahalan, Kathleen (2005). Three Approaches to Practical Theology, Theological Education, and the Church’s Ministry. International Journal of Practical Theology 9: 63–94.

Clebsch, William A., and Jaekle, Charles R. (1964). Pastoral Care in Historical Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Dunlap, Susan J. (2009). Caring Cultures: How Congregations Respond to the Sick. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.

Durham Health Partners (2004). A Report to the Major Stakeholders on the Health Status of Durham County, synopsis by Andrew Wallace. At http://www.healthydurham.org/docs/file/durhams_health/RepToMajorStakeholders.pdf (accessed May 13, 2011).

Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (2007). Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gooden, Rosemary D. (2008). Seeking Help for the Body in the Well-Being of the Soul. In Stephanie Y. Mitchem and Emilie M. Townes, eds., Faith Health, and Healing in African American Life. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, pp. 146–159.

Grundmann, Christoffer H. (2008). Mission and Healing in Historical Perspective. International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32: 185–188.

Hoge, Dean R., Johnson, Benton, and Luidens, Donald (1994). Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Koopman, Nico (2006). Curing or Caring: Theological Comments on Healing. Religion and Theology 13: 38–54.

Maynard, Jane F., Hummel, Leonard, and Moschella, Mary Clark (2010). Pastoral Bearings: Lived Religion and Pastoral Theology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Miller, Timothy S. (1978). The Knights of Saint John and the Hospitals of the Latin West. Speculum 53: 709–733.

Miller-McLemore, Bonnie (2010). Practical Theology. In Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, eds., Encyclopedia of Religion in America. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, pp. 1739–1743.

Moschella, Mary Clark (2008). Living Devotions: Reflections on Immigration, Identity, and Religious Imagination. Eugene, OR: Pickwick.

Thomas, John Christopher (2005). Health and Healing: A Pentecostal Contribution. Ex Auditu 21: 88–107.

Townes, Emily (1998). Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care. New York: Continuum.

Wacker, Grant (2001). Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Weber, Max (1998). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing.

Wesley, John (1960). Primitive Physic; or, An Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases, 23rd edn. London: Epworth Press.

Williams, Tammy (2002). Is There a Doctor in the House? In Miroslav Volf and Dorothy Bass, eds., Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, pp. 94–120.

Further Reading

Barnes, Linda L., and Sered, Susan S., eds. (2005). Religion and Healing in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Numbers, Ronald L., and Amundsen, Darrel W. (1986). Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Porterfield, Amanda (2005). Healing in the History of Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Playing

Jaco Hamman

Play is a persistent and quintessential human activity and a transformational experience that always seems to find some expression. This reality invites practical theological reflection. The complete character of humanity does not come into view unless we add homo ludens, a person at play, to our understanding. Harvey Cox wisely observed that "A theologically informed investigation of a [person] as imaginer, player, and hoper (homo ludens et sperans), instead of a [person] as sinner, or even creature, might yield some beneficial results" (cited in Miller 1973: 15). The Jewish and Old Testament Christian tradition is well acquainted with images of playing. The prophets Isaiah and Zechariah envisioned God’s reign of peace and justice, God’s shalom, as infants and children playing in city streets and elsewhere – even in the face of danger – with no fear (Isa. 11:6–8; Zech. 8:4–5). In these images we can recognize Jesus inviting children to come to him, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to children and those like them. We hear Jesus offering to all life to the full, which certainly is not possible without experiencing the transformative power of play (Matt. 19:14; John 10:10b).

Playing with others can be more pleasurable, gratifying, and rewarding than playing alone. Furthermore, such playing invites, sustains, and deepens loving and intimate relationships. Sometimes, playing can get us unstuck and save the day. Poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman writes that playing carries one across fear and uncertainty toward the slippery edges of possibility, where one must use oneself fully and stretch human limits to achieve the remarkable … we set bigger challenges, develop new skills, take greater chances, canvass worlds (1999: 38). Play, as this chapter will argue, also fosters and enriches faith, deepens hope, and can help us to love our neighbors and ourselves by minimizing conflict and opening new possibilities for being in relationship.

I experienced this possibility of playing as my wife prepared to visit Paris with a girlfriend. Families who need to get children off to school or into bed know how entrances and exits heighten anxiety in a family and especially in children. As our two daughters – aged five and three at the time – sensed that Mom’s departure was imminent and that Dad was anxious about being a single parent for a week, they became stubborn and uncooperative. Likewise, my wife and I were irritable and impatient with our daughters and with each other. The potential for a disastrous goodbye stared us in the face. I wondered how playing together could bridge physical and emotional distance and offer release for some of the tension we all felt. Playing saved the day as I promptly added another language to our household: "French!" That none of us could speak French was no deterrent even if it was slightly confusing. By making verbal intonations and sounds mimicking the way I envision French being spoken, I invited our daughters to speak French.

I asked: Parlez-vous? Mamma adieu Paris! Mula joie de vivre Papa? I continued with another nonsense sentence or two. That I used random words and phrases, most of which were not even French and others totally out of context, was of little concern. Soon my daughters joined me and we discovered that we could communicate deep fears without knowing a language. That week, with my wife in Paris, my daughters and I spoke French daily. Playing with words and sounds to acknowledge a significant absence and anxiety brought laughter and release. We all ate well, slept well, and had much fewer tears than I expected. Playful parenting is a blessing to all!

The Christian tradition, however, is somewhat skeptical about playing and does not always encourage or empower playing. In this chapter, I identify playing as a practical theological problem. This is most evident