Psychology for Pastoral Contexts: A Handbook

By Jessica Rose

This clear and accessible book offers a fresh perspective on the application of psychology in a wide range of pastoral activity. It presents a model of pastoral care that is Eucharistic and incarnational – a form of participation in the community.
The book goes on to discuss the nature of the unconscious and three core areas in mental well-being:

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9780334049708

Jessica Rose

Jessica Rose is a writer, editor and arts organizer who lives and works in Hamilton, Ontario. A passionate advocate for people and places, she works for a number of not-for-profit organizations focused on literacy, the arts, the environment, health and food security. A graduate of Carleton University’s School of Journalism, her writing includes the essay “Reclaiming Hamilton Through Artistic and Environmental Interventions” in Reclaiming Hamilton: Essays from the New Ambitious City (Wolsak and Wynn), Creating Healthy Communities (Rubicon Publishing) and the City of Hamilton Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP).

Book preview

PART 1

The Pastoral Context

1

Pastoral Activity as Participation

What is a ‘pastoral context’?

The word ‘pastoral’ takes us to images with a long tradition in the churches, but which many people find difficult today: images of pastors as shepherds caring for their ‘sheep’, the people. In the contemporary church we are far less inclined to think of pastors and the people in this way.

We can, however, trace this image to Christ saying to Peter, ‘Tend my sheep’ (John 21.16). He says this after the resurrection, shortly before he is to leave the disciples and return to the Father. Three times he asks Peter, ‘Do you love me?’ and three times Peter insists that he does. Each time, Christ responds telling him, ‘Feed my lambs’, ‘Tend my sheep’, ‘Feed my sheep’. At the heart of a pastoral context is the logic of this encounter: loving Christ is not just a two person relationship – it involves caring for those he loves as well. A pastoral context, then, is one in which concern and practical action for others – and each other – is rooted in a common love of Christ.

‘Pastoral’ care also has its secular contexts, particularly in education, where it addresses people’s needs at one remove from the primary purpose of the organization: the listening, supporting, encouraging or befriending that enables people to make use of what the institution has to offer. Similarly in the context of church life, pastoral care is summed up by Alastair Campbell as ‘that aspect of the Church’s ministry concerned with the well-being of individuals and communities’.¹ For the purposes of this book, the word ‘church’ is not used to refer to any particular one of the Christian Churches but to discuss aspects of community life that tend to be common to them all.

‘Man does not live by bread alone’ (Luke 4.4). All the same, from the earliest days of church life as described in Acts, it is clear that as soon as communities are formed human needs emerge and require attention alongside teaching and preaching. There are widows who must be provided with food (Acts 6), ill people needing to be healed (Acts 8.7), matters of church discipline to be settled (Acts 15), and ‘care of the afflicted’ as carried out by a widow thought suitable for inclusion in the church’s financial structure (1 Tim 5.3–16).

How has pastoral activity developed?

There is a sense in which pastoral activity as we understand it today is something that can happen anywhere, anytime. Although it is particularly a function of ordained ministry and teams of people are appointed to see that it takes place, essentially it arises from community where a common life of worship spills over into the practical expression of the love of God. It may be an encounter that lasts five minutes as you invite a stranger to join in coffee at the end of a service, or it may be a relationship over several years as you support someone through a long-term mental or physical illness. Life throws up different needs at different times, and in a pastoral context roles are not necessarily fixed. One week you may find yourself listening to my sadness over a lost job or a dying friend, while the next I might look after your children so that you can have a few hours to yourself.

This is the ‘Early Church’ model: ‘Encourage one another and build each other up, as indeed you are doing’ (1 Thess. 5.11). The Greek word here translated as ‘encourage’ is parakaleite, from the same root as Parakletos, the Comforter who will come after Christ returns to the Father. In the mutual encouragement of the community, we can see, perhaps, the Spirit at work.

It was not until the second century that pastoral responsibility began to be seen particularly as the business of bishops and clergy. This was partly as a function of elaborate penitential systems involving confession and repentance, and partly in relation to the need to understand the place of families in the Church: since the Second Coming had not happened in the first generation it was no longer considered irrelevant to marry and have children.

One of the bishops to pay particular attention to pastoral problems was John Chrysostom (c. 349–407). His sermons on wealth and poverty and on marriage and family life (he was one of the last of the Church Fathers to write about marriage!) are some of the earliest pastoral texts we have.² The sixth century gives us ‘The Pastoral Rule’ of Gregory the Great, the ‘pastoral pope’ – a treatise for bishops on the care and cure of souls which draws on the lives of the apostles and various Old Testament characters.³

In the earlier centuries, however, the pastoral emphasis was sacramental: confession and absolution, anointing the sick, using offerings at the Eucharist to help the poor. At a later stage, the Dominican and Franciscan orders gave new prominence to preaching, and the Jesuits to education and spiritual direction.

By the seventeenth century, we have George Herbert’s ‘Country Parson’ who is all things to all men, at least on a domestic level. His resources are Scripture and prayer through which he is able to embrace the cross, but it is also right for him to socialize and be humorous since ‘nature will not bear everlasting droopings’.⁴ He works with what is there: the people’s frame of reference, their festivals and customs. It is a benevolent patriarchy which with the Industrial Revolution begins to include social reform, led by people such as William Wilberforce (1759–1833) and Charles Kingsley (1819–75), author of The Water Babies and a canon of Chester Cathedral.

A further revolution took place in the early twentieth century with the rise of psychoanalysis and other schools of psychotherapy, through which pastoral work developed a psychological frame of reference. Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976), a Wesleyan minister, was one of the first pastors in this country to take Freud seriously. He acknowledged that Christianity as it is lived is open to the charge of infantile neurosis: a flight from reality (God will comfort me); a false sense of physical security (when in fact Christ promised persecution and death); misusing the cross as an escape from guilt (we are ‘let off’ because Jesus died in our stead); and narcissistic holiness (‘designer’ spirituality). Like Freud, Weatherhead saw repressed sexuality as the basis of anxiety. In 1936, he began work at the City Temple seeking out colleagues with a real Christian experience of their own, a psychological qualification and a medical degree. For those who sought their help, a series of six or eight interviews was combined with intercession for healing and simple talks and explanations about psychological processes. The pastoral counselling movement was born.

As pastoral counselling developed, many church pastors learned to speak the language of psychology and use its techniques, albeit applied in a theological context. The pastoral counselling movement also brought a new emphasis on lay intervention, using specially trained members of communities to spread the load. Alongside the pastoral counselling movement, theologians such as Harry Williams, Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen helped people to think about their faith with personal honesty and psychological intelligence.

As Alastair Campbell also notes, although pastoral activity may include pastoral counselling, it is actually a much broader field. There are also specific differences between pastoral counselling and pastoral activity in general. Whereas a counsellor generally holds back on his or her own views and opinions, the pastor – lay or ordained – can be assumed to represent the shared faith and world view of the community: if this is what we believe, then this is how we might deal with this situation. Unlike a counsellor, the pastor also has access to – and direct responsibilities towards – the whole range of relationships in a community. He or she is also a witness who carries certain expectations: we can draw strength from the role of the pastor as well as from what he or she does or says. Being there and going on being there – as individual and community – is an important factor in the pastoral role of the Church.

For example, a hospital chaplain remarked that not many people ask for her as chaplain, but they do welcome someone to talk to. The fact that she is dressed in a clerical collar is witnesses to the reason why she is there. On a broader level the liturgical cycle whereby the Church celebrates incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension feeds in at a very basic level to shaping the year for the wider community.

As the twentieth century progressed through two world wars, its latter part saw a crisis of identity in many institutions and professions beyond the borders of the Church. Previous notions of hierarchy, authority and gender relations were questioned if not broken down. In Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, W. H. Vanstone charts the changes that took place in the Church from the 1930s to the1960s:⁵ a change from being a benevolent parent at the heart of society to being a fringe member of society, from being needed to being needy, from being a Church that has the answers to being a kenotic Church. Similarly, in The Stature of Waiting, he points out the progression in the Gospels from activity to passivity, from action to passion, culminating in the moment when Jesus is handed over to the authorities.⁶

In recent times, alongside increasing attention being paid to the training of pastoral workers in the rudiments of psychology and listening skills, we have also seen a return to an understanding of pastoral work that is participatory. Rather than the pastor being the shepherd of the flock, care for each other arises from the love of God experienced in shared worship. It can happen anywhere, anytime, ‘to or for, by, with, or from everybody’ as Michael Flanders described the London omnibus.⁷ Of course, much of the activity involved in fostering the well-being of individuals or communities requires a more structured approach. It may be important that a person can rely on regular visiting or practical help or that a youth group brings people together each week and sometimes that skilled pastoral counselling is available.

Pastoral activity, then, includes visiting people who are ill, lonely, bereaved or in prison or hospital; conducting rites of passage such as baptism, marriage, funerals; conducting meetings; being involved in education of children and youth work; helping with personal dilemmas; resolving conflict; teaching and preaching; welcoming strangers. It is potentially endless, and one of the hardest things for people involved in it is to know where its limits properly lie.

Pastoral activity as participation

The model of pastoral activity adopted here is rooted in participation in a community, and we will be encouraging self-reflection as well as discussing difficulties you may meet ‘out there’. While pastors have particular responsibilities, they too are nourished by the community. Pastoral intervention is seen both as responsive – incarnating the love of God in response to distress – and as redemptive: entering into the life of community with a message of hope.

If you are already involved in a pastoral context you may well have found that there are parts that come easily and others you would rather avoid if possible. You may be a marvellous listener but hate meetings or dealing with conflict; you may be brilliant at getting youth groups or soup kitchens going but dread visiting people in hospital, or doing funeral follow-ups. Each one of us has to work out where we function best according to context, personal inclination and particular gifts, and remember to seek help with the other bits. As you read this book you will be encouraged to draw on your own resources, and question what difference faith, along with prayer, worship and ritual, makes to your own life and that of your community.

A basic axiom in this approach is that a good pastor is not someone who never makes mistakes, but someone who has the courage to reflect on those mistakes and what can be learned from them.

Thinking, feeling and doing

Another basic assumption is that an effective pastoral intervention involves bringing together three things: thinking, feeling and doing. These do not necessarily all happen at once, and the order in which they enter the equation is dependent on context, and may take time. For example, a young college chaplain went to visit a student about whom he was concerned and found him sitting in a room with the gas fire on – but not lit – and the windows closed. There was already a strong smell of gas. Without thinking he reached into his pocket, took out a pipe and asked, ‘Got a light?’ The student immediately leapt up and opened a window. Afterwards came the realization of what they both had done, and the beginning of the student’s long road into working on his feelings.

The chaplain’s ‘doing’ in this instance was exquisitely timed – if unplanned! But in bringing the three factors together, timing is not always easy. If we give people rational solutions at a time when they are not emotionally ready to hear them, or when the practical groundwork has not been done, the effort will be lost. It may also require different people to provide the different aspects of the intervention.

Grace was a well-loved member of a parish where for some years she had been warden and was in church every Sunday. She was, however, becoming too old and ill to cope in her own home. At first, members of the community rallied round, taking meals, visiting, helping her get to hospital appointments, but as her health deteriorated and her anxiety levels rose, they found themselves overwhelmed. The level of feeling grew ever stronger, the vicar being bombarded with their despair and frustration. Grace’s relatives had found a place for her to go which was in easy reach, but she refused to discuss it. When the vicar visited Grace, he did not have any practical tasks and was able on several occasions to listen at length to her dread of losing her independence. He felt torn apart between his sympathy for her and the burdened parishioners. He tried a few times to encourage her to consider a move but with no success.

It was only when Grace had had a chance to voice her feelings and know that they had been heard that she was ready to hear the thinking response. One day when the vicar visited, she told him she had been to see the place, but she was still not sure. It was then that he was able to say to her, ‘I think the time has come – and your friends and neighbours will be able to visit and enjoy your company rather than worrying about you.’ This time she was able to hear what he had to say.

For most of us, one of the three – thinking, feeling or doing – will come more easily than the others, and it can be helpful to identify which of them we need to work at – and even sometimes enlist people who are good at our weaker functions. You may be very good, for example, at chairing a discussion in such a way that everyone is heard and a reasonable decision is reached, but you may need someone else on hand to see that the decision is actually carried out.

Being informed, keeping the faith

Encountering people in a church context also challenges us to reconcile what our faith tells us with what we experience at a psychological level. Although both frames of reference may be deeply informative about the human condition, they often tend to pull us in opposite directions. People often find themselves torn between the desire to follow what they believe to be God’s will and the feeling that this is simply unmanageable. For example, a couple having difficulties in their relationship may find themselves facing the possibility of separation. Faith may tell them marriage is sacred, if only they can pray more they will find a way through together, they must learn to forgive; while a psychological assessment of the relationship suggests that perhaps the damage is such that neither will truly flourish if they stay together. Both these approaches contain truth: the question for the couple – as well as for the pastor involved – is to try to discern how to live authentically with their beliefs and the actuality of their situation. What are they actually capable of?

In a pastoral context, faith has to take the primary place in the sense of underpinning the whole enterprise, but this does not mean we can allow it to operate in ways that are dismissive or ignorant about how human beings actually function. From a psychological point of view we will assume that much of our inner life is driven by our primary relationships, and we are not conscious of how this is happening. Much of what goes on in human emotional life is happening out of sight, and we are passive in relation to it: like the ‘passions’ with which the early monastics battled in the desert, our forgotten or unnoticed experiences and assumptions can take us over without us being aware of what is actually happening. Increased awareness and consciousness of our unconscious life, though never complete, brings greater freedom.

On the other hand, to allow psychological insight to explain away or belittle faith without struggling to understand it also falls short. There is such a thing as grace, as the unexpected movement of the Spirit in a person’s life, and this can be mediated by sacrament, by ritual, or indeed by ‘the cup of cold water’ (Matt. 10.42) given by one person to another. For the pastoral worker, making an honest and respectful path through the situations he or she meets can be a hard journey in which there are many challenges to beliefs or assumptions. This book aims, within a theological framework, to provide some insight and practical guidelines in relation to problems in mental health for pastoral workers – whether in ordained ministry, pastoral teams or simply as members of a church community.

1 Alastair Campbell, 1987, A Dictionary of Pastoral Care , London: SPCK.

2 John Chrysostom’s sermons, On Marriage and Family Life and On Wealth and Poverty , are published in translation by SVS Press, Crestwood, New York.

3 For a detailed critique of this history see T. C. Oden, 1984, Care of Souls in the Classic Tradition , Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

4 George Herbert, 1981 The Country Parson , Classics of Western Spirituality, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, Ch. 27.

5 W. H. Vanstone, 1977, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense , London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

6 W. H. Vanstone, 1982/1987, The Stature of Waiting , London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

7 M. Flanders, 1957, from his introduction to the song, ‘A Transport of Delight’, in the revue with Donald Swann, At the Drop of a Hat : ‘Omnibus, my friend Mr Swann informs me, comes from the Latin, omnibus , meaning to or for, by, with, or from everybody – which is a very good description! This song is about a bus …’

part 2

Some Building Blocks in Psychology

2

Mind, Body and Spirit:

The Human Being as a Holistic Entity

Mind: conscious and unconscious

There is a saying from the Desert Fathers, ‘The thought that is concealed has great power over us.’ In the context of desert spirituality, we can take this as referring to the importance of a spiritual guide in the contemplative life: a disturbing thought that you cannot bring yourself to mention to your spiritual father or mother will become increasingly powerful. Freedom – and progress in the spiritual life – lies in being able to share it. Otherwise it becomes more and more compelling, intruding on prayer and possibly even driving you mad. In psychological terms, this saying still holds good: thoughts and fantasies you dare not confide in anyone else tend to become more and more powerful.

We can, however, take the saying to another level. Suppose the thought – idea, memory, expectation – is concealed not just from others, but from yourself. It resides, we might say, in the unconscious, and from there it drives your mood, your behaviour, your patterns of relationship. There is no way of understanding what is going on unless you can bring it into consciousness.

This can take place at the level of habits of thinking or reacting that inform our everyday responses. Such thought habits are sometimes called ‘scripts’: frameworks of understanding laid down in early childhood, which you do not even think about until you make a conscious effort to identify them.¹ Examples of scripts might be: ‘If something has gone wrong it must be my fault’; ‘I am an unhappy person’; ‘I never fail’, and so on. Whatever your own scripts are, they filter your reactions in any situation. As life goes on they can be modified, rewritten or even abandoned, but the point is to be able to identify them and how they are affecting you in order to be able to judge whether some change is needed.

Concealed thoughts also include forgotten experiences from the past – good and bad – that are built into our way of being and affect our reactions in the present. It is important to remember that our hidden mental processes do not only cause difficulties. Yes, they can have great power over us, but they can also give us great power – the power to love, to change things, to engage deeply with science and the arts and with many forms of community life.

When Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) developed his theory of the unconscious, he was trying to put into scientific – and therefore rationally accessible – language what was already