Echoes of Mercy, Whispers of Love: My Journey and a Theology of Hope

By Pauline E. Doty

Echoes of Mercy, Whispers of Love connects the work of Alfred North Whitehead, process writers, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Henri Nouwen, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others, to present a defense or apologetic for faith, hope, and love in action. This kind of faith and hope leads to transformed lives and transformed communities. A theology of hope provides a framework for counseling troubled, despairing persons in the midst of acute suffering, loss, and tragedy. Doty identifies the need for a healthy religion that will inspire, transform, and enable personal and community healing. This is the work of peacemaking in families and in our world.

This book will connect with an audience that includes all believers and all who live with doubts and questions. All seekers for peace, hope, and truth in our post-modern era will find this a stimulating and helpful dialogue with the hard questions. Doty poses searching questions for readers reflection. This book promises to provide inspiration, Hope, and a rare opportunity for spiritual formation in the midst of life struggles.

Hooray for Pauline Doty! Her courage encourages us to lower our lofty traditionsso they may speak with the hurt, pain, loss, grief of our everyday lives. She invites us by her exampletrust our own experience, follow our own questions, create our own process of life in faith and action.By confiding in us, Doty lends confidence that God (by many names and revelations) goes with and before us, all ways and always. This is a book for all whose process of life and work wants healing to lead to hoping, the practical to the prophetic.What a call to confront in urgent grace the outrageouswithin and around us!

Rev. John Auer, Retired, Forty years United Methodist congregational urban ministry

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452078403

Pauline E. Doty

Pauline Doty grew up in rural Crown Point, Indiana. She is oldest of seven children. In sophomore year of college, she suffered a mental breakdown and was able to get the help she needed. In the next year, she made gains in her healing and recovery journey, and her vocation goals changed from nursing to pastoral care and counseling. At Anderson University (Anderson, Indiana), Chicago Theological Seminary (MDiv), and Columbia Theological Seminary (ThM), she studied theology, philosophy, pastoral care, and counseling, integrating her work as chaplain with her own psychotherapy and healing journey. Pauline has been a certified Pastoral Care Specialist with American Association of Pastoral Counselors. She is retired member of the Association of Clinical Pastoral Education. (AAPC merged with ACPE in 2019). Her graduate thesis was completed for Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia, 1987: Responding to Persons in Despair; A Process Theology of Hope for Pastoral Care and Counseling. Attentive to faith issues and questions in the midst of crisis, loss, illness, tragedy, and mental health issues, Pauline has served in counseling and service programs, hospitals, hospice, homes, and homeless shelters. She is committed to overcoming divisions and prejudice caused by racism, mental illness, poverty, and homophobia. She has been a member of Church of God (Anderson, IN), Presbyterian, USA, and United Methodist congregations. Pauline is a certified NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Connections and Peer to Peer facilitator. She leads Forgiveness/Spirituality groups, NAMI Connections support groups, and provides peer counseling. Pauline lives in Columbia, South Carolina with her cat, Majesty.

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© 2010 Pauline Doty. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 2/24/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4389-8856-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-9820-3 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being.

Unless otherwise designated, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations designated NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 By International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The NIV and New International Version trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations designated THE MESSAGE are taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

Dedication

Emma Malinda and Robert Francis Doty, my parents

And Louise Watkins Johnson, my second mother

I am deeply grateful for all they gave to me in experiences of faith, hope, and love, for the learning and growing with them—learning about pain, suffering, brokenness, abuse, tragedy, evil, and the transforming power of love and forgiveness.

I’ve learned from them and with them about Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Eternal Presence—God. So many times their words and actions spoke: I love you much.

And I dedicate this book to my brothers and sisters: David, Mary, Mike, Doris, Jude, and Judy, who each in big ways and small ways have supported, challenged, tested, and loved me in all these years.

Advance Praise for Echoes of Mercy, Whispers of Love:

I commend Pauline Doty for taking the time and committing the energy to share her ‘voice’ in a larger conversation about meaning in life. She has clearly integrated her theology with her experiences. I teach a course on Spirituality. The subject matter is not religion as we generally think of it. The course is designed to assist participants in discovering meaning in their lives. Her chapters give clear focus to this type of pilgrimage. Her invitations at the end of chapters are helpful. Although she shares her view of life, the invitation allows readers to explore and discover their own conclusions. The conclusions drawn from such a journey may differ widely.

– A Professor of Spirituality, Clinical Pastoral Educator, and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

"As the primary caregiver of a son dying from AIDS in early ’90s, Pauline gave me the spiritual support I desperately needed. I am even more grateful to her for the counseling and help she gave to him. She was the only person he would talk to about God and dying. After a lifetime of being an agnostic, thanks to the hours he spent talking with Pauline, he faced death with Faith and love, instead of fear and despair. May God bless Echoes of Mercy and Whispers of Love and turn it into a miracle for many readers."

– A mother of son with AIDS

Pauline Doty invites the reader into the innermost parts of her life journey. The reader is treated to an intimate and honest disclosure of the author’s most personal agonies and ecstasies. Doty reflects on her life experience through the lens of respected theologians, biblical scholars, as well as her own grounded wisdom. Doty’s willingness to speak honestly about her life experience coupled with her astute scholarship provide a rich reading experience for scholar and novice alike. As an added benefit, Doty poses searching questions for reader’s reflection. This book promises to provide inspiration, Hope, and a rare opportunity for spiritual formation in the midst of life struggles. I recommend this book to anyone seeking hope in the Christian life.

– Robby Carroll, M.Div., LMFT

Shallowford Presbyterian Church

Presbyterian Minister, counselor, and consultant for 25 years

Atlanta, Georgia

"Pauline Doty has many talents, gifts, and graces. She has a love for humankind that most don’t understand and maybe never will. Doty’s love for the least of these and especially those who are lost is expressed in a way that everyone can understand. In this book she takes life experiences in the big city, her passion for people of all races, her background in pastoral care and counseling, and her love for God to deliver Echoes of Mercy and Whispers of Love. The reader will find these accounts and personal experiences fascinating and enlightening. This page-turner will continue to resonate in our memories long after we have read the last chapter and the last page."

– Allene McCollum

Outreach Coordinator

Cascade United Methodist Church

Atlanta, Georgia

Doty integrates and correlates the importance of a process theology method of reflection developed over decades of pastoral practice and her personal spiritual formation. She offers her own methodology (dialogical, journaling, reflective, and meditative approach) to confront and struggle with painful experiences of evil and the mystery and finitude of death. This model can assist others in their own journey of self discovery in similar conditions of having to correlate faith commitments with lived experiences. In so doing her life journey and reasoning in regard to suffering and finitude become metaphor for doing theology.

– Elizabeth Johnson Walker, Th.D., LMFT

Associate Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling

Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Anyone who has experienced depression or other forms of mental illness can find hope from Pauline Doty’s experiences. I recommend this book wholeheartedly. I believe it is one you can read and re-read and come up with new insights each time. Keep it close as a book you can recommend to friends and loved ones, especially for someone suffering from mental illness. The gleanings of faith that are expressed will help the person suffering and the family members who are supporting. Her instruction comes from her deep commitment and relationship with a higher power. I believe that anyone who reads this book will find great hope and optimism for living the best you can with a faith that can be pervasive in all aspects of life.

– Mark Holloway, NAMI Peer to Peer

Support Group Facilitator, Anderson, Indiana

Pauline Doty’s story and theology will touch the hearts and lives of many, proving again how God is working for the good in all things. Her book is an important contribution to pastoral theology and to persons in recovery or coping with grief and/or depression. She brings our broken relationships and uncertain futures to amazing grace and disciplines that bring hope. This book will support you as you engage others in pain and suffering, the same as it did for me. Pauline has had a significant impact on how I have coped with personal problems and tragedies in my own life. Her healing vision for relationships, systems, and governments has the potential of impacting humanity around the world.

– Jo Harrington Calkins, Ph.D.

Director of Research, Palmetto Health and

The University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Columbia, SC

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1 Overcoming Despair

Chapter 2 My Journey – Echoes of Mercy

Chapter 3 My Journey – Whispers of Love

Chapter 4 Everlastingness and Life After Death

Chapter 5 A Theology of Hope for Transformation

Chapter 6 My Journey – Amazing Grace

Chapter 7 Hope for the Future

Chapter 8 My Journey – Redeeming Love1

Chapter 9 A Theology Of Hope: God And Evil

Chapter 10 Doing Justice Together1

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written except for many friends, pastors, pastors’ wives, and family who have been on the journey with me, as we seek to live life with integrity, as we deal with the hard questions of our faith, and the struggles of loving God and neighbor as we love ourselves. Thank you so much—Jo Calkins, Sidney and Isabelle Holston, John Auer, Peggy Griffin, Lucille Coleman, Paul and Dorothy Rider, Lucy Beaty, Mack McClam, Sandy Nesbit, Jo Walker, Luonne Rouse, Phil Igney, Mae Waddle, Christie Stephens, Allene McCollum, and Willie Barrow—all are special expressions of God’s loving care for me.

I am very indebted to many professors, teachers, therapists, and pastoral counselors who have crucially guided me and supported me. Thank you: Miriam Needham, George Stroupe, Jap Keith, Edward Smith, Tim Little, Ted Schwartz, Carol LeFevre, Delwin Brown, Diane Elliott, John Vayhinger, and Archie Reed.

In 2007 I asked some colleagues to read chapters of this book and to meet with me for discussions and feedback. Their encouragement and feedback in seven sessions meant a great deal. Thank you! — Joe Allison, Kay Casterline, Bonnie Cox, Larry Green, Kay Shively, Ruby Wideman, Paul Saltzmann, Wilford and Wilma Jordan.

I thank David Liverett who designed the book cover, and my editors/proofreaders: Avis Liverett, Grace Suko, Althea Taylor, Carol Streeter, and Steve Lortz.

Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr., Professor Emeritus, of Claremont School of Theology, in 2007 took time to reread my three chapters on process theology and assisted with edits and rewriting several pages in what is now Chapter 9, A Theology of Hope: God and Evil. He first read some of my manuscript in 2003. In 2009 he again read several chapters and offered important guidance for edits. His support through the years has been a source of encouragement for which I am deeply grateful.

I have been privileged to be a part of some very special churches in all these years. From each congregation I have learned much and found very important friendships that nourished me and helped me to endure and overcome. I pray this book may help bring our human family closer to the vision and reality of Beloved Community, the divine commonwealth — the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

To all: "Thank you very much!" for taking time to share with me, to read my manuscript, and to give your attention and support in this significant way to my book, to my life, to my ministry. I am deeply grateful.

Preface

I like to remind myself of the words of Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities. He gives us six ways to enable peacemaking in all arenas—personal and political. In The Road to Daybreak; A Spiritual Journey, Henri Nouwen explains Vanier’s philosophy:

(1) Respect every individual human being; (2) create space for people to grow and become mature; (3) always stay in dialogue; (4) keep adapting mutual expectations; (5) enjoy the differences among people; (6) always direct your attention to those who suffer most. Jean offered these points to help us deal with the many conflicts that keep arising among us. They are the way to peace—whether it be in the family, in the community, or in the world.¹

I’ve been working on this book for over seven years. This book is the culmination of many years of being on the journey of emotional and spiritual healing, growing in Christ, and following my call. I am rewriting this manuscript in a time of transition after the death of my mother. This book is about what I’ve learned on my journey, as I’ve sought to make sense of life and death, pain, conflict, tragedy, the future, and hope.

This book is the result of all the years of God’s mercy and love working in my life, and especially reflects the learning, growing, and healing of the past forty years since my mental and spiritual crisis at age twenty. It is a book that I believe will enable persons to find more healing, more hope, and more clearness about how to follow God’s will in families, in our communities, in our churches and faith groups, even in our world.

In 1987 I completed a thesis for a Master of Theology program at Columbia Theological Seminary (Decatur, Georgia) titled, Responding to Persons in Despair: A Theology of Hope for Pastoral Care and Counseling. This thesis was the culmination of study, training, and work in pastoral care and counseling, and much time spent in intentional disciplines of prayer, journaling, and therapy as I’ve worked for growth and healing in personal relationships and in myself. I was thirty-eight at that writing. Some of those chapters, rewritten, are now in this book as my Theology of Hope.

My Theology of Hope includes the first writing and research I did in seminary at age twenty-four (1973), as I struggled to find a reasonable answer to the questions for theodicy: Why is there so much suffering and evil in the world, if there is a loving and all powerful deity? Mine was a very personal search for answers, not just an academic or professional learning exercise. My experience of serious mental illness at age twenty forever changed my world and the way I experienced and saw the whole world. I had spent three and a half weeks in the hospital—the last two and a half weeks in a state mental hospital.

In college following my hospitalization I studied Alfred North Whitehead and process philosophy and theology. I found discussions and interpretations that gave me new understandings of how God works in the world. In working with the hard questions about suffering and evil, God and the world, I found another possible interpretation for the reality and experience of evil and the demonic. Process theology assisted me in my faith struggles as I tried to make sense of my experience of mental illness, God, and the world. I believe my study in process philosophy and theology enhanced my Christian faith perspective.

In process theology the reality of evil is defined as crucially connected to the freedom to make choices, good and bad, in the context of a world with limits and imperfection at all levels. God’s omnipotence is redefined and reframed as the power of persuasive love. I will discuss these ideas in later chapters and they are key to my theology of hope.

The problem of evil in the world gets focused most crucially in the midst of tragedy. Why is there so much pain, suffering, and evil in the world if there is a loving, omnipotent, and good God?

In the first few generations of the Christian church there was not an established single interpretation for the origin of evil. There was wide difference and apparent freedom to interpret and speculate among these first Christians. The freedom to struggle with answering these age-long questions that challenge our faith is crucial to the task of constructing and living a theology of hope.

I believe this Theology of Hope develops a theological and faith perspective adequate to the challenge of meaningfully responding to persons in the midst of acute suffering, facing great tragedy and loss, or reckoning with the harsh impact of evil, chance, and limits for change. Most important, it provides a way of looking at the faith questions and the faith struggle that can enable a spiritual perspective and healthy psychological life for anyone, whether in the crisis of grief and despair at the present moment or not.

Four chapters of this book are more about the Echoes of mercy, whispers of love² in my life. My friend and former pastor, Rev. John Auer, wrote to me some months ago, giving me a strong affirmation to write more of my story:

Pauline,

Thank you for staying so faithful to your mother. And for your call alerting us about Louise. Hard to think of anyone to whom we owe more of our formation than Louise, Lucille, few others like them. Wish we could gather ourselves all together one more time! If it were not for you we would be missing each other completely. So thanks for that. I did do a couple of chapters of reading your manuscript at annual conference … Tell your story, girl—tell the stories of Louise! … We are nearing the end of our part in very busy summer—month called Artown with performances at church virtually every night. Right after Hiroshima/Nagasaki Sunday we get away for a while. Just had a person threatening his own life and others with a gun shot down by police in front of church yesterday. More things change, more they stay the same. 

John

Rev. Auer, along with his wife Julie, recently retired from pastoring First United Methodist Church in Reno, Nevada. His email refers to our early friendships with members of Julia Gay UMC on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, when he was our pastor over thirty years ago.

Journaling and Inner Healing

My recent decision to write more of my personal story for this book comes from friends who have encouraged me and from the promptings of the Spirit. You will understand the context and the life experiences out of which my questions, theology, and hope come.

I believe it is true that when we take time for, and seek deeper levels of healing in our personal lives, in our relationships, then we will see growth in our ability to exercise our gifts and share our love,