Drinking from the Same Well: Cross-Cultural Concerns in Pastoral Care and Counseling

By Lydia F. Johnson

Drinking from the Same Well is designed for those who seek a praxis-oriented theological grounding in the exploration of cross-cultural perspectives in the field of pastoral care and counseling. It traverses the broad terrain of cultural analysis and also explores in depth a number of discrete cross-cultural issues in pastoral counseling, related to communication, conflict, empathy, family dynamics, suffering, and healing. Cultural analysis and theological reflection are situated alongside numerous case studies of persons and situations that enflesh the concepts being discussed, and readers are invited to engage personally with the material through a variety of focus questions and reflective exercises.
This book can serve as a helpful textbook for seminarians and a useful guide for pastors and priests, church study groups, multicultural parishes, and anyone engaged in helping ministries with persons from other cultures. The goal is to develop culturally competent pastoral caregivers by providing a comprehensive and practical overview of the generative themes and challenges in cross-cultural pastoral care.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: May 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781630876715

Lydia F. Johnson

Lydia Johnson has taught pastoral theology in universities and seminaries in South Africa, Fiji, and New Zealand, and has held pastorates in Jamaica and the southeastern United States. She has edited several books on women's theology in Oceania, and is the coauthor of Reweaving the Relational Mat: A Christian Response to Violence against Women from Oceania (2007).

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Drinking from the Same Well

Cross-Cultural Concerns in Pastoral Care and Counseling

•

Lydia F. Johnson

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DRINKING FROM THE SAME WELL

Cross-Cultural Concerns in Pastoral Care and Counseling

Copyright © 2011 Lydia F. Johnson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Pickwick Publications

A Division of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-011-2

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-671-5

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Johnson, Lydia F.

Drinking from the same well : cross-cultural concerns in pastoral care and counseling / Lydia F. Johnson.

xiv + 164 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-011-2

1. Pastoral care. 2. Pastoral counseling. 3. Counseling—Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Cross-cultural counseling. I. Title.

bf637.c6 j234 2011

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

For Kelly and Erin,

who have made the cross-cultural journey with me

Acknowledgements

This book evolved out of many years of cross-cultural encounters and relationships, but most directly from my experience teaching a course in Pastoral Care Across Cultures for some years at Otago University in New Zealand. That was one of the most rewarding teaching experiences of my career, and I must begin by thanking the many students who participated in that course over the years, for their provocative ideas, questions, and sharing. I also wish to thank the former Head of the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Otago, Professor Paul Trebilco, for inviting me to develop this course initially as an offering of the department’s Distance Education unit. The coursebook I wrote for that endeavor formed the basis for the structure and content of this book.

My ideas about cross-cultural pastoral care have been nurtured by many professional and interpersonal experiences over a long period of time, both pastorally (as a minister in Jamaica and the United States) and as a teacher and practitioner of pastoral care and counseling (in South Africa, Fiji, and New Zealand). I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues and friends in those places, most especially at the Pacific Theological College in Fiji and the University of Durban-Westville in South Africa.

My deepest wellspring of gratitude goes to my now-grown daughters, Kelly and Erin, who grew up, came of age, and were spiritually and culturally formed in Fiji, South Africa, and New Zealand. As children they acculturated to new cultures much more easily than me, and their insights, openness, and compassion have taught me invaluable lessons. I cannot imagine having traversed this cross-cultural landscape without them by my side.

Prologue

More than ever before individuals and communities are today being confronted with the fact that we live in pluralistic societies where we are exposed to peoples and values of other cultures. We live in a highly mobile world, where people move in and out of nations and cultures as never before—whether as tourists, sojourners, immigrants, refugees, aid workers, missionaries, soldiers, diplomats, or students. We also live in a world that is bombarded with images and messages from elsewhere, through the mass communications outlets of television, the internet, social media, and so on. More and more people live in societies which have become multicultural by their very nature, such that there is an inevitable interface between peoples of different cultures.

In this interconnected world we cannot escape interacting with others who are culturally different from us, even if we may at times wish to do otherwise. These others are right here, alongside us, amongst us, and this will increasingly be the case for those who are involved in some way in caregiving vocations—as pastors or priests, chaplains, pastoral counselors, teachers, seminarians, health care providers, social workers, or simply persons engaged in outreach to the larger community through their communities of faith. The other is our neighbor, and as Christians we have been given a mandate to love our neighbors as ourselves.

But this is much easier said than done, even when our neighbor looks, sounds, and acts a lot like we do. When our neighbor is culturally different, we are confronted with a bewildering array of complex and at times inexplicable behaviors and attitudes. Sometimes these differences in habits, customs, worldviews, values, and ways of expressing ourselves may seem insurmountable. In pastoral care situations we may misread important signals, whether verbal or non-verbal. We may misjudge the nature of the problems that are presented to us, not to mention the most efficacious solutions to those problems. In short, we may make all kinds of mistakes in perception and response, even though our intentions are the best. We therefore need to be intentional about finding ways to better understand how others perceive the world and their place in the world.

I have been blessed to be able to spend most of my adult life living and working in a variety of cultures other than my birth culture. I have done so in the capacities of pastor and theological educator, so my opportunities for pastoral care have been numerous and challenging. I have certainly made my share of mistakes in understanding and action, and it is partly in response to my lifelong journey toward greater sensitivity and effectiveness as a cross-cultural caregiver that I have written this book.

For several decades I have taught pastoral care and counseling to theology students representing a diversity of cultural backgrounds, from the South Pacific, to South Africa, to New Zealand. In searching for suitable study materials for my students I have found that, while there is no shortage of secular academic works on cross-cultural issues, and a number of provocative reflections on cross-cultural theology, there are few resources in the field of cross-cultural pastoral care which combine scholarly analysis and theological reflection with a firm grounding in praxis. Secular theories, theological musings, and the results of scientific studies are helpful, but what has been most useful to me in my own cross-cultural experience and vocation has been reflection-on-practice—the true meaning of praxis. My students and I have benefitted most from a rigorous analysis of our own experience. I still hear from some of my former students regarding how profoundly their cross-cultural awareness was enhanced by engaging in course assignments such as person-in-culture interviews with individuals from other cultures, visitations in their homes and communities, and spirited group analysis of actual case studies.

This book, then, is designed for those who seek a praxis-oriented grounding in the exploration of cross-cultural perspectives in the field of pastoral care and counseling. My hope is that it might serve as a helpful textbook for seminarians and a useful guide for pastors and priests, church study groups, multicultural parishes, and anyone engaged in helping ministries with persons from other cultures. That is why I have included a Starting Where You Are exercise, with Focus Questions, at the beginning of each chapter, a set of Questions for Reflection at the end of each chapter, and numerous case studies, including a major case study with commentary at the end of each chapter. (In that regard, it is important to note that all names of persons in the case studies have been changed, and that some narratives are composites of situations I have encountered in my cross-cultural journeys). Ideally, this is a book which should be read and discussed collectively, preferably in a cross-cultural learning context. My hope is that it can stimulate open-ended conversation, honest self-examination, and proactive imagining about a way forward in your own cross-cultural encounters.

It is important to state at the outset that I approach the subject matter of cross-cultural encounter as a Christian. Scholars from secular psychology, sociology, and anthropology have contributed greatly to the understanding of issues in cross-cultural studies, and I have drawn on their insights in presenting many of the themes in this book (such as contrasting cultural worldviews and values, notions of identity, cultural empathy, communication, conflict, the family, suffering and healing). It is crucial that we learn from the findings of experts in all of these challenging areas. But I come to this undertaking not just as an academic but as a follower of Jesus Christ. I wish to reflect on what resources my Christian faith brings to bear on the tremendous challenges of cross-cultural understanding, relationships, and caregiving. That is why each chapter includes a theological reflection on the specific theme of the chapter.

I am convinced that Jesus’ own witness embodies a wellspring of riches which can inform our ministries of caregiving and our relationships with people from cultures other than our own. Jesus’ entire ministry was characterized by an intentional outreach to the other who was different. We can gain invaluable resources for our own cross-cultural ministries by continually referring back to Jesus’ way of relating to others. That Way is certainly my central point of reference throughout this book. It inspired the title of the book, as I reflected on the image of Jesus moving toward the moment when he could drink from the same well with the culturally-different Samaritan woman, in the Gospel of John.

I will be forever grateful that one of my college professors encouraged me to take part in a summer cultural immersion experience in a village on the Mesquite Coast of Nicaragua in 1968, when I was only nineteen years old. That experience turned my life upside down, awakened my cultural consciousness, and set me on a journey of cross-cultural exploration which has continued for more than forty years. The relationships in which I have been privileged to participate across a multiplicity of cultures have enriched my life in ways I could not have imagined as a child rooted in the Appalachian mountain culture of North Carolina. This journey will continue as long as I am alive, and I invite you to join with me in opening some of the doors to cross-cultural discovery.

1

Being Human, Being Cultural

Starting Where You Are

We will begin each chapter by enabling you to reflect on your own experience of the themes we will be exploring. As you then move into more in-depth explorations of relevant ideas and insights, the hope is that you will be able to analyze what you learn in relation to your own experiential reflections. In this first chapter we will be exploring the term culture. It is a word we use quite readily, in a variety of contexts, and, as we will discover, it is a concept of great complexity. Culture is not merely something exotic and foreign, like a National Geographic display of dancing natives in bizarre costumes. Each of us is living out the word culture every day. We will therefore begin our reflections on culture by locating ourselves in our own cultural framework. You can begin this process by responding to the questions below.¹

Focus Questions About Your Culture

1. Do you feel at home in the culture where you now live? Why or why not?

2. If asked to describe your primary culture (either your birth culture or an adopted culture), how would you summarize its major characteristics?

3. Are there any significant conflicts between your primary culture and any other cultural groups? If so, how do these conflicts affect you?

Defining Culture

Culture may be one of the most complex terms in the human vocabulary. Our intention in this chapter is to expose you to several approaches to understanding what culture is, especially from the perspectives of those with an interest in cross-cultural pastoral care and counseling. There is obviously no one correct answer to the question, What is culture? Many cultural anthropologists have stressed the centrality of meaning in any adequate definition of culture, a classic catchphrase being historically transmitted patterns of meaning embodied in symbols.² It was Melville Herskovits who famously defined culture as how human beings shape their environment—accentuating the fact that culture is a human construction.³ This anthropological view describes culture as the way in which social groups develop distinct patterns of life and give ‘expressive form’ to their social and material life experience.⁴ In other words, culture is how a particular group of people decide for themselves how they will live, what they will value, and how they will collectively assign meaning to their shared life as a people.

In recent decades, a growing number of cultural anthropologists have highlighted the need to broaden our conceptualizations of culture. They have emphasized the need for greater awareness of the complexities of cultural characterizations, and the dangers of lumping together cultural groups within a particular nation or ethnicity as a homogenous cultural monolith.⁵ Their warnings are a helpful reminder of the perils of generalization and reductionism in our efforts to define culture.

It is important to keep in mind the significance of meaning as we think about how culture shapes and influences one’s understanding of oneself and the world. The meaning-laden nucleus of culture is of particular relevance to those involved in cross-cultural pastoral care, because how one has been socialized to construe the meaning of one’s place in the world will have a significant bearing on how one views one’s own problems and the potential solution to those problems. This is true both for the caregiver and the careseeker.

Juris Draguns has provided a broad overview of the interface between cultural analysis and the field of counseling.⁶ He draws heavily on the work of H. C. Triandis, who first used the term subjective culture⁷ to speak of how we internalize our cultural predispositions as taken-for-granted givens which we seldom feel the need to objectify or scrutinize. Draguns has this to say about subjective culture:

This culture in our heads, which is composed of the shared experience and knowledge of a self-perpetuating and continuous human group, is part and parcel of our personal reality. It is absorbed in the process of socialization rather than actively taught and effortfully acquired. The components of subjective culture, in the form of perceptions, expectations, and other cognitions, are acquired unobtrusively over a lifetime of incidental learning. That is why the tenets of subjective culture appear to be so intuitively true or self-evident. Subjective culture, then, is like the air we breathe; only when we are deprived of it do we become aware of it.⁸

An awareness of the subjectivity of culture can help us to understand why we often have difficulty analyzing or being self-critical about our own cultural predispositions. As just one example, it has been generally assumed in the West that self-actualization, the primary goal of the therapeutic process, is a universal given. Yet self-actualization is in fact a reflection of a Eurocentric worldview,⁹ which values the self-determination of the individual above all else. This individual-centric paradigm has certainly been taken-for-granted in the field of Christian pastoral care and counseling. As Emmanuel Lartey confirms, The forms of pastoral care and counseling that have been practiced in the twentieth century reflect the dominant social, cultural, theological, and psychological theories of the West.¹⁰

Such a Eurocentric paradigm is clearly inadequate and even counter-productive in the multicultural world in which we now encounter culturally-different others as a matter of course. We therefore need to broaden the parameters of both cultural analysis and pastoral care and counseling to embrace a broader continuum of ways of understanding and relating between caregivers and careseekers from diverse cultural backgrounds. The starting point for such a task is gaining a better understanding of the significant degree to which culture is determinative of our very understanding of selfhood.

Cultural Self-Constructions

The unifying construct in the field of counseling, across all cultures, is the self. Yet there is no universal or culturally neutral definition of the self. We will explore self-concept in greater depth later on, when we examine identity issues in cross-cultural pastoral care. For now, we will simply note the most critical distinctions between understandings of the self in Western and non-Western cultures.

One common way to describe cultural contrasts in notions of selfhood has been to speak of the referential self of Western cultures—in which the self is viewed as an autonomous entity, the originator and controller of one’s behavior and destiny—versus the indexical self of most non-Western, collectivist cultures—a self which encompasses family (broadly construed), the wider community, even ancestors.¹¹ A good example of the indexical self is the concept known as ubuntu in the Zulu culture of southern Africa, roughly translated a person is a person by virtue of other persons. Clearly, if one is in a counseling relationship with someone from an indexical-self culture, one would have to take into account to a much greater degree than in the West the centrality of the extended family and community in any solution to the careseeker’s problems.

Another attempt to acknowledge fundamental cultural differences in defining the self has been the Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede’s four dimensions of selfhood, which he claims can be readily compared across cultures in sets of polar opposites.¹² One of these dimensions is individualism-collectivism (similar to what we just described above as the referential vs. the indexical self). On the individualism end of the spectrum, such cultures predispose persons to believe that they are more or less self-contained beings who are individually responsible for achieving their own personal goals. At the other end of the continuum, persons in a collectivist culture exist in an enduring network of inter-relationships; one exists not as a solitary I but always as part of a we.

Another dimension of selfhood which varies widely across cultures is the dynamic known as power distance, which refers to the psychological and sociological gulf which separates superiors from subordinates in any