In this issue, we’re publishing many articles on techniques and church strategy in counseling. But what of the counselor personally? What are the particular problems he or she faces?
Anxiety is one, and Ben Patterson explores in a personal way three sources of anxiety for those involved in pastoral care.
Last April 5, a Saturday, I got into my car and left home at six in the morning. I was scheduled to be the speaker at a Holy Week breakfast some eighty miles away in La Jolla, California, at the church where I had formerly been an assistant pastor. The breakfast was to begin at eight o’clock, and I wanted to give myself plenty of time to get there.
I thought the drive might take longer than usual because I expected I’d have to get out of my car periodically and stand up to relieve the pain in my leg. Lately I had developed a dull ache in my right leg whenever I sat for extended periods of time.
But this morning the ache lost its dullness. I had driven my car no more than ten minutes before I could no longer bear the pain. I pulled off the highway, nauseous and perspiring, got out of my car, stood up and leaned forward against the door, and tried to clear my mind for a decision.
I had to get to La Jolla, I reasoned. That was nonnegotiable. But I couldn’t stand the pain. That too was non-negotiable. So I struck a compromise: I would drive ten miles, allow myself a stop to get out of the car, let the pain subside, summon my courage, get back in, and drive another ten miles.
Three days later a doctor diagnosed my condition as a ruptured disc and prescribed total bedrest for three weeks. The only time I was to get up was to go to the bathroom. As things turned out, my bed was too soft, and total bedrest turned out to be total “floor rest.” Six weeks passed before I went back to work.
Thus began the most painful and confusing experience of my relatively sheltered life. Everything seemed to hurt, especially my pride. I am an athlete. I take good care of myself. Yet, I have a degenerative condition in my back. Degenerative. An ominous word: it sounds a little like depressive, which was, and at times still is, my state.
I write this rather lengthy introduction because this experience brought into sharp focus for me the problem of pastoral counseling and pastoral care. For I found myself in a unique position. I was pastor to the majority of people who came to pastor me. On the one hand, I desperately needed their help. On the other hand, they asked me to interpret the meaning of my calamity. I was counselor and counselee; and out of that little dialectic, I came to understand why pastoral counseling and care has been such a burden and drain on me. I began to realize that it has grown out of three anxieties.
The first anxiety is over my role as a pastoral counselor. Just what am I supposed to do or say?
As a seminarian, I was walking the floors of Los Angeles County General Hospital on the first day of a ten-unit class called Clinical Pastoral Education. Two women, who perceived me to be the chaplain, virtually pounced on me and dragged me into a room where their non-Christian brother lay dying of kidney disease. On the way they told me they wanted me to lead him to Christ before he died. They stood on one side of the bed, I stood on the other, and he lay in between-pale, in pain, and fighting his last battle against these two evangelical ayatollahs. The only thing we four had in common was that none of us knew what to say and were terribly anxious about it all.
A lot of water has run under the bridge since then, and I’ve gained experience as a counselor and pastor. But that same anxious feeling has come back over and over again, although usually in response to different questions: ‘Why me? ‘Why this cancer?” ‘Why this divorced?”
During my sickness the question most often posed was, “Have you been asking God ‘Why me?’ ” That set me thinking. No, I wasn’t asking that question because I have always been more predisposed to ask “Why not me?” I’ve never been like a Job who vigorously protests his innocence and the raw deal he’s getting. Not that I’m humble; it’s just that I have enough vague, free-floating guilt and anxiety in me that I tend to get nervous when things are going well. I think the rug is going to be pulled out from under me any minute.
That, of course, is bad theology. But even good theology can say, “Why not me?” To truly trust your life to God means to live in a kind of joyful agnosticism, not doubting that God is in loving oversight of your life, but radically doubting your ability to grasp how he is.
This has great significance for the pastor. We do not have to be answermen, for ourselves or for others. And we should not. We should avoid the quick fix of an easy answer, and instead, stand beside people as they face the silence of God in their lives. When Bob Lemon was manager of the New York Yankees, he was asked for advice by the new Chicago White Sox manager, Don Kessinger. His answer was, “I’d like to help you, but you don’t drink.” That is the seductive attraction of giving answers where there are none. It takes us off the hook, and puts them on theological booze.
Furthermore, the need to have or give an answer betrays a basic insecurity and mistrust of God. It demands that we be able to see God’s managerial hand. It’s the nervous kibitzing of a backseat driver. Better to painfully grope behind the silence of God and learn to trust him when there is no apparent reason, than to put your trust in easy answers. Our faith is not in his reasons, but in him and his promises.
The practical result? It takes the pressure off. The pastor can be there with the sufferer as parakletos, one who stands alongside-just as the Holy Spirit does. Then, as Henri Nouwen puts it, he becomes a living reminder of Christ’s presence, not the proprietor of a spiritual dispensary
The second anxiety is over time. It is embarrassing to admit this, but I find that some of my greatest struggles with pastoral care and counseling grow out of the fact that I almost always feel interrupted when someone needs help. I almost always feel interrupted when I need help. Perhaps this is just a problem of those who have the kind of personality and temperament that has every minute of every day planned. Never a day goes by that I don’t know exactly what I want to do at every point of the day. I’m not compulsive, just very purposeful.
But human needs can’t be scheduled. I’ve fantasized how nice it would be if I could sit down with God at the beginning of each year, receive from him my year’s quota of deaths, divorces, breakdowns, cancer, and my personal vicissitudes, spread them out evenly over the next twelve months, and then plan everything else I want to do around them. My first thought after the doctor diagnosed my back ailment and prescribed bed-rest was how it interfered with my plans.
Grave theological error lurks behind these ruminations. For one thing, whose time is it anyway? God’s or mine? It’s God’s, of course, and I receive time as a gift to be used in his honor. No one can take my time because I have none. Six weeks on the floor impressed that truth upon me.
Besides that, what is time? Our conception of time has been so conditioned by the wristwatch, that we tend to see it as a quantity to be managed, used, and controlled; it’s a fixed capital we have in our account to invest and spend very carefully. The Bible doesn’t indicate time as an abstract quantity; but rather times, seasons, and concrete circumstances sent our way by God. They are not to be managed, but understood; not used, but responded to. For this reason human need is never an interruption, but a summons to understand and act.
Again, like anxiety over my role, anxiety over time creates tension and pressure. The practical upshot of a proper view of time is to let me as pastor relax, and be my fallible and human self with my schedule. I can receive people and problems as from God’s hand, and trust his sovereign grace to enhance my bedside manner and order my priority list.
There’s a marvelous story in the Gospels about a Syro-Phoenician woman who comes to Jesus and begs him to heal her daughter. Actually, she pushes her way into his presence. Jesus meets her need with warmth and humor and sends her home satisfied. What makes the story so apropos to the subject of pastoral care is that it was Jesus’ day off, she was not a church member, and she had to batter her way through a protective secretary (Mark 7:24-30; Matthew 15:29-31). Jesus knew what time it was and whose time it was. God’s time was his time.
At bottom, anxiety over role and time come from the worst anxiety of all: anxiety over our relationship to God. Who’s in charge, really? Answermen and calendar people suffer from real confusion here. Can God be trusted? Can we stop trying to run the universe long enough to find time for others? Can we let God do the healing of persons through us?
The quality of our prayer life is a barometer of how we answer these questions. During my six weeks on the floor, all I could do was pray for my church. I was so concerned that things would fall apart without me that I prayed two and three hours daily. This is not a boast, because most of my praying was motivated by anxiety, not trust. But pray I did, every day over every person in my congregation. With each passing day the times got sweeter, until one day I found myself saying to God, “You know, I wish I had time to do all this intercessory prayer when I’m well!” His answer was quick and blunt. “You have the same twenty-four hours when you’re well as when you’re sick. The only difference is when you’re well you think you are in control.”
Helmut Thielicke puts his finger on our problem when he observes that Jesus moved out of his homeland of prayer with his father toward human need; we move the other direction. The world is our home, and when human needs weigh us down to the point of collapse, then, maybe, we make a foray toward the alien world of prayer. But, says Thielicke, “What he (Jesus) said to men he had first talked over with the Father.” Would that it were so with us! Then the sheep we shepherd would truly be cared for by the Great and Good Shepherd. Then the unsolvable riddles of human misery would be occasions for fellowship with Christ, not drains on our energy and just one more thing to do this week. Then we would know with Mary, who sat at Jesus’ feet, “only one thing is necessary”-that we listen and be receptive to God, and then to the person waiting in the room outside our offices.
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