The pastor in emotional crisis. Where does he go for help? Dr. Louis McBurney and his wife, Melissa, work full-time at their Marble Retreat Center trying to bring healing to Christian leaders unable to cope (See LEADERSHIP, Spring 1980, Volume 1 Number 2).
To give our readers an insight into what happens at Marble Retreat, we asked writer Harold Fickett, himself a pastor’s son, to spend a week at the retreat center and to thoroughly research one story. Certain dimensions of this story are unusual, but the underlying pattern has applications to all of us, for it concerns our most basic thoughts and emotions and the experiences which shape them.
The story is based on the experience of one man, his family, and the people to whom he ministered. The names of the people involved, except for Dr. McBurney and his wife, have been changed to protect their privacy.
We suggest if you have only ten minutes, don’t start this one now. Take time to read it as you would a story; let the background lead you into the events; notice the subtle interweavings of “normal” life. For the counselor, the pastor, the person trying to grasp the biblical counseling/ therapy role and to understand the troubles around him- and perhaps aspects of his or her own struggles-this article can provide important insights.
We have appended to the story a discussion of this case history with Dr. McBurney.
June 1978
In a southwestern city, under an oceanic sky, a man, David Johanson, and his wife, Claire, sat on a park bench beneath two eucalyptus trees. David was the pastor of a local Presbyterian church. His ministry had reached an impasse.
He looked down, unable to speak. Boyishly handsome at thirty-two, with a full head of brown hair, David looked from a distance like someone who might have been elected the outstanding member of his fraternity, as he had been; but up close, his features appeared stronger and somewhat mysterious: his eyes, though bright blue, were recessed, hidden. He sat so very still, as if to create boundaries for the wild struggle within him.
Claire’s eyes were dilated with fear. She said his name.
David told her then that he needed to get away; if he didn’t get away for a year, maybe longer, he might break down completely. He had never thought of himself as a candidate for a nervous breakdown, but he could not describe what he was going through now in any other way. He wanted to ask the church for a sabbatical.
Claire embraced him. She cried. But he knew, from how she held him, her hand on the back of his neck, from the catch in her cry which said yes, that her tears were joyful.
“I’m so glad it’s the church,” she said.
“Why? Tell me what you mean.”
“Lately, well, I thought it might be me. That you had stopped loving me.”
1971-1977
David Johanson began his ministry proper in 1971, when after seminary and a year as an assistant pastor, he received the invitation of Memorial Presbyterian Church to become its pastor.
This southwest congregation had severe problems; in fact, if they had not found David and come to believe that he could restore the life of the church, they would have disbanded. At that time, about fifty people attended the Sunday morning worship service, and the annual budget called for the church to raise $17,000, which it was failing to do.
David’s days and weeks quickly fell into a pattern. On weekdays, he prayed and studied until eleven in the morning. He usually had a business lunch. Counseling took up most afternoons. Although he felt uncomfortable in this area of his ministry, he often would see people one after another from one o’clock until dinner time. He and Claire went out almost every night of the week to visit church members.
David imposed this heavy schedule on himself, working upwards of ninety hours a week. He swore he took Mondays off to be with his family, but he often drove over to the church “just to check on the mail,” and then spent the whole morning taking care of administrative details.
A gifted preacher, David’s tenor voice gained in range and power as he delivered his messages, its tonal values providing just the right emotional coloring. Under his preaching, attendance at Memorial began to increase immediately, and after a few years hovered at about three hundred. One-third of the congregation consisted of college students from a nearby state university; they found David’s ministry helpful in coping with the pressures of studies and career choices. The budget increased to $112,000. One out of every four dollars went to missions, a fact in which David took pride.
His ministry at Memorial might be said to have hit its zenith on a Sunday in 1977.
The start of that morning’s worship service was delayed while the ushers set up a P.A. system and chairs in the courtyard outside the sanctuary to accommodate the overflow crowd. From behind the pulpit, David saw row after row of people leading back through the open back doors to those in the courtyard who sat in the hard sunlight. The attendance heartened him, of course, but as he preached, his high spirits became something more. His sermon-on paper somewhat awkward and hesitant in its attempt to articulate the reality of the atonement-possessed, as he delivered it, an eloquence [ far beyond his own oratorical gifts. He felt, and he knew the congregation felt, the excruciating pain of Christ’s sacrifice, and the anguish of taking upon himself the sins of the whole world. I
David became aware of how the setting was reminiscent of so much in church history: the crowds in the homes where the apostles preached, and those, who heard the preachers of the Great Awakening. Gradually, however, it was not a matter of the day, the sermon, or the crowd merely alluding to what the church had known. David felt the presence of God so powerfully that he needed an angel to say “Be not afraid.” For in the presence of the holy, his impulse, after those in the Scriptures who find themselves suddenly on the frontier of heaven, was to flee. He felt unworthy, and truly feared that the sanctuary walls, which seemed then a shield against the radiations of God’s glory, would collapse if the Lord came any closer.
Easter Week through Labor Day 1977
David received a call early in the week from one of his elders, Phil Wyeth. Phil was in many ways an exemplary Christian, and had been one of David’s most ardent supporters. Yet, over the phone his voice sounded stern, and David intuited that an unfavorable judgment of him was at hand. Phil wanted to meet privately with David and three other elders. Ordinarily, David would have agreed readily, but now he insisted that the meeting be an official gathering of the church session, its governing body, and that all seven elders be present.
At the meeting, David sat impassively as Phil presented a document accusing David of failing in his duties, both in terms of broad considerations-the standard of his recent messages was the first item- and specific instances in which David was purported to have acted against the will and advice of < the session. Four elders thought the charges just. The three other elders were nonplussed; they found the broad concerns groundless and the specific considerations erroneous. The most vocal of the three, Jack Taylor, took the document as a sign of deeper and unstated concerns; he wanted to know what was behind all this.
David thought he knew. As he listened to the elders discuss his performance as a minister, he remembered visiting in the apartment of Phil’s stepson. The boy wore a silk-screened T-shirt, which bore a dragster’s image, and dirty jeans, and had his feet up on the steamer trunk he used for a coffee table. His hands were folded behind his head, his 4 elbows splayed out. His girlfriend sat next to him on 4 the couch. She kept her eyes set on David, lovely brown eyes with flecks of gold in them, which now, reddened with incipient tears, looked wounded. David was trying to convince the couple that their living together was wrong. Even though people sought him out as a counselor, he felt extremely awkward dispensing advice; this situation was nothing less than a trial. But he stuck with what he knew to be right, and read appropriate verses from his Bible to the couple. The girl asked if the timing really mattered since they were to be married soon anyway. David suggested they come for premarital counseling. The girl agreed they needed it. But the boy said “screw that” and asked David to leave- virtually threw him out.
David then went to the home of Phil and Sheryl, the boy’s mother. He explained it was his policy not to marry any couple who did not satisfy him that they would endeavor to establish a home and family in keeping with Christian principles. Although Sheryl’s son and his girlfriend were Christians- Phil had, in fact, made a convert of the young woman-David believed them to be unprepared for marriage. He would not marry them, not until Sheryl’s son had a steady job and was willing to participate wholeheartedly in counseling.
David’s judgment delivered, Sheryl started screaming. He didn’t remember what she really said, although her point was clear enough: this was their church, he was its pastor, and he had better marry her son. He might have replied that Sheryl had spoiled her son trying to make up for the loss of his natural father, who had died as a young man in an accident; and that to keep on spoiling him by supporting him in this unwise marriage would not only be detrimental to her son but might ruin the life of his fiancee as well. But he said nothing. He became ever more quiet as the volume of her imprecations increased.
In the same way, the pastor said little when his elders finally turned to him and asked him to respond to the document and the ensuing discussion. He mumbled that he was not prepared at this time, but would do so next week at the regularly scheduled session meeting.
The next morning he went into his church study as usual in order to pray and prepare his message for the upcoming Maundy Thursday service. He opened his Bible and began to read, but in the midst of the second verse his vision blurred and he felt dizzy. He felt like he was going to faint. He leaned back in his reclining chair, gripping its arms firmly, and wondered what was happening to him. It must, he knew, have to do with the elders’ meeting. He would put that out of his mind, get after this message, and then he should feel much better. He tried. He tried until he knew he better take out the accusing document, go over it, and think through his reply; he would have to do that today or abandon the idea of working all together.
That day and much of the next, he went through the charges point by point and wrote out a detailed rebuttal.
The task completed, he reviewed what he had written, and believed he had answered and countered every charge. Yet, this did not bring him any satisfaction. He could not help feeling that although in their particulars the charges were wrong, the very fact that they had come into being indicated that the elders had detected something true about him, which at this point they had only misnamed.
Of course, his guilt had to do with his many sins. But what could people find out about him, anyway? That he was not the Christ-like figure so many people took him to be? That he did not always feel like praying? That he had lustful thoughts? That he was smug about the church’s success? This smugness, this sanctimonious pride, he guessed, was the most odious part of his character; this, and encouraging others in their idealized notion of him, which compounded his other trespasses.
He resolved, therefore, to return to the elders and confess. Putting aside the elaborate defense he had written, he composed a simple one-page statement to the effect that he had been smug at times and uncooperative at others; he needed the forgiveness of the elders for his pridefulness, and would do whatever they deemed fitting in order to rectify the situation.
As he waited to deliver his mea culpa, he still could not help recalling other times, circumstances, and decisions which might have motivated two of Phil’s three supporters. But David remonstrated with himself that, although all of this was true, he must take the responsibility for mishandling these situations.
When the board met, his supporters received his statement with a mixture of surprise and respect; they couldn’t quite believe he was “going the extra mile” in this way, but they assumed the other elders must now be satisfied, and, furthermore, convinced of David’s sanctity. There were handshakes all around, yet David, looking to his accusers, received the impression that he had only quelled for the moment the unfavorable judgments being made on his ministry.
David’s ministry at the church declined thereafter. Attendance fell, finances shortened. These facts could be credited to seasonal and societal economic factors, and David might have interpreted them in this way, if it were not for his haunting suspicion that Phil and others were out there shaking their heads and talking about what could be done with the pastor.
David was not simply paranoid. Phil soon came in and lambasted him, shaking his finger in David’s face, and threatening, in a loud voice, that David’s ministry with them might be nearing its end.
Faced with such harsh criticism, David prayed. He prayed for wisdom, guidance, and a true spirit of charity, as well as relief from the situation’s pressures. (He had constant pain in the back of his neck, and he slept lightly if at all during the long nights.) He continued in his prayers for other longterm concerns, one of which detached itself and joined with his thoughts about his predicament.
As a minister in the United Presbyterian Church, David, with his aggressive evangelical convictions, had been something of a lone wolf. He questioned the orthodoxy of the supplemental confession adopted by the United Presbyterians in 1967, which allowed its ministers latitude in how they must interpret the Westminster confession, the primary theological document of the denomination. It seemed to David that the supplemental confession bordered on apostasy and encouraged ministers interested in a social gospel to neglect fundamental aspects of Christian piety. He questioned the liberalism of his denomination all the more because it reduced substantially the number of churches who might call him to be their pastor; now when he might have wanted to find another church, the situation grew in importance and made him despair of moving elsewhere.
David contacted church leaders he respected for advice. One man suggested he meet with a minister who had left the United Presbyterian Church and associated with the Presbyterian Church of America, a recently formed denomination with evangelical convictions.
Subsequently, David attended the general convention of the Presbyterian Church of America. He found its clergymen to be of the same mind as he, and his participation in the convention took on the euphoric character of a long delayed homecoming. He, the lone wolf, the odd man out, the orphan, was treated as a true brother by everyone he met at the convention.
On the last Sunday in September of 1977, David stood before his congregation and announced he was resigning. He explained his plan: because of his differences with his current denomination, he must leave this church; but he would stay in town and establish a new church, which would be affiliated with his new denomination.
At the end of the service he invited everyone interested in founding a new church to meet with him that afternoon in his back yard. And there, with about sixty people in a familial, warm atmosphere, David started Olive Grove Presbyterian Church.
June 1978-June 1979
Nine months after the founding of Olive Grove Presbyterian, David and Claire had their decisive talk, and soon afterwards asked for a sabbatical. David was acutely depressed.
He might have understood the deep depression into which he had fallen, if the congregation he had led out of the Egypt of his first church had not found its way to a promised land. But it had. Within the first month it had moved into and made arrangements to buy a church building vacated by another congregation. Olive Grove’s membership grew at a steady pace, and its finances, while by no means assured, appeared healthy enough to him. David | had reason to think of Olive Grove as a final rebuttal to the charges he had faced. But his apparent triumph left him feeling as if all the meaning and vitality in his life had drained away.
So, a few days after his talk with Claire, he met with the elders of Olive Grove. He explained his need for the sabbatical by saying he was exhausted, l needed to spend time with his family, and wanted l to work on his dissertation-a book, painfully ironic in its conception, about how laymen might assist their minister in his duties.
David’s notion that he could write a book in his present state of mind was self-deceptive in the same way the reasons he gave the session for his sabbatical were misleading. He could hardly admit to himself how troubled he was, and so his representations to the session, which downplayed his emotional confusion, served to hide his real condition from them.
Olive Grove’s elders granted him permission to go on sabbatical, but since the church was just nine months old, they did so only after they had expressed a certain amount of sentiment that this was an inopportune time for David to leave them.
David and Claire took their daughters and as many suitcases as they could stuff into their station wagon and moved to upstate New York, where David had grown up. They found an old farmhouse which they rented at an inexpensive rate. David had a study there, and he spent his days, not writing his dissertation, but reading or staring out the study window at the fields of corn. The crop grew up, ripened, was harvested, and then the fields lay fallow. Winter came and went, the deep snows that year lasting well into spring.
David’s condition improved, but only to the extent that he enjoyed spending his days reading in his study, He did not wish to return to Olive Grove as yet. A symptom of his depression helped him to understand and gauge his inability to go back: every time the phone rang, tears sprang to his eyes. As a result, Claire took most of the calls. One day after she concluded a phone conversation, she walked directly into his study. She reported that the session of Olive Grove had called a general meeting of the membership, at which they would take a vote on the resolution that David should be fired.
Through a series of letters and one visit back to the church, David knew that his position there became less certain the longer he stayed on sabbatical. Now that the issue had come to a head, he determined to return and fight for his job, but he had little confidence in his ability to do so.
After David’s arrival back on the scene, the session held a preliminary meeting to determine procedural matters for the general meeting of the church. A representative from the denomination attended. He attempted to elicit from the elders their reasons for acting as they had. As the meeting was about to end, the representative asked directly whether the general meeting of the church was really necessary, whether the pastor and his elders could not forgive each other.
The clerk of the session, its chairman, then confessed to the bitterness which he harbored against David. He admitted, however, that he had just then come to the belief that they were trying to make David the scapegoat for all the church’s problems, which boiled down to their anxieties about finances. (Unlike David, most of the elders thought the church was overextended in its financial commitments.) Firing David would not solve the real problem. He suggested that the session not present to the general meeting its motion to dismiss David, and the group approved this.
So, without ever working through his depression, David resumed his pastoral duties, content to have hung onto his church.
Those church leaders who had been concerned about finances turned out to be soothsayers: the nation’s economy was in decline, and the church’s offerings reflected this. Also, although the reconciliation of David and his people was genuine, the crisis seemed to have exhausted the church emotionally; attendance fell off slightly, and it proved difficult for David and the elders to rally the congregation and create once again an atmosphere of enthusiasm and dedication. The next year David watched as his church began to fail.
Even so, he put in his long hours, acted cheerful around the church members, and in all other ways fostered the notion that he had returned to “his old self.” Actually, his present emotional life resembled his former way of being only as nightmares do the waking world. Indeed, almost constantly now, he carried within him that sense of foreboding and dread common to his nightmares. And within his own home and before his family, he began to exhibit his nightmare personality.
His monstrous self came out especially on Sunday nights after services, and the following Mondays which he took off from work. After the last church service he would come home, station himself in front of the television, watch the late movie, the late, late movie, and so on, until the test pattern appeared, all the while stuffing himself with popcorn and other snacks. These compulsive eating binges necessitated Claire buying special provision, and he could not keep from getting angry at his daughters if they asked him to share his sweets with them. He could not believe his own greed, but that was how he felt. He was short with Claire to the point of hardly speaking.
Yet, each Tuesday he flung himself into another work week, and although he found studying and preparing messages harder and harder he was not sleeping with any regularity-engaging in his routine tasks calmed him and lightened his spirit. But each Monday the depression was worse. He never answered the phone anymore; Claire and his secretary had to do that.
Marble Retreat, June 1980
In the spring of that year of depression, the Johansons read independently an article about Marble Retreat, a lodge in the Rocky Mountains, where a Christian psychiatrist, Dr. Louis McBurney, and his wife Melissa, conduct two-week seminars consisting of individual and group therapy for pastors, missionaries, and others in full-time Christian ministries. They talked the article over together sometime later, and quickly agreed that they should attend a seminar.
David and Claire arrived at Marble Retreat on a Sunday afternoon in June. While Claire unpacked in their large and commodious room, David stepped out onto the balcony. He looked across the narrow valley below to the opposite mountain ridge; the evergreens and newly foliated aspens up to the tree line looked like the beard of a great god, the peaks his face. For all his eagerness to come, David, now that he was here, felt extremely anxious. His feat reminded him of his first trips away from home to, summer camp. So here they were, at “psychotherapy camp,” where the idea was probably to speak one’s most intimate thoughts and articulate every nuance of one’s emotions to total strangers.
He was skeptical of psychiatry in the first place- many “shrinks” attributed everything to potty training, and what a lot of malarky that was. He looked again across the valley to the mountains beyond; the light, even as it began to fail, was painfully sharp. He thought of the passage, “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help.” He found the mountains about his own city comforting; with their sloped shoulders and modest peaks like weathered tombstones, they conveyed to him that sense of rest he also felt in New England graveyards. But the daring heights here fairly boomed out the awe-fulness of God in nature, and they were, he had to admit, a bit frightening.
He had favored the retreat’s isolation-no one could possibly find him, no one would know-but, now that he had traveled far enough away, away from his job, away from his daughters, away from TV and the sports page, away from every distraction, to meet himself, he reconsidered the wisdom of this trip. David Johanson was cracking up; how could he possibly have imagined he wanted to spend time with him? There on the balcony, before he even met him, David knew how cagey this McBurney was.
At dinner that evening, the Johansons sat around a family table with Jennifer and Richard, the couple who staffed the lodge, and the two other couples participating in the seminar, the Masons and the Lovejoys. The meal reassured David and Claire; Jennifer and Richard made it a pleasant time of getting together with people with whom they hoped to be friends. The other two couples appeared normal; they talked animatedly, particularly the Masons, who were from the Midwest; and they all four spoke of their work, especially Frank Lovejoy, a missionary to Africa’s Ivory Coast, with that sense of utter dedication which was so much a part of David’s life. When the conversation paused, however, they did look at each other with dumbstruck yet inquiring glances which asked, “You, too?” The Masons wanted to stay up and socialize after dinner, but the Lovejoys preferred, as did the Johansons a short time later, to say goodnight and retreat to their rooms.
The next morning Louis and Melissa McBurney walked into the retreat from their house a hundred or so yards up the road. They greeted the participants and brought them into a room on the second floor in which group therapy would be held each morning from nine o’clock until noon. Everyone found a seat in the circle, which was composed of a couch and several rocking chairs.
Louis appeared about the same age as David, maybe a little older. His Texas drawl, his sharp laugh, and his slow and careful gestures lent him the manner of a wily country doctor. David thought Louis’ proud mother might have described him as “dumb like a fox.”
Melissa, whose beauty had been softened but not clouded by motherhood, sat down on a pillow by Louis. She appeared almost gleeful, as if this were a camp and she the counselor’s favorite, and all were gathered around the old campfire. Yet, she never struck David as “too good to be true.” In the coming days she would talk openly of the price she had paid for being that child around the campfire, who only seemed so much a part of things, while doubting she was.
Louis introduced Marble Retreat, spending most of his time describing the recreational activities group members might engage in during their free hours. Finally, he said simply that they were all here to talk about what was on their minds. The group might begin by the members making a few introductory comments about themselves and why they had come.
No one volunteered for a very long moment or two. David looked at the other two couples: Frank Lovejoy, a man with a triumphant cowlick and the demeanor of an Eagle Scout; Debra Lovejoy, a tall, big-boned woman who was handsome, not pretty or beautiful, her jaw firm and set in almost a mannish way; Al Mason, a prematurely gray gent with a moustache, whose casual but stylish clothes might have earned him in an earlier time the epithet “a gay blade”; Julia Mason, well-dressed like her husband, but with a way of carrying herself that had a prim elegance, an almost regal quality. These people, who were they?
Al spoke first. He taught art at a Christian college, and had come to teaching after a stint pastoring a church. Now he saw his second career failing.
One story followed another, until they had been around the room. For most of the first day, the group concentrated on Al’s problems; it was as if they were all there to help him. David got no further than acquainting the group with the outlines of his recent past. In doing so, he confessed that he was tired, exhausted, and whipped.
The second day Al started off the conversation again, talking of his work schedule and the pressures it had generated while he was in the pastorate. “It got to the point,” he said, “where I’d feel guilty if I had to go down to the bank during the day. I didn’t want people to see me, to know I had taken part of the day to conduct my own business.”
“I know what you mean,” David said. “Why, I always have to be out every night and work on Saturday. And-I’m sorry Claire-I feel better at the office on my day off than at home.”
“Why do you think that is?” Louis asked. “Al’s contract had to be renewed each year by a voice vote l of the entire church. Were you under pressure like that?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“How?” Louis asked again.|
“Well, not in any specific way like that.”
“What would have happened,” Melissa said, “if | the church had found out how many hours you | were actually putting in?”
“They would have been mad at him,” Claire said p quickly. “You know, David, your elders, Bill Walker especially, were always asking if you wanted more time off.” She paused. “Maybe they did realize, at least this one man, how you were driving yourself.”
“How did you respond to his suggestions?” Louis asked.
“I didn’t say much, but they bothered me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s go back to the other thing. Why did you feel you had to spend every hour of the night and | day doing church business?”
“I’ve always been like that-in college, high school-I had to be.”
The group waited for David to continue, and he realized that what for him had been an unquestionable imperative did not necessarily speak to others in that mood at all.
“Look, from the time I was seven I did most of the manly chores around our home. My mother and father were an on-again-off-again thing. My mother looked to me.”
“She expected that kind of hard work from the time you were seven?” Julia Mason asked incredulously.
“She expected a lot; more and more as I grew up. I have two sisters, one older, one younger, but I was my mother’s ‘little man.’ “
Here he was talking about his mother! Although he wondered how this had started, he felt that these things needed saying, but with a due sense of proportion. “What I really disliked was her criticism. I came home with a report card one time. It had all A’s and B’s on it, basically an excellent report card. She asked why they weren’t all A-plus, something like that. She was never satisfied.”
“Did she appreciate what you did for the family?” Melissa asked.
“It was just expected. And if you messed up, she’d go after you.”
David sees himself returning from the local grocer where he has delivered his mother’s overdue payment. He’s walked a good long way, and he is tired when he comes in the kitchen door. He is ten years old. His mother stands by the sink. He wants to tell her about delivering the money, when she says, “So, you’re home. David, I’ve something to ask you. Were you rude to Mrs. Fitzgerald on the phone the other day? Were you?” He remembers Mrs. Fitzgerald had made some requests of him, and he had answered-he does not know why, “Sure, babe.” But he lies, denying his mother’s charge. “l know you were, David. I know you were rude. And now you lie about it. Come here.” He walks over to her and bends over without being instructed to do so. The blow, which emits a sound like kindling popping in a fire, hits him not on the buttocks but the lower back, and he sees the broken broom handle lying on either side of him before he starts to feel the deep pain. He does not cry, though. He turns around to his mother, hoping her temper will now cool.
“What are you thinking about?”
“One of the times. She broke a broom handle over me once.” David watched the reactions of the women in the room. All mothers, they pursed or bit their lips, then opened their mouths, each an oval which formed an unstated no. He thought they were over-reacting. “That wasn’t really as bad as it l sounds.”
“It sounds,” Frank Lovejoy said, “as if there might have been something worse, though.”
He looks at his mother, her curly black hair, her mouth, jagged and ugly when she is mad. “This one thing, this one thing,” she screams, “has wiped out every good thing you have ever done for me! I don’t know how I can call you n son of mine any longer. I don’t know why I suffered the agony of bringing you into this world, You were the worst. The pain! The pain you put me through nearly killed me! Now I don’t want to even look at you. Get away from me.” He runs up the stairs to his room, but as he runs he hears her calling after him, “All the good things are gone. You start over proving yourself to me tomorrow. You hear me!”
He felt then taken up in some force he could not explain to the group. It isolated him, made them appear distant, almost as if he were not in the room with them at all.
Louis again inquired about what he was feeling.
“It’s strange, it’s like it’s still happening,” he said.
“What?”
“The pain.”
That afternoon, David met with Louis in his small, book-lined and memento-cluttered office for the first of his every-other-day private therapy sessions. David spent most of the hour giving Louis his family history, birth dates, and when his sisters married, as well as the year of his parents’ divorce.
David had been shocked at the sudden intensity with which he relived that memory of his mother hitting him. Louis explained that suggestion plays a role in all therapy; that is, the surroundings, the official nature of their relationship as a doctor and his patient, and the urgency of the two-week timeframe all created an environment in which he might feel he had permission to recall and reexperience memories in a way he had not done previously. Louis told David he probably would have other such memories of his mother during the next two weeks. He advised him to make a list of all the times when his mother was especially angry with him.
On Wednesday in the group session, David made some connections from his past with his present. He saw his schedule and the perfectionism it implied as a logical extension of his mother’s expectations. The group talked further about how this had influenced his ministry beyond making him a workaholic.
Debra Lovejoy said, “It occurs to me, David, that your mother’s demands became the congregation’s demands. It’s frightening to see how that can come about, how the images mesh.”
“What do you mean?” David asked.
“Christ is the head of the church, and the church is his bride. David is his mother’s little man; David becomes a minister and represents Christ to this bride, and the bride, the church, suddenly starts acting just like his mother; starts to accuse him unjustly and punish him unreasonably. No wonder you reacted in the way you did.”
David turned from listening to Debra and stared at Louis. “You think she’s right?”
The group waited, most members thinking that Louis would deflect the question as he had many times before, making it once again a matter of how accurate David himself believed the statement to be.
Louis, though, knowing David was now prepared for this truth, said, “I think that has an awful lot to do with it.”
“Good night!” David said, “That’s really sick.”
“Human,” Al Mason said, “just human.”
When the group met Thursday morning, David began the conversation by reporting the insights Debra’s analysis had given him. “I can see why I haven’t been able to open up to people. If you’re afraid-I should say, if I’m afraid that any error I make would cancel out all the good I’ve done, then it would be difficult to let people know I’m human. But I am human and I was so afraid.”
“What’s the worst thing anyone could have found out about you?” Louis asked.
“That I’m not always so holy. I don’t feel like praying every day, or studying. That, well, I’m a man.”
“Meaning?” Julia asked.
“Okay, I have lustful thoughts.” David saw Claire blush, but he noticed Debra, Julia, and Melissa took this in stride.
“That’s awful,” Frank said humorously. “You probably should be hanged by the neck until dead for that.”
“I’m sure,” David said, pressing on, “that if I had been more honest with the elders at Olive Grove about the sabbatical, explained the emotional crisis was the fundamental thing, I would have avoided my problems with them. They really didn’t know why I needed the time off, so when problems came up, they felt deserted; they felt I had acted irresponsibly and carelessly.”
“Right,” Julia said. “Everyone’s not your mother, thank goodness.”
“That seems about it with the second church,” Louis said, “but not with the first church.”
“Maybe I should talk with the group about the list I made.”
“If you feel comfortable with that, fine,” Louis said.
“I made this list of my most vivid memories of my mother. You couldn’t get mad back at her in our house; that was the unforgivable sin.”
At sixteen, he is out by the family car after spending all afternoon washing and waxing it in preparation for going to a high school dance with his friend Bobby Hawthorne. David likes a girl named Susan English, and he expects to meet her at the dance. His mother comes from the front door across the lawn to the car. She bends down to the dome-like hubcaps of the ancient DeSoto and asks him for a rag. She shines the hubcap again, although he has been over it twice. As she works, putting some real elbow grease into shining the already immaculate hubcap, she says she wants him to take his little sister, Laura, to the movies that night. He reminds her of his plans to go to the dance. She waits a moment, rubbing the overlapping side of the front fender now, and then says that she’s sorry, but she’s tired and needs to get Laura out of her hair for a while. He and Bobby will enjoy the picture anyway.
Reluctantly, he tells her about Susan. His mother stands up. He hasn’t reached his full growth yet, and he and his mother are about the same height. She looks at him; he becomes conscious of having taken off his shirt and how his chest muscles have never really developed. His mother says in a dubious voice, “A girlfriend.” She looks him up and down. The rest of him, like his chest, remains as much boy as it is man. “A scrawny chicken like you with a girlfriend? You’ve got stars in your eyes, baby boy. l’m sure your sister will enjoy your company far more than a young woman.” She laughs. He curses her for the first time in his life. She strikes him across his mouth with the back of her hand.
He held his fingers to his lips; they were suddenly numb and stinging, like a limb that falls asleep. In another moment he started to cry, and continued to do so for some minutes in front of the group. Julia
Mason cried with him.
After a bit, Louis asked, “What are you feeling?”
“I love my mother,” David said.
“Yes, you do.”
“And, dear God, I hate her.”
It was about mid-morning then, and the group took a break for coffee or tea, which they prepared for themselves in the large but still family-style kitchen. When they all reassembled, David had composed himself, and Claire urged him to keep talking.
“Well,” he said, “somebody start me off on how this all applies to the first church. Please. I know it does. But it’s like being back in algebra class and working on a problem that won’t come right.”
Melissa asked, “Can you think, yet, about what your mother did and why it made you so angry?”
David thought for awhile and then said, “I wanted to get out of there. Not just that night, but my whole adolescence. I just needed to get away from her.”
“And?” Debra said.
“My life may read like an open book to you, Debra,” David said, “but when they’re your problems everything isn’t quite so lucid, is it?”
Debra looked away. Everyone else glowered at David.
“I’m sorry, Debbie, go ahead,” David said.
“I was only going to say that when the church started to judge you, find you wanting, as your mother did, you reacted in the same way: you left.”
“Okay, there’s something to that. I know I had real theological differences with that denomination, but I also know I didn’t leave until I started to panic. The theological differences-I’m still saying they were substantial, but I can see how I partly used them as an excuse.”
“Let’s look at the situation with your elder, Phil Wyeth,” Louis said. “It seems to me you were surprised by the way he and his wife acted.”
“I was. Their son was so obviously disobedient, and they were totally blind to how they were aiding him in ruining his life and the girl’s.”
“David,” Claire said, “I never told you this, but I did think you were overly harsh in that situation. Not the judgment you made; I agree they weren’t ready for marriage. But you didn’t seem as understanding with Phil and Sheryl as you have always been with other people.”
“Maybe,” Al Mason said, “you just couldn’t see a mother responding to her son that way, indulging him. Your own mother treated you so differently.”
“That makes sense. But I don’t know if I can take this. I feel like it’s all coming down on me.”
“No, please, no,” Melissa said. “That’s where you’re most wrong and most like your mother, judging yourself so harshly. You didn’t understand how the situation triggered an unconscious response that had as much to do with the past as it did with the situation itself.”
“You mean I expected the boy’s mother to react like my mother?”
“Yes. But the point is that everyone involved shares some responsibility for what happened. You are not in the position of David-the-child who is never good enough, who is always in the wrong. So stop punishing yourself. If you can have hidden motives, so can other people. You should have confronted Phil about his real reasons for charging you with failing in your duties.”
“I see that. But not the other thing; I don’t see how I can stop punishing myself, forgive myself.”
“You can’t,” Frank said. “But you can let Christ forgive you.”
There was a long pause.
“I’ve preached that for the last eleven years,” David responded, “and I’m not sure whether I’ve ever felt his forgiveness or not. Brief experiences, yes. But look, there’s all this pain to be healed.”
Friday morning before breakfast, David came down the stairs into the living room and walked on into the small room reserved for prayer and meditation. A “closet” in the sense intended by King James’ translators, the room contained a high-backed, Victorian couch which faced a window with a view down the drive. Before the window stood a wrought-iron cart that held a number of house plants. Sitting down on the couch, David looked at these plants for a time and knew but one of their names, Creeping Charlie. He looked to his left and studied the stained-glass window. The window looked like a piece of purely abstract art at first, but then David discerned the outlines of a fish, a chalice, and a cross. He looked harder, and he saw that the lines of all these emblems together made up one dominant motif: a Virgin and child.
He thought of how his mother’s image lay behind so much of his experience. It had been worthwhile to discover how much he resented her, and how their relationship, without his conscious knowledge, had directed his actions toward other people, and had shaped his own view of who he was and what he wanted. The more he thought about it, the more he understood the logic of his own life; and yet, now that he’d found a reason for the nightmare, his first elation passed, and he began to despair. Perhaps the iconography of his own life was as set and fixed as the images of the window.
His thoughts wandered for a time, or, one might say, paced, since the new-found knowledge of his past was like a cage all about him. He took up the Bible he had brought from home. Louis, in his private session the day before, had suggested he reread the parable of the prodigal son and meditate on it, imagining himself as the son, and his mother as the father. As he read, he found that the prodigal son’s rehearsal of his speech was very like the explanations he had prepared for his mother before returning home. How many times he’d thought out what to say, and how many times his mother had yelled, “Don’t answer back. I cannot believe you would do this to me. It destroys all the good you’ve done before!”
He continued reading, almost cynically awaiting the end of a story he knew so well. And yet, this time he was shocked to see that the prodigal son’s father had cut his son’s speech short too. In this edition, the son never got further than declaring he was no longer worthy to be called the man’s son. The father never let him have the chance to ask about becoming one of the household servants. For he was the man’s son and nothing could change that; being his son was not something to be earned or lost; it was a condition of his very existence. As the| son knew whom to ask, who his father was and always would be, so the father could not help but recognize the son he had created.
David felt a surge of emotion like that he had known the past several days, but now the emotion rose, gathered strength, lifted him high up, and then slowly left him. It was like riding a wave, as he had done many times on the East Coast as a child, or, more exactly, the experience reminded him of the times he had been rolled over and over, completely engulfed by white water, and then found himself deposited and left by the waters on the shore. Only now, the joy of finding himself alive and unhurt was magnified by a lifetime of being enclosed in forces he did not understand. He might have been an explorer who, after long years of traveling, had given himself up to death in ship-l wreck, only to find himself in the morning washed ashore, and not a foreign shore, but on that shore of l the place, home, he had left so long ago. David had| suddenly been given a new life which was his own,| and which, up to this time, he had never possessed and lived as he did and might now. Emerging from the chaotic wash of sound in his past, he heard his voice for the first time, and he was laughing. He was laughing long and hard, and he recognized his laughter as the one note in all creation he had been created by the Father to sing.
David told the group later that morning about his experience. He cried for joy, and Claire and everyone else wept with him. They felt that after this breakthrough, he could spend the next week, and the rest of his life, for that matter, content with helping others and enjoying himself during his free time.
However, the next week David began to understand that he was just beginning the long process of becoming reconciled with his past. He had made a significant breakthrough, but its value, after the immediate joy had dissipated, consisted mainly enabling him to recall additional painful memorial from his childhood. His private talks with Louis during the second week of the seminar were especially helpful in working out the implications of 1~~ memories.
On Tuesday of the second week, Louis asked David whether his relationship with his mother had influenced his relationship with God.
“Yes,” David said. “I’ve been thinking about that. That, and my long hours, and my lack of feeling God’s forgiveness. It seems to me I’ve been trying prove to Christ that I was worth dying for. Rut that’s crazy, isn’t it? It’s ‘while we were yet sinners’ that Christ died for us.”
“Do you think,” Louis asked, “that you might have confused Christ’s death and your mother’s pain in bearing you? Understood his sacrifice in terms of her descriptions of the pain of childbirth?”
“I don’t know,” David said. “Something like that. I guess I’ve been trying to satisfy my mother that I was worth bringing into this world. It’s partly that, and partly not. I don’t think my whole vocation has been a hoax.”
“No,” Louis said, “I’m not saying that at all. But a healthy body can become impaired in one aspect or another. Your relationship with your mother seems to have limited your ability to experience the love of God.”
“Okay. I can see that. Trying to be good enough for her has been like living under the yoke of the law. Only my Jehovah never accepted any of my offerings; I was always Cain.”
“One thing I think you need to consider is the role of your father in all of this.”
“But he was never really there.”
“Didn’t you tell me that during your adolescence one of the things which upset your mother most was when you would take your father’s side?”
“Yes.”
“And weren’t you surprised at how merciful the father was in the story of the prodigal son?”
“You’re saying that thinking of God as merciful was a kind of betrayal of my mother?”
“Well, those images are there.” Louis paused. “Maybe in the next day or two you can think about what it cost you emotionally to lose your father.” For the next two days David did so, and when he and Louis met again on Thursday, he had a question on his mind.
“This is how it all looks to me,” he said. “My mother became my vengeful God, and by forcing me to choose for her and against my father, she cut off any access I might have had to understanding God through Jesus Christ as a merciful and loving God. But still, here I am at the end of this seminar, and I really don’t see the point of blaming my whole life on my mother.”
“Neither do I,” Louis said.
“But isn’t that what this has been all about?”
“I hope not.”
“I’m really confused.”
“Look, David, you’ve been trying to forget what your mother did to you, how she treated you. You were able to forget or repress the specifics of what happened, but did that free you from being controlled by her?”
“I guess that in hating her, I’ve been her slave without knowing it.”
“Right. So the point is that you have to resurrect the memory of what she has been to you, so you can look at it honestly and forgive her. The honesty is only a prelude to forgiveness, but without it, forgiveness is just a sham.”
“I don’t know if I can forgive her; I don’t know if I want to-yet.”
“Augustine said the same kind of thing, didn’t he?”
“At least I want to want to forgive her.”
“That’s a start. I’d recommend writing to her, just telling her in as dispassionate a way as possible that you were never sure she accepted and loved you; that you want to love her and honor her as a mother should be, but that these memories have been keeping you from that. Once you’re free to love her, you’ll also have the freedom to love your dad in a new way. Then maybe you’ll begin to feel God’s love as well.”
1980-1981
David wrote to his mother soon after his stay at Marble Retreat. She responded, at first, simply with anger. But then she admitted that her father had been a hard man who had never told her he loved her, and that she found it difficult to express her genuine love for her children. Coming to understand his mother as someone whose own parents had made mistakes, as all parents do, though not to the same degree, helped David to begin forgiving her.
David also wrote to his daughters. He saw how he was continuing the perfectionist demands of his mother and her father, and he wanted at all costs to stop repeating their mistake. He explained to his children in this letter, as he never could have in conversation-his emotions would have been too difficult to control-how his mother had brought him up, what demands she had made of him, and what she had sometimes unwittingly communicated about his own value in her eyes. He confessed that he had made perfectionistic demands of his daughters, and he asked their forgiveness.
One day, a short time afterwards, he came into the living room and found his oldest daughter, Felicity, dusting the furniture. He looked at the piano and saw she had forgotten to dust the piano stool. As he walked towards her, she turned and looked up at him. Her face was stamped with his image; her temperament and much of her character were his also; she had his somewhat wiry hair, his secretive eyes; and she had his boastfulness as well as his tendency to sulk. It was difficult for him to accept his failings, even his mere humanity, and so it was difficult for him not to judge harshly what he saw of himself in his daughter. He saw how her eyes focused on him, and then, with a minute twitch, turned aside, he saw she was afraid. He put his arm around her, kissed her cheek, and told her how much he appreciated her work around the house. He started to leave the house, but looked back at the undusted stool; it could remain that way until kingdom come.
Besides treating his family with greater compassion, and having toward them a more forgiving attitude, David also tried to be more candid with members of his congregation at Olive Grove. He found, and would continue to find, this difficult. His personality seemed immured in selfprotection, and he found that he could not at a stroke bring these barriers down, but that he must disassemble them brick by brick. The effort paid off, however, as David’s change in attitude resulted in a change in the mood of the congregation. He and his people worked together to bring Olive Grove out of its slump, and, in time, they succeeded.
One of David’s main instruments in his task of changing his image of invincibility was cultivating friendships with the church leaders. He preached to the whole congregation about what he’d discovered at Marble Retreat, and he brought a few selected men further into his confidence by taking them out to lunch and discussing with them in greater detail his spiritual odyssey. He found these men quite receptive; he found them much more intelligent, wise, and insightful than he had ever allowed himself to guess.
After one of these lunches, he and one of the men were riding back to the church. David was driving, and noticed that the man peered straight ahead and that his face was flushed. He began worrying that he had made a mistake in speaking to him. Perhaps the man found David’s revelations embarrassing. But then, quickly, as if with speed a confession might be sealed and slipped into the world like a letter under a door, the man told him that he and his wife had been friends with another couple for twenty-odd years, and that for the last ten of those years, he had been sleeping with the other man’s wife. The man then took a deep breath and his color lightened, but he kept breathing through his mouth as if this admission had winded him.
Now it was David’s turn to peer ahead. In his mind he heard himself castigating the man for his sin, but he remained silent. He wanted to imitate Jesus in the Lord’s way of addressing himself not only to what a person said, but also to what that person felt about what he had said. This was difficult, especially in this situation, for David felt that lust was one of his own most serious failings, and he fought against condemning the man as he condemned his own sin. After another moment David said, “All the secrecy, the hiding, it must be awful.”
For the rest of the ride and another hour in David’s office, the man talked about this habitual sin which had enslaved him. He had tried many times to extricate himself from the situation, going so far as to request a business transfer to another city, but then had reneged. David counseled him about how to rely on God’s strength.
In this situation, as well as his other counseling work which bloomed anew, David found that the insights from his therapy enabled him to be a much more effective counselor. Significantly, he no longer considered other people’s problems too burdensome; he came to believe, in fact, that it never had been their problems he had found insupportable, only his own image as a perfected saint. Once he discarded that disguise and its attendant baggage, he had much more strength to lend others. “
Copyright © 1981 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
