Recently I ask a couple of counselors to write some articles for our new website. I was very excited to receive two articles that will give you a taste of the creativity and spiritual depth of pastoral counseling today. Check out more about their work by clicking on the link to their websites following their name.

Snapping Turtle Lessons in Pastoral Care

By Stephen Muse, Ph.D.

Director of Counselor Training & Clinical Servicest Pastoral Institute, Columbus, GA

http://www.pilink.org/

One day I stopped the car to render assistance to the largest snapping turtle I had ever seen: a veritable one-eyed giant at least two feet wide at the center. The kids and mom watched as dad had his first encounter of a close enough kind with this enormous and opaque alien presence, silent and still as a Dominican Friar as his radar took in the approaching menace now towering above him with unknown intent.

Grabbing him by the tail like my friend’s neighbor, who says he non chalantly drops them in a bag wasn’t going to work with this behemoth.  I reached out with both hands for the opposite sides of his armor. The sudden unceremonious Harumph! he gave me after he hunkered back into his shell and exploded like a jackhammer, his jaws flashing for a fraction of a second more like a mako shark, let me know he wasn’t exactly thrilled with my approach. My leg muscles spasmed and the hairs on my neck stood up as the adrenalin surged.

Now I was more excited than one should be when considering the best way to pick up a thirty pound razor-lipped, battle hardened, Special Forces turtle on a singular mission to drag his armor plated self across the steaming July-heated asphalt. I reached for a stick still thinking to pull him out of harm’s way before some other unfeeling dinosaur on four wheels decided to nail him to the pavement just for the sheer entertainment of it as so many of his smaller cousins had suffered. When his jaws clamped down I read the message with my hand loud and clear. Had it been my finger, it would have had emergency room written all over it. I let go. He wasn’t interested in my help. I don’t think he even liked me!  He certainly didn’t understand or care about my good intentions to render assistance.

With my newly acquired respect for the old mossy-back, I stood away and watched with awe as he continued his pilgrimage in his own good time. Humbly walking back to the car on rubber legs amidst the laughter and imitations of the whole scene by the kids, I was thinking to myself, ‘Just because you feel a strong desire to help someone doesn’t mean they want you too or even that you will know how even if you think you do.’

Transformative Pastoral Care in its depths is always a meeting between strangers, at least the strange parts of ourselves even when in familiar and trusting relationships. Approaching the mystery of a person with the presumption of already knowing enough to help simply on the basis of past history, or by virtue of being Christian and having many years of experience, ordination, a license or an advanced degree or whatever else is presumed to take the place of real love and interest, is a recipe for disaster. Dr. C.G. Jung in his eighties had learned this lesson and said he approached each new patient “as if I knew nothing.” On the other hand avoiding the depths of human relationships or pretending not to notice, because it’s just too plain anxiety-provoking is a betrayal of the Gospel.

The thing is, even a seemingly slow and plodding tortoise of a person, after downing enough of that potent elixir of unconfessed sins, losses, addictions, tragedies, and betrayals amassed over a lifetime, can be transformed into a mythical fire breathing, armor-plated snapdragon just waiting to spit out venom on anyone who dares to represent or speak about God in routine, clichéd ways indicating an unwillingness to really listen with compassion.

Such fire breathing is frequently in its depths a person’s prayer to God who may seem just a little too frightening or a little too distant to be vulnerable enough to be affected by the slings and arrows of their outrageous misfortunes for the person to even bother crying out. Their spiritual pain may be rage at God for being such a cruel taskmaster. Or maybe it is the universe’s indifference or any variety of the other false faces painted onto God by our own self-judgments posing as “the other.” The proverbial ‘log in my own eye’ inevitably swings back as if from God, hitting me on the head until I absent myself or attack back. Persisting in faith with and for each other, means we are going to encounter our own real selves. Remember Paul Ricoeur’s observation: “The quickest way to the self is through the other.”

Encounters beyond routine and automatic “helping” which venture out beyond one’s own self-centered judgments and preconceptions to risk real meeting with another ignites vitality and passion. The price of admission is tolerating the anxiety and uncertainty along the way as you move off the edge of the map of the known world where fear of mythical sea monsters begins. This separates the false shepherds from the pastoral caregivers who are willing to lay their lives down for the sheep and walk with persons like Jacob into the darkness together where they face the unknown alien presence. There they struggle with the deep anguish, uncertainty and inarticulate questions that are locked inside a person’s spiritual pain and discover that mysterious world observed by the saints in the depths of the human heart where, as St. Makarios the Great observed there are lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. And there    are rough uneven roads; there are precipices. But there also is God, also the   angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the Apostles, the treasures of Grace—there are all these things.

To offer this kind of pastoral care requires passion bearing: one must be willing to be affected in his or her self at the same depths and to the same degree as the person she or he encounters. This is why the Passion of Christ is both desired and feared. Entering the silence and struggling in the darkness confronted by one’s own and another’s neglected and abandoned heart in the presence of God is at points like encountering a wild and wounded snapping turtle. God is not tame. Neither is the heart. And neither is the world present in the depths of our fallen human capacity for sin or that of our neighbor’s, in spite of the pretty psychological clothing we wear to pretend otherwise. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom compared prayer to “entering the lion’s den.”(1)

To the degree that we actually reach out and touch the wounds we discover there, it may indeed draw blood – if not from us, most certainly from God who is waiting there , to meet each and every one of us in our private hells where we most fear to tread. It is only in such a depth encounter where the Spirit speaks in sighs too deep for words that the miracle of redemption begins. Here we discover the great Eucharistic mystery of love: the Uncreated Invisible Fathomless Eternal Spirit-God sheds human blood and miracle of miracles…it is our own, given for the life of the world. How can this be? Blasphemy you say! Can there be such treasure in earthen vessels??? St. Athanasius responds, “God became man so that man might become God.” But Dimitru Staniloae offers a mystery even more profound: “God became human, so that humanity might become human.”

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(1) Bloom, A. Beginning to Pray. (New York: Paulist Press, 1970)

e-Journal Archive

• October 2009