Category: ministry

A voice from my past came back to bless me the other day, through an email from a friend. My friend was speaking to someone I had helped decades ago, and whose memory of kindness shown then, and non-rejection when life was messed up, remains blessing to her, and is now encouragement to me. That email touched into something that is a given in pastoral care – the invisibility in the present of later consequence. And for me mixed memories, of hard decisions, sometimes unrewarded effort, becoming the target of anger and frustration that has to earth somewhere, and the sense that an undercurrent of grace carries us along sometimes despite our best efforts to row in the other direction.

Mary Oliver's poem below expresses with psychological precision and pastoral prescience what that undercurrent of grace can sometimes feel like – the categorical imperative of caring.

For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it

  from the sand.

Let me fumble it into a box, with the

  lid open.

Okay, I put the box into my car, and started

  up the highway

to the place where sometimes, sometimes not,

  such things can be mended.

 

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I

  won't call it good or bad, just

    one way or another.

 

Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

  the back of the front seat and

    punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

 

But we all know, son't we, how sometimes

  things have to feel anger, so as not

    to be defeated?

 

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world,

  even in its hard places.

So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

  you have to do something.

From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Beacon Press, 2010.

The poet achieves accuracy in describing the ambiguity that surrounds those responses we like to think spontaneous, but are often either premeditated or arise out of habits of the heart. Three times she uses "Okay", and it can mean concession or defiance to those who might wonder why she bothered. Her understanding of the language of anger, and why anger may be all a person has to prevent being overwhelmed by circumstance, is one of those profoundly humane insights that makes Mary Oliver essential reading for those whose calling is the care of others. To love the world in its hard places requires commitment to act, without foreseeing consequences beyond that present immediate imperative, "to do something".

The photo comes from here – where you can find a vision of an alternative lifestyle in an altogether different climate from Scotland in November.

Reading Colm Toibin's new novel, Brooklyn. About the emigration of a young Irish woman to the United States, and the experience of separation, loss, disorientation and soul-testing loneliness that we call homesickness. Tobin is a beautiful writer, and writes about women's experience with sensitivity, insight, and a counsellor's sympathy, combined with an admirer's confidence in the resilience and dignity of this woman's ways of meeting circumstance and change. It doesn't make much sense to review a book only a third of it read, so I'll come back to this novel later.

But even what I've already read shows why novels are essential reading for people whose calling is to the care of others through pastoral friendship. I'm often asked about good books on pastoral theology, or for recommended titles that get to the heart and the point of what real pastoral care is. You often see the skeptical, disappointed, even dismissive expression on the face when instead of the latest theological heavyweight, or practical how to do it manual, or popular pastoral care in twenty minutes kind of book, (has anyone written pastoral care for Dummies yet:))you offer a list of three or four novels. Now I'd want to add biography, poetry, and some philosophy as other required resources (alongside obvious pastoral theology texts), but for now sticking with novels, here's one novel of one writer I learned from and still do. (Going to do several more over the next couple of weeks).

The Good Husband, Gail Godwin. A magnificent central character, Magda, is a literary scholar, a charismatic liberated and utterly impressive woman, is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her husband, Francis, who happily lives in her shadow, becomes the carer of a stellar woman facing the greatest challenge of them all. No it isn't sad, morbid, dark – it is humane, compassionate, incisive. Godwin dissects the responses and attitudes of those who come and go, gather and stay, accompany or stay away from Magda in her last months. But the faithfulness, the cost and the self-effacing but effective presence of the good husband holds the balance of a relationship that is both blessed and doomed. And I can't think of a more nuanced and gentle exploration from different perspectives, of the experience of dying, in any pastoral theology book. The wrong things said, the crass questions, the gentle unintended kindnesses as well as the intentional acts of care, the tongue tied visitor embarrassed by pain and diminishment as well as the caring silence of the one who simply sits, holds hands and speaks only in sounds of reassurance, and then the practical carers who get things done without fuss and without intruding, the medical procedures at times humiliating, at times restoring, and all this told by a novelist who should be given an honorary doctorate in the humanities for the sheer humanity with which she writes.

I did a presentation on this book at a gathering of newly accredited ministers. It would make a too long post. I'll adapt it and post it over a couple of days next week – unless of course broadband is up and running at my new hoose up in Aiberdeen, like!

I've just slowly re-read H R L Sheppard. Life and Letters. There is in the Church of England, an entire tradition of pastoral theology, impressive, humane, cultured, compassionate, shrewd, theologically subtle, liturgically enriched, open to ridicule by some but not by those on the recieving end of such spiritually enhanced friendship. Not only in the Edwardian years when Sheppard was such a warm and energetic witness to Christianity in action.

Geoff Colmer recently reminded those who need reminding of the equally remarkable Michael Mayne, another of those lovers of God whose faithful costly work in the Church and amongst the community is a labour of love for God and the world. Prompted by Geoff (see his blog at January 22 here) I went looking for more about Michael Mayne and found the Times Obituary. It is a wide ranging and admiring pen portrait of a pastoral theologian who never wrote a book on pastoral theology – he simply lived it.

How else explain a man who arranged the 50th Anniversary Commemorative service for El-Alamein, and had the sons of Rommel and Montgomery doing the Bible Readings?

How else explain a priest whose involvement amongst those with Aids, and their carers, his chairmanship of various charities dedicated to the care of those who suffer, was exemplified in a reputation for meticulously prepared chairmanship and intentionally informed leadership?

And how else explain a man who wrote several books out of the depths of his own suffering, and from the breadth of a profoundly cultured and humane scholarship in literature, science and spiritruality, books that are masterpieces of spiritual insight and pastoral reflection, not least on his own suffering and the rich meaning he discerned in his own living?

Susan Hill, in Howard's End is on the Landing, her autobiographical trawl through most of the books she ever read or that inhabit her overcrowded bookshelves, singles out the writing of Michael Mayne as amongst the most significant spiritual writing she knows. It was her who put me on to Michael Mayne, and increased my personal indebtedness to an increasing cluster of Anglican priest theologians immersed in pastoral vocation that embodies the care of Jesus for folk.

For all our anxious chatter and strategising about mission, and our frantic (at times frenetic) searches for relevance, impact, innovation and hoped for durability of church as we know it, there is something impressive, too easily understated and overlooked, about lives of exemplary priesthood, publicly demonstrable goodness in Jesus' name, thoughtful and patient understanding of the surrounding culture as a disposition of loving attentive witness, borne before the world and born in prayer. We too easily underestimate the salt and light of a good life, radiant with a humanity that reminds people of the sheer attractiveness of Another who "went about doing good".  

Thomas Merton on integrity and care in writing. I've broken his two paragraphs into six guidelines that should help quality assure hastily posted blogposts – or at least raise embarrassment levels amongst the pious but careless.

And in fairness to Merton, some of his strictures were directed at several of his own early overcooked spiritual writings.

"We who say we love God: why are we not anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God?

If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all….

It is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well.

I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead….

The fact that your subject may be very important in itself does not necessarily mean that what you have written about it is important.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book…there are many who think that because they have written about God they have written good books."  (From The Sign of Jonas, Harcourt Brace, 1979, pages 60-61)