Pastoral Counseling — Off the Usual Track
by Ron McDonald, D.Min.
The American Association of Pastoral Counselors in its By-Laws defines pastoral counseling as “a process in which a pastoral counselor utilizes insights and principles derived from the disciplines of theology and the behavioral sciences in working with individuals, couples, families, groups and social systems toward the achievement of wholeness and health.”. Pastoral counseling is the counseling ministry of the faith community. It is psychotherapy that integrates psychology and theology. It is the work of a theologically trained minister who does psychotherapy.
I have long been attracted to pastoral counseling partly because it is off the usual track for becoming a psychotherapist—it’s slightly counter-cultural. A pastoral counselor is required to be trained in theology and psychology. Though many psychotherapists are excellent theological thinkers, it’s not part of their professional requirement that they integrate theology and psychology. Similar to the psychiatrist who is required to integrate medicine and psychology, a pastoral counselor is also required to be proficient in two separate ways of thinking.
As a Quaker I have long identified myself with a mystical and counter-cultural point of view. Quakerism first attracted me because of the luxurious quiet that encourages introspection, listening, and inward peacefulness. I was immediately impressed with how this inward quietness influenced Quakers to seek simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality. These testimonies deeply influenced my theological thinking, becoming touchstones to testing truth. I have begun to believe that they define health—mental health, physical health, and relational health.
Theologian Dorothee Soelle has been a major influence in my vocational life. She was a professor of mine in seminary, encouraging me one semester to study Quakerism as a participant-observer. A United Methodist at the time, I now know that that one semester experience helped prepare me to join Quakerism a few years later when I became disillusioned with Methodism. Later Dorothee encouraged me to write my master’s thesis on “Conversion as Radicalization.” She and I believed that conversion at its deepest levels moves one to the root of life’s concerns. Although I was far from clear what those root concerns are, now I believe they are summed up nicely in the Quaker testimonies (simplicity, peace, integrity, community, equality).
Dorothee’s last great book—one of the best I’ve ever read—was The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. She suggests that mysticism is a more common experience than we have traditionally recognized. Rather than being confined to the truly pious who have great visions and profound revelations, ordinary people have mystical experiences in moments of awe, union with another, excellent teamwork, community consensus, empathy with suffering, dancing, singing, and joyfulness. Most mystical moments go unnamed, so we don’t realize how many of them there are. In nearly every counseling session there are so many quiet exclamations of “Yes,” or “Wow!”—moments of gratefulness, appreciation for courage and insight, acknowledgement of pain, quietness, and laughter—that, when acknowledged, can be strung together as an incredible string of mystical experiences. In fact, when I’m paying attention, I am quietly affected by mystical moments that come one after another. I wake in the morning, step outside to get the paper and am greeted by the new morning air and a sky awakening with clouds, blueness, and fresh breezes. I sit down and partake of a simple breakfast that truly tastes good. I pet my cats and dog as they lean their soft fur into my hand. I prepare for a walk as my dog dances around me, celebrating our time together outdoors. Later I get into a car and, when I think about it, marvel at the easy, smooth, comfortable transportation I’m blessed to enjoy…as I listen to music I love. I stop at a crosswalk and watch an emaciated, toothless couple walking nearby, talking quietly, and I am aware of not only their poverty, but the high probability that they are methamphetamine addicts. I care, and I somewhat guiltily lift up a prayer to God for them to find healing.
My whole day could continue like this, giving me pause over and over again for the beauty of life and the humanness of compassion. Strung together, my whole day—if I notice it—is a mystical array of smiles and love. At my best I hardly notice the grumpiness, meanness, and injustice that is also evident everywhere, for “nothing can separate us from the love of God…”
Paul wrote that, only he included “…in Christ Jesus.” I don’t have any problem with that as long as I understand the archetypal meaning of Christ Jesus. He represents the smiles and love that I am writing about. He is what saves us from the meanness and injustice.
I read Dorothee’s book almost 30 years after having her as my teacher, just three years before she died. There were times when reading it that I felt sure that some of our conversations about Quakerism and radicalism were between the lines of her insights, particularly when she wrote about Quakerism. She had been part of what led me to Quakerism, and now she was leading me to another understanding of pastoral counseling—the idea that a pastoral counselor is a mystical scientist. It is not just a way of thinking, but a way of embracing the world, particularly the world of psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy’s purpose is to help people in times of stress find healing options and have the courage to take those pathways. In order to accomplished this high calling, all clinicians are schooled in two central facets of psychotherapy—diagnosis and treatment planning. We are taught from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, which includes decision trees for figuring out what behaviors, fears, and idealizations lead us to the correct diagnosis of a counselee. From there we are taught various methods of treatment, ways to help counselees overcome their disorder. Many people see successful treatment as an end to the symptomatic suffering, but there is a deeper issue worth exploring. Symptoms have symbolic meaning that point to a higher need. Theology’s central question, “What does that mean?” is the next step for those who have the foundational strength to take this path. Some people, upon achieving symptomatic relief must spend their energy shoring up their legs before they move towards greater insight. Some therapists, also, are not prepared to help counselees beyond symptom relief.
Pastoral counseling, at its best, seeks to help convert people to radical change, to help them develop a mystical and activist orientation to life. We hope to help counselees name the spirit as it moves in their lives, which also calls one to fulfill a call to create beauty, healing, and peace. At its best, pastoral counseling helps people be true to themselves and do things that are congruent with that clear sense of self. To be a good pastoral counselor one has to give up the very thing we are trained to be: an expert. When any psychotherapist buys into the notion that he or she is the expert–which is at the root of learning diagnosis and treatment planning–it is a set up for helping people “discover” their own pathology and victimhood. They will be forever tempted to be whatever their diagnosis says is in their character, which can be an excuse for never being truly healthy and getting things done well. On the contrary, when the pastoral counselor uses training to help understand human nature rather than diagnose and treat pathologies, he or she has a radically different posture: humble ignorance. From this posture the counselee is more likely to find insight, motivation, and the will to overcome suffering, bad habits, and poor relationships, for the psychotherapist who begins with humble ignorance will mainly be asking questions that help the counselee find his or her own way.
The pastoral counselor, as one who trusts in the process inherent in asking questions, is a mystic in psychotherapist’s garb. Questioning encourages the openness that leads to the way of faith. In helping counselees open up to the spirit’s activity in their lives, we help them find the redemption and wisdom inherent in suffering, and joy in the dance of life. The pastoral counselor takes the best of psychotherapy and goes beyond it, encouraging openness, naming the spirit, calling counselees and therapists into a mystical place where hope is truly alive.
Howard Clinebell suggests that the work of the psychotherapist is not complete until the counselee can affirm and embrace his or her earthiness, both physical and ecological. Jesus said of such earthy people, “You are the salt of the earth.” Salt, of course, is an essential ingredient in our nourishment. It makes things taste better (some say) as well as preserves food. As the salt of the earth, we are to make the world a better place and preserve that which is good.
Dorothee suggests that we live in luxurious prisons of individualism, consumerism, and degrees of violence. Individualism has its place, but it must be tempered by community. Consumerism is the institutionalization of greed, and it’s so ingrained in our society that it seems normal. Even Simple Life is a magazine for buying more stuff. Our fear of physical violence is so strong that we no longer notice the multiple levels of passive violence that permeate our lives: incivility, cursing, honking horns, littering, loud home maintenance machines. Many of us insulate ourselves from these vices by building fortresses like gated communities, windows that don’t open, cars that are so big that the only threat of most wrecks is the inconvenience and the danger to those who drive small, economical cars.
A radical conversion makes these things bothersome, for it heightens our sensitivity to what is wrong. It awakens in us that which Walter Brueggemann calls “the prophetic imagination,” an image of a world filled with justice and beauty, one that is well cared for and inclusive of all creatures large and small. This prophetic imagination is expressed so well in a verse of the old Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” that Quakers sing at nearly every gathering:
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,
Its streets, its slums, as well as God above.
Salvation is here where we laugh, where we cry,
Where we seek and love, where we live and die.
This image is the salvation that makes us see the world in a radically different way. Our earthiness, our salt-ness, causes us to embrace simplicity, community-mindedness, and strategies for social change. The mystic psychotherapist and counselee grow to become change agents. This is a prophetic perspective, not what we expect from those in the counseling profession, unless we see counseling, particularly pastoral counseling, as a ministry of the larger community.
Howard Brinton used to teach that the difference between most meditative traditions and Quaker meditation is that traditional meditative practices begin with encouraging the person to pull away from others into a private, personal space where one might find peace. Quaker meditation, in contrast, asks the worshipper to seek this inner peace within a community connection. In some ways it might be a more difficult way to meditate, for the Quaker is asked to find peace while surrounded by other worshippers who make noise, talk, dose off, even allow children to sit restlessly nearby. But it’s also the root of the Quaker peace testimony. If you can find quiet peace in a distracting environment, maybe a peaceful way can be found anywhere.
In the same way, pastoral counseling is peace work. We are seeking together to find a way to peace, ways to love, and the courage to live fully by fighting the most difficult battles–the ones within our own souls and with those we choose to live with. If you can find peace within and at home, maybe you can find and create peace anywhere.