Category Archives: Spirituality

Spiritual meditations and reflections

Blog, Counseling, Spirituality

Pastoral Counseling

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Pastoral Counseling involves, in addition to skills and practices of professional counseling, a sensitivity to, and appreciation for your faith and spirituality. In addition, it involves a pastoral counselor’s awareness of, and fidelity to, their own spirituality, and to finding the healing spiritual intersection between client’s and counselor’s.

Your faith might be informed by any one of the world’s religions or by a faith of your creation. As a pastoral counselor, I want to know what your faith means you. Does your faith help you grow, heal, love others and yourself? Or, does your faith lead you to self-condemnation and self-loathing?

Brother Michael Gallagher, of the Benedictine Holy Cross Monastery, has defined spirituality as a Grace with which we choose to cooperate. Spirituality presupposes a numinous reality (God, Holy Spirit, Divine Spark, Higher Power, Ground of being, etc.) and how we respond to it. Your spirituality might take the form of occasional to daily meditation and prayer; occasional to daily worship rituals; occasional to regular study and reflection; occasional to regular acts of service to others. It might take the form of a 12-step program, it might take the form of following a monastic rule like The Rule of Saint Benedict. But it only counts as spirituality if we cooperate with it.

All of this is to say that, in addition to all traditional practices of professional counseling, pastoral counseling strives to help people discover the life giving and healing dimensions of their spirituality, and help them find ways to cooperate with it.

Blog, Counseling, Spirituality

Naming the Powers

I’m hesitant to use ‘Satan’, ‘Demon’, or ‘Powers’ type language when formulating an understanding the root cause of issues be they spiritual, emotional, or relational. I find that thinking in those terms leads me either to feelings of helplessness or it leads me to adopt a combat and struggle mentality instead of a mentality of compassion and love.

I like Walter Wink’s understanding of ‘Satan’ and ‘The Powers’ as the fallen spirituality at the heart of our institutional and human systems that lead us to use power, coercion, and violence to get what we want or need.

Name-calling is a form of violence. When I call something ‘demonic’ I practice the violence of name-calling. I think it is the subtle and clever nature of evil to tempt us to use its own tools of power, coercion, and violence to confront it. When I indulge in the violence of labeling something as ‘demonic’ I am in the thrall of the very same fallen spirituality that I want to confront. I fall to this temptation when I am frightened by the destructive potentials I see in the person or system.

Having said all that, I recognize that when we ‘name’ our fears [demons] that have control over us, they often lose much of their power. But we need to name them specifically and with compassion, not condemnation. When we name our vulnerable places, our shame, our fears of disconnection; incompetence; loneliness; helplessness; hopelessness; then we start to take away their ‘demonic’ power over us and start to claim our healthy desires and initiate the process of healing.

When I start such name-calling I am indulging in lazy-mindedness and avoiding the work of understanding motivation and needs of the person or system I’m labeling (be it me or a client).

When I start such name-calling, I am indulging in the blame-game and abandoning responsibility to work towards the redemption of the person, system, or situation.

I subscribe to Walter Wink’s formulation:

  • The Powers are created by God [and hence good].
  • The Powers are fallen.
  • The Powers are in need of redemption.

When I adopt this point of view, I can let go of a little of my fear, I can ask the object of my fears such questions as:

  • What wholesome purpose are you working towards or what wholesome desire is driving you?
  • If all things are Gift, in what way are you a Gift to me?
  • How can I best respond to you with Love?

In the therapy process some of the process is making friends with those parts of our selves we don’t like or are frightened by. Those parts may be the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, or those parts that are frightened or those parts that are in pain. To make friends with our hurting parts is to ask them:

  • How they are working to protect us?
  • How did they grow so strong?
  • What is their wholesome desire for us?
  • What do they want/need?

In these ways, we are working to redeem those fallen and death dealing parts of ourselves, to respond to them with love and healing.

Marriage, Spirituality

Gender Roles in Marriage

I’m always delighted when I run across something that leads me to alter or deepen my views and understanding. I’ve found that in reading Marriage at the Crossroads by William & Aida Spencer and Steve & Celestia Tracy. The book is structured as a conversation between two couples, both Evangelical, both where at least one partner is a Seminary professor, but they have different theological understandings of the meaning of marriage. In the jargon, the discussion is between the’Egalitarian’ view that holds that men and women are equal and the same in all matters related to family and ministry and the ‘Complementarian’ view that holds that men and women are equal but different in matters of family roles and ministry.

Steve & Celestia Tracy deal with the ‘hard texts’ of I Corithians 11:3

But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. (NIV)

and Ephesians 5:21-33 which deals with the whole issue of submission to each other and to Christ.

I used to subscribe to the Egalitarian view, but I am drawn to that view which challenges me to do better. Steve & Celestia Tracy challenge me in that way. If I claim my male headship in my marriage, it is less claiming a role of authority and more emulating the Godhead’s example of headship through initiation of love, and honoring and empowering.

Initiation of love involves proactively engaging my spouse’s concerns and challenges, being intentional and spontaneous in care and affection, actively engaging the whole family, not passively delegating child-rearing and household concerns to my wife.

Honoring and empowering involves recognizing our spouse as a unique creation of God, with unique gifts and a unique calling to ministry. It is our job to uplift, honor, support, and encourage her in her growth in God as an individual and in her calling to ministry, whatever in may be.

I don’t think I even need to deal with the issue of my partner’s submission. I’m plenty busy enough trying to take care of my own submission.

Spirituality

Death Penalty a Mortal Sin

Acts 7:44-8:1a


“And you continue, so bullheaded! Calluses on your hearts, flaps on your ears! Deliberately ignoring the Holy Spirit, you’re just like your ancestors. Was there ever a prophet who didn’t get the same treatment? Your ancestors killed anyone who dared talk about the coming of the Just One. And you’ve kept up the family tradition—traitors and murderers, all of you. You had God’s Law handed to you by angels—gift-wrapped!—and you squandered it!” (The Message, Acts 51-53)
This reading is the culmination of Stephen’s trial before the Temple Authorities. Stephen had been critical of the veneration and worship of the Temple, instead of God. His accusations offended the Temple authorities. They put Stephen on trial and Stephen presented a summary of Israelite history, a history of repeatedly receiving and rejecting God’s grace. Stephen accuses the authorities of following the same pattern in their execution of Jesus. Stephen’s accusations enrage them. So they killed Stephen, turning to sacred, lawful violence and death to relieve themselves from their distress.
I believe the death penalty is a mortal sin committed by our society. I would like to imitate Stephen’s structure of argument (without the name) calling to make my case. [I am indebted to the writings of Rene Girrard for the following interpretation.]
Holy Scriptures reveal our fallen tendency to turn to violence. Cain kills his brother Able (Gen. 4) in an attempt to relieve his envy and jealousy. Moses kills an Egyptian soldier in a rage over the violent treatment of an Israelite slave (Exodus 2:12). David, in an adulterous, lustfull, plot, arranges for Uriah to be killed in battle (2 Samuel 11). Elijah kills 450 prophets of Baal (1 Kings 19) in a zealous religious fervor. In all cases, the killers face their shame and God lets them live with the consequences. Cain gets separated from the presence of God but God loves him and protects him from others killing him in retribution. David acknowledges his sin to God and suffers through the grief of his son’s death. Elijah runs to the mountains and in his meditations realizes that God exists not in the mighty storms that characterized Elijah’s ministry but instead God is in the ‘silence’ (1 Kings 19: 12).
Holy Scriptures show us story after story of our attempts to use violence: sometimes explained by human failings; sometimes explained as acts of God; sometimes justified as religious zealotry. Again and again, violence fails to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Jesus’ execution, death, and resurrection are God’s ultimate revelation of the failure and futility of sacred/lawful violence and the resurrection shows God’s victory over redemptive violence. It is up to us to give up our culture of violence or God will continue to let us live with the consequences.
I write this meditation as part of the ministry of a congregation that choose Saint Stephen as its namesake. In what ways are we/you called to imitate Stephen, to name the sin we see in the world, to name it with Love, and challenge the world to do better?
Counseling, Spirituality

Struggle for Blessing

Genesis, chapters 31-33, tells the story of Jacob returning to face his older brother, Esau, whom he had cheated out of Esau’s birthright and their father’s, Isaac’s, blessing. Afterwards Jacob ran away in fear for his life. Years later, he goes back, fearfully hoping for reconciliation and forgiveness with his brother. The night before he meets Esau, Jacob spends the night alone, wrestling with a man (?), an angel (?), God (?). During the struggle, Jacob is injured but he continues to struggle demanding a blessing before he releases his opponent (?).

People seeking counseling and psychotherapy are often struggling with issues of guilt, grief, broken relationships, broken spirits, and/or broken bodies. It takes courage to come to counseling, prepared to engage in the struggle, knowing it may include facing real pain. It takes faith to hang onto the trust that there is a blessing to be claimed that is worth fighting for.

As a pastoral counselor, I believe in the hope of healing: physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual. As a pastoral counselor, I work to remember I am not God. I do not heal. Instead I strive to serve as God’s hands, ears, and heart, as a companion in the night of struggle, as my clients strive for blessings in their brokenness.