A Theology for Pastoral Psychotherapy

God's Play in Sacred Spaces

Brian Grant, Richard L Dayringer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780789012005
• eBook ISBN: 9781317788959
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The role of the pastoral psychotherapist requires balance between the individual, the community, and God. Are you ready to take on this challenge?This unique book examines the role of pastoral psychotherapy as it relates to the individual, the community, and God, and describes the process of pastoral psychotherapy in detail. It identifies healing as a mark of God's activity, and then shows how God, through healing, creates communities that ultimately shape the selves and personalities within them. Pastoral psychotherapy is a sanctified act taking place in a sanctified space. It occurs in "sacred space" as defined/created/hallowed by God, the community, the therapist, and the client. The delineating of this sanctified holy space separates what goes on in therapy from the secular, ordinary processes of life. A Theology for Pastoral Psychotherapy: God's Play in Sacred Spaces finds God in the creation of each sacred space. Pastoral psychotherapy has developed as a means of enabling individuals and communities to cope with the ills of the modern age. It addresses sin and evil in today's world, changing the way that clients relate to people, ideas, and events in their communities, families, and individual psyches. A Theology for Pastoral Psychotherapy: God's Play in Sacred Spaces describes the process of psychotherapy from a theological point of view. It shows how God hallows sacred spaces and explores the power of God to stimulate the search for healing. A Theology for Pastoral Psychotherapy: God's Play in Sacred Spaces:

• explores the sharing of selves as presented by theorists on intersubjectivity
• identifies the creation of the therapy dyad in the work of the Holy Spirit, drawing on new trinitarian theology
• explores ways in which therapy both is and is not an extension of the work of Christ
• shows how God lures us toward spiritual growth
• links psychoanalysis to the mystical disciplines, interweaving mystical Christianity, object-relations view of psychoanalysis, and process theology

Based on the theories of Bion, Klein, Winicott, Bollas, and Whitehead, A Theology for Pastoral Psychotherapy: God's Play in Sacred Spaces is an in-depth examination of the intricate interplay of God, community, the individual, and the therapist in pastoral psychotherapy. at www.HaworthPress.com.

Part I:
The Context of Pastoral Psychotherapy

Chapter 1
God and the World

Every starting point for theological writing is arbitrary, yet each has implications for the shape of the finished document. The starting point is always an illusion. It cannot avoid presupposing experiences and imagery that can only be detailed later in the book, and some that can never be detailed at all.

A pastoral psychotherapist's speech about God always carries the marks of the experience of the holy in the therapeutic hour, and the hope of making it intelligible to people who have never been there— at least in the same chair. The therapist-reader will recognize the divine support that he or she experiences with clients; the nontherapist reader may recognize that support as of the same form, having plausibly the same source, as redemptive events experienced in other arenas of life. Both readers will hopefully sense the fit of those experiences with saving events they find in scripture and with the character of the author of those events.

For me the affirmations begin with the concrete experience of healing, both my own partial liberation and others I have been privileged to share. I claim God as the source of those events, and identity God by characteristics of those events. I call on the Revelations passage cited in Chapter 1, "Behold, I make all things new," as God's central self-affirmation, and take the biblical accounts of the calling of prophets, the healing of demoniacs, the recruitment and growth of individual disciples and their community, and the conversion and commissioning of Paul as paradigms for God's participation in bringing human persons and communities to fruition.

The Marks of Healing

Such healing has discernible marks. It frees and focuses energy, moving beyond the alleviation of present distress to goals shared with a wider community. It produces a sharper focus and the ability to shift that focus from point to point within a context. It reduces total suffering, while increasing the sense that unavoidable suffering is meaningful, in the process often carrying the sufferer through a period of more intense pain than had been known before. It establishes ties with a community, typically a more inclusive community than the sufferer had known. It generates hope, understood as an affect and a stance rather than a conviction about specific outcomes. These are the signs of healing, hence of the activity of God.

They are consistent with the marks of divine activity described by many theologians, particularly those in the process theology tradition. Bernard Meland centers this activity in the language of redemption, arguing that "redemption is a renewal of creative good [his term for God] in our natures, accentuating the lure of the . . . image in our subjective life. . ."¹ At another point he writes of grace, ". . . out of the creative ground and the redemptive life working simultaneously to impart to us a new freedom—a freedom to partake of the freedom of God."² Wieman writes of the encounter with God as the creative event, showing itself through an integration of new meanings with others previously held, expanding the richness in quality of the appreciable world, and deepening the community with those who have conveyed God's energy to the recipient.³ Gordon Jackson talks of God's aim giving "each nascent occasion its best 'shot' for its richest possible attainment."⁴ Sallie McFague takes healing as the ethical norm for her model of God as lover, arguing that it unites spiritual and physical reality, emphasizes the balance of the organism and the environment, and calls on awareness of both our resistance to evil and our identification with those who suffer.⁵ Paul Tillich repeatedly pointed out the identification of God's activity and healing. He identifies the two closely in his 1946 lectures on the relation of religion and health: "When salvation has cosmic significance, healing is not only included in it, but salvation can be described as the art of 'cosmic healing.' "⁶ Later he argued that "Salvation.. .is the ultimate aim of all divine activities . . and that "saving the person is healing him."⁷

One of the marks of God's activity is human healing. The healing is the expression of God's grace, the product of God's spirit, which is "always discerned in relationships," as Meland writes.⁸ Furthermore, those relationships always cany the person toward community and are always expressive of existing community. Meland writes that "we live on the grace of one another. . . . The qualitative meaning of human living is as communal as the symphony."⁹

The intention of these authors and myself is not to claim that healing takes precedence over all marks of God's presence and action, but to show how all acts claimed as God's by the witnessing community (with the possible exception of creation) have a dimension of healing, as they can also have a dimension of redemption, liberation, revelation, purification, judgment, and so on. Creation is exempted only because the tradition has understood God to generate substance and energy out of nothing, and healing involves the transformation of a preexisting condition. It could be argued that since the emergence of sin, suffering, disease, and death, all God's acts are attempts to restore and complete creation; hence healing and other dimensions of God's action are part of the ongoing process of bringing the world into being, in accord with God's will. Creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) has the effect of a divine first draft, with all God's subsequent acts, all at least partly healings, being analogous to sacred editing.

A World Flawed and Good

God's saving, healing power moves through an infinite web of relational strands, conveying transformative energy serially to being after being. But God also operates in the macrocosm, before and beyond any given dyadic relationship, establishing the conditions that enable such relationship and give it its salvific power. Though the full range of God's nature and activity is beyond the scope of this or any book, there are affirmations about God's character that must be made to place the healing activity in context. We need a way to identify God, to know that we are talking about a God who has many names and complicates our theologies by not answering clearly even when we choose the right one. We have Tillich's Ground of Being; Tracy's "power not our own," borrowed from Meland's "a good not our own"; Wieman's "creative event"; McFague's "mother, lover, friend"; and Jesus' "Abba." As McFague reminds us, all are fictions, all emphasize some aspects of what we believe about God and omit others, and all are at best inadequate and skewed.¹⁰

Yet believe we must. I contend here that God is the Source from which all being emerges and by which all being is set free. God is the lure for adventure, in the Whiteheadian sense,¹¹ the constant generator of new possibilities in every moment of existence, that which makes us and all beings take pleasure in increasing the intensity of harmony and contrast; and Who takes pleasure in the harmonies we create and share in our own lives. This God has generated a reality in which all beings are internally related to all other beings in every moment of time, so that Wordsworth's line "I am a part of all that I have met" is literally true.

It is true in a reality, a world, we hold as essentially good, though flawed, and which we understand God to affirm, though perpetually seeking to improve it. To call the creation good is to contend that new fulfillment is always possible, that God is always capable of and intent upon generating the possibility of greater contrast, harmony, and intensity, a new adventure building on the present reality; and that that is more important than the equally vivid reality that some creatures will not respond, will not be fulfilled, will be effectively walled off from life by the wounding of their own individual or corporate past. It is to contend that the world is worthy of love, and that loving it and seeking to cooperate with it will produce more gratifying and fruitful life than will hating it and seeking to obstruct its processes. It is to argue, with David Tracy, that there is a bond between how we ought to live and how things really are.¹² We are equipped for fulfillment, but not determined to it.

These resources move through an enormous variety of channels into the lives of selves. They are transmitted through genetic structures, conveying the achievements of eons of life. They are transmitted through geological and physical processes that precede and underlay life, necessary for its emergence and continuation. They are transmitted through human engineering, such as the canals of the Ganges basin or the highways, railroads, and bridges of the United States. They are transmitted through the sociological forms of a culture, such as the development of voluntary organizations in Western democracies or the tribal structures of ancient Eurasia. They are transmitted through intellectual achievements, such as the invention of calculus or the development of sonata form. And they are transmitted through the explicit and the more amorphous manifestations of religious traditions, such as the massive infusion of energy, focus, and identity that lifted the Hebrew people out of anonymity during and after the life of Moses; and the surge of hope, thought, creativity, and organization that the life of Jesus of Nazareth loosed into the Mediterranean and broader Western worlds.

These processes function at the level of conscious thought and teaching like the discourse of this essay; but far more inescapably, more constantly, and less refutably (because less explicit) at vague, diffuse, and unconscious levels, conveyed by the tonality and meter of music, the aroma of spices, the rhythm and sound of a language, and the symbolic structure of a culture's religion, poetry, advertising, architecture, social exchange, kinship system, and a myriad of other vehicles. This last body of resources is the stuff of which our selves are formed and flows to us through that combination of conscious and unconscious processes termed "causal efficacy" by process thought. It is taken in by what psychoanalysts call the internalizing of object relations and is what makes a conversation in the same language and on the same subject feel so different when the partner is a South Indian than when that person is from Alabama, Nicaragua, the Philippines, or French Canada. If my language structure was formed in the mold of Luther's Bible, it has a different feel than if those patterns grew out of the Book of Common Prayer, or the Koran, or the Mahabharata. The processes by which these incredibly complex influences constitute our selfhood are explored in detail in Chapter 4. For now it is sufficient to understand that God is one of the influences luring us to combine and integrate the meanings we bring to this instant with whatever other stimuli the instant provides, offering us optional methods and contents for the combinations, and binding us into the community with others who have made similar choices.

Hence God fuels enormous variability, enormous pluralism, by presenting each of us with new possibilities of integration, forever luring us into greater elaboration of the selves we are becoming. Much of the combining constitutes glorious adventure and creativity, as new syntheses emerge that hold contrasts of increasing intensity and energy in fruitful, exciting tension: as with the linking of Gandhi's ideas on nonviolent resistance with the Gospel tradition of the African-American church in the work and thought of Martin Luther King Jr.; or the blending of African, Caribbean, Native American, and European peoples together into an exciting if unsettled new ethnicity in Brazil.

But not all the opportunities for adventure are accepted, and not all of those attempted are successful. The application of the wisdom and hopefulness of liberation theology to the social structure of Nicaragua has not produced a stable and self-sustaining revolutionary process, though the attempt continues. Often the expansion of competing strands of human growth, meaning, and identity in the same territory produce hideous, intractable, pitiless conflict, as we see in Israel/Palestine, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, and on a less dramatic scale, many American inner cities. Will those conflicts eventually generate stable, new historical creations, such as the French people or the white segments of North American society, or will they continue to witness the triumph of force over persuasion, as in this century's straggles between Nazis and Jews, Turks and Armenians, Hutu and Tutsi? The fact that either outcome is plausible, and each eagerly sought by people who believe harm will be done if they fail, is a witness to the finitude of God and the ignorance of humanity. We do not always know which outcome is holy, and even when we think we know, we and God together cannot always bring it about.

The Condition of Western Society

To arrive at a theological understanding of pastoral psychotherapy in this confusing pluralism, it will be helpful to conceptualize the current state of the society. The United States in the early twenty-first century inherits a history of relationship between cultures and families. My reading of that history suggests that as Euro-American people have come to believe in the possibility of increased prosperity, they have typically chosen to use that prosperity to produce more freedom and privacy for individuals and nuclear families.¹³ The historical periods in most cultures and extended families when resources are most held in common are those in which economic necessity has forced increased efficiency. The difference expresses itself in the percentage of young adults permitted and endowed to marry and to live independently of their parents.¹⁴ There is a strong correlation between periods when a high percentage of young adults have that opportunity, and the combination of technological innovation and prosperity.

History's most rapid increases in material prosperity, and in independence of traditional and familial authority, erupted in Europe and North America throughout the nineteenth and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. They continue today in many countries of Asia and the so-called third world. These increases bring incredible expansion in the possibilities of individuals and massive upheavals in every aspect of life. To name just a few: patterns of acceptable moralities change (sex, care for parents, acceptability of economic striving); populations shift dramatically (rural to urban to suburban to exurban); life spans increase, creating essentially new life cycle patterns (the "empty nest" phase is now the longest epoch in the average American marriage); and old institutions lose their functions (small towns, passenger railroads, the factory, the print media, the church) and are replaced piecemeal by new patterns. New value investments that support a newly organized society are invented. The pace of change accelerates rapidly, and sources of human support and the comfort of stable structures become harder to find.

It is no accident that psychotherapy and its existentialist ancestors first appeared during this period. Much that psychotherapy provides replaces things no longer available in the culture at large: dependable meetings with interested, sympathetic persons; an arena in which to explore thoughts and feelings; a safe situation to try out new behavior; a setting that acknowledges the cost of stress, change, and loss; a plausible set of explanations for the bewildering experiences of modernity and postmodernity. Many of the things it provides were unnecessary in a setting where life was very similar from generation to generation, new behavior and values rarely had to be invented, and mass institutions provided satisfying guidance for the living of life.

Despite the glib title of a recent book, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World 's Getting Worse,¹⁵ our decline (if any) is not evidence against psychotherapy as a method, but rather a marker of the magnitude of upheaval and distress for which psychotherapy has become a remedy of choice. For better and worse we have invented a societal pace that hurls many individuals to the outer edges of their ability to cope.¹⁶ We have wrenched them out of stable community, familial, and institutional structures; presented them with the need to invent new roles and tasks; punished them severely when they failed; and offered them—even occasionally delivered to them—previously unthinkable privilege and comfort when they succeed. But because even the successes were in many ways unthinkable a generation earlier, there is little broad ideological and community support even for those who meet society's stated goals. We encourage our children to make as much money as they can, and raise searching questions and powerful condemnations about the salaries of corporate executives and professional basketball players. They get money, power, envy, isolation, and hatred. We shoot our wounded and demean the heroes we first created. No wonder we need so many healers.

One of the odd consequences of our pluralism and our pain is that nothing presented in a therapist's office, no matter how bizarre and damaging in its present context, has not served the growth and ennobling of human life at some time in some place. God has used wildly varying, even contradictory forms and processes to shape human beings and other creatures to their pr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Fm Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Context of Pastoral Psychotherapy
• Part II Pastoral Psychotherapy as the Play of God
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Bm Page