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| ISBN-13: | 9781596272644 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2015 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
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Pastoral Theology for Public Ministry
By STEPHEN BURNS
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2015 Stephen BurnsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59627-264-4
CHAPTER 1
Reading the Living Human Document: A Therapeutic Tradition
With this chapter, we open up the first of three styles or traditions of pastoral care: the therapeutic, which comes first in as a broadly chronological sketch, with classical and liberationist traditions following. This chronology reflects the way in which each tradition emerged through the twentieth century. In what follows, then, the three traditions are presented in a construct that suggests their historical emergence as distinctive emphases through the last century, each of which remain viable in the twenty-first century, and all of which draw on long, even ancient, precedents in the practice of pastoral care and the durable sources of theology in scripture and tradition.
The therapeutic tradition is illumined by the image of "reading the living human document." The phrase "living human document" is central to this tradition, and is one of its gifts and challenges to the practice of pastoral care. In order to understand its significance, we need to focus on the ministry of one particular Presbyterian minister in New England in the United States of America in the first decades of the twentieth century, Anton T. Boisen. Boisen lived to be nearly ninety years old, and by the time of his death in 1965 he had left a huge legacy to the church in the form of a program of pastoral training for ministers that came to be known as Clinical Pastoral Education.
Opportune Madness
Anton Boisen was born in 1876 in Bloomington, Indiana, the child of parents who had emigrated from Germany in the decade before his birth. Both of his parents were involved in the University of Indiana: His father taught modern languages (an area in which Anton would study) and his mother was among the first cohort of women to attend the university as students. Members of Boisen's extended family were also involved in the work of the university: His grandfather was professor of math and a cousin of his grandfather was the university's first president. Boisen's father died when Anton was seven years old, and one particular other person also involved in the university, a Dr. William Bryan, came to be something of a surrogate father to him. This relationship was very important in Boisen's youth, and remained so throughout his life. His autobiography, Out of the Depths, is dedicated to Bryan, as "teacher and friend." Bryan was professor of philosophy and psychology and he encouraged Boisen to study psychology as an undergraduate, as well as supervising some of Boisen's postgraduate work in that field. While unsurprisingly his father's death during his childhood years left a profound and enduring mark on the son, the wider academic context of his upbringing is also important, as it underlines Boisen's familiarity with a milieu in which he later sought and found influence himself.
As a young man, Boisen — a person with "a preoccupied mind and a distant personality" — was engaged in numerous lines of work, including things as diverse as modern languages (like his father), ordained ministry (like a number of others in his extended family), forestry, and ethnography, according to biographers. However, in all of these activities he "had not found his vocation." At age forty-four, Boisen experienced some kind of major mental disorientation that led to his hospitalization in a psychiatric institution. This important personal experience in Boisen's life stands behind the pastoral theologian Robert Dykstra's depiction of pastoral theology being "born in madness."
As he was to narrate in a substantial theological memoir of his experience published in 1936, The Exploration of the Inner World, Boisen came to understand the problem which led to his illness in terms of a sense of unfulfilled vocation — what he called his "years of wandering." He also made clear that a more immediate presenting problem was a sometimes intense preoccupation with masturbation. Again in Exploration of the Inner World, he wrote, "The realm of sex was for me at once fascinating and terrifying," and he was overwhelmed by it. In part, he was overwhelmed because his "sexual interests could neither be controlled nor acknowledged for fear of condemnation" in the religious environment in which he was raised. But at least on reflection, it seems that he understood this interest in "sex-organ excitement" — that apparently preoccupied him from the age of four — as a manifestation of the deeper distraction: his vocational "wandering." It is clear from his reflections, too, that in his adulthood both his vocational and sexual frustration clustered around one particular woman. Out of the Depths indicates that he harbored a lifelong love of Alice Batchelder, which remained unrequited, and utterly consuming. Boisen himself suggested that his religious faith was "interwoven" with his love for Alice, just as it was with his memory of his father. For her part, Alice "sensed that Boisen needed her, if not as a wife, then certainly as a point around which to center his life." In any case, when Boisen's various wanderings led to an inability to function in his professional work and in the domestic sphere, his family arranged for him to be admitted against his will at Boston Psychopathic Hospital in Massachusetts. He was diagnosed with violent delirium and was considered to be a severe case from which recovery would be quite unlikely. A week later, he was transferred to Westboro State Hospital. Yet despite the initial diagnosis of severe delirium, and much to the surprise of his psychiatrists and the clinical team responsible for his care, Boisen was soon well enough to be discharged. As it happened Boisen was able to be given a choice to leave the institution within a matter of weeks. He chose to stay and remained a patient there for fifteen months.
Remarkably, Boisen chose, over time, to stay for extended periods over the next years, to live in the kind of therapeutic community in which he had initially been confined against his will. That is, although he was never forcibly admitted again, and so was always free to leave, Boisen chose to spend much of his life in institutions like the one in which he had been a patient. Sometimes he lived in such institutions in roles as chaplain, and at other times chose to live in hospitals as a patient. In 1924, four years after his breakdown, he was appointed as chaplain to a psychiatric institution, Worcester State Hospital, and chose to live in the hospital in his chaplaincy role. Later, when Boisen began to pioneer training programs for clergy working in hospitals, he again chose to remain living in hospitals. In other words, as Henri Nouwen — one of Boisen's students and biographers — noted, Boisen "made his own illness the focus of his life."
However strange it may have seemed to others, for his own part, Boisen regarded his hospital experience positively. As he said, "To be plunged as a patient into a hospital for the insane may be a tragedy or an opportunity. For me it was an opportunity." He saw it as the opportunity to understand the experience of mental illness.
As Boisen was later able to reflect on his initial hospitalization in relation to what he saw of others living closely with him in hospital situations, he came to think that mental illness was a matter of the patient's inner world becoming disorganized. He stated what he came to see as a common problem for many persons in these terms:
Something ha[d] happened which ha[d] upset the foundations upon which his (sic) ordinary reasoning is based. Death or disappointment or sense of failure may have compelled a reconstruction of the patient's worldview from the bottom up, and the mind becomes dominated by the one idea, which he has been trying to put in its proper place.
For Boisen himself, his disappointment centered on his unrequited love for Alice; this had become the "dominating idea" which felled him.
Boisen's Courage
Boisen was presumably at least partially aware of his own needs in choosing to make psychiatric hospitals his home, but his decision nevertheless took courage. This courage marked his later life as profoundly as his sexual preoccupations had marked his adolescence and young adulthood, and in one notable piece of testimony he likened his adventurous approach to a willingness to get lost: "It is only the dubs who never go five miles from camp, who don't get lost sometimes." And
for me to stick right to camp and wash dishes all the rest of my life for fear of getting lost again would take out of life all that makes it worth living for me. I am not afraid. I have always managed to find my way through; and I do think that in a very real sense I have been exploring some little known territory, which I should like now to have a chance to map out.
Over time, Boisen became convinced that problems commonly diagnosed as medical were in fact, or at least in part, religious — as in his own troubles with sex — and he was concerned about what he perceived as the failure of psychiatrists to engage with the religious dimensions of the mentally distressed and the failure of Christian pastors to engage with the terrain in which psychiatrists worked. Boisen's concerns about pastors were both that they had little or no opportunity to engage institutionally in ministry in psychiatric hospitals and that they had little or no training or skill to engage personally in journeying with others into their "inner world" of religiously related trauma. Religious language and religious practice were media through which disorder might be manifest. Hence, on the one hand, Boisen wrote, "I feel that many forms of insanity are religious rather than medical problems and that they cannot be successfully treated until they are so recognized." He saw the key problem of many persons in psychiatric hospitals as that of not having resolved "inner conflicts like that which Paul describes in the famous passage in the seventh chapter of Romans" — "I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate" (Romans 7:15). So while the church may have believed and proclaimed that this Pauline conflict could be overcome, it is clear that some people struggle hard to resolve it, breaking down in the attempt. Psychiatric patients are those who have come to "unhappy solutions which thus far the church has ignored." On the other hand, Boisen felt that the kindly but inept ministers who conducted services in the hospital "might know something about religion, but they certainly knew nothing about our problems." As an example of what he meant, he related a story about one such minister preaching on the gospel text "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out" (Matthew 5:29) to a congregation of persons in mental distress. But Boisen also recognized that the fact that ministers might simply take services but not visit on the wards was not simply their fault: "They probably received little encouragement to do so." Indeed, it was his own experience that when he looked for a ministry position in hospital chap-laincy, there were no available options. He decided therefore to take a job in the psychological department (and later the social services department) of a hospital. It was only after some time that he was able to move from that position into a chaplaincy role. Boisen's life was marked not only by the courage to "get lost," but also by the patience and persistence to find ways toward the opportunities he sought.
Boisen's Vision
The events of Boisen's life turned him from various lines of unproductive work toward enormously fruitful service in the context of a sector ministry in psychiatric hospitals. During his time as a chaplain and resident in psychiatric hospitals and later as a seminary professor (then also residing in hospitals), Boisen developed what he called clinical pastoral training, which would come to have enormous influence on ministerial training in many traditions across continents for decades. What has for many years now been widely known as Clinical Pastoral Education is deeply dependent on Boisen's vision. Growing through collaboration with others from his own initial experience, programs of clinical pastoral training were Boisen's attempt to put right at least the lack of opportunity and encouragement for ministers to become engaged with persons living with mental illness. He began to host such programs as a chaplain, working in hospitals with seminarians who, as part of their training for Christian ministry, would encounter patients in psychiatric wards: They would do more than take services, but would also work on wards as ordinary attendants, spending time with patients, and being able to get to know persons by sharing something of their experience.
This model of close involvement with persons experiencing mental distress has become a mainstay of ministerial formation in mainline traditions in the United States. Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) might now feature in the training of ministers beyond liberal Protestant traditions — including Roman Catholic or Pentecostal, for instance — to different extents. CPE can now also feature as a part of ministerial formation in other parts of the world rather than just in North America. While Boisen's model was focused on hospitals, asserting the role of the chaplain in an interdisciplinary clinical team (because "the chaplain is also a scientist, specialized in the religious aspects of the case under consideration") many other kinds of sector ministry, not only in hospitals, now embrace more or less of Boisen's legacy. So prison ministry, industrial chaplaincy, and forms of ministry in other contexts have learned from his vision of a need for ministers to be present in different arenas. Also forged from Boisen's vision of the chaplain's role in a psychiatric care team have been many other practices of chaplaincy in multidisciplinary teams in many different contexts.
Reading the Living Human Document
Central to clinical pastoral training was Boisen's emphasis on attention to the experience of persons, themselves regarded by him as "living human documents." The now commonplace stress on the priority of experience in contemporary theology can be related to Boisen's initiatives. He developed the kinds of insight and convictions that have not only shaped his own and others' engagement with psychiatric institutions and other sector ministries, but that also engaged his academic theological colleagues as well as ministerial practitioners, and that have shaped a discipline within the theological curriculum for generations to follow: "practical theology."
Boisen used the phrase "the living human document" to turn attention from the study of texts in theology — scripture, historical documents, books of systematic theology, and so on — to human persons. As he said, "Theological students should have the opportunity to go to firsthand sources for their knowledge of human nature. I wanted them to learn to read living human documents as well as books." So in Boisen's vision, patients — persons — were texts to be read. Notably, for Boisen, such reading of persons was not simply a case of the minister making observation about a person living with mental illness, but involved the minister having access to the patient's medical files, therapeutic team meetings about the patients' care (these days often called "case conferences"), and being engaged in dialogue with medical professionals. It involved inter-disciplinary, which is to say nontheological, sources and included these in theological reflection. Not only did Boisen want to turn theology toward persons as living documents, he also wanted theology to look to the insights of other fields of knowledge.
He was, therefore, a pioneer of an approach to theology that sought to decenter written texts, abstract ideas, or academic theories as the starting place of theological reflection and to replace them with the concrete realities of particular human lives. His example has not been uncontroversial, not only because of its obvious challenge to what many have long considered authorities for theological construction and correctness, but also because of his own seemingly minimal appreciation of theology. For while he was insistent that what were often understood as medical or psychiatric problems included religious dimensions that needed to be recognized, his own theological style was firmly embedded in the kind of liberal Protestantism in which he was raised. Indeed, his own interest did not extend very far in an explicitly doctrinal direction. As he said in his autobiography, "My own problems were not theological, they had to do with inner adjustments." And when, later in life, he came to a point where he felt able to own a personal creed, it was a minimal one: "I believe that the paramount human need is that for love and that there is a law within which forbids us to be satisfied with any fellowship save that of the best." In liberal theological environments, such as the one in which he had grown up and later taught ordinands, this perhaps rather modest role for theology and this bare creed may have been welcomed, but it has not always been the case in other environments.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pastoral Theology for Public Ministry by STEPHEN BURNS. Copyright © 2015 Stephen Burns. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Part One: Pastoral Theology — Resources for the Task,
Chapter 1. Reading the Living Human Document: A Therapeutic Tradition,
Chapter 2. Returning to the Word at Table: A Classical Tradition,
Chapter 3. Erecting Streetlights on the Road to Jericho: A Liberationist Tradition,
Making the Connections: A Personal Reflection,
Part Two: Public Ministry — Always Oneself, Never Only Oneself,
Chapter 4. The Pastor as Symbol,
Chapter 5. The Person as Pastor,
Afterword: Seminary,
Recommended Reading,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,
What People are Saying About This
"Stephen Burns does in this book what Anglican theologians do best. He draws together disparate themes and sets them in harmony, point and counterpoint, in such a way that the whole range of pastoral practice and care comes into focus. It has been said that the ideal Anglican clergyperson is liberal in the study, evangelical in the pulpit, and catholic behind the altar. Learning from Burns, we might be able to add that she is a whole person at the bedside."
—The Rev. Jason Ingalls, President of the Board, The Scholar-Priest Initiative