The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
June 11, 2023
Proper 5A
So as you may recall, I’ve been taking counseling classes through Idaho State University to help expand my abilities. Seminary crams a lot of stuff into three short years, and so we clergy come out with more general knowledge to help us tackle the challenges of parish work. And then we still learn a lot on the job – there is no seminary that has courses in plumbing, building maintenance, and landscaping, you know.
Pastoral care is a delicate art. The heart of pastoral care is God and the sacred dignity of the human person, a person created and beloved of God. When we sit with someone, whether they are struggling with something or not, we are sitting there in the presence of someone made in the image of God, and God is always present with us, too.
So what makes pastoral care a delicate art? Because we are there, too. We bring to our interactions our whole history. We bring our own brain chemistry, we bring our own inner thoughts, we bring our own pain and trauma and joy to the conversation. The person before us is a sacred mystery, and we are, too.
There is no “secret” to how we care for one another. There’s no magical technique or system that guarantees the correct result. Human beings are not machines, where you can pull out a “defective” part and replace it with a working one. Human beings are not computers where you can just go in and re-write the code to get the result you want.
The healing ministry of Jesus often takes on this feeling. Something’s wrong, Jesus shows up, Jesus fixes it, sends you off. Healing becomes fixing a problem. Bleeding, disability, even death become a thing that Jesus fixes. Healing is reduced to a cure, to problem-solving.
Healing, however, is more than that. It must be.
There are problems we cannot solve. We can push off death with medical and surgical advances, and that is wonderful. But death still comes for us all, and it can come for the ones we least expect. And even if there are medical and surgical cures, can we afford it? Families still do that math calculation in their head – is this a real emergency, or will this be a bill for something ibuprofen and rest could have fixed?
And there are problems that we can try to fix, but it might break something else. Just read the side effects for any medicine!
And there are problems we can’t really fix. Our brains evolved all these wonderful tools, ways of thinking, brain chemistry and neurons to help us survive… and our brains use those same things to make a mess of many things. Can the brain really fix itself, let alone fix anyone else?
And so pastoral care takes a different approach. We can’t fix others, and, even if we could, the person is far more than the problem we’re trying to fix. They are a sacred mystery, remember? In pastoral care for one another, we bring ourselves to be with another person. Pastoral care isn’t what pastors or clergy do to “fix” someone. Pastoral care isn’t limited to clergy. Pastoral care is done by all of us.
So what tools do we have, if we aren’t able to fix one another? The best tools we have are our presence, our attention, and our heart.
First, we have our presence. To be willing to be there with someone, whether it’s in person, or on the phone, or even through messages, that’s a powerful tool. It’s a powerful tool when we are absolutely powerless. In a hospital room, we can’t fix it. At the home of someone grieving, we can’t fix it. But we can be there.
Sometimes we’re too scared to say the wrong thing that we say nothing, we shy away. That’s normal. It’s scary to be powerless. But we can be present so that others are not alone.
And that leads me to the next tool: our attention. It’s not just paying attention to the other person and their needs – it’s paying attention to ourselves, too. Looking inward. What’s going in inside us? Are we afraid of saying the wrong thing? Are we thinking about our own experiences with sickness, with death, with mental illness? We can notice these thoughts and acknowledge them. We’re not bad people because our brain has wandered or focused on something else. We acknowledge them, and we choose to pay attention to this person right here.
If we don’t pay attention to ourselves, we might get swept up in our own brains and patterns of thinking. We might not be able to hear what is being said.
I think of the reading from the Prophet Hosea today. To paraphrase it, God is upset that the people have wandered away, and then when things go wrong, then they decide to return to God and beg for help. God says, “Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early. Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets, I have killed them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
We might have found our brain focused on wondering who in our modern age might fall under that category of people who ignore God and then presume God will fix their problems for them. We might think of how our own thoughts are like the morning clouds and evaporate quickly. We might hear that phrase “killed them by the words of my mouth” and gotten caught up in an image of a vengeful God. We might have wondered about what steadfast love and knowledge of God look like.
Where did your attention go during that reading? What popped up for you, what took hold of your brain? Or were you thinking about something else entirely – about what you need to get done today, about how beautiful the church is, about a confrontation you’ve had with someone?
Attention is a rare and precious commodity, so when we can give ourselves and someone else even the smallest bit of focused attention, that means a lot.
And finally, our last tool is our heart. Our heart makes that human connection, creates that bridge of empathy between us and another person. In our presence and in our attention, we step inside their world for a moment. We draw on our own experiences, our own pains and joys, the stories we’ve read and heard and imagine ourselves inside their world for a moment. And yet we remember, too, that our experiences and their experiences are not the same thing. They may be similar, but not the same. Dr. Elizabeth Horn over at ISU teaches this powerful definition of empathy: “The ability to understand what another person is going through as if you were that person, without losing the ‘as if’ quality, and communicating that understanding back to the person.” In other words, empathy helps you to understand what it is like for another person, but you remember that the experiences are not the same. They may not want your advice, they may not want to hear your story and how it turned out ok. But can you communicate back that you hear them, and that you are holding them in your heart? Those are the skills of pastoral care, those are the tools for healing that we all share. This is how we all who are made in the image of God can be with one another through joy, pain, and heartbreak, and how we can be agents of God’s healing for one another and for the world. And God is with us, every moment. God, who is fully present, God who is fully attentive, God who is fully love.