THE HEALING
How are we healed of our wounding memories? We are healed first of all by letting them be available, by leading them out of the corner of forgetfulness and by remembering them as part of our life stories. What is forgotten is unavailable, and what is unavailable cannot be healed. Max Scheler shows how memory liberates us from determining power of forgotten painful events. “Remembering,” he says, “is the beginning of freedom from the covert power of the remembered thong or occurrence.”
If ministers are reminders, their first task is to offer the space in which the wounding memories of the past can be reached and brought back into the light without fear. When the soil is not plowed the rain cannot reach the seeds; when the leaves are not raked away the sun cannot nurture the hidden plants. So also, when our memories remain covered with fear, anxiety, or suspicion the word of God cannot bear fruit.
To be a reminder requires a dynamic understanding of the lives and behaviour of those who need to be reminded, an understanding which offers insight into the many psychic forces by which painful memories are rejected. Anton Boisen, the father of the Movement for Clinical Pastoral Education, pleaded for this dynamic understanding when he proposed a “theology through living human documents.” Many pastoral theologians and psychologists have deepened this understanding with the help and inspiration of the contemporary behavioral sciences.
During the past few decades theological educators have become increasingly convinced of the importance of this dynamic approach to ministry, and the many centers for Clinical Pastoral Education have made great contributions in this direction. But today, in the seventies, new questions are being heard. Has the great emphasis on the complex psychodynamic of human behavior not created a situation in which ministers have become more interested in the receiver of the message than in the message itself? Have we not become more immersed in the language of the behaviourial sciences than in the language of the Bible? Are we not talking more about people than about God, in whise name we come to people? Do we not feel closer to the psychologist and psychiatrist than to the priest? Sometimes the questions have an accusatory and self-reighteous tone, but often they are raised with an honest desire to move forward with a full appreciation of what has been learned. Such questions challenge us to look beyond the task of accepting. Accepting is only one aspect of the process of healing. The other aspect is connecting.
The great vocation of the minister is to continuously make connections between the human story and the divine story. We have inherited a story which needs to be told in such a way that the many painful wounds about which we hear day after day can be liberated from their isolation and be revealed as part of God’s relationship with us. Healing means revealing that our human wounds are most intimately connected with the suffering of God himself. To be a living memory of Jesus Christ, between our little life and the great life of God with us. By lifting our painful forgotten memories out of the egocentric, individualistic, private sphere, Jesus Christ heals our pains. He connects them with pain of all humanity, a pain he took upon himself and transformed. To heal, then, does not primarily mean to take pains away but to reveal that our pains are part of greater pain, that our sorrows are part of a greater pain, that our experience is part of the great experience of him who said, “But was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into the greater glory?” (cf. Luke 24.26).
By connecting the human story with the story of the suffering servant, we rescue our history from its fatalism chain and allow our time to be converted from chronos and kairos, from a series of randomly organized incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity to explore God’s work in our lives. We find a beautiful example revealing this connection in Martin Luther’s letter of counsel to Elector Frederick of Saxony. He writes:
When, therefore, I learned, most illustrious prince, that Your Lordship has been afflicted with a grave illness and that Christ has at the same time become ill in you, I counted it my duty to visit Your Lordship with a little writing of mine. I cannot pretend that I do not hear the voice of Christ crying out to me from Your Lordship’s body and flesh and saying: “Behold I am sick.” This is so because such evils as illness and the like, are not borne by us who are Christian, but by Christ himself, our Lord and Saviour, in whom we live . . . .”
All our ministry rests on the conviction that nothing, absolutely nothing, in our lives is outside the realm of God’s judgment and mercy. By hiding parts of our story, not only from our own consciousness but also from God’s eye, we claim a divine role for ourselves; we become judges of our own fears. Thus we disconnect ourselves not only from our own suffering but also from God’s suffering for us. The challenge of ministry is to help people in very concrete situations—people with illness or in grief, people with physical or mental handicaps, people suffering from poverty and oppression, people caught in the complex networks of secular or religious institutions—to see and experience their story as part of God’s ongoing redemptive work in the world. These insights and experiences heal precisely because they restore the broken connection between the world and God and create a new unity in which memories that formerly seemed only destructive are now reclaimed as part of a redemptive event.
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ. Pp. 22-27. Minneapolis: Seabury, 1977.
How are we healed of our wounding memories? We are healed first of all by letting them be available, by leading them out of the corner of forgetfulness and by remembering them as part of our life stories. What is forgotten is unavailable, and what is unavailable cannot be healed. Max Scheler shows how memory liberates us from determining power of forgotten painful events. “Remembering,” he says, “is the beginning of freedom from the covert power of the remembered thong or occurrence.”
If ministers are reminders, their first task is to offer the space in which the wounding memories of the past can be reached and brought back into the light without fear. When the soil is not plowed the rain cannot reach the seeds; when the leaves are not raked away the sun cannot nurture the hidden plants. So also, when our memories remain covered with fear, anxiety, or suspicion the word of God cannot bear fruit.
To be a reminder requires a dynamic understanding of the lives and behaviour of those who need to be reminded, an understanding which offers insight into the many psychic forces by which painful memories are rejected. Anton Boisen, the father of the Movement for Clinical Pastoral Education, pleaded for this dynamic understanding when he proposed a “theology through living human documents.” Many pastoral theologians and psychologists have deepened this understanding with the help and inspiration of the contemporary behavioral sciences.
During the past few decades theological educators have become increasingly convinced of the importance of this dynamic approach to ministry, and the many centers for Clinical Pastoral Education have made great contributions in this direction. But today, in the seventies, new questions are being heard. Has the great emphasis on the complex psychodynamic of human behavior not created a situation in which ministers have become more interested in the receiver of the message than in the message itself? Have we not become more immersed in the language of the behaviourial sciences than in the language of the Bible? Are we not talking more about people than about God, in whise name we come to people? Do we not feel closer to the psychologist and psychiatrist than to the priest? Sometimes the questions have an accusatory and self-reighteous tone, but often they are raised with an honest desire to move forward with a full appreciation of what has been learned. Such questions challenge us to look beyond the task of accepting. Accepting is only one aspect of the process of healing. The other aspect is connecting.
The great vocation of the minister is to continuously make connections between the human story and the divine story. We have inherited a story which needs to be told in such a way that the many painful wounds about which we hear day after day can be liberated from their isolation and be revealed as part of God’s relationship with us. Healing means revealing that our human wounds are most intimately connected with the suffering of God himself. To be a living memory of Jesus Christ, between our little life and the great life of God with us. By lifting our painful forgotten memories out of the egocentric, individualistic, private sphere, Jesus Christ heals our pains. He connects them with pain of all humanity, a pain he took upon himself and transformed. To heal, then, does not primarily mean to take pains away but to reveal that our pains are part of greater pain, that our sorrows are part of a greater pain, that our experience is part of the great experience of him who said, “But was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into the greater glory?” (cf. Luke 24.26).
By connecting the human story with the story of the suffering servant, we rescue our history from its fatalism chain and allow our time to be converted from chronos and kairos, from a series of randomly organized incidents and accidents into a constant opportunity to explore God’s work in our lives. We find a beautiful example revealing this connection in Martin Luther’s letter of counsel to Elector Frederick of Saxony. He writes:
When, therefore, I learned, most illustrious prince, that Your Lordship has been afflicted with a grave illness and that Christ has at the same time become ill in you, I counted it my duty to visit Your Lordship with a little writing of mine. I cannot pretend that I do not hear the voice of Christ crying out to me from Your Lordship’s body and flesh and saying: “Behold I am sick.” This is so because such evils as illness and the like, are not borne by us who are Christian, but by Christ himself, our Lord and Saviour, in whom we live . . . .”
All our ministry rests on the conviction that nothing, absolutely nothing, in our lives is outside the realm of God’s judgment and mercy. By hiding parts of our story, not only from our own consciousness but also from God’s eye, we claim a divine role for ourselves; we become judges of our own fears. Thus we disconnect ourselves not only from our own suffering but also from God’s suffering for us. The challenge of ministry is to help people in very concrete situations—people with illness or in grief, people with physical or mental handicaps, people suffering from poverty and oppression, people caught in the complex networks of secular or religious institutions—to see and experience their story as part of God’s ongoing redemptive work in the world. These insights and experiences heal precisely because they restore the broken connection between the world and God and create a new unity in which memories that formerly seemed only destructive are now reclaimed as part of a redemptive event.
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Living Reminder: Service and Prayer in Memory of Jesus Christ. Pp. 22-27. Minneapolis: Seabury, 1977.
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