Category: pastoral care

Taking as its medium

I have for some time now moved away from using language that refers to life and action as somehow ‘poetic’.  This shift has happened for a couple of reasons.  First, I had developed a theological writing style that employed a certain type of poetic language.  And what I mean by this is that I wrote about theological topics in a style that was simply supposed to ‘sound good’.  Theology, along with other disciplines, can afford one this opportunity.  No one can really verify if my explication of the Trinity is really valid or relevant.  Rather, it is supposed to move or  persuade.  This style tends to work fine when keeping the conversation theologically ‘in-house’.  As I began to expand my theological discourse I found that my language was running aground on folks who simply did not share some of my presuppositions and basically had the refrain of bullshit called out to me on several occasions.  This presented a clear intersection in how I was going to proceed.  I could entrench my approach and state that the conversation stalled on mutually incompatible presuppositions.  Or I could head back into the workshop and take another look at how I was going about things.  I decided on the latter.

This experience was part of larger theological shift that saw me move away from theology and practice as a discipline of orthodoxy (yes I can be challenged on how I understand orthodoxy) to theology and practice as a mode of understanding and engaging joy and brokenness in the world.  And I should also note that this past year found me heavily influenced by Kierkegaard for whom ‘the poetic’ is a false attempt at immediacy in life which actually puts oneself at arm’s length from life through ‘pretty’ language (I am grossly paraphrasing here).

This process also left a profound mark on how I now read theology.  Theology that was once inspiring now came off flat.  I don’t think I have many illusions about some neutral or material access to reality ‘as such’.  But I am much more interested in beginning from a phenomenological perspective which attempts to describe and not only describe what I see and intuit but also describe my location and perspective.  If I could now characterize my theology I would call it something like an existentially minded attempt at liberation theology.

All this to say that I was somewhat taken aback by Tim McGee’s recent post which outlines James Cone’s understanding of theology as a sort of poetic task.  Now as I read it I could see that the use of ‘poetic’ was different than the understanding I had moved away from.  It still struck me, however, that I had almost completely discarded any expression of the ‘poetic’ in how I express theology and practice.  Poetics for Cone is a response to the possibility of liberation.  We are creative and evocative because we are free.  This is an embodied and holistic poetics.

I had posted a comment on Tim’s blog stating briefly something of what I here stated above.  After that comment I went to a hospital to do some visits.  At the hospital I encountered what we all encounter at hospitals.  I saw bags of urine stacked on a cart in the hall.  I saw a bloody skid mark on the floor next to one person I visited.  I hear the calls for and saw the silhouetted nursing aids clean soiled patients.  I saw a neighbouring patient with a foot bloated literally like a blown-up surgical glove.  I heard sounds and moans coming out of doorways; one with the never ending refrain
Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me, Deloris . . . please help me . . .
I experienced all these common hospital scenes and I thought of the pretty words that people hold on to in this time; the pretty words people look to me for in this time.  It is many of these pretty words that I am trying to speak less of.  I am trying now to understand what theological poetics would look like and sound like taking as its medium the piss and shit of these places.

It will come to me

Yesterday I visited a woman with severe dementia.  Typically people with Alzheimer’s or dementia are quite enjoyable to visit.  Enjoyable in the sense that there is no awkardness or certainly no need for it.  No pressure for small-talk, no need to fill in an silences, etc.  Conversations just sort of ramble for the part.  Of course there is always some sadness in these encounters.  I mean I can’t help but have some sympathy for a sweet old lady who kept trying to remember something.  In one instance she finally said, without any real frustration, if its important it will come to me.  I’m still trying to process that one.

Getting what you ask for – Egypt Update

I am developing a basic framework for a ‘visitation team’ at my church.  This team will help connect with those in the congregation who are physically unable to regularly participate in church.  This morning I was looking through a few resources that I could use to help equip this team with some basic approaches to care and visiting.  A while back I bought a cheap copy of Carl Rogers’ classic On Becoming a Person in which he outlines his client-centered model which is based on the belief that each person has the inherent ability to change and that particular relationships can help facilitate that change.

I have strongly mixed feelings about this approach.  It is very easy to critique this book on its optimism about the possibility of becoming an ‘autonomous individual’.  However, I am respectful of the sort of posture Rogers wishes to nurture.  I am constantly bewildered expressions from those who reject an individualist approach to contemporary issues and those who want to address systemic issues.  It almost invariably seems as though the people wanting to address systemic issues must, must, heap scorn upon actual individuals (particularly if they do not agree with a particular view of systems).  In any event, as I was working through a few his very readable chapters what troubled me more than the dichotomy between systems and individuals is the notion of what positive change could look like.

Rogers cites a study which explores the implication of various parenting styles.  The best model in his estimation is the ‘acceptant-democratic’.  Here is his description the children,

Children of these parents with their warm and equalitarian attitudes showed an accelerated intellectual development (an increasing I.Q.), more originality, more emotional security and control, less excitability than children from other types of homes.  Though somewhat slow initially in social development, they were, by the time they reached school age, popular, friendly, non-aggressive leaders (41-42).

I tried to imagine what these kids looked like and it was not hard.  These are the children of upper-middle class families who excel in school and have enough restraint and insight so as to manipulate passive-aggressive acts for the purpose and maintenance of social dominance.  I also expect that these are the families that nod assent to the value of church and social responsibility but don’t give a shit about making any significant change for those values because they have already arrived.  And they are also afraid of those who ‘unstable’, that is, not like them.

This is just a guess.  But if it is correct then Carl Rogers has unfortunately succeeded because there seems to be a whole glut of these families.

** Update – Perhaps it is with a Rogerian sort of unconditional acceptance that Senator Clinton has approached the Mubarak family.

I Saw the Future

In the past two weeks I have visited a number of seniors in my congregation.  I have to say that the experience has been a little unnerving.  In these visits I encountered paranoia, gibberish and sexual frustration.  All the while I walk the halls to find a particular room and a particular person and in the process pass by men and women sitting with their heads tilting back and to the side staring at the ceiling or staring at nothing at all.  Some moan.  Shouting can be heard coming from some rooms.  This, I imagine, is the fate of the majority of westerners; that is if they are lucky enough to be able to afford one of these places and can get in.  There is nothing absolutely nothing in nature to preserve our mind and body.  It is the natural order to become decrepit and crazy.  One woman was fondling my hands continually repeating it would be wonderful if my hand could be outside . . . could my hand be outside . . . do you think my hand could be outside.  This is the culmination of life.  There is no dignity ahead.  Know that now.  Let that inform you now.  These people are not becoming less human they are becoming more human.  They are returning to our original essence which is formless and void.  Hold on and reinforce all you want.

Really, though, these people are crazy . . . and we accept it.  It is more human to be crazy than to be not crazy.  I remember one piece of graffiti I saw which read all of god is insane.  It was the ‘all’ that got me.  But they are not crazy and god is not insane.  We build out of ineternal materials and so we slow down the flow of divinity thinking it will cease, reside, rest but the Tent must always move.  And when a middle aged person acts like any single person I am referring to above then we fear.  And at times for good reason for they are still strong enough to enact this strange divinity.  They are in step with the speed and we cannot keep up.  No I am still wrong.  We are all crazy.  It is simply a numbers game.  How many people are convinced of which truth.  Love is what differentiates.  Love is what cuts along the the arbitrary horizon of sanity.