Chapter 10

Learning From Our Mistakes

Even with the deepest commitment to listening and encouraging, conscientious Christian caregivers will make mistakes from time to time in their caregiving relationships. Learning from present mistakes for the sake of preventing future ones is the primary concern of this concluding chapter. It begins with a brief summary of what this book has already said about faith-talk at its best, and then goes on to provide some concrete examples of how things can go wrong in it and of how to get the conversations back on track. The major emphasis throughout the discussions that follow is on acknowledging prayerfully our humanness and fallibility as Christian friends and caregivers, and on trusting in God’s power and grace to overcome the mistakes that we do and will make in striving to minister to people in His name.

The Answering is in the Listening

People who are struggling with questions about faith and belief need and deserve answers that reflect both the best that is to be found in the Christian tradition and the best that their own reasoned judgment and conscience can bring to life’s challenges in the here and now. In general, the most helpful answers are those whose truth is discovered for oneself, with the encouragement of others. Nevertheless, earnest questions about the Christian faith are frequently met with highly general exhortations and pronouncements which allow little room for exploring why a particular question is of concern to the particular person asking it, and almost no encouragement to discover more than just one way of answering it. A life-long Episcopalian, distraught over the possibility that her diocese may break from the denomination over the issue of homosexuality, is told: “You just have to trust that our leaders are telling us only what God is telling them, that we have to disaffiliate.” A father of two severely troubled teen-agers, painfully second-guessing before his Fundamentalist pastor his decision to divorce their mother two years ago, is comforted with the proclamation: “You don’t have to worry about your sin if you trust in the Lord; he already paid the price for it in full on the cross.” A staunchly pro-life advocate, still in shock over an unexpected pregnancy at age forty-four, is advised by her Catholicism-bashing good friend: “Abortion is your decision and yours alone to make.”

As “answers” to both stated and unstated faith-questions, all three of these sincerely-intended affirmations are more than passably Christian. And any or all of them might be true and right for any or all of these struggling believers at one time or another. But whether they and other affirmations like them are helpful in the particular circumstances that give rise to them in the first place can only be known by patient and respectful listening, waiting, asking questions, and then listening and waiting some more. This is a process which resists giving answers—whether our own or others’—and instead encourages people in need of them to begin composing the answers that will make the best Christian sense to them on their own terms.

“This idea of listening, and listening, and listening some more really grabbed me when you first introduced it to us,” Patrick told me. It had been quite a while since he completed one of my training classes, and during that time he had become an experienced and effective caregiver of whom I was very proud. “And it sounded so easy,” he went on:

Boy, was I wrong. Listening well is one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do. And it’s one of the most rewarding. But just when I thought I was on top of it, working with people on grief and family conflicts and parenting their parents and things like that, I had a care receiver who all of a sudden brought up big questions about God and suffering and heaven, and—well, his pain scared me so bad I wanted to take it all away right then, by using just the right words to express just the right answers so that we’d end up praising the Lord together and thinking everything was totally, completely, wonderfully all right.

When I asked Patrick what he did about his scare other than what he wanted to do, he smiled and said:

I started thinking to myself that I needed to ask questions and not spout off the first pious thing that came into my head, but for what seemed like hours I didn’t know what to ask. And then it came to me. I checked out with him whether I was understanding his questions right, encouraged him to pick the one that was most bothering him at the moment, and lo and behold he was off and running and I wasn’t scared anymore.

I especially appreciated the next question that Patrick asked his care receiver: “Any thoughts on why this particular issue has become so important to you right now, rather than at some other time?”

Listening carefully to people as they struggle to express hard questions about their personal faith is essentially no different from listening to people as they struggle to cope with any other life-issue. It is just as hard, but no harder, and it threatens just as readily but not more so to dissolve into doing too much of other people’s work for them rather than supporting them in their doing the work themselves. The idea of racing in with quick fixes, whether of unresolved grief or unresolved doubt and everything in between, is a very seductive idea, particularly in its hinting that there is wisdom to impart and accolades to garner by the imparters. By contrast, the idea of keeping in the background and congratulating people for solving their problems on their own seems, well, un-rewarding. As one pastor with a good sense of humor put it, “it’s my responsibility to keep my people’s faith intact, isn’t it? And I want to get all the credit that’s due me for it!” Quickly, he eased my mind by saying, “Just kidding!” And then his good friend chimed in, “Yeah, sure.”

A little later on in this same conversation, another pastor jumped in with a question that raises a crucial issue for the dynamics of faith-care that I have just been describing:

But isn’t it the responsibility of a caregiver, whether it’s us or our laypeople, to help somebody with a faith-question to answer it the way the gospel answers it? To me, this listening approach looks like a just listening approach and that whatever the care receiver says, no matter how theologically off base it is, is okay. “Kill the infidels,” for instance. That’s ok?

No, killing infidels is not ok, anymore than denying medical treatment to poor people, or worshipping nature goddesses, or accepting only men as church leaders, or deeming the universe to be the creation of an evil deity are ok. None of these is ok, and they are not ok because the gospel, properly understood, makes it impossible to say otherwise. This pastor is very wise and very right—up to a point. Where he is not right is in his assumption that this very same gospel is to be understood in its every detail at all times and everywhere the same way, and that because this is so, there is only one thing that the gospel has to say to people in every kind of situation and to every kind of question about its meaning and its truth.

Even so, however, the pastor is right in his assumption that though we can question and disagree about what the gospel means for different times, places, and circumstances, we are still raising questions and disagreeing about how to interpret the gospel. That is, our questions and disagreements are about what is and is not God’s own “good news” for us, and not about mere opinions floating in the air, alighting on people willy-nilly, no one of which demonstrably better than any other. Our listening to people who may indeed be feeling “whirled around by every fresh gust of teaching” (Ephesians 4:14) is a listening for what the God of the Christian gospel is in fact doing in their lives while storms of questioning and doubting rage. We bear the storms with them encouragingly, in the sense of lending a little of our own courage for the struggle to live a life worthy of just that God’s incomprehensible mercy toward and faith in us.

Saying the Right Things at the Wrong Times

Phyllis was sitting on the living room floor, crying and rocking gently from side to side. It took her a long time to get the words out. “Why . . . why?” Her jaw tightened as she went on. “He was such a loving person . . . always giving . . . never complained . . . to endure so many things going so wrong, and nobody could stop it . . . .” Warren, Phyllis’ husband, seemed momentarily at a loss for any words, overwhelmed by the intensity of his wife’s reactions. Painfully silent minutes passed. Then, Warren slowly turned to the couple’s pastor, Steve, and blurted out the question for which there is never a satisfactory answer: “How can we go on believing that God is always in charge when he lets something happen like this? Tell me! Where’s there any good in how Matt had to die? Where? Can’t God do anything about things like this?”

Matt, Phyllis’ only and much beloved brother, had just died from AIDS, contracted as a teen-ager through unprotected sex. Throughout Matt’s long and ultimately unsuccessful course of treatment, Phyllis and Warren had frequently sought Steve’s help in order to deal with their mounting grief and anger, the latter compounded by fellow parishioners’ depiction of Matt’s disease as a punishment from God. Phyllis now expressed her distress in words she drew from a favorite hymn: “My mind just isn’t ‘gladsome’ any more, Steve. God hasn’t been ‘kind’ to Matt or to us, and I’m having a lot of trouble trusting whether his mercies are ever all that sure.” Warren intellectualized his own feelings somewhat, but he did not discount them:

I’m not quarreling with anything that’s out there, or with why God chose to put it there. I’m only trying to figure out why there isn’t a better harmonizing between what’s out there than there seems to be. Viruses have as much right to exist as we do, I guess. But why do they have the right to kill us off like they do?

Desperate to comfort his distraught parishioners, Steve made a decision that proved unwise. Avoiding a direct response both to Phyllis’ poignant lament and to Warren’s searching question, Steve instead launched into sharing a hard-won discovery from his own personal journey of faith:

I’ve had things happen in my life, too, that made me question God’s goodness and power. What I learned, though, was that the Holy Spirit was using my questioning to open up even deeper mysteries of his providence and grace. It will happen to you, too, if you’ll let it.

Not surprisingly, Phyllis responded to Steve’s testimonial with only barely disguised scorn: “I know you want to help, but what you’re saying to us only sounds like just more ‘there, there, everything is going to be all right.’” Warren chose his own words with bluntness and belligerence:

Deeper mysteries? That kind of talk makes me even madder. What kind of a God would put Matt through all he suffered, and us with him, to teach us all something that we couldn’t have learned some other way? Not the kind of God I want to have anything to do with.

Clearly, Steve’s ministry to this grief-stricken couple was off track. Intending to comfort Phyllis and Warren, he only angered them. And by his next statement, he made their pain even worse: “Where is that wonderful faith that I’ve seen in you these past months? You’ve been such an inspiring witness to Matt, and if we’re going to turn other people’s hearts at church, you must keep your own hearts strong.” Minutes later, Steve beat a retreat to the door, all the while enjoining his beloved parishioners to trust the Lord in all things and promising to check in with them after they have prayed some more about their commitment to God.

Early the next morning, Steve called me for help. “I can’t remember a time,” he stammered over the telephone, “when I ran so roughshod over people’s feelings. I wanted so much to make them feel better. And when they didn’t react the way I hoped they would, I just wanted to get away from them. What’s wrong with me?” When Steve and I met face to face later that day, I asked him to go over the previous evening’s conversation again, and to focus especially on what he was feeling while listening to Phyllis and Warren rail against God. He immediately acknowledged feeling angry that two of his most admired parishioners were repudiating once rock-solid convictions about God’s compassion and understanding. Our talk proceeded as follows:

Leroy: As you described yourself in the conversation with your parishioners, Steve, you sounded to me more scared than angry.

Steve: I did get out of there pretty fast, didn’t I?

Leroy: Any thoughts about what you might have been running from?

Steve: I think I was scared that Phyllis and Warren would find out just how much Matt’s suffering had shaken my own faith.

Leroy: So there isn’t that much difference between how you are looking at Matt’s illness and death and how Phyllis and Warren are.

Steve: And that’s making me feel as much guilt as I feel fear. I’m supposed to be helping Phyllis and Warren with wise spiritual guidance, but I don’t have any, and for a few minutes I got angry with them instead of with myself.

Leroy: I’m betting that you started straightening that out on the way home.

Steve: I called you just as soon as I got in the door.

Leroy: Ok, I think you’re tracking pretty well the anger and guilt you’re feeling. But I’m wondering if there isn’t more about the fear part. Part of it seems clear enough. You were scared that Phyllis and Warren would find out something about you that you didn’t want them to know.

Steve: I guess I have to own up to being scared about what’s really going on in me, whether anybody else ever finds out about it or not.

Leroy: About the shakiness of your faith?

Steve: (Pause) About the hell to pay for losing trust in God.

Leroy: Down the road, you mean?

Steve: That, too, but hell here and now also. The hell of not feeling God’s presence and love in my life.

Leroy: As tough as it is to feel guilty about blaming your parishioners, maybe it’s even tougher to live with being scared—either that there’s no God at all or that he doesn’t care one way or the other anyway.

Steve: That’s where I think Phyllis and Warren are right now, driving away their scare by getting angry and feeling guilty.

Leroy: You, too?

Steve: Me, too.

Leroy: What do you think might happen if you shared more openly with Phyllis and Warren some of your own struggle to accept Matt’s death?

Steve: My first thought is they would give up on me.

Leroy: What’s your second thought?

Steve: That they might risk our trying to figure things out together.

When Steve returned to his couple’s home that evening, things went better. He said no more about the triumph of faith over doubt that he had earlier extolled. And instead of exhorting Phyllis and Warren to maintain—somehow—a “proper” Christian attitude toward the tragedy afflicting them, he began by expressing some of his own painful feelings and questions:

Steve: I’ve been thinking a lot about our last visit, and I want you to know how very sorry I am for the way I let it end.

Phyllis: We thought you were pretty put out with us.

Warren: But we realized that we couldn’t blame you. We’re hard to be around these days. More than a few of our friends have as much as said so.

Phyllis: But it was still hard to face that even our own pastor was about to give up on us.

Steve: It sure must have seemed so, from the way I acted—fussing at you for not being stronger in your faith and then getting up and walking out on you.

Phyllis: I just wish I could be as strong in my faith as you are in yours.

Steve: Well, before you continue on with that comparison, let me share a little more of where I am right now as I struggle to come to terms with Matt’s death. No, Phyl, it certainly doesn’t seem like God’s done right by Matt, and that’s tearing me apart, too. And Warren, you put such a profound question about those dreadful viruses so respectfully, and I admire you for that. I’m really desperate for an answer to it, just like I think you are.

For most of their time together that evening, Phyllis, Warren, and their pastor openly and together sought strength in their grief and for their faltering faith. As Steve would express it some weeks later, it was just that spirit of openness and honesty that enabled all three to find their way back to trusting in God, together.

Repairing the Damage

Just as there is much to be learned from Steve’s ministry with Phyllis and Warren about how to make a crisis of faith even worse, there is also much to be learned from it about how to repair unintended damage before it gets out of hand. Steve’s difficulties with his couple began with a failure to heed an overarching principle of both good conversation and effective caregiving: listen, and then be ready to listen some more. In his fervor to talk Phyllis and Warren out of their negative feelings and thoughts as quickly as possible, Steve did the one thing that he almost never does in his role as a pastoral guide. He kept on talking, from a perspective and about an experience beyond the capacity of his troubled parishioners to appreciate at the time.

In spite of his blunders with Phyllis and Warren, however, Steve almost immediately began to prove himself an effective caregiver by the way that he accepted full responsibility for the session’s downturn. Almost by the time he reached his car that evening, he had assessed how unhelpfully the visit ended, identified his own behavior as the main cause, and committed himself to find out why he was undermining his own best intentions for the couple. In a similar situation, another pastor I know reacted quite differently: “They just won’t listen to the very people who most want to help them, myself included, so they have only themselves to blame for how bad they are feeling.” For this pastor, there must always be blame assigned when things go wrong, and if it is pastoral care that is not going well, the care receiver and not the caregiver is the one at fault. By contrast, Steve not only refused to let himself off the hook for his mistakes; he refused to play the blame game entirely. Quickly regaining perspective on the situation, he blamed neither himself nor his care receivers. Instead, he made himself accountable for his own contributions to an unhappy situation, and sought help in order better to comfort Phyllis and Warren on their terms rather than on his.

There are many reasons why, in spite of their best efforts to the contrary, even the most conscientious caregivers sometimes fail to listen long enough and well to others in need. Some people simply do not know how, usually because respectful listening to others played little if any role in their upbringing, and hold little or no value for their approach to life in the here and now. One lay shepherd expressed her own struggle to become a better listener this way:

Sometimes it seems like I’m working on tuning in to other people harder than anybody I know, and getting fewer results. You can’t imagine how hard it was growing up around people who only shouted at each other. (Smiling as she shouts) But I’m working on it! And I’ve got friends telling me I’m getting better at it. It’s just that I have so far to go.

Steve, too, knows about the difficulties of unlearning the bad habit of substituting talking, even if not shouting, for listening. In this respect, his family of origin is not much different from this lay shepherd’s. Both she and Steve, however, are “working on it,” and though they have occasional lapses, they usually pick up on them right away, readjust their behaviors, and begin listening better again.

Another reason why otherwise very caring people fall into the unhelpful pattern of talking more than they listen is that they become too eager to “fix” things for others that others should “fix” for themselves. This pattern, too, is sometimes the result simply of following the wrong role models. By way of illustration, a good friend once told me with considerable frustration how hard it is to live up to his father’s omnicompetence:

The guy can do anything, and is ready at the drop of a hat to jump in and take over for everybody in every conceivable situation. No surprise that he is a hugely successful businessman and that he takes such good care of his family, me included. Sometimes I really feel like a failure that I’m not the problem-solver he is, but at least I keep on trying.

As did my friend, Steve also grew up with a strong drive to make things better for people. In Steve’s case, it was his mother who was the model. And so, he admitted, when Phyllis and Warren were falling into a spiritual abyss, he did “what came naturally” to him. He threw them a rope and started pulling—before either of his parishioners showed any inclination to grab on. Steve had a catchy name for this part of himself: “If I didn’t watch myself constantly, I would end up being a kind of spiritual handyman—no job too small, and all that.” What he said next shows that there is a good bit more to this Fix-It pattern, in himself and many others like him, than the mere emulation of another’s outward example: “I know that working so hard to make other people more spiritual keeps me from being so anxious all the time, and from having to look inside myself to find out why.” Steve then went on to describe his mother’s scurrying around on others’ behalf as a running away from having to pay too much attention to her own inner self: “I really think,” he mused, “that Mom was pretty scared about what she might find if she started getting in touch with herself more. When I was in seminary she warned me not to pay much heed to ‘all that psychology I was learning,’ that it would only mess me up.” Trying to take charge of someone else’s life, Steve is discovering, is often a way of quashing anxiety about one’s own.

A therapist to whom I have made a number of referrals once told me very candidly about how hard she has to fight within herself against rushing in to “cure” her clients of their distresses:

It’s ludicrous on the face of it, of course, for me to think I can cure anybody of anything. But sometimes I’m ready to go for it anyway. Especially when I’m feeling on the verge of being out of control in my own life and scared to death about it. Then it’s the “let’s whip this family into shape” business, because I’m the one who’s feeling so far out of shape.

Having to get people in crisis to look at their situation the “right” way is a major impediment to effective caregiving—whether offered by therapists, pastors, spiritual guides, or friends—because it puts the caregiver in the position of expending more energy on his or her largely unconscious issues than on the care receiver’s quite conscious ones. It serves neither party in the relationship well. Caregivers will continue to feel anxious about how far off the mark they may be in their own lives, and care receivers will continue to feel anger and guilt about their inability to measure up to their caregivers’ expectations of them. When Steve acknowledged having the same kind of uncertainties that Phyllis and Warren were experiencing in their own loss, his frantic desire to restore their confidence in God eased. He began to wait patiently, as he put it, “for God’s succor on God’s own terms and in God’s good time”, in the midst of rather than detached from his cherished parishioners’ anguish.

There is nothing inherently wrong with sharing one’s personal journey of faith in caregiving situations. In fact, in some situations it could be wrong not to. To a newly widowed parishioner, a still grieving pastor may decide to acknowledge quietly how hard it is to be strong for her own children’s sake while sometimes feeling so spiritually depleted herself. To a care receiver whose self-esteem is near collapse in the wake of a bankruptcy, a lay caregiver may decide to confess a past business mistake of his own and to describe some of the difficulties of overcoming its consequences. To a young woman doubting her ability to fulfill the obligations she would have to uphold were she to become a member of a religious order, a nun may decide to recount something of her own struggle with her vocation and how she found it possible to give up what she had to give up in order to fulfill it. It can be especially helpful to people suffering a crisis of faith to know that at least some of their fellow believers understand what they are going through, on the basis of personal experience rather than in the abstract.

What makes the simple, quiet sharing of mutual understanding helpful is (a) its timing, and (b) its focus on the recipient’s need rather than on one’s own. What Steve initially offered Phyllis and Warren might have been received more warmly and gratefully had it been offered later in their conversations together, once the couple became ready to hear it. That Steve’s own earlier experience would not be wholly irrelevant to his parishioners’ present need was confirmed toward the end of his next visit with them. After sitting silently for a time, while Steve and Phyllis were talking together, Warren re-entered the conversation pensively: “Steve, I’d like to ask a little more about what you said earlier that set me off so much. I’m sorry I got so angry with you about it. You didn’t deserve that. Would you be willing to give it to me again? Maybe this time it’ll get through to me.”

Warren’s request made it easy for Steve to express again his trust that God is with people in all their genuine questioning. This time, though, he shared his personal experience of belief triumphing over doubt slowly and even-handedly, in a way that encouraged rather than discouraged Warren’s questions and that respected Warren’s doubt. When Warren finally said, “I really would like to believe that, Steve, but I’m just not there yet,” he was paying eloquent tribute to the freedom that Steve had acknowledged in him, to draw his own conclusions about other people’s ways of dealing with the kind of crisis he and his wife were suffering. Toward the end of their further discussions, Warren looked back at that particular moment in their work and said to Steve, “You’ll never know how much I appreciated having the room to breathe that you gave me right then.” Phyllis, musician that she was and is, added a comment that Steve especially treasured: “I was breathing better again too, from not having to be a better Christian than I was. And you know what? I think right then I must have been breathing in some of the very breath of God.” Edwin Hatch’s hymn from which Phyllis drew her words, “Breathe On Me, Breath of God,” is one of the great hymns of the church. It celebrates especially movingly the biblical notion that God’s breath (Spirit) brings new life with it. When it is hard for us to breathe on our own spiritually, God does some of the breathing for us.

A Theologian in Every Pew

When I was considering titles for this book, this is the one that kept coming to mind. It expresses what has been a favorite idea of mine for a long time. Realistically, though, the word “theologian” is off-putting to a lot of people, and I even get a little nervous myself when I am called one more than once in the same introduction. Nevertheless, we do not hesitate to invoke the word “theology” in all kinds of discussions when the pressing question is what we should believe and do as Christians. Searching for answers to just this question is what theology does, and anyone who has ever engaged in the process is, perhaps without knowing it, a theologian too. As one parishioner put it, “I guess I’ve gotta start sorting out my theology; the old one isn’t working so well.” When I asked him to say a little more, he made two comments that go to the very heart of what theology is all about: “Well, for one thing, I’m not as sure as I used to be about what’s Christian and what’s not. And for another, I’m not sure that what some people are saying is Christian makes a whole lot of sense anymore.” After a perfectly timed pause, he added: “No offense, preacher.”

The classical definition of theology in the church is well expressed by the phrase fides quarens intellectum: faith seeking understanding. One important implication of this phrase is that raising questions and thinking hard about the Christian faith is an essential and ongoing part of what it means to be a Christian. Faith is not something that we either have or do not have; it is something that, with the help of a loving and merciful God and of people who love and serve Him with gladness, we are in the process of acquiring, all of our lives. In the process, what lies before us is often something more like “puzzling reflections in a mirror” than something we can see “face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12), and because this is so, our understanding of the God in whom we trust and the beliefs we hold about Him must remain incomplete, even as our seeking must remain without ceasing.

In a previous chapter of this book, the fides of the classical formula was interpreted to mean trust and belief. Here, I want to add two other traditional differentiations, between what we believe as Christians (e.g., as defined by creeds and doctrines), and how we come to believe what we believe (e.g., in the balancing of scripture and tradition with experience and reason). Or: between faith as the content of our beliefs and faith as the process of acquiring beliefs and making them our own. It is important to honor both aspects of believing. In putting the emphasis on listening to and encouraging people in times of questioning and doubting, though, I have focused more on the process of helping people to decide for themselves what they can and cannot believe than it does on conveying explicit beliefs and asking for assent to them as conveyed. In words which should be more than familiar by now, I have emphasized listening to people’s questions as much as I have providing answers to them.

Most educators and evangelists do well at answering people’s questions about the content of the Christian faith. As do practitioners of that particular branch of theology known as apologetics, whose concern is to defend the truth of Christian beliefs against those who doubt or deny it. That is one reason why they occupy the special places they do in the life of the church. And many laypeople are hesitant about putting themselves in the position of dealing with questions about faith that they assume only those more knowledgeable than they should be dealing. There is something to be said for their hesitation. The hard questions about Christian belief and action that have been discussed in this book are being asked forcefully today not only by the unaffiliated and the disaffected, but by many of the most thoughtful and conscientious members of our churches as well, not to mention the very teachers, evangelists, and apologists who minister to them. Because they are very difficult questions to answer, it is understandable that lay caregivers might want to refer them to people they believe have better answers to them.

But people who ask hard questions about faith do not need definitive, close-out answers nearly as much as they need being listened to, respected, and encouraged to seek answers for themselves, with the help of someone who has a good feel for their struggles and a willingness to search with them for answers that make not only good sense, but Christian sense besides. Because this is so, talking about faith remains just as much a ministry of the laity as all pastoral care in the church does. It is my fondest hope that in every congregation people in every pew will be able to find alongside them a fellow Christian who, as their theologian for a time, will be just as committed as they are to seek a deeper understanding of the faith by which God has called all of us to live gracefully and joyfully, in this world and in the life to come.