Short Article/Discussion regarding Pastoral Counseling: HERE
Author Archives: bukallifeministries
Clinical Pastoral Education, Baguio City
Summer Session is coming. We have two CPE groups starting up in Baguio. One group will start on March 18th, 2013. A second group will start April 1st, 2013. The second group may (if available) join for some of the orientation of group one.
Contact us at info@bukallife.org, if you have any questions.
Manigong Bagong Taon (Happy New Years!!)
I always get nervous about putting a schedule down, because it seems like as soon as we put a schedule down… something changes. Nevertheless, planning Christian Life and Self-care seminar in Isabela province February 22 and 23. The training with SNN is postponed. Half-unit CPE begins in Baguio January 8th. CPO starts January 14th, and we are now accepting applications for CPE full unit starting in March 2013. Happy New Years!!
Please contact us at info@bukallife.org if you have any questions.
Sorrow at Christmas 2012
We like to focus on the JOY of Christmas. But we know that this is not always the case. In the Campostela Valley of Mindanao, a typhoon came through recently and led to flash flooding and a great deal of loss of life and property.
Last year, our disaster response team joined the Philippine National Red Cross, Kagayan Disaster Response Network, and other groups to train and provide crisis care. This time we did not. Others are taking on that role. With this disaster, our role is much smaller. Essentially, our role is to help others help those in need.
Our partner in the US, Carmelita, with her church Gautier United Methodist, sent over boxes of hospital blankets, towels, gowns and so forth. We have been sharing these with one of the hospitals that we work with in our chaplaincy training. However, we were able to send dozens of these blankets to the Masbate Clinic here in Baguio who are collecting blankets for the evacuation centers in Mandinao. Additionally, Good News Camp in Waynesboro, PA, gave us collections from a week of camp for children in Mindanao. We focus on training and providing pastoral care… not on seeking and distributing donations. However, in these cases, we are blessed to have these to be able to forward to those in need.
It is awesome that major players do major things in times of sorrow. But so often what matters is people who in their own way, big or small, help those who need it… sharing God’s joy.
But What do you MEAN??
Books are not meant to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means. -Umberto Eco
The quote above can lead some to say, “That’s foolish! It says what it means, and means what it says!”
A clue to the challenge of the quote is that meaning is more tied to value than to facts. People commonly give facts to support certain values. But facts alone don’t reveal these values commonly. That’s because value is part of the affective part of our being, rather than cognitive or behavioral Also, part of the affective part of ourselves is our emotions. In fact, it is hard to draw clear boundaries between emotions and values— they are intertwined.
If, then, one wants to know what something means to another, listen to emotion or feeling words. Take the following example.
John says, “My uncle died yesterday.”
Now you know the facts, but what does that really MEAN to John? You can only guess. Rather than guessing, you could ask, “Oh my… you does that make you feel?”
John could give many different responses.
- “I’m so very sad. He was like a second father to me.”
- “Happy! He hurt everyone he knew. I’m glad he’s gone.”
- “I feel lost. He was paying for my schooling. What do I do now?”
- “Angry! He was supposed to take care of my auntie. Instead, he drank himself to death.”
- “I don’t know. I don’t feel much of anything. I barely knew him.”
When we talk to people… we need to focus less on facts than meaning.
A Healthy Faith?
In Pastoral Care and Pastoral Counseling, it is generally believed that the faith of the individual can be a vital part of the healing process. This belief is built from a more fundamental assumption that faith is healthy. Yet, what is faith?
One of the best works I have seen on faith was written close to 40 years ago. Wayne E. Oates, a Christian Psychologist (and writer and seminary professor) wrote a book in 1973 called The Psychology of Religion. The final chapter (19) is titled “Toward a Psychology of Faith.” As a Christian, Oates valued faith. However, as a Christian Psychologist, he understood that some understandings of “faith” (both inside and outside of faith communities) may be psychologically destructive. So Oates sought to find a good understanding of the Biblical view of faith, informed by psychology, while avoiding unhealthy faith (or unhealthy things that are called faith by some).
- Unhealthy Faith involves allegiance to the irrational
- Unhealthy Faith involves trust without demonstrated trustworthiness
- Unhealthy Faith is absence of, or denial of, doubt
The following is an excerpt from the chapter, under the subheading of “Faith as an Act of Surrender.” The chapter looks at faith in terms of faith in God, but also faith in other relationships. Thus it doesn’t look simply at “saving faith” but healthy faith in its many forms.
… faith involves a surrender of one’s childish sense of omnipotence, that is, an acute sense of total responsibility for everything other people do. One sees it in clinicians of every kind— doctors, ministers, social workers, psychologists, and so on— who feel themselves a failure unless they can be everything and totally succeed with persons in their care. One sees it in parents who accept total responsibility for the thoughts, values, and acts of their children. Faith as an act of surrender in such situations can be expressed in the account of a World War II solder who volunteered for combat without his father’s explicit approval. Upon sailing for Europe, his father said to him, “Son, your mother and I have done all for you we can. You’re on your own now. You have made your bed and you will just have to lie in it.” Then nearly thirty years later he says, “I thought he was angry, then. But being a father now, I can see he was telling me that he cared but that there were limits beyond which he could not go in doing so.” He exercised an act of surrender, or a life of faith, in order to survive the pain, the anxiety, and the helplessness of seeing his son in war.
Yet surrender is not a once-for-all giving up of one’s need to be totally responsible and all-powerful. It is a daily, twenty-four-hour-at-a-time exercise of faith. It must be done again and again, not as a work of merit but as a means of spiritual survival as a finite self in one’s own right before God. Without this faith, all sorts of substitutes— drugs, alcohol, work— become the insulation of terror, the inducers of sleep.
This is my sincere wish and prayer for all bereaved parents this holiday season – and all through the years that it takes to integrate such a huge loss into the fabric of our lives – that more gentleness and caring would be shared with those who have lost someone especially dear, that more gladness and warmth would be unconditionally shared, that time would be time taken amidst the daily and holiday bustle to recognize the depth of grief behind the mask and the silence of the face, and that a hand of genuine and continued friendship and love would grasp those who are hurting and who so badly need comfort. Sometimes those who deeply grieve aren’t transparent with their grief (for wide and varied reasons of their own); sometimes people around those who deeply grieve don’t take the time to notice or don’t take the time to do anything…
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When is it NOT okay to say “God is Good”?
People of faith often know the right thing but still end up saying the wrong thing. Commonly, bumper sticker phrases like “It must be God’s will,” “Everything will work out,” and “I’m sure it’s for the best” pepper our conversations with people struggling. I would like to think that we know better than to say this, but somehow fall into meaningless aphorisms when we under pressure to give a word of wisdom.
A good example of this is the bumper sticker phrase “God is Good, All the Time.” Rather than get into the question of whether God IS indeed always good (from our perspective), let’s consider if there are times when the phrase is not useful in conversation. Try the following Blog Post for this question:
The preacher shouted out, “GOD IS GOOD!” And the congregation responded, “ALL THE TIME!” At which point the choir picked up it’s cue:
God is good all the time
He put a song of praise in this heart of mine
God is good all the time
Through the darkest night, His light will shine
God is good, God is good all the time
But Christians have developed the bad habit of saying “God is good” in a way that suggests that sometimes God is not good. This is because, whether we like it or not, some elements of the prosperity gospel has seeped into the wider Christian subculture.
The rest of the article is HERE
On-line Journal
Article on Crisis Care with Theological Perspective
Based on a recent staff meeting at Bukal Life Care, it was decided that we would use our website (www.bukallife.org) for useful organizational information (as well as our Facebook Group). We would use our Blog here for useful information in the areas of Life Care, Chaplaincy, CPE, and so forth. With that in mind, attached is a recent article on Crisis Care. The article is actually in “Bukal Life Journal” (2012 edition). The entire e-journal is located HERE.
Bukal Life Care 