What's a minister to do? Serve and carry - ministering to grief and crisis - Ministries

National Catholic Reporter, Jan 24, 1997 by Dawn Gibeau

What's a minister to do when confronted with familiar roadblocks to effectiveness?

* The recipient of ministry may be suffering in ways the minister has never confronted -- overwhelmed by the death of a child, perhaps, or suffering the ravages of a terminal disease such as Huntington's.

* A stroke may impair a patient's speech to the extent that words are garbled or wholly different from what the person intends to say. The minister may not understand or know how to respond.

* A minister may become defensive when called to serve a judgmental person whose views on political or church-related issues are poles apart from the minister's, and the minister feels compelled to defend his or her beliefs.

* The ministerial environment may be clogged with distractions: noisy cats or dogs in a home, a chattering TV in a hospital room.

What's a minister to do?

Last October, social work specialists Mari Ann Graham and Curt Paulsen explored such dilemmas with BeFriender and Stephen ministers. Both groups specialize in ministering to individuals in grief and crisis situations.

Graham, who recently completed a workshop for BeFriender coordinators, teaches in graduate and undergraduate social work programs at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn. Paulsen teaches family practice in the social work master's degree program at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, and teaches spirituality of the family in the religion depart meet. BeFriender Ministry sponsored the gathering.

Graham and Paulsen did not come up with packaged recipes to solve specific situations. Rather, they and the participants explored ways to deal with difficulties. Said Graham, "There's a mystery in helping people," and "our pain often serves."

Graham explains the difference between helping another, which can be counterproductive, and serving: "Helping is when you go in thinking you have lots to give and you're somehow going to help this other person." Then "you set up a situation of inequality, where you're up here and the other person is down there. You don't have to intend to do it," but the other person "can pick up on that instantly."

In contrast, "when we serve, we're serving from our weaknesses, our pain, our vulnerability. We draw from all our own experiences, and then our limitations serve, our wounds serve -- even our darkness can serve." Further, "our ignorance, our unknowing can serve people."

All these weaknesses "can keep us open and allow us to be present" to others, Graham said. "The more we allow ourselves to suffer," without being masochistic, "the greater our capacity to be with others."

Paulsen said ministers need not seek out suffering, for "we are assured that we will hurt psychologically at various recurrent times of our lives to the point of great pain, all of us without exception."

But, asked Graham, "do we really know how to suffer?" She noted that when people have a child born healthy and a house to go home to and a car to drive, they don't cry, "Why me? Why do I have a healthy baby and a house and a car?" Yet they cry "Why me?" if their baby has a birth defect or something goes wrong with the house or car.

"We live in a culture that teaches us not to suffer," she said. As Douglas John Hall has written in God and Human Suffering (Augsburg Fortress, 1986), that has three consequences: People have trouble accepting their own suffering; they lose their capacity to enter imaginatively into the suffering of others; and they need to blame or find scapegoats.

Graham talked about the need for imagination. "We've experienced some things, but we've not experienced what this person [being ministered to] is going through right now. We can only enter into it through imagination. I don't think we cultivate imagination nearly enough in our culture." In order not to recoil in disgust from another's suffering, we must learn to suffer as Helen Luke recommends in her book, Old Age (Parabola Books, 1987).

In Graham's words, Luke says the "why me?" reaction to suffering means one is lying under the weight and feels its heaviness, whereas constructive suffering involves carrying the weight. "When we do that, the burden is lifted somewhere else. It's as though some positive energy is released somewhere else because we are carrying" the weight. The Bible expresses the same idea: "My yoke is easy, my burden is light."

Luke writes that depression and self-pity are unproductive. So is replacing these with pleasant, happy feelings, which are "simply a palliative, laying the foundations for the next depression. Nothing whatever has happened to the soul."

When suffering is accepted, she says, "the pain remains, but it is more like the piercing of a sword than a weight." Along with acceptance, it is natural and right to hope for release from suffering, to seek appropriate help, support from friends in grief and rest from exhaustion.

"Nothing is too small to offer us an opportunity to choose between suffering and depression," Luke writes, and contends that every time a person exchanges neurotic depression for real suffering, he or she is sharing to some small degree in the carrying of the suffering of mankind, in bearing a tiny part of the darkness of the world."