Spiritual Dimensions of Suffering, Healing and Wholeness

A Formative Exploration
Columbia Theological Seminary Spiritual Formation Certificate
© May 17, 2002 by Norman Stolpe

As a pastor I am often called upon to walk with others through their times of suffering. During these experiences I intentionally try to focus on the other person and not draw attention to myself. While I often get feedback indicating that my presence has been beneficial, internally I wrestle with a strong sense of being inadequate for the need. This is more than being unsure of having the “right thing” to say or do. It is an awareness of how inconsequential my own sufferings have been. I have a sense of the presumptuousness of accompanying someone else through an affliction of far greater magnitude than anything I have experienced.

At such times I have come to appreciate the power of Scripture and the Holy Spirit. As a discipline for my own spiritual formation and as a tool for pastoral care, I have purposely cultivated a familiarity with the Psalms over the past 30 years, praying through them monthly and reciting a memorized index line for each one twice a week. So as I listen to someone sharing their pain, I am almost always able to identify a Psalm that resonates with their experience and emotions and read it to them. This seems to be a source of courage and strength for many folk.

I also find that the deeply engrained “Jesus Prayer” springs readily to mind as I drive to the emergency room in the middle of the night or ride the elevator to be at someone’s hospital death bed. What starts out as a prayer for mercy on me, that I can say and do the right things, quickly turns to a prayer for mercy on the ones who are suffering, that they will experience the reality of God’s presence. Somehow, when I am with the person in pain, my concern and calculation about what to say and do melts away. I am no longer anxious, and everything from if and how to pray to if and how to touch just seems to flow, and I say and do things I had never thought of before. If I believe what people tell me after these experiences, the things that seem most beneficial are those that were farthest from my mind when I arrived. I can only believe that this is the work of the Holy Spirit. Though in a different context, it feels like what Jesus said in Matthew 10:19, “Do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time.”

Reflecting on the issues of the Spiritual Dimensions of Suffering, Healing and Wholeness following our course and my own personal and pastoral experience, I began to see how accompanying others in their suffering had shaped my spiritual formation. I also became aware that while not catastrophic for me, I had received some wounds that have significantly influenced my spiritual formation. I concluded that I could benefit from examining some of my key experiences with suffering in light of this course for this formative exploration paper.

My Sister’s Divorce

My sister’s first marriage was in trouble before they reached their first anniversary. After seven years and three children a violent, painful split was irrevocable. Though 25 years ago, my mother’s anguish is still vivid to me, as she went from Illinois to Kentucky to rescue her daughter and grandchildren from a squalid shack and a hostile son-in-law. On moving in with my parents, my sister discovered she was pregnant again. I watched my parents sacrifice the comfortable life they had settled into to support my sister and her children for five years until she could get an education and a career. As those children have grown up, they have gone from crisis to crisis, and my parents have provided counseling, shelter, cars, schooling.

My wife and I met regularly with a small group with some other couples in our church. They had been prayer support through the weeks all of this developed. Usually I asked for prayer for my sister and reported the most recent events. During one such evening’s update I was overwhelmed with the inevitability of what was happening and my parents’ anguish. Suddenly this was not just another one of my sister’s “stupid mistakes;” this was a disaster. I began to cry, then to weep, then to sob and tremble.

The others in the group gathered around and rested their hands on my shoulders. No one said anything. As my tears subsided, I realized the others were all crying too. I learned something of the spiritual power of presence that night. How glad I was that our friends were just there – no assurances, no advice, not even Scripture or verbal prayer – just presence. Though I could not have articulated it then, as I reflect on it now, I hear the words I have often said as a pastor, “I do not have solutions for life’s most serious problems, but I can promise you will not have to go through them alone.”

Questioning My Calling

I got into congregational, pastoral ministry in the aftermath of an argument between the pastor and the Christian education chairperson of our church. It was part-time, and I kept my editorial, research and consulting CE ministry. After a couple of years I took both my personal satisfaction and my perceived effectiveness as a confirmation of God’s call to permanent, full-time pastoral ministry. At just that time, the senior pastor I was working with asked me to resign because he did not think I had the gifts for pastoral ministry. I was crushed, but with the encouragement of the elders, we stayed in that church for several more years and have maintained a friendship with that pastor to this day.

I view that as my “dark night of the soul.” For over a year I struggled with depression without pursuing therapy or medical help. They might have been beneficial, but it might also have short-circuited the spiritual lessons I learned during that time. Somehow, Proverbs 17:22 seemed to be the key that released me from depression, “A cheerful heart is a good medicine, but a downcast spirit dries up the bones.” It took another year of reflective prayer, conversation with trusted advisors, and trying many opportunities before coming to a settled conclusion that God had indeed called me to pastoral ministry in the church. And it took still another year until a received a call to first Presbyterian Church of Mt. Holly, New Jersey, where I served as Minister of Nurture for seventeen years with great satisfaction.

I had begun my monthly prayer excursions through the Psalms before this experience, and it was the cries of anguish and complaints that so characterize the Psalms that sustained me through that year of depression. In this experience I learned that “if I make my bed in Sheol, [God is] there.” (Psalm 139:8) I learned the value of many counselors in confirming the calling of the Holy Spirit when the elders of that church (including the pastor who had requested my resignation) commissioned me for ministry in New Jersey. I have also learned the value of not running from painful relationships and situations. That very same pastor turned to me for support and prayer twenty years later when he was forced out of another church.

Christ’s Presence in the Broken

My life and my ministry have always had an urban character. In Mt. Holly I was immersed in “street people,” drug addicts, the broken down people at the bottom of just about any heap you could imagine. I led youth mission trips that brought protected middle-class young people into relationships with poor folk in the urban centers of the eastern U.S. I have been to Haiti twice and to Honduras. But it was a four-month sabbatical at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill, Ontario that gave me a perspective by which relationships with those who suffer in these ways has shaped me spiritually. For Jean Vanier, the founder of the L’Arche movment (a global network of communities in which mentally handicapped “core members” and their “assistants” live together), it is not that the “normal” people take care of the “handicapped,” rather it is that those who are suffering convey the presence of Christ, not just to the “assistants” but through the community to the whole world.

In this way, the ministries of mercy and justice essential in an urban setting are less a way of meeting people’s physical needs, than they are the settings for relationships in which the presence of Christ is discovered and proclaimed. Through these relationships with suffering, broken, wounded people I have learned to be a receiver, to live in grace.

A man in one congregation I served has schizophrenia and is resistant to treatment. With a magic marker he draws stigmata on his hands and sometimes on his forehead (for all I know he may draw them on his feet and side too). Understandably, many in the congregation are uncomfortable with him, and he is a strain on his daughter who cares for him. But I have learned that I need him, the congregation needs him, as a witness to our complete helplessness and dependence on God’s grace. I take his magic marker stigmata as a sign from God of how fully Jesus entered into our human suffering through the cross.

Confrontation with Catastrophe

Despite my acknowledged inadequacy, I have accompanied people through many of life’s inexplicable tragedies (premature death of a parent or child, debilitating illness or injury) while keeping my own equilibrium. I have found this more difficult when accompanying people through suffering willfully and knowingly inflicted by someone loved and trusted (suicide and murder). For me the pain has been most excruciating when I have been called into the middle of marital infidelity involving church leaders with whom I have not only served but been close friends. On more than one occasion I have kept information confidential, not even telling my wife, who could perceive my pain but offer no effective relief.

From this I have learned something of honestly facing my own vulnerability and the importance of vigilance and spiritual accountability. While my conversations with the spiritual directors I have had has not actually focused much on those specific incidents, having felt the pain of the disasters of others has encouraged me to be transparent and honest with talking with a spiritual director. It reminds me that I need to be alert to the director God has for me in Texas.

Lessons from A Disastrous Pastorate

After seventeen fruitful years in Mt. Holly, with the blessing of the Session of First Presbyterian Church, I went to serve as (solo) pastor for a new, nondenominational church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. By the time I had been there six months I had my first of several confrontations with a small group demanding my resignation. They wanted the pastor to be an “executive director” not a “shepherd.” Despite three distinct, official affirmations of the Board that I was called to be their pastor, this group prevailed, and I resigned.

For a year I developed a community chaplaincy ministry. I am thankful for those who supported that effort as it kept my family together in that time of transition. It also confirmed loud and clear my calling to pastoral ministry. I had hoped to stay in Milwaukee so our high school son would not have to change schools. But that didn’t happen. I still feel that he suffered most from our sojourn in Wisconsin, and wrestle with my feelings of regret for him.

In Mt. Holly, I had the fellowship of Monmouth Presbytery and the Rancocas Valley Clergy Association, but in a nondenominational church in Milwaukee such avenues were not automatic; I had to make them for myself. I learned the importance of team ministry and mutual support in mission. I met regularly with a prayer fellowship of urban pastors. I introduced myself to other pastors in the neighborhood. I developed close relationships with eight and phoned one of them a week to ask how I could pray for them. When things got really ugly at the church I was serving, a trusted core of this group became my prayer support and sounding board. I found guidance and encouragement. One, from a large congregation, included me in their staff fellowship during my months of community chaplaincy. Not only did I feel included and supported, they asked me to do some teaching on spirituality for their staff.

During that year, my wife and I took a week at Fairhaven Ministries in Roan Mountain, Tennessee where they offered retreat and counseling for wounded pastors. That began a process of asking questions and exploring the lessons learned from the experience with the church in Milwaukee. Exploring those lessons has consumed many pages in my journal. Perhaps the most significant is: don’t try to pastor alone!

On coming to Dallas and to a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), I have made a point of participating in their monthly pastors’ lunches. I attend the Greater Dallas Community of Churches meetings, and I participate in the visiting clergy education programs at Baylor and Presbyterian Hospitals. I have a list of prayer-partner pastors. I need the spiritual shaping of others who share this pastoral calling.

Mental Illness Strikes Home

Just before we left Wisconsin our oldest son’s wife had their second child. A few weeks after his birth our daughter-in-law had a sever episode that was identified as post-partum psychosis. Our son phoned from Pennsylvania in the middle of the night to tell us his wife had been taken by ambulance to a psychiatric hospital. Months of hospitalization, medication and therapy have been positively effective, and our grandson is now two and his Mom is functioning quite well.

I felt utterly helpless as I listened to Jon on the phone that night and as we struggled through the months of uncertainty. I had some sense of the distance that evoked Jesus’ cry, “Why have you forsaken me?” I felt considerable fear as I had experience with people who suffered with bipolar disorder who became non-functional and almost impossible to relate to, and a dreaded that this might be my son’s fate. I became keenly aware that “doing all the right things” was no protection from this kind of pain. I found that my response to the Andrea Yeats case was way out of step with the angry blaming so many people engaged in. I could only hurt, not analyze. After teaching about intercessory prayer that gets beyond asking God to fix things and asks that we see from God’s perspective, I urgently prayed for God to fix our daughter-in-law.

Facing Mortality

A couple of the continuing education events I have recently attended at hospitals have been about grieving. The congregation I serve has many older people, so I am doing a lot of funerals. They have classes and groups that were started in the 1940s and are struggling to continue, and many are grieving the loss of those institutions. Both of my parents and both of my wife’s parents are still living, though age and health concerns are increasing. They live in Illinois and Minnesota, while we are in Texas.

This juxtaposition recently prompted me to write in my journal at some length about our parents’ deaths. I imagined likely scenarios for the remainders of their lives, circumstances of their deaths and their funeral wishes, particularly what role they might want me to have in their funerals. I examined my emotional responses. I thought about talking about some of this when we visit with them this summer.

All four of our parents are Christians of great faith. Death in itself seems to hold little fear for any of them. Yet, I have been thinking how their deaths will shape me spiritually, and how anticipating the reality of their deaths shapes me spiritually right now. Somehow it doesn’t seem to have much to do with hope beyond the grave or looking forward to an eternal reunion with them. It seems, rather, to speak more to my awareness of the need to be dependent on God, of realizing that however much I have drawn from my parents, and however long they will be living, they are not the secure center. Only Christ is that secure center, not in some shallow pietistic way, but in the sense in which Simone Weil writes that “the Cross is our only hope.” (p. 75)

Conclusions

I have not organized these reflections to try to derive some specific conclusion. Rather, I have tried to look at how I have been shaped spiritually by my most significant encounters with suffering. I think I do see here patterns in my pastoral ministry. I try to offer to others those things that have been sources of healing and wholeness for me: presence, touch, prayer, Psalms.

I am drawn back again to the centrality of the cross. By entering into the suffering of another (even if my own personal experience of suffering is far smaller), as Christ entered into our suffering through the cross, we find the path to expectant hope, not just for ourselves but for those God calls us to serve.

A woman in the church in Mt. Holly was diagnosed with a rare, fatal cancer of the lining of the lungs. When she could no longer go out, I stopped by her home as she moved toward death. One day she told me, “When you come, I believe again that I can get through this. You hang onto God, and I’ll hang onto you when I can’t find God any more.” As I review the spiritual shaping of my suffering experiences, I realize that the extent to which I am “hanging onto God” is the result of having hung on to others when God was elusive to me.

Kreeft writes, “What then is suffering to the Christian? It is Christ’s invitation to follow him.” (P. 137) Here is this reciprocity of “hanging on” again in a different form. In our suffering as human beings, Christ entered into our suffering, as it were through the cross, to “hang onto us” while he “hung onto God.” Now we are called to “hang onto” Christ through our sufferings, both for ourselves, and when we are called upon to accompany others through their suffering.

It is not only my own personal sufferings that shape my spiritual formation. If I will truly enter into the pain of those to whom I am called, then their suffering can be formative for me as well (though the way I am formed may well be different than the way they are formed). So presence, listening, Psalms and prayers are not merely “skills” for helping someone else with their suffering. I, too, am shaped by the presence of Christ between us, by the way they speak of their pain, by the honest struggles of the psalmists, by even my own prayers that call people to experience the reality of God’s presence in their time of suffering. I am not the professional, pastoral care giver (even if empathetic and effective), but I am a person made in God’s image being molded to be like Christ by each encounter with someone else’s suffering.

But I am also God’s presence to the person in pain by which they are also being brought through their suffering toward the expectant hope of wholeness. This divine influence is not dependent on my having suffered a pain of similar magnitude to the person I am with. It is not dependent on my skills in pastoral care (which isn’t to say that good skills are not beneficial). It is not even dependent on whether I am myself aware of and in tune with God’s presence in that particular moment. Rather it is that in some fashion, God is taking us together through the cross, through our suffering, toward hope and wholeness.

I have written out of my pastoral experience, not because this is the domain of pastors, but because it is the context in which God brings me up against formative suffering. This is not about “how to do pastoral work.” It is about how this one pastor is discovering that God is shaping me with the presence of those who suffer around me, while at the same time God shapes others with my presence in their suffering.