THE COCK-EYED COUNSELOR [Sat, 8-19-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Fait & Life for the Years of Winter—THE COCK-EYED COUNSELOR [Sat, 8-19-23]

 

There is a difference between a pastor who counsels and a Pastoral Counselor. The latter is essentially like other psychological therapists, seeing patients one at a time, or in groups designated for a particular form of therapy, but unlike a secular therapist, the Pastoral Counselor uses spirituality/religion as a tool.

I never wanted to be a Pastoral Counselor, but any pastor is a counselor, and I wanted to be good on those occasions when people asked me to hear their problems, listen to their needs. So I did a lot of course work and continuing education in counseling.

Unlike a Pastoral Counselor, or other therapists, most of the folks I counseled were church members. I saw them in all sorts of different settings—worship services, youth group, parents of youth group members, committee members, community participants-- in addition to sitting down together in my office, or on a park bench, or in a coffee shop. [Many folks don’t want to be seen at the pastor’s office.]

It changes the relationship a lot if the counselee is not just a person with a problem but also a member of your pastor-parish relations committee, or a major financial contributor to your church, or a major pain in the patootie.

Rarely did we have opportunity to set up a time each week to dig into their issues in depth. My opportunities to help were fifteen or fifty minutes, and probably no follow-up. It was drive-by counseling. [1]

One of my main counseling as a pastor, though, was in group therapy, although it wasn’t called that. It was called Sunday morning worship. I could say things, open up possibilities, to 50 people, or 400, at one time, that I could not say to an individual.

Each person who came to see me thought of their problems as unique, but they were actually universal. If one member had that problem, then most of the rest did. I could work on that general problem from the pulpit, but I had to be careful that the member who had come to me in the first place did not think I was singling them out, betraying their trust. That could be tricky.

Because I addressed those universal problems, however, people thought I had them in mind individually even if they had not talked to me in person. Thus I had a totally undeserved reputation for reading peoples minds.

That is due in part because I have slit eyes. They just don’t open very wide. It gives me a look that is somewhere between sleepy and sinister.

Almost every optometrist I’ve ever gone to has tried to get me to have eyelid surgery to correct that slant eye problem. I never did. There is an advantage to having people think you can read their minds. Makes pastoral counseling much more efficient.

John Robert McFarland

1] Since I once pastored in a community that had a lot of Amish folk, I am reminded of: What goes clip-clop, bang-bang? An Amish drive-by shooting.