Episode 113: Spiritual Direction and Counseling

[Music] welcome to godsplaining contemplative preachers contemporary age each week join the dominican friars as they consider all things catholic welcome to godsplaining i am father jacob bertrand today i'm here with our very own father gregory hey how you doing i'm doing well i'm back in uh freeburg and um weather's beautiful so i was sitting outside earlier reading the book about the atonement by eleanor stump and uh yeah one of the friars was like putting down new mulch in the garden which is nice it's always good to survey someone else's work while you yourself do not work well i suppose i was doing work of a certain sort but certainly not his work work that permitted me to keep my hands free of mulch so i would describe my present state as um peaceful and um delightedly aloof from gardening from gardening okay that's great well i might have said this on another episode at some point or another but when i decided to enter religious life my dad said that i entered religious life to avoid doing manual labor because i always hated doing yard work growing up or at least that's how it's proposed like the past is kind of you know retold by the victor and i guess like my dad won this one but i don't remember having a particular disdain for yard work but just like a disdain for having to do like mulch things and like whatever yeah yeah so see i think it's it's a matter of finding what work you like because when chores were portioned in our house it typically wasn't done by like proclivity or affinity it was just done by random maternal fiat i came to discover there are a couple things that i do like doing folding laundry nice oh i hate that um you really least favorite oh at least i i dread folding laundry like i will have to when i do laundry i will have to dump out the clean clothes like from the laundry when i bring it back to my room i'll have to dump it on my bed so that i will fold it because i'm a little ocd and if i won't go to sleep if the work's not done so that's the only way i hate folding i'd rather like like clean the bathroom and like do dishes and like dust i'd rather do anything i'd rather mulch than full laundry strategy i i don't know what it is i just don't like it okay well um i'm sorry for your negative experience and i'm here for you thank you if you were really here for me to fold my laundry oh one other story that has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about but when we were when my first summer assignment our first summer i was assigned that was this was like 2012 i was assigned to our community in louisville kentucky where father gregory was his first priestly assignment and at the time there was a woman working at the house she was kind of the housekeeper but had gotten older and it was just kind of doing laundry and like my mother did my laundry growing up and then when i went to college like whatever i did my own laundry but i've never had a stranger do my laundry and there was in that in that house like the prior was like so i forgot her name but she was like she's gonna do the laundry it's like i prefer like i'm like a 24 year old man i prefer to wash my own underwear and he's like no she's going to do your laundry because that's her job and that's what she is like okay so all the laundry everything but the habit came back it washed laundred washed folded and ironed pressed like starched into like a six by six square so like from underwear socks shirts everything came back in like a six by six square and one tall stack and that was like you're like three foot stack of laundry every week it was great so i didn't like that either so i just have a bad thing with audrey but we're not talking about laundry today's episode is not on chores and it's not on laundry in fact it has nothing to do with those things but it might because laundry drives me nuts so today we're going to talk about spiritual direction and counseling um you might after listening to me think that i might benefit from a little both but we're going to talk about spiritual direction and counseling we've talked about both i think separately in different ways perhaps not devoted full episodes to either topic but have talked about them in various ways we've gotten a lot of questions about spiritual direction less so about counseling but more about like the role of spiritual direction in our live episodes particularly so it's something that um just even in like the godsplaining circle however small that is people have been asking and uh we've been talking about it's also something in a wider circle and perhaps a circle that more people care about like the general world um that you know if you look at statistics um about the number of americans who are diagnosed with some sort of um mental health issue whether that just be anxiety depression something more serious there are you know some some reports have staggering numbers upwards of like one in four americans are dealing with these issues um uh and then even like thinking about the pandemic in the last year and a half almost two years now uh even more incredible statistics about the people about numbers of people who struggle with just mental health in various capacities in various ways so it's it's a live issue it's a real topic it's a real thing and to pretend or not to pretend but to not recognize some ways by which like our mental health is united or connected to our spiritual health and our just our health our well-being as human beings would be a bit short-sighted so we thought we'd talk about the relationship between the two how um how they sit together how they don't um where maybe some pointers at some point about where like a priest's expertise is and ends and and those sort of things so just have a conversation so father gregory kick us off um get us into the into the topic into this discussion about spiritual direction and counseling and their relationship and that sort of thing yeah i think that just consulting our experience many of us feel in some way limited in our approach to life so we talk often on god's planning about happiness and how whenever we you know know and love whenever we seek to better understand or better to kind of choose in a certain situation we're motivated by happiness but because we want to be kind of right with god itself with others and oftentimes we feel ourselves deficient in some way shape or form so we're motivated by this desire to overcome whatever obstacles or impediments keep us from being happy or growing in happiness and in so doing a lot of the the means or a lot of the instruments that the church offers for our assistance while you know good excellent um consoling in their own way to us feel kind of humble and so we can have the experience of feeling like we're somehow missing out like okay i've been praying i've been making decent use of the sacraments maybe i've introduced a little bit of penance into my life and still i feel myself unhappy or unhealthy or feel myself not yet fully realizing my potential as a human being as a christian and so we hear other people talk about you know i did thus and such in the context of spiritual direction or i went and saw a mental health professional and i had this breakthrough and so we feel like okay if other people are having good experiences in these settings maybe i too should avail myself or maybe i i too should you know set up an appointment or you know take take the plunge um and then the question is where do i turn or to whom do i turn and uh and how so yeah i don't know maybe just talk a little bit yeah yeah the i think that like the what you what you started to point out and what you were kind of getting it too and then it is is important to understand the purpose um or the end i think we talk about like knowing the ends of things a lot um because so often we don't or so often like the world doesn't propose that as knowing what some like what the true purpose for something is before pursuing it or so like understanding the difference between um spiritual direction counseling or their end what they aim to what they aim to accomplish is i think a really important starting point because if we go into like a spiritual direction meeting if we think that somehow a priest in spiritual direction is going to um play the role of mental health counselor and and help me deal with some sort of uh you know uh mental health issue it's just it's probably not gonna happen i mean there might be like corresponding beneficial effects but the same in the same way you wouldn't go to like a mental health counselor to um or a psychiatrist or psychologist to like work out things spiritual specifically so maybe starting there in in offering a sort of at least from the the spiritual side the preside like what are expectations vis-a-vis the actual things spiritual direction counseling what what should we as people pursuing the lord expect from one or the other or how to like look at them to use them well yeah so i think yeah just as you kind of give indication it's helpful to talk about them in light of their ends or in light of the goals that they seek to accomplish so counseling you know the approach is therapeutic and what a mental health professional is trying to address are maladaptive patterns of thought or of behavior so you have different schools you know and you can think about whether someone is more so trained in like psychoanalysis or more so trained in behaviorism or more so trained in something a little more contemporary like cognitive behavioral which tries to go about a war on both fronts maybe maybe war isn't the best word but tries to pursue it on both fronts and what that individual what that professional is trying to do is propose adjustments and kind of like rehabituate the person to healthy living whereas in the context of spiritual direction the approach and a word that we sometimes use on the show is more mystagogical so the idea is that god proposes kind of like mysteries of divine life i mean god doesn't propose and like a kind of here i am at the front of a classroom and i'm going to set forth certain propositions but god gives himself uh god offers himself to the human person um and he does so so as to lead us into the divine life and what a spiritual director does is try to accompany and that's a word that's kind of become o quran in the last 10 years try to accompany the individual on that path so to help you know him or her enter more perfectly into the divine life and so as you know to seek ways to help the individual consent to and cooperate with grace more excellently more freely more generously however you want to describe it um so in light of those two things you know we as priests are kind of trained in seminary or in uh you know religious formation to be cognizant of our own competence you know we had a professor who told us you're trained basically to minister the sacraments to preach with a modicum of with a modicum of excellence right and then to offer something in the way of spiritual counsel but not too terribly much unless you really pursue that whereas a counselor would be trained in these more kind of therapeutic things so then yeah the question is given what they offer do i need one do i need the other do i need both how you know how should we think about that how do we go about making that decision yeah i think in in beginning to think about like what do i need uh there it's important to point out too that um both spiritual direction and counseling of whatever sort um are our tools here so uh we can talk about them as as tools and as aids um for the person so like we've been we've been comparing the two counseling and spiritual direction by by way of contrast um that's not to say that they are wholly unrelated uh you know but they they both serve a particular and in our our tools so one of the things that i think father gregory and i uh agree on um there are probably more than one one thing maybe more than a couple but one of the things that we do agree on with respect to spiritual direction it's like uh is how it's used as a tool in the spiritual life sometimes i'll tell people like spiritual direction is not the eighth sacrament it's not necessary for salvation but it can be super helpful for particular things or particular times or circumstances in life i think we could say the same thing about counseling generally i mean some people might need it more more immediately than others but it's also not and this i think we'll talk about a bit later in the episode sort of just like expectations from um entering into one other or both but you know these are these are tools to help lead us to a sort of whole and integrated humanity whether it's with just our mental health with our spiritual life the combination of both and those those kind of things so i don't know if you have anything more to say if we about that but yeah yeah i think that a good kind of disposition with which to approach the question is to say yeah maybe i need it and maybe i don't um and it might be important and it might be not so just to approach the question somewhat modestly if you think about it just at the level of statistics um you know in the united states of america among practicing catholics if you were to compare the number of people who are in the pews versus the number of priests who are available for spiritual direction i think it works out to be about one priest per 2100 practicing catholics so if you do the math on that typically one goes to spiritual direction for about 45 minutes 50 minutes like once every four to six weeks so it's impossible that everyone seeks spiritual direction and the next question is okay of those practicing catholics who then should go should it be you know people who what have like the most problems or struggle with habitual sin should it be people in particular states of life should it be people who are discerning particular vocation should it be um i don't know people who donate more to the church and as a result of which should expect more comparable benefits from their pastoral care like whenever you try to assess it on like on one of those criteria things get or one of those yeah one of those criteria things get little bit weird um so i don't i don't think that we want to be like too cold and calculating about it you know if you struggle with habitual sin at this frequency or if you go to the sacrament of confession with this freak you know then you should no it's it's not like that i think we should start with a kind of modest approach and say okay god gives you a variety of means to attain to perfection he gives you you know his only begotten son he gives you the church he gives you the sacraments he gives you grace virtue gives the holy spirit he gives you all kinds of great things spiritual direction is one of them but as like you said it's not the eighth sacrament when you when you kind of put it um in rank order on this hierarchy it's it's not as important um and so that is a good way by which to kind of hold off at arm's length or keep at bay this clamorous fear that if i don't seek spiritual direction then maybe i'm missing out or maybe there is some unknown unaddressed obstacle to perfection that were i to know it in the context of spiritual direction i would be the next patrick or i would be the next you know blessed virgin mary so that's just simply to say maybe maybe not take the pressure off yourself and then i don't know maybe work on some of the principles that we'll that we'll discuss as we go forward yeah okay we're gonna take the pressure off of us for a minute now too we're gonna take a quick break as we're kind of halfway through halfway through our time uh but when we come back we'll talk a bit more about this maybe maybe not do i need it do i not and then uh consider some ways by which to go about approaching spiritual direction counseling expectations with regard to these things so stay tuned we'll be right back you are listening to god's planning visit us at godsplaining.org to listen to our episodes shop our store and donate to our podcast all gifts go to improving the podcast and bringing the gospel to more listeners thanks for your support welcome back to god's planning father jacob merchant here with father gregory and we've been talking about spiritual direction and counseling the relationship between the two how they interact how they don't maybe not so much about how they don't interact but kind of what they are and how they can be useful and helpful and just before the break brother gregory was talking about the question of like do i need one do i need to go to spiritual direction do i need to find a spiritual director um do i need to see a mental health counselor a psychologist a psychiatrist do i need both do i need a priest who's a mental health counselor gosh limitless options and iterations of this um and i think one of what father gregory was saying just before just before the break is is really helpful to recognize that our lord um reveals gives himself in ordinary and sure means that our kind of guarantors uh of our salvation you know if we participate in them and offer ourselves and cooperate with the grace that's offered and and that's the ordinary course of the christian life so the sacraments through the the the church offering the sacraments regular prayer life the pursuit of virtue um living a graced life but then of course there are aids and helps that benefit that spiritual direction counseling might be one of those um and to to reiterate yet again what father gregory said is that um they're they're those that saying that doesn't mean that like those who go out to seek one or the other are somehow like doing too much like overachievers here but rather just the opposite that like we can trust and we also take great confidence in the reality that um that there are sure means of pursuing and entering into friendship with christ so um i don't know i did did we cover everything that we did you say everything on that yeah i think you did you're nodding okay so um let's talk about then like what it what we should be thinking about i guess managing expectations uh in approaching spiritual direction and approaching counseling and approaching these things with respect to the end of growing in holiness and growing closer to christ um yeah so let's let's talk about that yeah maybe a good place to start would be just to talk about or to return to this theme of happiness and here maybe i'm just going to give vent to my generally melancholic disposition but because because in the church we do talk regularly or frequently about happiness sometimes it gives the impression that everyone should be happy and if you're not yet fully happy then you are lesser as a human being so it's almost as if to say like this present life should be wonderful because you know we talk about heaven we say that the present life should be in anticipation of heaven and if heaven is beatific then this life should be a kind of beginning of that beatific life but i think that we can kind of again hold that off at arm's length and simply say that a lot of people are unhappy and that's just fine not in the sense that we should celebrate our unhappiness and be like i'm not okay you're not okay everyone's not okay let's just wallow in our unokayness but i think that you know it's just it's helpful to be cognizant of the fact that human life is very hard um and it can be very sad uh it can be anger inducing in a variety of ways uh and that's okay it's okay to be a bit beat up it's a it's okay to feel like you're just kind of taking it from all sides because life just is that way and if we return to the wisdom of saint thomas aquinas and some of the sources from which he draws he has a kind of i don't know um kind of simple appreciation for the type of happiness which is possible here and you'll hear it described as a kind of imperfect happiness so the happiness which we await in heaven is a perfect happiness and so far as it's you know full and it can't be lost and you have no anxiety about it being lost but here it isn't full it can be lost and we do have anxiety about it being lost and also the types of things which constitute our happiness in heaven here are going to be interrupted they're going to be kind of storm tossed and shipwrecked in a variety of ways so you know you're just living your life and then someone whom you love dies or you're just living your life and you can track some serious illness or you're just living your life and you lose your job are you supposed to in that moment say the the most important thing in this setting is that i smile a lot and that i you know however it goes i project a kind of happiness because if i don't then i am not the saint which i am destined to be it's like no no you don't have to add to your present sorrow or your present trauma the additional guilt of feeling like you're you're processing it incorrectly or processing it less than optimally it's okay you know a lot of life is difficult and a lot of life is sad that's very encouraging thanks one of the i guess one of the ways by which to think about the reality of what father gregory was just explaining is is to recognize that uh probably as as many of us already do that that we are like in the church here on earth we we often talk about the church as a pilgrim church or a church on the way and uh when you when you consider what that means to be like a true pilgrim or somebody who's truly on the way um it's not we're not talking about like a luxury all-inclusive kind of like uh trip or like on like an ocean liner where we're just like sitting with you know enjoying meals and and like playing shuffleboard and that sort of thing like that's that's not that's not what life is about and i don't you y'all don't need me to tell you that um i think our own experiences are sufficient evidence to to make that point clear um but it's just again to recognize that they're like even in the best of circumstances even in the like the the most simple of of kind of um paths of life there are worries there are concerns and to expect that not to be somehow magnified because of our own sin because of the fallenness of the world because of like the insanity of the world because of this that you know because of our uh whatever even even our weaknesses and brokenness that doesn't have to do with our sin you know these kind of things that it's going to come and it's going to um there will be periods of difficulty in life and the christian the christian life doesn't promise our lord doesn't promise to take that away but to fulfill it and to lead to continue to lead us on the way to that place wherein it will be fulfilled so the the whole like the whole virtue here um at least in this point of like managing expectations is really the virtue of hope um and and hope pertains the object of hope is is is that which is that which has yet to be attained you know we can't hope for something that we already have but we hope for for heaven and and the perfection that comes there so like father gregory was saying it's it's like it's very important to recognize that it's okay sort of not to have everything perfectly aligned or not to be perfectly happy or not to be perfectly whatever because we're not we're just simply not and i think that takes like a big burden a big pressure off of us because we don't have to go out in the world i mean i'm not saying like when someone asks you on the street like how you doing you just like unload and on the next stranger but you don't you know there there doesn't have to be the sort of attempt um to kind of like uh force a false facade of happiness so yeah one thing i think is helpful is a lot of times when we talk about happiness we associ we associate it with a kind of um outwardly manifest joy but i think it's helpful to introduce into the conversation another paradigm of happiness which is doing the thing that you you know are convicted that you're called to do so the word that i use most often is fit um i had a mass across town a couple of days ago and you know i i meditated on the readings and i prepared a homily but um i don't like to preach from a text too terribly much in one because composing a text in french for me takes like a thousand hours but also because i just end up reading something to them losing eye contact and i feel like a lot of that preaching exchange is lost um so i'm here in this chapel with like 35 young people who are doing a year internship with the philanthropist institute and i was trying to explain in this idea while i was trying to preach this idea of like being where you ought to be or being where you're supposed to be without importing like a kind of moralism into it like do the things that you should and i was searching for words and that finally i was like in english the word is fit so i think that that we derive a kind of peace and in truth a kind of happiness from the recognition that i'm supposed to be here and you know god be praised that i am here a phrase that i often use is just playing the hand that you're dealt because i think that sometimes we're haunted by the fear that you know real life is elsewhere and if i could just get to that real life then things would be good whether that be you know like once i have financial security or once i'm in my state of life or once everything kind of settles down then i'll be dot dot dot but what that does is it effectively pushes your happiness off to some kind of future ill-defined date where you may or may not arrive so i think that if we you know kind of interiorize this disposition of okay all right this is my life i'm going to play the hand that i'm dealt and that may entail some trauma or some psychological disintegration the point is not to say all right i'm going to banish thoughts of those things or the recognition of those things rather i'm going to i'm going to move through those things right i'll consent to those things i'll address those things i'll find my real life in those things rather than seeking it elsewhere and that doesn't mean again that you make of yourself a doormat or adopt a kind of victim spirituality but it's to say like we can't flee we have to enter and in entering we come to discover all right this needs to be addressed in spiritual direction this needs to be addressed in counseling but ultimately like life is to be lived and i don't yeah i don't need to have additional anxiety at the thought that maybe there's another life to be lived or a life to be lived elsewhere yeah so thinking about i guess from father gregory from your perspective as a priest um one who is engages at times in spiritual direction i think um probably not in counseling i think uh giving counseling you know who knows i don't know maybe maybe you're like a secret psychologist i don't know no i do know i know you're not uh what what do you think as far as like expectations should be so we talked about like happiness anxiety kind of things but like and looking at someone perhaps who's considering maybe i need a spiritual director maybe i should see a mental health console like what what is the like vis-a-vis the end of the christian life what is what what should we expect in pursuing those things or hope to get out of them really yeah yeah maybe maybe a helpful way to organize it is just talk about the three ages of the spiritual life you know you got beginners proficient and perfect and in the beginning stages you're dealing a lot with habitual sin and when dealing with habitual sin the best kind of fix as it were the best move is regular confession and ideally with the same person and so far as there's greater familiarity there and kind of greater accountability but in the context of regular confession sometimes you discover that part of your habitual sin is an unaddressed and deep-seated trauma and in that case then it might be the move to seek counseling and you would talk that through with your spiritual director and kind of as you as you move through those initial stages and kind of you know you know cease to be as haunted by or as beleaguered by habitual sin and you find okay there i i i've begun to experience this real call for perfection and it's animating me and it crops up my thoughts with kind of bewildering frequency and i really want to be about the work but i need to know more about the spiritual life i need to know more about you know the gifts of the holy spirit and how i can be more prompt in my ascent to the workings of god in my life then that might be a an opportunity or an occasion for for spiritual direction i think it's especially helpful for those who are discerning a vocation um i think it's especially helpful for like priests and religious um insofar as those are those are places of kind of heightened vigilance uh regarding like perfection in in the spiritual life and it's not because priests are religious are per se better than lay catholics you know psychopathic counsel lumengencium says quite clearly you know all of us are called to the perfection of charity but sometimes you know certain persons will experience it with a greater urgency or experience it um with uh it seems as if god is giving more manifest gifts or more abundant gifts which have with them a kind of greater responsibility for stewardship so that would be i think that that's kind of the criteria that i use by and large and i think that that's yeah i think that that's helpful yeah yeah and i guess in our last like couple minutes together any final thoughts about about any of this about pursuing spiritual direction about counseling about not pursuing them about expectations yeah any of that yeah i think uh maybe maybe just some yeah final thought about when you look at the lives of the saints some of them are are paragons of you know psychological integration but that's not necessarily the case and that's not to say that we look back on 13th century saints and say like wow how how crazed were those people but also yeah we just we just don't know what the lord was doing in a life and to pursue holiness is not necessarily or always going to look like psychological integration that's not to say like you know you have a mental health issue leave it to the side just pursue holiness because that's kind of anthropologically or it's kind of philosophically irresponsible but i think that life will sometimes entail serious trauma and psychological disintegration and that doesn't make you a second-class citizen in the life of the church like you're thereby impaired from pursuing holiness when you think of like st thomas aquinas for instance at the end of his life he was writing at a rate of like 15 pages a day which probably was too much if you just look at it from self-care perspective right but i as a dominican who reads sumotheology with great frequency i'm super grateful that he did that and some people think you know on december 6 1273 when he had a vision of god that corresponded with a mental breakdown and you know that's a little bit of revisionist history and who's to say but okay all right just take it on its face value he was pursuing the lord and maybe he went about it by less than excellent means but we shouldn't you know we shouldn't necessarily go back and say he wasn't holy because he wasn't healthy i think you pursue holiness right you pursue god and if he makes you if he makes you holy god be praised if he makes you happy in this life god be prays certainly he will in the next and if you know if he makes you healthy awesome should we thereby hold you know like look look suspiciously on other means whereby to become healthy no no no no you know like some of our closest friends you know seek counseling and you know take medication for mental health issues so there's no stigma attached to those things by any way shape or form but we shouldn't think that like leaving no stone unturned means looking frantically in every direction for simultaneous means whereby to become happy healthy and holy as if they were the same thing um so yeah i don't i don't mean that in a way that's yeah to be taken offensively or to be taken judgmentally it's just simply to say to be patient with yourself to be patient with the lord and then you know to to weigh to sort out to integrate the counsel of those whom you receive all on the on or in the context of this life's pilgrimage great i think that's helpful thank you uh excellent well thanks so much for tuning in to to this episode on spiritual reduction and counseling and some i guess of our insights as priests however young and inexperienced with respect to the relationship between the two uh if you think someone might benefit from from tuning in as always please feel free to share um like the episode subscribe on youtube do the things that help us as you have been we're grateful for uh thanks to for our patreon supporters your support financial support of course always helps us to continue to kind of grow grow the podcast and witness and preach the gospel more effectively and more expansively uh thanks for yeah tuning in to this episode our thursday episodes continue to drop regularly our guest planning episodes on uh every other monday in our live spending every other friday so tune in to those two know of our prayers for you and until next time god bless thanks for listening to god's planning a work of the dominican friars of the province of saint joseph follow us on facebook twitter and instagram leave a review on your podcast app and visit us at godsplaining.org [Music]

Channel: Godsplaining Podcast

Views: 744

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: catholic, dominican friars, theology, philosophy, religion, faith, order of preachers, godsplaining, seekers, Truth, preaching, questions, searching, prayer, meditation, OPEast, catholic priest, counseling, mental health, help, spiritual direction, therapy

Id: GbPyE3BZukk

Length: 33min 47sec (2027 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021