The Church as Hospital

a few months ago i was in portland oregon and i ran into an old friend of mine we had lunch together we were both therapists back in i want to say the 1850s that's sort of what it feels like but we were recounting an incident that had happened when we were both teaching in a small college we were at a cocktail party with faculty and there was a uh one of the faculty members was sharing a few with a few of the rest of us about his uh he said i only have three years before i retire he says i can hardly wait to retire i am so sick of this job i'm so bored with my students and then he went on to say that uh he hadn't had a student that had challenged him for many years and he didn't know how he was going to take three years of this and this other professor standing there from a different department he said you know do what i do i make a game of it when a student walks into my class it's my challenge and my goal to destroy every belief system that he came into the classroom with from his parents from his religion from whatever that's what i do that's what gives me pleasure and that's what keeps me going so this other professor said oh what a good idea i think i'm going to start doing that and i walked away i just walked away and i went over to some other faculty members and i mentioned what had just been taking place in this conversation and this other professor who was a really dear man and when i respected he kind of shook his head when i told him what had just been said that weekend i drove to cannon beach oregon where i used to have a little cabin and i went running on the beach which was my standard way of relieving tension from those days and i and i thought do i want to spend the rest of my life teaching with people like that i love my students i love to interact with them i respect their opinion i don't care whether they agree with me or not i told myself i respect them the following week or two we had at the clinic i had a couple bring in a 17 year old son who had been diagnosed as clinically depressed by his family physician and the parents were concerned so we sat in my office for a while about 15 minutes talking to the three of them and then i had the parents step out and in the waiting room and i continued on talking to this young man and i finally thought about something so i said you know i want you to get a tablet and i want to have you go on a 40-minute run every day and at the end of the 40-minute run i want you to write in journal form what you were thinking while you were running and bring that tablet back next week and share it with me so the following week he came back and day one he was depressed day two he was depressed day three was a little less depressed day four he was flying eye he was happy so i called his parents in and i said you don't need to bring your son back here i said he's not he's not manic depressive i said your son needs to get off his rear and run every day and be physically active and get together with his friends and stay away from his computer and so the end of that week we had our usual staff meeting and i had one of the other clinicians say what is wrong why isn't this guy coming back you know the rule around here i said he said we have a rule that anyone that's coming to therapy has to agree to six months of therapy and i said yeah we don't know why it's got to do with money if they're coming for six months we get income from their insurance company i said i'm in this business that i want to help people i'm not interested in the money aspect of things and i said and besides in order to get insurance coverage we have to diagnose people and i said you know darn well that the average that if you don't know how to diagnose them or it's too early to decide what's going on with them you can use schizophrenia as a diagnosis because that's sure to get insurance coverage and it's such a broad spectrum of people that come under that that anybody you could pretty much say is schizophrenic and trump they said you know and everybody was all against it and so i eventually went back to the oregon coast and on a run i thought i don't want to do this anymore i don't want to do this anymore so i took a sabbatical and i never went back to that profession what i did discover at the end of that sabbatical was i discovered orthodoxy and much much to my amazement i discovered that the orthodox church does not see itself as a religious institution but as a hospital for the soul and her priests are the therapists i can tell you honestly that it is the therapy that comes from within the life of the church that actually changes people it changes people the trouble with psychiatry is that it there are pill pushers they're sort of like electroshock treatment people that have had electroshock treatment for they seem okay because they're kind of in a daze and they're not fretting and they're not causing trouble with their friends or their family drugs do the same thing they kind of make a person slightly comatose so everything seems okay but the root of the problem is not addressed only the orthodox church addresses the issue one of my favorite authors hirothius vlacos metropolitan herophius wrote this incredible book called orthodox psychotherapy i remember once when a a former friend of mine complained to me that why did you ever leave the profession you know you were a good therapist and and i so i said i loved him this book and he read it and he said that's one of the most profound books i've ever read orthodox psychotherapy by hirothios flaccos he said i had to read it twice to totally understand it he says that guy's deep well it's not herothios that's deep it's orthodoxy that is deep this is what our church gives to us we are in a terrible position right now as a society and and worldwide with this pandemic uh it's all looking like this pandemic is going to come to a terrible uh period of time of closure in the coming months some are saying that we're probably going to have a worse closure worldwide in the western world than we did before a lot of companies aren't going to survive certainly a lot of restaurants aren't going to survive and certainly already we're seeing eviction notices going up so that there are going to be families with children who are homeless these are terrible times our country is more polarized now than i have ever seen it what is the answer to all of this it's not in psychoanalysis it's not in a bowing to the wishes of the state that so many clergymen and bishops seem to be heading towards but it is in each and every one of us taking seriously our faith concentrating on our prayer life on going to the divine liturgy and receiving the holy mysteries of christ body and blood studying the lives of the saints especially the martyrs because we're ultimately i believe going to face the good possibility of martyrdom if we're true to the faith and we refuse to go along with the reset we need to do that we need to immerse ourselves in the life of the church like never before and it is only then that we will find the survival skills we need to face whatever comes our way and i think most of all we orthodox christians need to live with a life of joy because how can we not be joyful when we have a relationship with christ and we are members of his holy church orthodoxy is our nation we have reason to be joyful so glory to god for all things

Channel: Fr Tryphon

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Id: DamlMYUqllI

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021