CPSP Pastoral Report

I was talking regularly at that time with a pastoral counselor, John Florell, and at one point he suggested that maybe it would be helpful for me to turn around and face this demon head-on, perhaps by doing some Clinical Pastoral Education. After a couple of years of Monday headaches, I left that congregation and took what for me was a frightening leap into a CPE residency position at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago.

I credit that year in so many respects for saving my pastoral, professional, perhaps spiritual life. It was a wonderful, wonderful year of acute personal trauma. It didn�t take too many weeks for the headaches to begin to subside.

I went from CPE back into a graduate program in pastoral theology and � wouldn�t you know it? � worked throughout those four or five years as a hospital chaplain at the Medical Center at Princeton, one of the most fulfilling experiences in ministry I�d had to that point and since. I often miss that life and work dearly.

So I know and respect what you do as students and teachers, and I�m still a cheerleader for your cause with my own students at Princeton Seminary. Thank you so much for your work and for allowing me to join you here today.

When John DeVelder asked me whether I could substitute on relatively short notice for a speaker who couldn�t be here this week, he told me that my topic was to be �Who We Shall Be.� I was intrigued by the topic and told John I�d be glad to come. �Who We Shall Be.� It�s got a nice prophetic ring to it.

I thought of Yanna the Psychic, who reads people�s palms and tarot cards on the second floor above the Burger King on Nassau Street in downtown Princeton. I�ve never found myself utilizing Yanna�s services foretelling the future, though she�s been working there for years. She�s been making the local headlines of late, however, especially for having relieved one of her clients of around $150,000 over the past couple of years. Law enforcement officials were really upset about this, and a judge recently insisted that Yanna pay back this money. It wouldn�t take a psychic to predict that the lady who paid Yanna $150,000 doesn�t have great prospects for a very promising future. Now, it seems, Yanna�s own future, at least for the time being, isn�t looking very bright either.

So I thought of Yanna predicting people�s futures when I heard the proposed topic, �Who We Shall Be.�

I also thought of too many vigils staged by Princeton Seminary students over the years on the Saturday night before Easter, in which hundreds of us would parade to various sites all over campus, walking through the whole of biblical history � from Creation at 7:00 p.m., right up through the Eschatological Banquet at midnight. Partway through the night, when we got to the part of salvation history that involved the Old Testament prophets, we would all be standing outside under the balcony of the President�s office. A student dressed in campy prophetic garb and a fake beard would appear standing on the balcony at the appointed time and invariably shout shaming words at the audience below. Who knew that to be a prophet required so much nasty shouting?

Well, I�m not Yanna the Psychic, and I don�t want to shout at you today about your future and mine as caregivers and pastoral theologians. In fact, I�ve now come to see prophets � those of days of old and of days like ours � not so much foretelling the future at all but forthtelling it, persons who simply tell us what they see going on around and within them as honestly and courageously as they can, often without so much as a hint of raising their voices above a whisper and with no elevated balcony or recognized platform in sight.

None of us can claim much by way of foretelling, of predicting the future, but I think we are all called to the task of forthtelling, of telling forthrightly what we see and hear around and within us in the present with all the integrity, honesty, and courage that we can muster. Who knows, maybe that�s precisely how Yanna herself bilks $150,000 from a client, by looking at the palm of that troubled woman�s hand only after having first looked deeply into her eyes and recognizing, maybe even identifying with, the pain and yearning therein. Maybe that�s how the biblical prophets got their starts and earned their livelihoods, too, risking to tell of what they saw in the here-and-now more than assuming what the future would hold.

So perhaps �Who Shall We Be?� rather than �Who We Shall Be� � a pensive question more than a fiery proclamation, an intentional decision more than any psychic prediction.

An Idea for a Book

One thing that�s been on my mind a lot in the present lately is a book I�ve just finished editing, entitled Images of Pastoral Care: Classic Readings. I asked John deVelder, among others, to endorse the book for its back cover, and this request, in turn, led to the invitation to speak with you today. I�m a little anxious about talking about the book. It feels a little self-promoting to do so � this lecture as extended infomercial like those on late-night television. I found a way to talk myself out of this initial discomfort with self-promotion, however (for I really do want to promote the book), in that the publisher informed me a couple of weeks ago that since it�s an edited volume for which I�ve had to shell out a hefty sum to various publishers for permissions fees to reprint others� works (even Anton Boisen�s, whom I had thought was long dead and therefore didn�t need the cash), it was unlikely I would break even from royalties were the press to sell every copy it published, itself an unlikely prospect. If the publisher sells every copy it produces, I�ll still be in the hole (making Chalice Press, it strikes me, into something of my own personal Yanna the Psychic). So I�ve taken strange comfort in this fact, because now I can encourage you to buy this book, when it is published in the fall, as a sort of selfless Public Service Announcement. I think it�s a book that will be especially helpful to students in a first unit of CPE.

Let me tell you a little about it, and why I think it will be helpful, but especially today what I think the book has shown me about where we stand as pastoral theologians in the present, and therefore, in a sense, what it may tell us about who we shall be.

The book is an edited collection of the works of a number of pastoral theologians, many of whose names � Boisen, Hiltner, Nouwen, Pruyser, Gerkin, Dittes, Capps, Miller-McLemore, Kornfeld � are very familiar to many of you. I�ve chosen excerpts from each of these writers� works in which they propose an image or metaphor for describing pastoral care, starting with Boisen�s description of the recipients of care as �living human documents� and moving through Seward Hiltner�s description of caregivers themselves as solicitous shepherds, Nouwen�s wounded healer, Campbell�s and Capps�s wise fool, and so on, down through the decades of contemporary, mostly Protestant, pastoral theology.

Three of the essays and images were written either by or for hospital chaplains in particular � Heije Faber, in his book Pastoral Care in the Modern Hospital, likened the work that you do (no offense intended) to that of the clown in a circus; my own essay develops the biblical image of the intimate stranger to describe the work of the hospital chaplain in situations of sudden traumatic loss; and Karen Hanson, a hospital chaplain in Minnesota, sees the work of chaplains as akin to that of nurse midwives. Henri Nouwen�s famous book on the wounded healer, and Paul Pruyser�s book on The Minister as Diagnostician, are also particularly relevant to hospital ministry. In the end, however, most of us in nearly any type of ministry are likely to find ourselves in each one of the nineteen chapters and pastoral images or metaphors of the book.

The initial idea for this book emerged out of informal exchanges among colleagues over the course of several recent annual meetings of the Society for Pastoral Theology. A small group of faculty teaching at seminaries and divinity schools that offer doctoral programs in pastoral theology or related fields had begun to gather for an hour or so of conversation during those conferences with the modest agenda of exchanging ideas and learning more about our respective Ph.D. programs. We were seeking to answer questions concerning the specific emphases and requirements of the various programs, the kinds of professional positions to which each school�s graduates typically gravitated, and the texts and topics we considered essential to a core graduate curriculum in the field.

Every institution represented around those tables used a distinctive nomenclature to designate the discipline. Claremont School of Theology offered a Ph.D. in Theology and Personality. At Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary it was a degree in Pastoral Theology, Personality, and Culture. Emory University graduates received a doctorate in Person, Community, and Religious Practice, while Vanderbilt students worked toward one in Religion and Personality. Boston University�s program was in Pastoral Psychology, but Princeton Theological Seminary�s was in Pastoral Theology.

These differing program names mirrored the sense of ambiguity that we ourselves as faculty confided to having experienced when expected to describe or justify our work to others, especially to those charged with assessing our academic standing or status. It became equally clear that a number of us struggled to determine what mix of texts and authors to include in core courses in the history and methodology of pastoral theology at a graduate level. Those texts that we did tend to use were as varied as our institutional designations for the discipline. We found disconcerting this collective inability to identify one or even a number of definitive texts that would lend our students confidence that they were indeed appropriating a coherent sense of the tasks, tools, or methods of pastoral theology.

Despite these common concerns, however, those involved in these conversations over the years clearly shared an undisguised devotion to what we could all somehow continue to name as pastoral theology. We were unwavering in the conviction that pastoral theology had something of critical value to offer. None of us expressed any qualms whatsoever about our mutual desire to see pastoral theology press forward in its service to church, academy, and society, however elusive the nature of its mission even to those entrusted with its oversight.

I typically found these conversations with colleagues to be oddly encouraging. Long after, they continued to lead me to reflect on that process whereby I had come to regard myself, with varying degrees of conviction, as a pastoral theologian. Central to this were certain of my own teachers � Donald Capps, Sandra Brown, James Lapsley, and John Florell, among them � who seemed to have attained some level of comfort in thinking of themselves as pastoral theologians. In their own ways they inspired me to enter challenging venues of ministry, like that of the CPE residency in Chicago, that would otherwise have seemed beyond my reach. Thus I found myself working not only in hospitals, but psychiatric institutions, counseling centers, prisons, and, at times even more disorienting, in utterly ordinary suburban congregations and seminary classrooms.

Though my teachers, too, sometimes found it difficult to specify the nature of pastoral theology in explicit terms, there was no question, in my mind at least, that they were pastoral theologians to me. I saw them as caring, courageous iconoclasts. Their influence quite literally changed the trajectory of my life and contributed to a calling that, however difficult to name, captured my imagination and subsequently shaped a vision of what I hoped to be and do.

Those annual Society conversations led me as well to reflect on certain articles, chapters, and books that had been especially important to me over the years in forming my own pastoral and professional identity. Among them were a handful of philosophical works on hermeneutics, practical theological methodology, and the nature of interdisciplinary dialogue. More often they included many of the far more accessible, experience-near, even autobiographical works and metaphors for ministry that I have subsequently incorporated into this new book.

The Image is the Thing

I remembered how at crucial junctures in my ministry I was often guided, sometimes literally saved, by several of these works. I remember a conversation, for example, with a despondent woman in the immediate aftermath of an unsuccessful suicide attempt. In that instance my early, almost constitutional affinity for Henri Nouwen�s image of the wounded healer, with its rich emphasis on empathy and depth in pastoral care, seemed to do more harm than good. The more empathic I tried to be with her, the more her despair seemed to increase. At such moments I found welcome respite and practical guidance in what were for me at that time the more alien images of the circus clown and wise fool of Heije Faber, Alastair Campbell, and Donald Capps, with their corresponding emphases on reframing, the intentional use of paradox and humor, and a productive focus on a problem�s surface as much as its depth.

So too as a hospital chaplain facing tragic situations that accumulated over years of ministry to the point of taking a serious toll on my faith, I was able to gain needed perspective by conceiving of my work in terms of an image of the intimate stranger in the biblical witness and contemporary public life. In these and many other situations, then, the image was the thing. Having access to a variety of metaphors for ministry provided a modicum of courage and guidance at those not-infrequent moments when I could not possibly have known what I was doing. In gathering these images into one volume, I hope, in turn, to help ministers and seminary students not only to readily discern those dominant or �default� metaphors that typically orient their own pastoral styles, but also to discover an array of alternate metaphors for imagining their way into those inevitable circumstances in ministry where a fresh vision and new approach are warranted.

So I gathered together as many of these metaphors as I could find, though I�m sure you�ll tell me today some I�ve forgotten to include. I knew that they would need some sort of organizing and connecting, especially for the younger generation of seminarians and CPE students for whom so many of these images would be new and unknown.

I myself learned a great deal about what I personally thought of the task of pastoral theology as I attempted to write both an extended general introduction to this book as well as additional introductions to what eventually became its three major sections � those of classical, paradoxical, and contemporary/contextual images of pastoral care. Perhaps for one of the first times in my career as a pastoral theologian, I had to say what I myself thought pastoral theology was and is. This gets to the topic of this lecture as well, which is what it is � or who it is � that pastoral theology, and we as pastoral theologians, shall be. I�d like to share now with you some of those thoughts, many of which, I think, seem very much in keeping with what the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy appears to hold most dear in your own organizing principles and philosophy of ministry.

We Shall Be Minimalists

First, then, I�d like to suggest that we are and shall be minimalists who search out truth in the particular, the singular, the personal.

In putting together this book, I�ve come to understand pastoral theology as an art more than a science, in particular an art that values minimalism or minimalist aesthetics. I see pastoral theology as a discipline that seeks not lofty, overarching theories of universal truth or broad ethical principles from which will trickle down strategies for living for the masses. Rather, I envision a pastoral theology with more down-to-earth, minimal ambitions, a field that remains content to search out multiple truths in the particular, the individual, the singular, or the biographical, with the supporting conviction that, as Carl Rogers once said, �What is most personal is most general.� He writes:

There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own.... In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.(1)

Rogers�s work resembles the work of the artist or poet much more than that of the philosopher or scientist.(2) Similarly, like the artist and poet, pastoral theologians have tended to concentrate on the partial and the particular rather than the whole or the universal. Pastoral theology does not, in this way, aspire to greatness in the sense of becoming a �theory of everything,� so much as it more modestly and humanly strives to discern beauty or, more pointedly, to discover tiny rays or sources of hope amid complex and painful realities in the lives of particular individuals and communities.(3)

In a thin but poignant book on pastoral counseling, written at the culmination of nearly fifty years of teaching pastoral theology and the psychology of religion at Yale University and Divinity School, James E. Dittes calls for the pastoral counselor to become an �ascetic witness.� Counseling, for Dittes, becomes an almost monastic discipline, in which the counselor renounces the world and its various determinations of success, renounces even any need to succeed or to know that one has, and invokes instead �an alternative reality� wherein �the counselee can experience relief from the burdens of �the world��:

The discipline accepted by the pastoral counselor is an astonishingly simple one. The counselor is content to be a witness, not a player. The counselor is intensely present to the counselee, but as a witness. The counselor does not crave or design to have an impact, to make a difference, or to leave his or her mark on the counselee�s life. Nor does the counselor aspire to find satisfaction, community, or accomplishment.... The counselor abstains from the normal desire to be included in another�s life. The pastoral counselor �gets a life� elsewhere.... The counselor replaces the role of player or partner with the role of witness. The counselee replaces the need to engage, accommodate, and skirmish with the enlivening awareness of being closely and unconditionally regarded � a replacement of the mode of �law� with the mode of �grace.� (4)

Dittes perceives pastoral counseling as a safe and unusual arena where a counselee simply cannot fail but instead at last experiences her life unfiltered.

I�ve found, in putting together the Images of Pastoral Care book, that perhaps the only thing that unites each of these seventeen theorists, other than that they all seem to believe in the power of metaphor to describe pastoral work, is that they all emphasize that appropriate pastoral care shuns the moralism or moralistic tactics so familiar to pastoral care before Boisen (and still operative in many religious counseling approaches today). This may be the only unifying thread throughout these essays, and it is an important one. The authors all want to avoid shaming, judging, or condemning the person seeking care. Since the individual conscience can be the most shaming and moralistic agent of all in our personal lives (more even than our institutions or loved ones), I think for this reason we need to retain a pastoral theology that helps people look within themselves, one that emphasizes the depths of individuals� intrapsychic lives. In an era when pastoral theologians are turning to sociology and to examining socio-cultural contexts of pastoral care (and these contextual considerations are necessary and important), we must also retain our historic interest in individual psychology if we are to be truly helpful to persons in need. I see this emphasis on individual psychology as a kind of minimalist aesthetic.

We Shall Be Pluralists

Second, I�d like to suggest that we shall be those who privilege pluralism.

The recognition that there are multiple paths to knowing and healing and the attempt to honor individual differences reflect a long history in pastoral theology of privileging, to borrow from William James, pragmatism, pluralism, and empiricism over idealism, monism, or rationalism. In A Pluralistic Universe (1909), James writes:

What do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean? Reduced to their most pregnant difference, empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habits of explaining parts by wholes. Rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism, since wholeness goes with union, while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views. No philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch, a picture of the world in abridgment, a foreshortened bird�s-eye view of the perspective of events. And the first thing to notice is this, that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience.... All philosophers, accordingly, have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention.... A philosophy is the expression of a man�s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.(5)

From its earliest roots in the 1920s, the contemporary pastoral theology movement in mainline Protestantism has embraced and been influenced by James�s plea for a philosophical pragmatism and pluralism, �the habit of explaining wholes by parts,� of engaging and juggling individual voices and perspectives in the pursuit of understanding and health. Such an emphasis is evident, for example, in the early work of Anton Boisen, that Presbyterian minister whom you know so well. In mid-life Boisen began to suffer severe psychotic breakdowns and, after regaining some measure of psychological health, proceeded to establish Clinical Pastoral Education. In an appraisal of Boisen�s contribution, Bonnie Miller-McLemore observes that

Boisen, having suffered an emotional breakdown and finding himself inside a mental hospital, refused the marginalized, ostracized status of the mentally ill patient. He claimed the importance of what he learned about health, spirituality, and theology as learning that could occur from nowhere else than inside the experience of illness and suffering. This lesson � that we must hear the voices of the marginalized from within their own contexts � is one that pastoral theologians have known all along, even when Boisen claimed the validity of his own mental breakdown. (6)

In his early book The Exploration of the Inner World (1936), Boisen speaks appreciatively of James�s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), from which he appears to have appropriated, without acknowledgment, James�s term documents humains in describing hospitalized psychiatric patients as living human documents who have the potential to reveal profound new theological truths, unavailable in textbooks, to seminary students and clergy willing to attend to and learn from them.(7) Theology is not so much something to be imposed on or taught to a hospitalized patient by the minister, Boisen believed, as something to be discovered in and gleaned from that patient. This learning was then, and remains today, revolutionary. Pastoral theology, following James, has thus long valued the individual as a progenitor rather than merely a recipient of religious truth. This makes, in my view, for a more modest, but also at times for a more rough-and-tumble, theological discipline. Pastoral theology begins with the scattered and unwieldy parts in order to attempt to understand the whole. Historically for pastoral theology, what is most personal is most general. We shall be pluralists.

We Shall Be Those Who Attend to Individuals

In his book Paradox and Discovery, the philosopher John Wisdom �tells of a keeper at the Dublin zoo who had a record of unusual success at the difficult task of breeding lions. �Asked the secret of his success, Mr. Flood replied, Understanding lions. Asked in what consists the understanding of lions, he replied, Every lion is different.��(8)

This expert zookeeper�s impossible, paradoxical response � How could one ever hope to understand �lions� as a species if every individual lion is different? � captures the quandary of the pastoral theologian and, indeed, of every minister who seeks to become an agent of hope (Donald Capps�s metaphor in chapter sixteen) in complex situations of human tragedy and need. Since every person and every problematic situation is different, it stands to reason that in pastoral theology and ministry, as in breeding lions, one never finally arrives at some fixed body of knowledge for understanding or action. Still, despite essential difference among individuals and the many problems they face, the minister paradoxically can and sometimes eventually does come to the equivalent of the zookeeper�s hard-won sense of understanding lions. What accrues, then, in the many images of care in the Images book is this generous sense of wisdom and hope for understanding persons that derives in large measure from a growing appreciation for their inestimable differences.

William James once said that �one of the most philosophical remarks [he] ever heard was made by an uneducated carpenter who was doing some repairs at [James�s] house.� The carpenter told him, �There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.�(9) The carpenter�s observation is one that, a century later, even scientific research could be interpreted to confirm. Geneticists note, for example, that in terms of the chemical base pairs that comprise our DNA, human beings are 99.9 percent identical. Thus all individual human variations can be accounted for biochemically by a mere 0.1 percent of our genetic material. Still, what a difference that 0.1 percent makes!(10) In reflecting on his carpenter�s insight, James writes:

The zone of individual differences, and of the social �twists� which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative processes, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where past and future meet. It is the theater of all we do not take for granted, the stage of the living drama of life; and however narrow its scope, it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions.(11)

This minute but infinitely fascinating zone of human differences and passions is, of necessity, what captivates the pastoral theologian�s attention. The Images book�s array of essays, metaphors, and images attests to the fact that pastoral theology, not infrequently over against more firmly established or highly esteemed ecclesiastical disciplines, inhabits a messy, pluralistic, characteristically protestant and thereby occasionally heterodox universe.

Valerie DeMarinis captures this sense of the unruliness of pastoral theology in telling of a conversation she happened to overhear between two professors of systematic theology:

The topic was pastoral psychology in general, and the pastoral practitioner in particular. One said to the other, �They are just like scavengers. They have no real theory, just a hunting and pecking, a grabbing and applying. There is no order for them. And they can never explain what they do or why they do it, only that something works or not. It is all technique, and at best has some rationale to measure if it works. It is a very sad state of affairs.�(12)

DeMarinis acknowledges that while she was initially troubled by the disparaging nature of this professor�s depiction of her field, on further reflection she actually came to embrace his image.�Scavengers, though often thought of negatively, are in point of fact highly skilled at collecting, extracting, and cleansing,� DeMarinis writes, thereby proving herself to be something of a capable scavenger in the process. �The responsible scavenger is one skilled at survival, one who knows how to search, salvage, purify, and transform the elements of the world into that which nurtures and sustains life.�(13)

So, too, British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips claims a similar task and purpose for psychotherapy:

If the aim of a system is to create an outside where you can put the things you don�t want, then we have to look at what that system disposes of � its rubbish � to understand it, to get a picture of how it sees itself and wants to be seen. The proscribed vocabulary in anybody�s theory is as telling as the recommended vocabulary.(14) In this respect the pastoral theologian or caregiver, along with the psychoanalyst, must scavenge unapologetically, rummaging about resolutely in what others individually or collectively discard, the minister as dumpster-diver. You can learn a lot about people by going through their trash.

Long before DeMarinis chanced upon the conversation that revealed to her just how distasteful this sort of enterprise is to traditionally more fastidious systematicians, William James, in his plea for pluralism in philosophy, observed:

It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangible; and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat, they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair, without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. Those of you who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt � a shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit refutation. But one must have lived some time with a system to appreciate its merits. Perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate your first surprise at such a programme as I offer.(15)

If, as James asserts, philosophers tend to pursue �cleaning up the litter� of the universe by attributing to it some grand systematic structure, then pastoral theologians � with their modest parcel of diverse metaphors and images, a tolerance for the untidy, and a keen eye for the individual, the singular, the unprecedented � are those radical pluralists who, like James, engage in a more �turbid, muddled, gothic sort of an affair.� If we pastoral theologians attempt to unclutter the universe at all, we likely do so, as DeMarinis and Phillips suggest, at ground level as unassuming scavengers, that is, by confronting, even feeding on but ultimately attempting to transform, its refuse, its odds and ends.

More inclined to pluralism than to systematics, then, the authors whose works are gathered in the Images book would likely affirm the paradoxical truths both of the Dublin zookeeper and of James�s carpenter. Pastoral theologians tend to attest that while the difference between one individual, community, or system and another may be small, that difference is nonetheless very important for us to understand as we approach our own vocational variant on the difficult task of breeding lions, that is, as we consider our own attempts as pastoral theologians and caregivers to, in the words of DeMarinis, �search, salvage, purify, and transform the elements of the world into that which nurtures and sustains life.�

We Shall Be Healers of a Seasoned Sensibility

In engaging this book�s assortment of essays and images, I am hoping that the reader will experience a sense, as I have in gathering them, of happening upon an embarrassment of riches. One finds in the collection of essays an at once ancient but surprisingly contemporary cache of practical wisdom for guiding acts of caring in Christian community. To be sure, these authors know their Bibles, church history, and theology; but they seem to know something more as well, holding however loosely to a kind of weathered, down-to-earth sensibility for tending to those who suffer or despair. Having traveled many paths into the darkness, as have all of you in this room, they seem to have discovered there cathartic rays of light.

My hope is that this collective dose of images will serve to refresh and expand the repertoire of pastoral understanding and care and counseling approaches of already seasoned ministers and other caregivers. So, too, am I convinced that seminary students currently grappling with their own emerging sense of pastoral identity will find orientation and encouragement in the diverse array of images and styles of care reflected in the book. To this end, I�ve envisioned the book being assigned in an introductory course in pastoral care and counseling, a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, or a field education or other setting of ministry.

In addition, your students will discover here a unique entree into historical conversations and controversies in pastoral theology throughout the twentieth century. Usually subtle but occasionally overt clashes among pastoral theologians surface in these pages. They reflect differing understandings of the nature of the self and its healing, of the appropriate subjects and objects of pastoral and pastoral theological concern, and of the particular cognate disciplines perceived to be of most value to this field. Even as every lion, parishioner, or counselee, and even as every zoo, congregation, or social context is different, so, too, these essays collectively affirm that every zookeeper, caregiver, or pastoral theologian is different. One thus finds in the book competing philosophical, theological, and anthropological assumptions that reflect, or lead to, divergent clinical, congregational, and communal claims and strategies of care. The wounded healer who pursues the depths of what he conceives to be the singular core of another�s fragile self may well experience as unsettling, for example, a wise fool�s focus on superficial matters and her utter confidence in the sufferer�s resilient multiplicity of selves. It is certainly possible to conceive of philosophical and clinical common ground between the wounded healer and wise fool, along with the many other competing images for ministry here. These various metaphors nonetheless reflect a kind of historical ebb and flow within recent pastoral theology. The image of the solicitous shepherd that comes into ascendency in the 1960s gives way to the wounded healer in the 1970s, which in turn is displaced by the wise fool of the 1980s, while a host of alternative images arrives on the scene from the 1990s to the present.

Also evident in the book are tensions among the authors and images regarding who or what is perceived to be the subject or object of pastoral concern. Is it an individual parishioner in need, as in Boisen�s living human document as well as in Seward Hiltner�s shepherd, Dittes�s ascetic witness, Paul Pruyser�s diagnostician, or Capps�s agent of hope? Is it a larger congregation or community of persons, as in Miller-McLemore�s living human web, Gaylord Noyce�s coach or moral counselor, Edward Wimberly�s indigenous storyteller, or Margaret Kornfeld�s gardener? Or is it at times the minister�s or caregiver�s own unique self and sorrows, apparent in Nouwen�s wounded healer as well as in Jeanne Stevenson Moessner�s self-differentiated Samaritan, or my own intimate stranger?

Though these positions are not always mutually exclusive, neither are they easily reconciled. They reflect differences both in the relative weight attributed to individuals, families, and the larger community as the source of problems and in the locus of intervention and the resources perceived to be essential for their amelioration.

Readers will also come to find that the range of cognate disciplines engaged by pastoral theologians today has considerably expanded. Various schools of clinical psychology �particularly the psychoanalytic, analytic, and personal psychologies of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Carl Rogers and their disciples, and the functional psychology of William James � served prominently to inspire and undergird the contemporary pastoral theology movement in its early days of Boisen and Hiltner.

Recent pastoral theologians, however, are as likely to draw on systems theories, sociology or political science, or philosophical hermeneutics. They engage African American, feminist, or queer studies as well as art history, literary theory, or even scientific brain research as much as or more than any individual or group psychology as their principal partners in dialogue and practice. This trend, too, can be readily traced through the historical progression of images and metaphors of the book. In this regard, then, the collection offers not only multiple ways to imagine one�s own ministries of care but also a unique narrative means by which to access the historical sweep of contemporary pastoral theology.

We Shall Be Evocative Artists and Art Critics

Quickly, then, two further psychic predictions from Yanna: first, we shall be evocative artists and art critics.

The essays of the book also caused me to raise questions concerning the practical import of a metaphorical approach to pastoral theology and ministry. Presumably, it is not enough to say to a minister or seminarian, �If you see those in need of help, it is your job to help them.� Such a response only begs further questions of what it means to help others in need and of what is unique about the kind of help a minister can offer. I�ve found in assembling the essays and images of the book that their authors rarely attempt to answer these kinds of questions by providing detailed instruction for entering into particular situations of need. They function less as technical training guides or �how-to� manuals for basic counseling or crisis intervention skills than as works of art intent on inspiring ministry in more indirect and subtle ways. Like the evocative power of images in portraits, sculptures, films, or poetry, these pastoral images serve not so much to inform specific tasks of ministry but to foster a richer sense of pastoral self-understanding, identity, and integrity.

There are a number of possible ways one can respond to an artistic image. One way is to view it with reverence and adoration, as one might contemplate an icon of the Virgin Mary or of Christ on the cross. Another is to see it as a �graven� image, as a sacrilege or threat, and seek to destroy it by any means possible. A third way is to engage, as art critics do, in a combination of appreciation and critical appraisal.

All of these possible responses have their proponents, and the history of the church is replete with examples of all three. The third approach, however, seems to be one that both honors the tradition and enables its adherents to adapt to new realities. This is likely the most helpful way to consider the progression of pastoral images of this book, i.e., as ongoing attempts by contemporary pastoral theologians to honor their tradition while adapting to changing realities of church and culture. Thus in order to understand and assess Bonnie Miller-McLemore�s image of the living human web, for example, one would be served by knowing something of Boisen�s living human document.

I also noticed a tendency of authors in this collection to romanticize the particular image or model they are promoting, an inclination that may reflect a more widespread idealization of metaphors within pastoral theology in general. The authors understandably accentuate the positive features of the pastoral image they propose, less often highlighting its more questionable aspects or its limitations. A shepherd, after all, is not always known to be solicitous or courageous; a web is often a sticky nuisance; a coach is held accountable for the team�s losses and for the behavior of players even off the field; a gardener can grow weary over decisions about which plants are worth trying to save. Individual essays therefore tend to function here more as exercises in art appreciation. Taken together, however, they also serve as a means of critical appraisal, as art criticism. The turn to each new metaphor in successive chapters may be seen in part as an implicit critique or recognition of the limitations of the old.

We Shall Be Survivors

Second, and finally, I�d like to suggest that we pastoral theologians and caregivers shall be survivors.

There are pressures at work against pastoral theology today as a formal discipline and subject matter within seminaries and divinity schools. I�m not so alarmist to say that pastoral theology as we know it is an endangered species, but there is some cause for concern. A large swath of well-known pastoral theologians � Donald Capps, Rodney Hunter, Andy Lester, Howard Stone, Nancy Ramsey, among them, are nearing or have reached retirement age or, in the case of Ramsey, have moved on to an administrative position, and we in the academy at least no longer take for granted that as these retirements occur, the positions will be filled by others. In the 1960s, there were far more positions in the field of pastoral care in major seminaries and Divinity schools than there are now. Princeton Seminary, where I teach, is a happy exception to this general trend in many distinguished institutions. Two decades ago we had two tenured and one untenured positions in pastoral theology at PTS. Today we have four tenured positions. But we do not take this positive development for granted, and we still look over our shoulders and cover one another�s backs.

So we must be alert. We must continue to think, as you are here today, about the future of pastoral care, though we are not Yanna the Psychic nor Hebrew prophets of old. But we are those who know a good thing when we see it, know life-changing acts of ministry when we see them, and are occasionally privileged to find ourselves serving as agents of such acts of transformation, agents of hope, in our ministries of care and counseling.