We Have Made Lies Our Refuge

6 Takes on Why Exchanging Pastoral Care for Therapy Was Bad

File: The Kyrkegrim Turned Preacher pg 115 the Preacher.png - Wikimedia Commons

I have so many scraps and drafts and tabs open, my computer is a mess. But it’s Friday, and I was noodling around looking for something—can’t even remember what—when X offered me like seven different posts about the woman in Utah who climbed up a live wire. They had to shut power off for something like 800 homes and then get her down. Apparently she was screaming something about the world not being safe, which sure was true for the amount of time she was up there. Cue a ton of awesome electricity jokes.

Who said, right before the election, that we’re about to have the greatest mental health catastrophe of all time? Can’t remember, but I saw that clip everywhere just before everyone went to the polls.

So I finally tucked into Karla Kamstra’s Deconstructing: Leaving Church, Finding Faith and, wouldn’t you know it, on page three she tosses out this old chestnut:

The practice of seeking wisdom first from the Bible and then from your pastor is common within evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity. While it can be helpful for people needing advice on issues of religion, I have witnessed and experienced for myself congregations being accused of “weak faith” for even acknowleging their internal stirrings. We were told we had “doubters’ minds.” I have also seen the dark side of this belief system, where pastors inappropriately attempt to fill roles that belong to qualified therapists. I have heard them dismiss issues of mental health and admonish women for considering divorce from abusive husbands. I have even listened as young women shared their heartbreak for being told they weren’t allowed to date other memebers of the church because the pastor didn’t approve of these relationships. This is the same mentality and religious ideology I’ve seen speak of “praying the gay away.”

This ticks all of the usual boxes so I thought I would just have a bunch of thoughts on this fine, chilly November Morning Afternoon.

One

Not to be pedantic, but it just seems so overwhelmingly obvious that telling everyone to make their own meaning and find their own identity is such a terrible terrible idea because what happens is, and bear with me here, everyone comes up with the same identity. And that identity is, in the words of the lections from the Daily Office this morning, death-preferring liars:

We have made a covenant with death,
    and with Sheol we have an agreement,
when the overwhelming whip passes through
    it will not come to us,
for we have made lies our refuge,
    and in falsehood we have taken shelter.

Two

The problem with taking pastors entirely out of the equation of mental health is that you can’t really have true mental health without addressing the health of the spirit, and the only way your spirit can be truly healthy is if you know God and love him. Of course, there are a lot of people in our society who would count as being mentally “healthy” who have rejected the Lord and all his marvelous works, preferring politics and ideology and work and other kinds of coping mechanisms to make the long days go by comfortably. They may say a lot of common sense things and not appear to be unhappy or anything. I mean, have you seen the abs on RFKJ? He looks physically and, ngl, mentally healthy. And I’m fine with saying that in human terms, maybe he is.

But spiritually he’s a dead man unless he turns to the Lord Jesus to be his savior. The spiritual desolation of unbelief is not rational or reasonable.