Hi friends-

Recently, I’ve been writing with a friend who is in a course about pastoral care. I told him that I think about my work these days, particularly in chaplaincy, in terms of the “cure of souls” as Eugene Peterson wrote about pastoral care. (I wrote about his idea a dozen years ago, and sometimes I say ‘care of souls’.) My friend asked me what I meant. Here’s what I said:

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Here’s what I think it means.

In contrast to counseling (guiding people from problems to answers) or teaching (giving people answers or principles) or evangelism (moving people toward a decision), I want to start with the pain or hope or moment or questions that people are asking in response to situations that they are in. And I’d love to be able to acknowledge and help them acknowledge the physical situation and/or the emotional situation and/or the relational situation, often seeing what people can’t see themselves.

So, for example, I often can see that people are physically exhausted from caring for others, or are grieving the three deaths in the last year. Meanwhile, they are focused on the caring or the doing the work and don’t understand that this fatigue isn’t failure.

In their why-center or their longing-for-meaning center they are bruised or confused or working too hard.

And so I want to listen to and help them listen to their heart.

[heart, soul, why-center, longing-for-meaning center are all made up words to help capture what is us. But I’m hesitant to contrast body and soul, because Jesus put on a body and was raised in a body and ascended with a body, and so thinking in terms of embodied souls or something that is informed by the incarnation matters.]

So I bring attention and attentiveness and words that help people discern what God may be saying and to see that God is faithful to the promise to be with us always.

I’m not giving you a simple answer to your question, but I may be giving you helpful things.

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May you find some rest from God in whatever you are in the middle of.

Jon