Pastoral care
Pastoral care is that theological and academic professional field within practical theology that tries to describe and identify appropriate categories of understanding the comfort and compassion of God, in order to portray meaningful images of God within the realm of human suffering and pain
- Pastoral care represents my therapeutic procedures and skills that try to communicate and verbalize the meaning dimension, and the comfort of the gospel, in such a way that people will be consoled.
- Pastoral care is about the experience of engagement with God with real-life issues in such a way that concrete actions of comfort, change, liberation and transformation take place as an expression of the vivid and actual presence of God.
- Through pastoral care, hope is fostered, and an anticipatory experience of tomorrow is instilled in such a way that our being functions are comforted. Care and Comfort in this regard imply being empowered in one’s being functions and discovering significance and meaning in such a way that the result is the courage “to be”.
- Pastoral care inspires people for the ensoulment of life by stimulating creativity and imagination in such a way that human souls can be illuminated and opened up for the aesthetic dimension of life through symbol, metaphor, and liturgical rituals; faith seeking beauty, aesthetic and creative expression of the content of faith. Imagination and creativity represent the dimension of aesthetics in pastoral comfort: the healing that emanates from God’s grace and salvation. This consoling dimension can be related directly to the realm of the sublime in spirituality. It represents the urge for constructive change and the expression of meaning in life in such a way that instils hope.
- Pastoral care has a hermeneutical task, i.e. to link the stories or narratives of people’s lives with the Story or Narrative of the gospel. In this regard, pastoral hermeneutics is about the attempt to understand and interpret the fundamental issues in our being functions in the light of our understanding and experience of God. One can call them existential issues as they are related to our struggle to come to terms with life and our search for meaning in life.
1. Models of care and counselling:
- Healing
The act of healing implies the restoration of a loss and the search for integration and identity; to regain what has been lost or to attain new coping skills, coping mechanisms, or the reframing of existing concepts and ideas. A holistic and comprehensive approach to healing includes physical, psychological, relational, contextual and spiritual healing. Spiritual healing within a Christian context is closely related to the notion of salvation.
- Sustaining
The art of sustaining is linked to the capacity to accept what cannot be changed and to adopt a realistic stance in life. In this regard, one needs a support system in order to survive or to take courage to proceed with life. Sustaining is not about negative resignation, but about realistic acceptance and the art of drawing strength and support from existing resources.
- Guiding
Healing is linked to choices. Often difficult decisions need to be taken. In order do this, one needs a moral framework, a philosophy in life or a soul friend who can guide one through the difficult trajectories of life. Guiding is not about the prescription, but about the empowerment and enabling of people. As a guide, I act as a co-interpreter of life.
- Reconciling
Reconciling is about the overcoming of estrangement, isolation, and hatred through forgiveness and unconditional love (grace). It is about bringing people together and overcoming the gap of forgiveness. Enmity should be exchanged and overcome by the peace of salvation. Through restorative justice and mediation as tools, this can be accomplished.
- Nurturing
This is the art of how to grow into maturity and how to use human potential and spiritual potential in order to foster and facilitate growth through different stages of life, can be linked to a developmental model in care. Its aim is maturity and identity.
- Liberating
People need to be helped to be emancipated from “slavery”, addiction and situations of victimhood. This implies a movement from bondage, through transformation and change, to overcome situations, structures, and circumstances that dominate people and rob them of their human dignity and freedom. At stake are issues of social justice and the notion of equality and human dignity. Liberating actions often go hand in hand with processes of democratization.
- Empowering
In empowering, pastoral care needs to deal with issues related to power and the abuse of power. The aim here is to confront powerful institutions and to reveal the abuse of power. Another aspect of empowering is to equip people with the necessary skills and knowledge to prepare them for the various crises we face in life. The main emphasis in empowerment is preventive care, for example, helping people to die before they reach a terminal stage, and enabling couples to understand the nature of love before entering into relationships and marriage.
- Interpreting
Pastoral care has a hermeneutical task, i.e. to link the stories or narratives of people’s lives with the Story or Narrative of the gospel. In this regard, pastoral hermeneutics is about the attempt to understand and interpret the fundamental issues in our being functions in the light of our understanding and experience of God. One can call them existential issues as they are related to our struggle to come to terms with life and our search for meaning in life. In pastoral hermeneutics the pastor functions as an interpreter or hermeneutic of God images, i.e. people’s perceptions and noetic concepts of God. Here a pastoral assessment, or pastoral diagnosis, is about the appropriateness of a God-images (not whether they reflect the confession of a church or community of faith, not whether they are true or false, correct or incorrect, but whether they are appropriate in terms of our human quest for meaning and our struggle to come to terms with human suffering).
Pastoral functions are therapeutic in themselves. Their intention is to try a change and to promote human and spiritual health and maturity.
2. “SOUL” AS THE FOCAL POINT OF SPIRITUAL AND CHRISTIAN HEALING
Pastoral care deals with a very specific dimension of our being human. From a theological and anthropological point of view, we call this dimension “soul”. One can even say that the “what” in pastoral care is the human soul. We, therefore, don’t address the ailment or illness of the patient (caregivers are not medical staff) or merely the psyche of the person, but the whole person as an “ensouled body” and an “embodied soul”. This view needs a more detailed explanation.
The use of the term “soul” in Scripture refers to human wholeness and not to a different substance, as in the case of Hellenism. Plato, for example, provides us with the idea that a soul can be deprived of its body; that it does not come fully into its own until it has been separated from the body, and that it is immortal. The body is therefore merely clothing for the soul, a kind of prison from which it should escape and be liberated.
The soul does not refer to an inward substance, but to the totality of life within the presence of God (Coram Deo}. Because of the notion of human beings created in the image of God, the soul reveals attitude and aptitude. It resents subjectivity and responsibility. Because of our stewardship, the soul is more than a psychological entity within us. It is nearly impossible to capture the meaning of soul in a theory of personhood or personality type. Soul implies more than knowledge (knowing functions) and deeds (doing functions). The soul is an indication of the quality of our being functions.
The soul is revealed in attachment, love, and community, as well as in retreat on behalf of inner communing and intimacy.
In conclusion, one can say that “soul” refers to a collective identity within the corporate structures of life, i.e. marriage, family, clan and society. Soul reflects a network of social systems and spiritual forces and designates a qualitative stance in life. Therefore, we can say one does not have a soul, but one is a soul in every fibre of one’s being human. A human being does not possess immortality, as in the case of Hellenism. The Bible views a human being in terms of realism, i.e. we are vulnerable and part of creation. A human being is a mortal creature: immortality is a quality given to us as an act of God’s faithfulness – God’s grace 1 Cor. 15:53). A qualitative description of one’s position in life is not an attempt to pin our being human down to either experience, being functions, behaviour or even spirituality. What we have in mind are wholeness and unity. A human being is an embodiment of a soul and an ensoulment of the body. One does not have a soul, one is one’s soul in terms of mind, will, emotion and body. The religious dynamic in this embodiment and ensoulment is spirituality as expressed in our directedness towards transcendence (the divine and the ultimate).