Therapy

Since my resignation as a cleric nearly three years ago, while in many ways my life has remained or indeed become very enjoyable and fulfilling, there've been some big questions around with which I've needed to wrestle, questions to do with identity and purpose: with belief and accountability, with responsibility and calling. Sometimes I seem to be so pulled apart by my often rather contrary thoughts that my end-state is one of numbness, really: just plodding on and getting through things without understanding or feeling anything very much.

I suspect there is nothing all that unusual in this. While some of us cope better than others with the complexities of existence, part of what it means to be human is this capacity we have not only for doing lots of things with dexterity and skill and inventiveness, but also for reflecting on what we do, and of course asking that troublesome question why. Sometimes the best of us find the questions and anxieties of life threatening to swamp us. I'm glad, therefore, and grateful for the people available to me with whom I can just share stuff, maybe not all that articulately always, but whose patient listening is so important.

As I recall from my days in ministry, the patient listener may sometimes feel frustrated by his/her inability to come up with the solutions and cogent advice we feel the situation requires of us; but of course we shouldn't be, the listening process itself is therapeutic. Today I spent an hour trying to express how I feel about the present situation, about possibilities and decisions that are facing me, about what I hope for, what I fear, what I feel about past events. I was well and carefully listened to throughout, not always with complete understanding I suspect, since I'm not at all sure I was always making coherent sense, but certainly I was attended to.

And it's because of that careful listening, rather than because of any wise words offered in reply, that this evening I feel so much more sorted out and organised. I have a clearer understanding of where I am now because when you speak things out loud rather than just churn them around in your head you do begin to make connections and sense out of what otherwise might just be a jumble. This means that the future is also clearer: I may not know yet what choices and decisions I may make when the time comes, but I do know I can approach them with more confidence and less anxiety.

Being listened to achieves a lot. And I am also reminded that one of the most valuable things about time spent in prayer is not that God answers us when we pray (he does, of course, if not always in the way we would choose), but that he listens, and that he does so with patience, with understanding and with love - like the father who stood day after day, watching in hope for the return of his prodigal son.