Liturgies

Monday, August 26th 2013

Meeting the Spiritual Needs of People

By Bob Aldred

Not everything is as we assume, or as we perceive it. As a young Minister in my first church, one elderly lady parishioner was going on holidays, and as is expected of Ministers, she put it on me to mind her dog – a very ordinary looking daschund. The problem was that we had very poor fencing and the dog took off.

So off I went to find the dog. About a 100 yards up the road there was a dog in someone’s front yard - a very ordinary looking daschund. I whistled and it followed. All was well with the world!

When the elderly dear arrived home and came to collect the dog, she took one look and said, “That’s not my dog!”

“It looks the same to me,” I said.

The dog, as dog’s do, wagged its tail and went off with the confused and unconvinced new owner.

Not all is what it is perceived to be.

Peter has asked me to tell my story. I want to talk about the spiritual dimension of my life mainly influenced by my family and my experience and practice as a Pastor, Chaplain and counsellor.

The first major trauma of my life occurred when I was 4 years old. My mother was admitted to hospital, terminally ill with tuberculosis. She died in 1947, I was 7 years old. Now a child of a single father with no government support, we eventually moved in with my maternal grandparents, where we lived until Dad remarried 10 years later.

Naturally, I was very close to my Dad, a strong Labor supporter; and to my Pop, a strong socialist. My uncle and cousin were active members of the Communist Party during this time when it was very influential in Australia. I was the delivery boy for Communist publications around Lakemba in south western Sydney.

My father and grandparents provided me with a loving, caring and nurturing family. I was luckier than most children where a parent died, or who lived in a dysfunctional family. However, there were low times when I badly missed my mother, and wondered often about why God took her from me. These were my first questions about God. Thus the early part of my spiritual development was the spirit of love, socialism and my childish concept of a God who took away my mother.

The values I was taught at home by word and example were based on a passionate belief in the fair go. As a typical left wing working class family we hated Bob Menzies and BA Santamaria, Joe Stalin’s photo was prominent, there was a healthy antipathy for authority, (my grandfather would not stand for the National Anthem), gave roast dinners to tradesmen and morning tea to the postman. My father and grandfather gave English lessons to the new Chinese immigrants who worked at the local Chinese green grocer shop, and would help anyone in need.. We certainly weren’t born again Christians or in any way religious.

But we practiced love your neighbour in every sense of the word. Socialism in practice, underpinned by integrity and where behaviour was more important than belief.

When my father remarried I was 15. We moved to Mosman in Sydney, where I joined the youth group at the Church of Christ. Young, idealistic, and passionate, I was caught up in the Billy Graham Crusades and youth activities, where I was given leadership roles. It was a natural progression to go into the Ministry.

After ordination, I trained as a Psychiatric and Industrial Chaplain, which I did for three years in conjuction with a parish, before being appointed Director of Community Services with the then Sydney Central Methodist Mission responsible for the homeless, psychiatric, disability, Lifeline and youth programs. The Superintendent was the Rev Alan Walker, World Evangelist for the Methodist Church, founder of Lifeline, Christian Socialist and a sociologist. Alan Walker had a significant influence on my understanding of theology, social justice and the mission of the church

It was in these years as a Chaplain and with the Mission, that I began to question the dichotomy between preaching and practice. The pulpit was easy. You preached the ideal, safe, and expected theology of the church. In practice, what you promised from the pulpit that God could do, didn’t work in everyday life. God didn’t cure the sick or heal the broken hearted, favour the faithful, house the homeless, or feed the poor.

The experiences of chaplaincy, and my involvement with social justice campaigns, welfare programs and the media, especially talk back radio, moved me to embrace the notion of the spiritual dimension as opposed to religious conformity. This was reinforced when I became CEO of the Alcohol and Drug Foundation, where the spiritual dimension underpinned treatment programs such as the AA 12 steps, and addiction is described as the disease of hopelessness.

Recognising the spiritual dimension of life is the role of the Chaplain. In the mental health and the alcohol and drug field I worked as part of a professional team, with a recognition that the bio-psycho-social model needed to be extended to include the spiritual needs of clients.

Alan Walker was motivated to establish Lifeline after receiving a late night phone call from a distressed and lonely person with no one to talk to. Alan described this loneliness as one of the worst maladies of modern society. This is not about being alone, but the loneliness you can experience in a crowd, lying awake at night, or even sitting in a church. It is the spiritual loneliness of the unloved, rejected, and the broken hearted.

The spiritual need for the lonely is for love and hope. The Biblical “fruit of the spirit”, or spiritual outcomes are in Galatians 5:22-23 “ love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

Simplistically, this means facilitating what Dr Lloyd Geering terms the attributes of God by which we can know something of the spirit of God. Thus, he writes,” When I say I believe in God, I … include such things as : I trust my fellow humans. I trust the world. I say ‘Yes!’ to life. I look forward to each day in hope and faith.”

Conversely, there are also the negative features of the spiritual dimension: loneliness, despair, hate, intolerance, etc., that can cause spiritual hurt, and in the extreme it can break the spirit of others. Scott Peck’s book “The People of the Lie” describes those with this spirit as not seeming to have any desire to be good, but wanting to be seen as good. They are those who are self-righteous and judgemental, often holding official positions in the church and the community, the are the good church people but poor Christians.

I sat in a therapy group at Rydlemere Psychiatric Hospital and listened to a good looking young man suffering from a psychosis tell of his experience of loneliness and despair. “Depression is being in room in darkness with no light, and you cannot find the door. Despair is when there is no door.” Behind the looks, everything is not as it appears.

In the spiritual dimension of relationships, we can communicate love, build confidence and resilience through faith in each other. In marriage counselling, we address three types of communication: oral, physical and spiritual. Oral communication is about words and listening, hearing and understanding. Physical communication is about everything thing from the touch and hug to sexual communication. Spiritual communication is more than word and touch, presence and silence, feeling and understanding. It is the dimension that gives hope, communicates love, seeks the best for the other, exhumes faith that gives confidence, breathes new life into the other.

Adrian, a doctor colleague of mine told of his experience of being sent to Hong Kong to set up a treatment facility for refugee heroin addicts from Vietnam. He teamed up with a Presbyterian mission in Hong Kong that was staffed by volunteer missionaries. They sat quietly with the addicts and silently “prayed”, listened and supported them. The outcomes were positive and quite remarkable. Adrian came back to Australia and returned to Hong Kong some months later. This time, there were a new lot of missionaries doing, on the surface, what the previous ones did: “prayed”, talked and supported. This time, however, the results were disappointing. I asked “why?” Adrian, not a religious person, replied, The first missionaries cared, the second lot wanted to evangelise.”

You see, not everything is as it appears. It is the spiritual dimension of life that can build or break someone’s spirit.

For me, God is the spirit of love and hope and faith in all that is good. After my “sacking” by the Church of Christ for my social justice views and bringing undesirables into the Church, it was the discovery of the spirit of community here at SMX that gave Dorothy and me fresh hope in the mystery of the spirit of the loving God.

This is a glimpse of my story. The spiritual dimension where I find the attributes of God pervading and lifting my spirit and the spirit of those I love. This is the kingdom of God within us: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.