CARING FOR THE CAREGIVERS

Keynote Address for NAMMA Conference
June, 2011
by Herbert Anderson, PhD, Research Professor of Practical Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California.

It is a pleasure to be part of this Conference. I hope your stay in the Bay Area will be pleasant. This is of course the home of the World Champion San Francisco Giants. The victory did not come easily. It was a year of torture – endless stress – uncertain victories until the very end. And this year is no different. There is much worry and uncertainty about our Giants. But then, there is fear and anxiety everywhere in the land and cynicism is in the air we breathe. One more natural catastrophe seems to be around the next corner. Your theme about caring for caregivers reflects an awareness of the challenges and complexities of life and ministry in this time.

Before we explore the unique caregiving challenges of being a port chaplain, I should say a word of indebtedness to David Mesenbring with whom I had an extensive conversation about his experience in maritime ministry. He is, as you may know, on the staff of St Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, WA working in Church and Society where I also have worked doing pastoral care. He sends his greetings. I am also grateful to Bob Febos, my daughter's brother-in-law, who is a retired ship captain now living in Port Townsend. In our conversation about port chaplains, he wanted me to thank you as a ship captain for your ministry to seafarers – particularly what you do at Christmas. And the thank you came with an apology for taking you for granted for all his years as a captain. My third specific maritime source for this talk was the website for Seafarer's International Research Centre in Cardiff, Wales. There is an abundance of information about work conditions on ships and the shifting demographics of seafarers but I could find nothing about port chaplains.

The Hard Work of Conversation

There are several reasons why it is important to talk about care for caregivers. The first, and most obvious reason, is that caring for another is hard work. If the care involves changing soiled linens or walking with a recovering stroke victim or driving a van full of seafarers just off the ship to Target – it is work often requiring patience and flexibility. And if we understand care as listening attentively to someone tell their story as it wanders through one crisis after another – keeping track of all the players – and taking in as much of the pain as you can bear – that too is exhausting. Listening to another – in such a way that their pain is on your heart – often depletes us. The result is sometimes called compassion fatigue. It is the weariness that comes from listening to countless troubles and bearing many burdens.

An Australian friend of mine has written a lovely little book called Conversation as Ministry: Stories and Strategies for Confident Caregiving (The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland. 2003). Reading the book is like looking over the shoulder of a minister. Here is what he says about the hard work of conversation:

"People who have engaged in a serious conversation often report how tired they are afterward. Indeed, it is intellectually and emotionally demanding to be genuinely present to the other in conversation; it demands a lot of energy... Being in intensely focused conversation requires disciplined concentration and that is tiring" (pp 89-90)

My point is this: care for caregivers is necessary because the work of listening care is tiring – and sometimes even exhausting.

And then there is the additional work of resisting the impulse to move too fast or offer advice prematurely or preach to them or even scold them when people we care for continue to make self-defeating choices. Moderating our impulses or holding back the desire to fix them takes energy. It also takes a conscious effort to make sure that we don't confuse their story with our own story – especially when we have a lot in common. Whenever we are in a conversation in which care is the focus, we are always double listening – listening to their story but also listening to what their story stirs up in us. We need to keep listening to ourselves so that our care is in response to their needs rather our own.

Learning to Listen

One of the hazards of giving care is that we confuse identification with empathy. When identification prompts us to say too quickly "I know what you mean" or "I know what you are going through because I have been there myself", we have taken an ineffective shortcut to empathy. Even if we have both had a mother who died of cancer, the experience of grief is not the same because for one thing, the relationship with each mother would be different. When we confuse our stories, the danger is that we lose focus on the other. When we use identification as a shortcut to understanding, we are tempted to care for them as we would like to be cared for rather than listening carefully for the care they need and desire. The Golden Rule is ambiguous. It is not always the case that we should do to others what we would like to do to us. Rather, we should do for others what they would like to have done for them. Keeping our stories separate is another part of caring that simply adds to the work.

On the other hand, if their story is so different because they come from a culture we do not know or seems alien to us – then imagining their world in order to empathize with them is even more labor requiring paying attention, listening carefully and then imagining a different world. One of my mantras for pastoral care comes from the ancient philosopher Cicero. "Because I am human, nothing that is human is foreign to me." Even if we have never been confined to a ship for months or endured the perfect storm or been abused by ship companies withholding pay or been away from our families for 6 months, the task of caring requires us to imagine a world – another way of being – very different than our own – because nothing that is human is foreign to us.

The retired sea captain I talked with reminded me about the rich ethnic and racial diversity of seafarers today. Not only are their worlds different than the one you may know best – they are often trying to express some deep anguish or seek help in a language not their own. Communicating – with care – listening and then responding – across language barriers is particularly labor intensive. Seafaring is a global workplace in many ways. Maritime ministers have been doing multicultural or intercultural ministry long before the rest of us. Walking in and out of different language systems and communicating understanding across cultural and religious diversity takes more time and more energy. So – even when we are good at care – listening carefully, empathizing compassionately, keeping our stories separate, comforting when needed, challenging when appropriate, standing by just in case – all of that is hard work and we do it every day. Sometimes we don't count the cost because there is neither time nor energy to take a break before the next crisis.

Finding Rest

Listening is hard work and takes energy but what often wears us out most of all is that we take their pain home with us. That is the second reason why caregivers need care. It is a consequence of being compassionate – of allowing ourselves to be moved by the stories and struggles we hear. In more than 40 years of teaching pastoral care, the most frequently asked question by students is about how to stop taking home the troubles people tell us. It wears us out and unfortunately does not help the other.

The key is easy to say but difficult to do: it is to give back their troubles or problem – after you have held it for a time. They would like you to take their troubles away but that is not possible. You hear their story as accurately as you can – hold it for time with as much compassionate understanding as you can muster – and then you give the story or the trouble back to them. If their pain lives in you, it does not help them and it makes you weary and heavy laden. But because you have held their pain or worry, it is not the same. They know that they are not alone because you have held their struggle – even for a short time. We also let go of the struggle so that there is room for the next person off the next ship who is being unfairly treated by the ship company or lonely and anxious for family far away. In order to be ready to be receptive to another, we need to keep emptying ourselves to make sure there is room enough for the next troubled or needy person. When we carry around too much pain and struggle from the stories we have heard, we have cluttered our internal space making it difficult to be receptive to the next person.

Take a moment to reflect on the conversations you have had during the last month and identify one story or struggle or one individual whose pain has stayed with you for whatever reason. Turn to a neighbor and tell a story briefly about someone whose struggle lingers with you.

Because our care is sustained by the promise of God's presence, we are able to relinquish the stories and struggles we hear and commend them to God. We bear one another's burdens and then give them over to God. The invitation extended by Jesus in Matthew 11:28 has been a source of comfort for many, many Christians. "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest." Those of us for whom carrying burdens is a professional responsibility have sometimes been reluctant to apply this invitation to ourselves. But it is a promise for us too when we are weighed down by the burdens others have off-loaded on us. We find rest from our burden bearing in Jesus. Perhaps a line from the familiar hymn "I lay my sins on Jesus" makes it clearer: we are invited not only to lay our sins on Jesus but also our griefs, our burdens and our cares. We care for ourselves – we find rest for ourselves – when we give the burdens of others to God.

Compassion and Our Shared Burdens

The distinction I want to make as clearly as possible is this: you listen intently and carefully to the struggles seafarers bring to you. Because you receive their stories with compassion, they will know by how you respond that their pain has been on your heart. Compassion is the key.

We allow the other's pain and suffering to move us in our bowels – as Jesus was moved by the crowds that followed him. As a result, they are less alone. And then we not only give the pain back to them, we also hand over their burdens to God. That is what we intend when we say – as we often say – I will keep you in prayer. Intercessory prayer is the pastoral strategy that hands over to God the people we care about and the burdens we bear – while at the same time conveying to the person seeking care that they will be remembered.

For seafarers who feel they have been ripped off and abused by their employers or forgotten by their families back home – who feel alone in their struggle – adding their name to a list of people for whom intercessory prayer will be made is a gift of grace. The simple act of writing in their presence their name in the book of names for which intercessory prayers are made is concrete assurance that they have been taken seriously. You may not be able to advocate for them with the company that is abusing them but you can promise to advocate for them before God. And they will be remembered. But writing their names in a book is also important for you as caregivers – because you do not need to carry the name and the story inside yourselves. Their name is recorded in the book of Intercessory Prayer for God to hear and bear. In that way, Intercessory Prayer also becomes a form of care for the caregiver.

In Galatians 6:1, the Apostle Paul uses a maxim from Socrates to encourage people of faith to "bear one another's burdens." As it was reported, the maxim from Socrates was this: "one must share one's burden with one's friends, for possibly the friends may do something to ease your burden." Other maxims from the Greek tradition carried the same message: "accept all burdens among friends as common" or this: "accept the misfortunes of your friends as your own." New Testament scholar Hans Dieter Betz adds the following interpretation which makes this passage even more relevant for caregivers. "The maxim means that 'failure' by Christians should be regarded as part of the 'burden of life' and should be shared and born by the Christian community." (page 299 Hermeneia: Galatians, Hans Dieter Betz, Fortress Press, 1979) We unburden ourselves of the stories we have received by handing them over to God; and we unburden ourselves of the struggles we have heard that weigh us down by sharing our burdens with our colleagues. The second way by which caregivers are cared for is by unburdening ourselves to God and one another.

Even though maritime chaplains are often solo operators, you do not do this work alone even if you work alone. God is always present. For many people in ministry who have a lively prayer life and live in constant awareness of God's presence, God's care may suffice. Most of us, however, need the concrete presence of colleagues and friends who will hold us and hold us accountable. There was a particular time in my life when I was a part of three men's groups – each with a different focus – that kept me together and kept me from doing anything foolish. A psychiatrist friend Carl Whitaker used to say that every helping person needs "a cuddle group." That is not a very sophisticated term but it is accurate. We need friends and colleagues to hold us and hold us accountable.

The Greek maxims from which the Apostle Paul borrowed for verse 1 of chapter 6 carry a central message: we have our burdens as friends and colleagues in common. And I am particularly taken with the interpretation of Hans Dieter Betz that our failures are part of the burdens we share and carry for one another. The sad truth, however, is that too many of us hide our failures and put up a facade of success that takes energy to maintain. We assume that nobody else has failed the way we have. We pretend not to fail. I understand that sharing our vulnerabilities is risky business. So we need to be careful of whom we choose to trust. But trust we must in order to fulfill the law of Christ by bearing one another's burdens. Our willingness to bear each other's burdens in the work of ministry is necessary for survival. Martin Marty said something like that many years ago in a little book called Friendship. "We have friends, or we are friends, so we do not get killed." (Friendship, p 14 Argus Communications, Allen, Texas). We have friends, or we are friends, so we do not get killed. What I understand that to mean simply is that having friends with whom we can share our failures and our successes is necessary for survival.

Most studies of clergy well-being reveal "loneliness" as our chief malady. In one sense, there is an inescapable loneliness in ministry because of the burdens of others we must bear alone. But our fears, our failures, our joys, our dreams, our success, our temptations to cross boundaries, our unhappiness in marriage or worry for our children, our discouragement because of lack of support from the church, our boredom in work or sadness because of how maritime chaplaincy has changed – those are just a few of the things that we can and must share with one another. I understand the risks of sharing our struggles with one another as well as with God. And I understand the complexities of distance and schedules that make it hard to meet. For some of you, meetings like this are the only lifeline you have – and they may never quite meet your expectations. The conversations are too superficial – too much bragging to hide our pain – too much hiding so no one will learn about our failures. And then we go home even lonelier than we came.

I am a little embarrassed to use the old chestnut about the hymn "What a Friend we Have in Jesus" that becomes "What a Jesus we have in our Friend." But it makes my point and moves us to the second topic for conversation. Turn to your neighbor – hopefully the same one you talked to before – and tell about a time in your life when a friend was Jesus for you. It is not necessary to share what you were struggling with at the moment – though you may. Simply talk about a time when you needed a friend and colleague and found Jesus in a friend who cared.

Having colleagues and friends you trust – who keep your feet to the fire and who have your back is more important for survival in ministry than a balanced life. It is a gift when there are colleagues in the maritime ministry nearby with whom you can share or when you connect on Skype with those at a distance. But these friends and colleagues need not be chaplains who share your work if they are people you trust. And even if you only meet every other month for a day of honest and authentic conversation, it is enough to sustain you in the time in between. What is important is that we are willing to be honest and vulnerable with one another for the sake of authenticity in ministry. Martin Marty is correct. We have friends and we are friends so we do not get killed.

The Work Is Hard and Getting Harder

The third reason why caregivers need to be cared for comes both from outside and from within ourselves. The society does not value what you do in the same way it once did when seaman's centers were founded around the world. And sometimes it feels like the church has forgotten as well. Or it may be that you cannot do what matters to you – what has always mattered to you in ministry – but what you must do seems pointless. Or what matters deeply to you does not seem to matter to those who support you. And the perks are gone – the little privileges that bring pleasure to work. There are many challenges coming from society that make ministry anywhere more and more difficult. The role of clergy does not carry the same automatic respect it once did. In an increasingly secular society, or at least in a society in which organized religion is declining, positive response to our efforts is less and less predictable.

Caregivers also need care because they are susceptible to being wounded on the inside. We are wounded ourselves because the job takes more energy than we have to give away or because we are worried about paying all the bills or because we are overwhelmed by changes or discouraged about the lack of response from the church for the work we do or unhappy in our marriage or bored in a job we can't afford to leave. Or you may be overwhelmed by more and more expectations with fewer and fewer resources. It may be hard to get out of bed or turn off the computer to do a job you no longer understand or are ill-equipped to do in a place that no longer values what you do. If you have come to this conference tired and just a little discouraged, it is not a moral fault or a sign of weakness. The work you do is hard and getting harder.

The needs have changed, the security is more complex, and Homeland Security can become an excuse for not going on the ship. The demands of tight security become another reason to work in the church rather than be on the docks. There is less turnaround time to do the van ministry and less need for the telephone ministry. This challenge to imagine new expressions of an old ministry is easier for some than for others. If you are an iconoclastic sort who relishes a new challenge, this is a great time but not if you are inclined toward more conventional ministry.

For your third short conversation, I want to invite you to talk with your neighbor – and hopefully the same neighbor – about some external change in the work you do that is particularly challenging or discouraging. Or, if you are willing, you may talk about a struggle that comes from the inside that saps your energy or colors your days gray and makes your work more difficult.

Abandoning Presumptions of Power

In his book The End of Christendom and the Future of Christianity,Douglas John Hall identified powerlessness as one consequence of the decline of Christianity. God is at work, he argues, in the humiliation of Christianity. Indeed, the decline of Christian dominance has been gradual and inconspicuous and may not yet have occurred in some towns in Texas or Minnesota. But there is no doubt that we are living at the end of Christendom. What we are called to give up at the end of the Constantinian era is the presumption of power and influence. It is a hard habit to break – especially when we believe that remaining in power makes it possible to do so much good or at least makes our work easier. But I believe Douglas John Hall is correct when he observes that "presumption upon the past power and glory of Christendom is perhaps the greatest deterrent to faith's real confession in our present historical context. " (p 3). The gift at the end of Christendom is that it might enable churches to develop genuine community, uncompromised theology, and a more honest engagement with other faiths and diverse cultures.

After Christendom, Hall argued, it will be harder to presume privilege in the practice of ministry. In Christendom, ministry was more like civil service with ranks and privileges attached. Roles and hierarchical power mattered. When, however, the church is more like subversive outposts than a mighty army, roles and rank are less important. What will matter is character. Which brings us around to the hardest expression of care for the caregiver: strengthening our resilience and fostering authenticity. That is internal work we must do that is more like preventive care for the time ahead. I am not telling you anything you don't already know when I say we need authentic and sturdy souls who are willing to do the work of maritime ministry without privilege and with less power in a context with varied cultures that are often alien or sometimes hostile to the Church.

The Quest for Authenticity

Sturdy souls or ministerial character, as I envision it, is not just a cloak that one can take on and off. Rather, it is as close to us as breathing. It begins with giving up past presumptions to power. It is formed from general spirituality, shaped by disciplined meditation and the study of Christian texts, and informed by the practical knowledge necessary for the work of ministry. That work of forming an authentic character is preventive care because it strengthens us for the inevitable challenges to Christian ministry in the 21st century. The minister today is an entrepreneur in the spiritual marketplace competing for the allegiance and participation of fewer people with diminishing resources. What we need from pastoral leaders in this new context is more than knowledge, clever strategies, marketing skills or even increased professionalization – important as those may be. Rather we need to form women and men as ministers of the Gospel who will be courageous imaginative and durable enough to be in the world as partners and neighbors without domination and without certitude. The gift of this time of struggle is an invitation to deepen our commitment to authenticity in ministry.

It is an authenticity without illusions. Both the cynic and the saint know the same discouraging realities of the world's pain and the difficulty by which any true healing and redemption come. The cynic despairs of hope of any real change. The saint responds with faith, maintaining hope and zeal in the face of the many discouraging failures and partial embodiments of God's promise. In the face of overwhelming complexity, regular disappointment and ordinary adversity in ministry, it is not surprising that powerlessness is often a metaphor used to describe the experience of clergy in general and maritime ministers in particular. It takes a sturdy character to acknowledge real and even necessary powerlessness in ministry without either exaggerating it or being immobilized by it.

The great enemy of authenticity, a friend of mine once observed, is self-deception and the inclination to claim too much for oneself as a person or a pastor. The living of an authentic life is a continuing challenge and should not be interpreted in moralistic terms. My friend John Paver lived and died with flawed courage and transparent vulnerability and with a fierce, irrepressible desire to know and understand what was happening in his person, his ministry and his faith. Authenticity requires fierce honesty and presumes the willingness to be vulnerable. Which brings us back to an earlier discussion about the passage from Galatians that when we bear one another's burdens, we share our failures as well as our successes.

The kind of compassion that makes for good ministers also makes one susceptible to being wounded. The goal cannot be to become invulnerable. Rather we need to live with an awareness of our vulnerability without self-deception and without being overwhelmed by what we know. That is pastoral authenticity.

The authenticity of a minister's soul is regularly endangered by temptations to power and pretence. We are tempted to pretence whenever we fear exposure or when the ordinary posture of faith as resting-in-neediness is too dependent. We are inclined to self-deception whenever we think we fail but others do not. We are more likely to get into difficulty when we hide our vulnerability behind a cloak of control or a carefully constructed public persona that promotes an image detrimental to human wholeness.

Approaches to the Christian faith that emphasize invulnerability and success as signs of God's presence are false promises that can only be sustained by also denying the abundance of suffering in the world. Being an authentic individual means being naked before God. The challenge is to find a safe sacred place to reveal to our own selves and to others our self-deceptions and then allow the Gospel to address us, and the power of the Spirit to transform us. As people of faith, we live without pretence because we believe that the human soul is ultimately hidden in God whose graciousness touches everything with mercy – even the minister's soul. If we live with Christ as God's wound in the world, we will embrace vulnerability as a central characteristic of authenticity.

One Final Word

In her poem, "A Litany for Survival," Audre Lourde wrote these words:

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision...
when we are silent we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
Remembering we were never meant to survive.

I believe the greatest enemy of human well-being is our inability to live with the reality of finitude and death in life. We were never meant to survive. Nor will our work survive. It will be transformed by those who follow after us. The final and for me the ultimate source of well-being in life and ministry is to live with the awareness that we do not have our life as a possession. Our life is not our possession. In a book that has had a significant impact on my thinking about life and ministry entitled Death and Life: An American Theology, Arthur McGill describes the Christian life in this way: "In the kingdom of God no one is related to any good by way of possession. There is simply no such thing as possession. We do not have ourselves; we constantly receive ourselves and expend ourselves. We do not posses strength or righteousness or knowledge; we constantly receive them and expend them. And if we try to make any of God's blessings something we possess and have at our disposal, then it will not be long before circumstances will bring us to a situation where our possessions – our possessed faith, possessed love, possessed competence, or possessed piety – prove inadequate. Once again, we are forced back into the condition of spiritual poverty." (pp 62-3 Fortress Press, 1987). All our best efforts at self-care – all our plans to live a healthy life will be insufficient in actual situations.

We do not have our life or our health or even our authenticity as something we possess – as if we could tuck them away for some future contingency. But if the rhythm of our lives and our ministries on the docks and on the ships and with the seafarers is one of receiving and expending, then our lives and our ministries will be an endless discovery of new forms and new levels of need and new dimensions of caring and being cared for. To that end, may God give you grace.

Let us pray.

God of life,
there are days when the burdens we carry
are heavy on our shoulders and weigh us down,
when the road seems dreary and endless,
the skies gray and threatening,
when our lives have no music in them,
and our hearts are lonely,
and our souls have lost their courage.
Flood the path with light,
turn our eyes to where the skies are full of promise;
tune our hearts to brave music;
give us a sense of comradeship
with heroes and saint of the past and present;
and so quicken our spirits
that we have be able to encourage
the souls of all who journey with us on the road of life,
to your honor and glory. Amen

— Attributed to Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

 

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