Jun 19 | CPE Journal #12: June 12th*
Sorry the entries are out of order – I got behind on my transcriptions, heh.
***
As I read some of the resources we were given on the CASC website, I came across a stunning quote by Irving Yalom:
“As participant [in a patient’s story], one enters into the life of the patient and is affected and sometimes changed by the other.”
This was stunning to me because a) it reminded me of Dr. Pat Dutcher-Walls telling us in Hebrew Bible 500 that God’s holiness, in the world of the Israelites, could be dangerous if you weren’t prepared: you can get “zapped,” like with electricity; and b) it reminded me of the wounds Jesus brings back with him from death. God is changed by encounter with humanity – and we are invited to be changed by our encounters with others.
This is the cruciform life! This is the life that is not fully subsumed but is changed in a way that cannot be undone.
“It is the relationship itself that becomes…a place that holds and empowers the person to change.”
When this is framed in the language of the dialogical counselling relationship, it is even more explicit:
“The dialogical relationship generates a new reality – the between – beyond the imagination and expectations of both client and therapist, revealing the uniqueness of who the client is and can become with the empowering presence of confirmation. Who we are and can become in pursuit of the meaning of our existence is not remembered in our psyche but emerges in the dialogical relationship of the I and Thou.“
(This last sentence is where the relationship to Martin Buber’s work is made clear).
I also noted this quote:
“One’s sense of identity requires the existence of another by whom one is known.”
I wrote that down with big exclamation points. Identity is what I continually come back to when articulating the life of faith. How I want to be seen is as someone who chooses to identify as belonging to Christ, and that for me means someone who proclaims good news, reaches out to others and meets them where they are in order to listen, participates in the work of healing, and proclaims God’s sovereignty and intimacy through the stories of Scripture as communicated through my life’s story. I do this because I see myself as Christ’s own, and part of my inner battle, I think, comes from the sense that I belong to something else – not myself but a false self imposed by societal shackles and a story of pain and self-hatred. This story is inextricably woven into a lot of other people’s stories as well, and rather than trying to carve out an idol of myself as singular and alone (i.e. the dream of Western individualism, which I think is naive – we can never truly be alone and only for ourselves; we were made and evolved as social creatures on a planet).
I choose who I am to belong to – the one who accepts me as I am, “ashes and all.”
-Clarity