Once I was summoned to give "the Sacrament of the Sick" (yes, those are scare quotes) to a believer very much advanced in age and who was, clearly, moments away from eternity. Seeing the obvious, I made the decision to give the Last Rites rather than simply "Anointing of the Sick" (which is the proper name of this sacrament).
As I began praying the Rite, I was interrupted by a member of the chaplaincy staff and indecorously yanked out of the patient's room and given a mild dressing-down for beginning the Last Rites instead of a mere anointing. It was clear that, first, the patient's imminent death was a subject of denial and second, the chaplaincy staff was more interested in the transitory emotional state of the family than the care of the patient's immortal soul.
In my line of work, if I've heard it once I've heard it a thousand times: Being "pastoral" is code for "assuaging someone's feelings." Thanks be to God, the professor of pastoral theology at my seminary worked very hard to disabuse us seminarians of the idea that being "pastoral" and being "truthful" are somehow dichotomous. Clinical Pastoral Education supervisors, on the other hand, are notorious for harbouring a "reductionist" pastoral outlook that is more interested in assuaging than authentically pastoring. (I remember being in the office of one such CPE staff and observing that this person's bookshelf--it was only half-full but only with books on psychology and other titles that look like they were recommended by Oprah Winfrey.)
I bring up this story because it has crossed my mind many times as I read through Revd Dr Harold Senkbeil's The Care of Souls: Cultivating a Pastoral Heart. Written from a Lutheran perspective, it provides sound guidance on what it means to be a shepherd. He thus quotes an American Lutheran theologian, Carl Walther:
Pastoral theology is the God-given practical disposition of the soul, acquired by certain means, by which a servant of the church is equipped to perform all the tasks that come to him in that capacity--validly, in a legitimate manner, to the glory of God, and for his own and his hearers' salvation.
That last clause is crucial--"to the glory of God, and for his own and his hearers' salvation.
Yet, looking around, one may be given the impression that "pastoral care" is about being the custodians and guardians of someone's feelings rather than her or his soul.
But Jesus isn't a glorified Tony Robbins. To assuage is not to save.
At the heart of this grave error is a fundamental ignorance of how the soul operates--and let me say right now that theological anthropology is sorely, sorely lacking in pastoral formation. If a physician has a commanding knowledge of the various means of diagnosis and of various pharmaceuticals, it would be absolutely useless if she or he did not know human anatomy. So how can pastors apply the medicine of grace and mercy if they do not know the "anatomy" of the soul?
When I bump into such "pastoral malpractice" as being fixated on one's feelings rather than the healing of one's soul, my "Thomistic sense" starts tingling. Why is that? Because St Thomas Aquinas--in line with the Biblical testimony--teaches that the human soul has three parts: The "vegetative" part (devoted to nutrition, growth, and reproduction), the "sensitive" part (with eleven prime emotions in two categories, namely the "irascible appetite" and the "concupiscible" appetite), and the "intellectual" part (where the intellect and will operate).
It is the intellectual soul--the part of the soul where the intellect and will function)--that distinguishes human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom. What makes us human beings is that we have intellectual/rational/cognitive souls. But what makes us sinners is that original sin introduced a disorder in the soul: The sensitive part is given to "overriding" the intellectual part. When God created our first parents, he gave them the "gift of integrity" which, among other things, meant a correct ordering of the soul: The intellectual part of the soul governs the sensitive part, which in turn governs the vegetative part. St Thomas also uses synonyms for these various parts of the soul: Sometimes "spirit" means the intellectual soul or mind (cf Eph 4:23) and "soul" as being the sensitive or animal soul (akin to the early Hebrew idea of soul as life). Now we can understand what the sacred author meant when he said that
...the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit... (Heb 4:12).
This is how St Thomas Aquinas explains the passage:
The Word of God effects and distinguishes between all those divisions and species, namely, how the sensibility is distinguished from reason; also, the species of the same sensibility in itself; also, the species of the function of reason, and what arises in the rational soul from the consideration of spiritual and earthly things. (Super Hebraeos, C.4, L.2, §222).
In other words, the disordered, sinful mixing-up of the sensitive part of the soul ("sensibility") from the intellectual part of the soul ("reason") is corrected by the preached word of God so that the soul is so healed that each part is restored to its proper place. Hence St Thomas goes on, citing a mediæval Biblical commentary called the Ordinary Gloss:
...it can be explained, according to a Gloss, in two ways: so that the soul refers to carnal sins which involve bodily pleasures, such as lust and gluttony; but the spirit refers to spiritual sins, which involve an act of the mind, such as pride, vainglory, and the like. Or by soul is understood evil thoughts, and by spirit good thoughts. Then the sense is this: reaching, i.e., discerning, unto the division of the soul and the spirit, i.e., between carnal and spiritual sins, or between good and evil thoughts (§223).
To reduce pastoral care to a fixation on someone's feelings or emotional state is to focus on the wrong part of the soul, namely the sensitive part. This is not to say that feelings aren't important; they are. But to assuage feelings before healing the soul's intellect is like giving first aid but skipping a hospital visit. Emotional disorders (and I am not talking about people with emotional and psychological disabilities) are often the result of intellectual disorders.
The Orthodox lay theologian Fredericka Matthews-Green has famously said that "sin is infection, not infraction." This is very much in accord with St Thomas' theology which refers to sin as "wound" and grace as "healing." By applying the salve of grace and mercy to the human soul infected by sin, we begin to see a gradual healing of the person's emotions. (See how "salve" and "salvation" are related?)
As pastors of souls, our calling is to bring people to Jesus the Divine Physician who wants nothing less than to give us abundant life (cf Jn 10:10), not just a pep talk or a fainting-couch. Perhaps the shepherd's staff can drive the point home: One purpose of the crook at the top of the shepherd's staff is so that he can hook a sheep by the neck or the hind legs and pull it away from eating something that looks delicious but is actually poisonous. In other words, the shepherd knows better than what the sheep feels like eating.
Let's start putting an end to the "pastoral malpractice" of skipping the health of the soul that focuses on assuaging rather than saving, and begin to restore the habitus of pastoral care as "having a thousand eyes" (as St John Chrysostom put it) to diagnose the soul of the believer (and believers-to-be) in view of applying the salve of Christ's loving grace.
