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Healers Together

By Ian Gregory.

 

The traditional role of the priest in British society has now been taken over by the doctor, to the detriment of the priest, society, and the doctor. Discuss.

Our weary family GP made this observation, reflecting on the number of calls he had recently been asked to make to homes where all that was needed was a listening ear and some reassurance.

“I asked them if they had contact with a minister of religion, and they looked blank,” he said, “but that was the person they needed.” It was not that the comfort they required was second best to a bottle of pills, but that he had no time to spare for pastoral care at that level, and anyway, as he saw it, it was not his job.

The doctor is the first person people think of whenever they feel a bit off, followed by the chemist, social services, and a 999 call. Very few people indeed outside the established congregations of the faithful would dream of sending for the minister. Even in the event of death it is the funeral director who is expected to offer sympathetic words and advice.

Why is this? One reason is the perception that a minister of religion is unlikely to have anything practically useful to say, and anyhow it would probably be embarrassingly irrelevant. Another is that the wounded pagan, not having been near a church for years, doesn’t know a minister, and is prevented by conscience from looking one up. Anyway, a minister of religion is surely a harbinger of death (‘Look, dear, there’s a parson calling over the street. Must be more serious than we thought’)?

This calls into question the role of the minister in today’s world. Because it is so ill-defined he/she is free to set the agenda of their day’s activity. Some make themselves furiously busy in their denomination and community in order to satisfy a subconscious urge to be useful to God. Others achieve just as much, perhaps more, by quietly getting on with whatever comes to hand.

Then there are those, to be quite frank, whose days are spent in a form of holy idleness. One such told me: “I never visit; if anybody wants me they know where I am”. His loose connection with the real world was reflected in the pulpit, too.

The current debate about what ministers are for is throwing up a range of exciting possibilities. If the radicals are right very few will be retained in the traditional roles of pulpit and pastoralia. They will be chaplains in every conceivable area of public life, and certainly in hospitals and education, airports, sport, and retail parks.

It is even suggested that breweries might employ them to look after staff and customers in the new-style pubs of our age, or that the police could use them as chaplains to stretches of motorway with mobile prayer cars, attending accidents or being available to the anonymous masses of stressed-out strangers who throng motorway service areas..

Our GP, however, has hinted at an even more innovative idea: that a surgery could have a minister on the staff team to undertake much of the pastoral work which is not really the realm of anybody else in the surgery. Many doctors and nurses, of course, have a gift for human relationships which they did not get from their professional training, and some ministers have no gift for such work at all. But the germ of a role is there for suitably -gifted individuals.

Already many clergy are engaged in a dual-role: leading a congregation, but giving time to chaplaincy in schools, colleges, and hospitals. And it is in those roles that many of them find true fulfillment, as they come into contact with the unchurched who have as little time for parsons as turkeys have for Christmas.

It may even be that the public perception of the minister will be hugely improved as they are seen to be increasingly invo1ved in the real world. Churches, too, will benefit if funding for ministerial salaries is enhanced from the budgets of medical practices, schools and colleges, and (nice thought) the cash-rich breweries.

There would of course have to be a sea-change in the concept of ministry. The traditional pattern of study, pulpit and ‘more tea, vicar’ pastoralia would give way to a new listening, counselling and exposed role in often challenging conditions.

But if one thing is emerging in today’s materialistic world it is that there is a crisis-level shortage of those willing and able to get alongside the hurt and bewildered casualties of a ‘me-first’ age. A decent pagan I know told me he went to the local surgery, feeling terrible, only to find it closed, but a cleaner opened the door to him and spent half an hour listening to his troubles.

“After that, I didn’t need the doctor,” he said. Just talking to a sympathetic listener had helped ease the pain. There is a lesson there for the prescription-happy medic and the talk-addicted parson. Perhaps, in the unfolding new century, we are all going to have to become specialists in what I have heard called ‘ear-drum therapy’ - in other words, just listen, won’t you?