The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Doubleday Image Book. an Image Book)
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for if youth no longer aspires to become adult and take the place of the fathers, and if the main motivation is conformity to the peer group, we might witness the death of a future-oriented culture or—to use a theological term—the end of an eschatology.
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3. The convulsive generation
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Everywhere we see restless and nervous people, unable to concentrate and often suffering from a growing sense of depression.
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The generation to come is seeking desperately for a vision, an ideal to dedicate themselves to—a “faith,” if you want. But their drastic language is often misunderstood and considered more a threat or a sturdy conviction than a plea for alternative ways of living.
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Inwardness, fatherlessness and convulsiveness—these three characteristics of today’s young people draw the first lines on the face of the coming generation.
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II. TOMORROW’S LEADER
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three roles ask for special attention: (1) the leader as the articulator of inner events; (2) the leader as man of compassion; (3) the leader as contemplative critic.
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1. The minister as the articulator of inner events
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The greatest complaint of the Spanish mystics St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross was that they lacked a spiritual guide to lead them along the right paths and enable them to distinguish between creative and destructive spirits.
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Drugs as well as different concentration practices and withdrawal into the self often do more harm than good.
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On the other hand it also is becoming obvious that those who avoid the painful encounter with the unseen are doomed to live a super...
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They have become unfamiliar with, and even somewhat afraid of, the deep and significant movements of the spirit. I am afraid that in a few decades the Church will be accused of having failed in its most basic task: to offer men creative ways to communicate with the source of human life.
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But how can we avoid this danger?
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I think by no other way than to enter ourselves first of all into the center of our existence and become familiar with th...
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The key word here is articulation. The man who can articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering.
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only he who is able to articulate his own experience can offer himself to others as a source of clarification.
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In this context pastoral conversation is not merely a skillful use of conversational techniques to manipulate people into the Kingdom of God, but a deep human encounter in which a man is willing to put his own faith and doubt, his own hope and despair, his own light and darkness at the disposal of others who want to find a way through their confusion and touch the solid core of life.
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In this context preaching means more than handing over a tradition; it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in the community so that those who listen can say: “You say what I suspected, you express what I vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my mind. Yes, yes—you say who we are, you recognize our condition …”
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Teaching in this context does not mean telling the old story over and over again, but the offering of channels through which people can discover themselves, clarify their own experiences and find the niches in which the Word of God can take firm hold.
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finally, in this context liturgy is much more than ritual. It can become a true celebration when the liturgical leader is able to name the space where joy and sorrow touch each other as the place in which it is possible to celebrate both life and death.
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So the first and most basic task of the Christian leader in the future will be to lead his people out of the land of confusion into the land of hope. Therefore, he must first have the courage to be an explorer of the new territory in himself and to...
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2. Comp...
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Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority.
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Compassion is born when we discover in the center of our own existence not only that God is God and man is man, but also that our neighbor is really our fellow man.
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For a compassionate man nothing human is alien: no joy and no sorrow, no way of living and no way of dying.
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Thus the authority of compassion is the possibility of man to forgive his brother, because forgiveness is only real for him who has discovered the weakness of his friends and the sins of his enemy in his own heart and is willing to call every human being his brother.
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And if priests and ministers of tomorrow think that more skill training is the solution for the problem of Christian leadership for the future generation, they may end up being more frustrated and disappointed than the leaders of today.
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But just as bread given without love can bring war instead of peace, professionalism without compassion will turn forgiveness into a gimmick, and the kingdom to come into a blindfold.
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3. The minister as contemplative man
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It might sound surprising and perhaps even contradictory, but I think that what is asked of the Christian leader of the future is that he be a contemplative critic.
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What I have in mind is a very active, engaged form of contemplation of an evocative nature. This needs some explanation.
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It is not the task of the Christian leader to go around nervously trying to redeem people, to save them at the last minute, to put them on the right track. For we are redeemed once and for all. The Christian leader is called to help others affirm this great news, and to make visible in daily events the fact that behind the dirty curtain of our painful symptoms there is something great to be seen: the face of Him in whose image we are shaped.
Rick Lee Lee James
Yes and amen!
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He does not shoulder every protest sign in order to be in with those who express their frustration more than their ideas, nor does he easily join those asking for more protection, more police, more discipline and more order. But he will look critically at what is going on and make his decision based on insight into his own vocation, not on the desire for popularity or the fear of rejection. He will criticize the protesters as well as the rest seekers when their motives are false and their objectives dubious.
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as Teilhard de Chardin remarked, “to him who can see, nothing is profane.”
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For a man of prayer is, in the final analysis, the man who is able to recognize in others the face of the Messiah and make visible what was hidden, make touchable what was unreachable. The man of prayer is a leader precisely because through his articulation of God’s work within himself he can lead others out of confusion to clarification; through his compassion he can guide them out of the closed circuits of their in-groups to the wide world of humanity; and through his critical contemplation he can convert their convulsive destructiveness into creative work for the new world to come.
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