Press Releases01 Nov 23

Connections, hope and love in walking with people pastorally

Primate reflects on the links between relationships and recovery

Archbishop John McDowell’s reflection at the MindMatters conference drew out what hope and love can mean in the context of mental health, following on from Archbishop Welby’s keynote address on faith earlier in the day.  Addressing delegates at the event on Friday, 20th October, the Primate acknowledged that we have all had our “bumps in the road” whether in ministry or in personal life. 

Relationally, speaking as an identical twin, he remarked that the sense of connection between two people who have the same DNA “is simply a kind of heightened example of the sort of connection that we all have with one another.”  As a curate in Antrim, his duties included being a chaplain at Holywell Hospital, an institution caring for people with significant mental health difficulties.  In most of those situations, he found that all he could do to help was to sit and listen.

In a wider perspective, the Primate noted that Ireland was a place with a huge amount of societal trauma.  Archbishop Eamon Martin had recently drawn attention to the “completely unresolved emotional impact” still felt in families affected by the Civil War, and the more recent trauma from the conflict in Northern Ireland with no community mechanism to help in resolving it.

“It has always been love’s way that in order to rise, she stoops,” Archbishop McDowell continued, “and that’s what effectively sitting alongside people or even sitting alongside yourself with difficulties is.  Sitting down is getting in the same place as the other person is.”  Pastorally working with people who are in difficulty will be like walking through water with them and “if you’re going to walk through, you’ve got to get wet, and you need yourself to have support.”

Chapter 13 of John’s Gospel records that Jesus knew that his hour had come and having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the very end.  Jesus was always there for his disciples. “You know, 90 per cent of life is just turning up, by and large,” he commented, but people who have found themselves in a very difficult emotional position and a very low stage can feel that they’re a burden to others.  In many ways, our job is “to love them to the end, to stay with them no matter how long” as well as signposting people to those with therapeutic expertise.

Being available and reliable are old–fashioned virtues but they’re what make the difference to someone for whom others haven’t turned up and haven’t stayed there to the end.  People in difficulty need encouragers who have “hope in a reality beyond what they can see or touch” – a permanence on which we can lay our head on.

“I often think that when God looks at the world, he sees very little of what we see,” the Primate noted. “We see huge activity, we see getting and spending, achievements, and he simply sees those emotional and spiritual connections that are going on all over the place and that we are blind to.

“In terms of that sort of engagement, all of your victories will be quiet and they’ll be out of the way.  People won’t see them, and all of your failures will be public … and that’s a thing that people of faith have to live with.”

Concluding, he related an experience of a young woman who expressed that she knew she was well when visiting a church one day when on holiday in Ireland.  She didn’t get well all at once, and still had to go through the therapies for her condition, but her story points to a hidden element of healing which sits beyond our control or when we would expect recovery to happen.