IS LOVE ENOUGH OR DO WE ALSO NEED GRACE?

So I received a recent ad on-line from a Lutheran Seminary.  (I must have accepted some cookies sometime back.)    Invited me to a new study of Faith and Mental Health. 

As an ordained pastor who happens to also be a licensed therapist, I was intrigued enough to open the window for a peek inside.  Near as I could tell, their program featured the premise that good theology makes for good mental health.   Start with faith and end up with sound reasoning.   My words, not theirs.

This got me thinking about how in my tandem career I had become credentialed in mental health well in advance of my ministry credentials.   Along that journey I met a boatload of folks going the opposite direction.   They were all pastors going into the counseling field as a kind of second or perhaps dual career.    As we crossed paths, I found myself being viewed as something akin to a motorist going north in the southbound lanes.   No horn honking per se, but some funny looks as if to query, “why would you ever leave mental health counseling to go into parish ministry?”  

I’m not here to claim my direction was better, but I will say it was different in a way that matters a lot to me.  Wasn’t until I saw this ad that I really spent much time thinking about how faith formation and mental health interact.   Was it the chicken or the egg?  

This led me to wonder such things as “Do people need to go to church before they get in therapy?” or are they better off “getting in therapy before they go to church?”

I know.   Sounds weird when phrased that way.   But I think these questions carry some validity.

As an old geezer who’s worked both sides of the street, I have an observation that isn’t exactly flattering when it comes to the church crowd.   Granted, this is all anecdotal.   There’s no science behind what I’m about to say (or at least no studies I’ve come upon in my reading).   Prior to entering parish ministry after seminary, I had found some of my toughest counseling clients were presenting as strong Christians active in their faith.   And when I say “toughest” I mean they had an almost intractable belief that they were not really lovable.   In fact, they were so unworthy of love that, were it not for divine grace or unmerited favor, they often feared for their eternal future.  

Now there is such a thing as mincing words in this whole discussion, noting that love (at least the “agape” that Jesus spoke of and the “charis” that Paul wrote of) is perhaps a fraternal twin if not identical.    But if I were able to, slang term, accurately “get inside the heads” of many Christian clients in mental health counseling prior to my work in pastoral ministry, then there really was a difference in meaning.   Such clients told themselves they were unworthy of love.   That the God of their understanding had judged them so, if not from birth then at least from adolescence (oh, those terrible teen years!!), as “less than” and “not enough” in ways that required…….you guessed it……grace.  Unmerited favor.   Grace is what God did on the cross because, well, we were otherwise unlovable.   Unworthy.   Not good enough to spend some afterlife with beyond our earthly tomb.  

I came to view such church-based thinking as a source of at least some level of mental illness.  

Here’s why.

Over my decades of working in mental health (aka “behavioral healthcare” to ease the silly stigma out there) clinics, I conjured up my own definition of anxiety as being “faith in fear” and of depression as being “doubt in love.”    My mission was always to promote faith in love and doubt in fear, my own definition of therapy or mental health.    So long as there was “doubt in love,” in my experience, there was bound to be “faith in fear.”    And the reverse.  

So why not just settle for “faith in grace” for fear of being otherwise cast out of God’s all-perfect Kingdom?   Because such a mindset always carried an undercurrent of anxiety and depression that would be recurrent at times of chronic human fallibility.    Next mess-up and my church-based clients were back with more anxiety and depression again.   Still singing “Amazing Grace” as needed to save “a wretch like me.”     Like the Apostle Paul in Romans 7, they confessed that the good they would they did not do and the evil they would not do, that they did.   Which, of course, led Paul himself to conclude: “What a wretched man I am!  Who will rescue me from this body of death?”

This is certainly not to say that my churched clients were worse off than my others, but I did note that many were as badly affected by fear-based thinking and were feeling as unlovable as if they’d never opened a Bible before or entered into Christian worship before.  If theirs was a Paul-based, fear-based, outer-grace dependent belief about themselves, they were often no easier to treat or to heal than others who struggled to know love.    Or to know themselves as truly lovable.    

This, then, is why I once again ask such things as “do people need to go to church before they get in therapy?” or are they better off “getting in therapy before they go to church?”   

Does faith lead us to better mental health or does mental health lead us to better faith?  

Asked very differently, are more people today in therapy because of a referral from their pastor or are more people in church today because of a referral from their therapist?

In no way am I critiquing the Lutheran seminary that seeks to prioritize faith formation ahead of clinical practice.     But I do long for the day when clinical educators would help practitioners work toward faith-formation in areas of spiritual empowerment.    If those who, having learned faith in love and doubt in fear, would be incorporated into the work of the church, then I believe the church could look a great deal more then like Jesus than it does now like Paul.    

If therapy came first, our theology may look quite different.

If mental health came before faith formation, then maybe love would finally be enough.