By Khalila RedBird Post date March 12, 2016
As an analyst and engineer who has moved in adulthood from Christian to Pagan, I’m acutely sensitive to the words of spirit that are obvious and unquestioned to someone in the Christian community but fall painfully on many of us outside that worldview. As a chaplain, who serves people of any faith or none, and as clergy active in interfaith communities, I want to be able to serve as a bridge to understanding — particularly when the touchier words come up.
Faith is one of those touchy words, as it often seems to be used as a marker of identity and privilege: “a person of faith”; “you’ve got to have faith”; “do you have faith?” To Christians, the meaning might be obvious, or they might differentiate faith from The Faith. But would any Christian consider me, a Witch, to be a woman of faith?
Would I describe myself as a woman of faith?
No. I would have to be a lot more clear, with an answer to the unasked, “Faith in what?” Quoting St. Paul’s definition isn’t the obvious answer, to me. But I know from painful experience I can have a crisis of faith, and people I meet in chaplaincy are often faced with just that, no matter what their religion or spiritual background.
Wikipedia, for once, is no help:
{Faith is variously defined as belief, confidence or trust in a person, object, religion, idea or view.[1] It may also be used to refer to a particular system of religious beliefs. The term ‘faith’ has numerous connotations and is used in many different ways, often depending on context.}
My unease came to a head in seminary, where a course in Pagan Pastoral Counseling (my major) used a respected text, Paul W. Pruyser’s The Minister as Diagnostician: Personal problems in pastoral perspective. 1976. Pruyser bases spiritual assessment (a standard task for a chaplain) on six diagnostic variables:
- awareness of the Holy,
- Providence,
- faith (understood subjectively),
- grace or gratefulness,
- repentance, and
- communion.
And my professor, himself a Witch through and through, picked this ancient tome for us? My world wobbled a bit.
It turns out that Pruyser knows his stuff, and, while he chose the language of Christian ministry to explain it, the dimensions of human spirit in crisis that he laid out covered the matter excellently. Time to cope, chaplain.
If I read him correctly, the question comes down to: What do you hold to be true, and how tightly are you bound to hold it so?
In my mind I would be trying to assess, for this patient, whether his worldview encompassed the challenges it appeared he was facing (or about to face), whether it offered specific guidance for the situation, and how open he might be to exploring whether or not that would be helpful.
Leave a comment