Traumatic Things

Imagine you’ve been a pastor for twenty years.  And in those twenty years you’ve been intimately involved in dealing with:

• The motorcycle wreck death of a 20 year old you taught in confirmation class
• The stillborn birth of a couple’s long-wanted child
• The suicide of a middle aged deacon
• The institutionalization of a young adult after he attacked his sister
• The court martial of a young man in the Marines
• Numerous cancer protocols, unsuccessful fertility treatments, and heart bypass surgeries

You get the picture.  Although the examples above are not necessarily from my own experience, they are familiar experiences for most pastors. 

During a CPE (chaplaincy training) residency fresh out of seminary I did 23 baby funerals in one month.  It convinced me to go into parish ministry where people would call me when healthy babies were born. 

Ministry can be traumatizing.  I’ve known pastors who reached their limit with one final, excruciating horror:  the kidnapping of a child of the church, the sudden death of a two year old,  the car accident that wiped out a family.  It’s not something we talk about in seminary:  how to handle pastoral care for a lifetime of trauma shared with people we love.  We minister alongside them.  We learn their most intimate hopes and fears in pre-marital counseling.  We baptize them and their children.  We bury their parents and spouses and children.  We love them, and when they face a tragedy, it’s as if it’s happening to us.  Yes, I know all about self-differentiation.  But sometimes tragedy impacts us.  Or clobbers us.

We are not the only ones with this responsibility to care for the traumatized.  And there are those who are standing by to help us with our own trauma.

It’s an enormous privilege to share painful experiences with people, just as it’s a privilege to share the joyous times.  But as pastoral care is increasingly shared with trained elders and deacons – as it should be – we professional clergy are finally blessed with others who help take some of the weight off our shoulders and share the pastoral caregiving.  The best pastors are not threatened by sharing pastoral care with other church leaders.  In fact, it’s our job to teach others how to care for the traumatized.  It’s part of our self-care too.