Proposal for a journal paper
Much parish life is lived in fragments of time, little slips of moments grabbed before or after church services. Whilst the content and the spirituality of the church services form the greatest part of spiritual direction in a parish, the other key moments are in the homilies and confession offered by the clergy in the parish- homilies as a one-to-many broadcast of ideas and exhortation, and confession as a one-to-one listening and offering of advice and healing words. Nevertheless, parish priests are mostly taken aside to one corner and asked ‘to give a word’, a tiny fragment of time in which to discern the spirits and respond. The demands of such fragmentary moments of spiritual direction bear heavily on clergy and elders, and can result in simple, robust and direct answers to a specific question. Such ‘answers’, stripped of context and theological reflection can, however, become idols in their own right as parishioners place these ‘pearls of wisdom’ in the contexts of their own lives and turn those intended pearls into grit that chafe with the rest of their worldview. These pearls of wisdom are turned in on themselves and become instruments of spiritual oppression and alienation. The opportunity to open up a spiritual question for a parishioner, and free them in Christ has been lost and the parishioner goes away hurt, confused and bereft. Often the spiritual enquirer wishes to change their lives, to become ‘less sinful’, more holy. Clumsy responses in these fragments of time dramatically halt spiritual progress, entrenching superstitions and fear of church authority. The challenge for the spiritual director is to avoid providing blunt and simplistic answers to questions and to allow the spiritual enquirer to develop their own means of answering the questions, in the context of church teaching, and develop their own motivations for change. This paper explores links between Orthodox Christian spiritual direction and the principles of motivational interviewing developed by, amongst others, Miller and Rollnick (2002)[i]. Motivational interviewing (MI) as a set of principles starts with the assumption that change (progress or improvement) is expected of the interviewee but such change is elicited from within, rather than imposed from without. It is proposed that the principles of motivational interviewing used in the context of spiritual direction can strengthen the parishioner’s own motivation and capacities for spiritual development thereby avoiding the use of prescription and proscription and other external motivators. The paper will explore the principles of MI in the context of the actions of Jesus Christ in the Bible and develop the theological basis for employing MI. Evidence of MI principles will be identified in the Philokalia, a primary source for the history of spiritual direction in Orthodox Christianity. Very little work has been undertaken with respect to the application of MI principles in the Christian context (Martin[ii]Miller & Martin 1988[iii] and Tan[iv]), so this paper seeks to develop the themes of initial work in this area. [i] Rollnick, S, and W R Miller. “What is motivational interviewing?” Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy 23.04 (1995) : 325-334. [ii] Martin, John E (2009) "Motivational Interviewing: Applications to Christian Therapy and Church Ministry". Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Vol. 28, No. 1, 71-77 [iii] Miller, W. R., & Martin, J. E. (Eds.) (1988). Behavior therapy and religion: Integrating spiritual and behavioral approaches to change. Woodland Hills, CA: Sage Press [iv] Tan, S. Y (2007). Use of prayer and scripture in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 26, 101-111. Tan, S. Y, & Johnson, W. B. (2005). Spiritually oriented cognitive-behavioral therapy. In L. Sperry, & E. P Shafranske (Eds.), Spiritually oriented psychotherapy (pp. 77-103). Washington, D. C: American Psychological Association.
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October 2023
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