Chaplain Catherine F. Garlid on a descent from head to heart

Excerpted from a sermon dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Joan Hemenway

"South on the Post Road"

Some people lead with their heads and some with their hearts. Good pastoral care engages the process of bringing heart and head together. When my husband Peter and I were first dating I was in seminary and he was working in a book store. I was stuck with a head full of theology and he was not sure he believed in God. One evening he invited me to dinner and before we ate he asked, “Do you mind if we pause for a moment to give thanks?” After the moments of silence I asked, “So who are you thanking?” His answer was, “I don’t know…I just feel so grateful I have to let it out.” I was disarmed and humbled, having never experienced such a feeling.

Before the 1940s, the care of the sick, the dying, and the marginalized tended to be didactic and moralistic. If someone was troubled, she needed a pep talk or an admonition. As soldiers came home from World War II they said that what they needed in the trenches was not a sermon, but a good ear. The pastoral care movement was emerging with two distinct schools of thought about the direction of care. First was the Boston school of the “Once Born” religious experience: “learn to be rational, face the facts, and conform to the real.” Trust God to carry you to health and fulfillment. Then the New York school of the “Twice born:” liberate yourself from rigid self-expectations and embrace chaos knowing that God is in the chaos, too. Irrational inner conflict must be integrated into who you are and how you love.[1] In the context of Christianity, the experience was “twice born” because it involved the Cross, what Paul refers to as “Christ crucified,” “the foolishness of God that is wiser than men, the weakness of God that is stronger than men” [I Cor.1:22-25]. It involves an encounter with suffering and evil and requires heart.

Figuratively, I have journeyed south on the Boston Post Road, a journey of descent from head to heart. Martha Nussbaum critiques much of Western philosophical thought on the basis that it has separated reason from emotion. She argues that, in fact, emotions inform intelligence and identity because they shape the value we place upon the persons and objects that we cherish. Our passions, including our erotic and aggressive passions, help us embrace the fullness of life.[2]

Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad. “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might (or, as it is translated in Jesus’ words, “and with all your mind”). If we cannot bring head and heart together, we cannot function with integrity as pastoral care givers or persons of faith because we cannot embrace suffering and pain.

[1] “Clinical Pastoral Education,” from Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Joan Hemenway, Inside the Circle, Chapter 1, JPC Publications

[2] Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge)

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