Clergymen struggling to comfort the afflicted in New Orleans are finding they, too, need someone to listen to their troubles.
The sight of misery all around them — and the combined burden of helping others put their lives back together while repairing their own homes and places of worship — are taking a spiritual and psychological toll on the city’s ministers, priests and rabbis, many of whom are in counseling two years after Hurricane Katrina.
Almost every local Episcopal minister is in counseling, including Bishop Charles Jenkins himself, who has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jenkins, whose home in suburban Slidell was so badly damaged by Katrina that it was 10 months before he and his wife could move back in, said he has suffered from depression, faulty short-term memory, and difficulty concentrating or sleeping.
Low-flying helicopters sometimes cause flashbacks to the near-despair — the “dark night of the soul” — into which he was once plunged, he said. He said the experience felt “like the absence of God” — a lonely and frightening sensation.
I am speechless …torn between sympathy for Katrina victims and the obvious displacement of faith by therapy for “post-traumatic” stress disorder.
Faith and therapy are not mutually exclusive. They need all our prayers and support.
I would not deny the efficacy of psychological or psychiatric counseling but its relationship to religious faith, in my expereince, is only tangential. I know that there are practices that offer “Christian counseling”, but more formal approaches appear to draw their protocols from the literature of secular reseach and discovery. I suppose prayer can be called meditation and a rosary is reinforcment, but that would seem to be about as far as it goes.
Therapy is no more contrary to religious belief than is any form of health care. If these folks had hypertension and were seeking treatment for it, you wouldn’t criticize their “displacement of faith.”
Prayer is needed for mental illness as much as it is for physical illness. So is treatment, including meds when necessary. God can heal miraculously, but God uses therapists as much as physicians to heal.