.

“We played the pipes for you,
and you wouldn’t dance;
we sang dirges,
and you wouldn’t be mourners.”
Matthew 11

I’d only been ordained a handful of years when my wise Godmother, a psychotherapist by training and vocation, suggested that I might benefit from monthly professional supervision. I responded that I had a good spiritual director and some wise friends, adding that every now and then I went to confession.

What could costly supervision possibly add to all this therapeutic conversation?

Safely shelving the advice I went on to survive many ups and downs probably for half a dozen more years until some Anglican priests told me of how much they benefitted from meeting with an professional once a month who would helped them milk every encounter and experience for all it could teach them.

That shifted my perspective.

Before this moment I was simply seeking to survive, something I was stubborn enough to do even in painful isolation. These wise people were encouraging me to move beyond just coping and to live.

So I took the step, and in the thirty years since have not looked back on professional supervision which has become a regular and welcome monthly routine for me.

I’ve had a few supervisors over the years, my current one for 18 years since the untimely death of Jenny aged only 64. It was Jenny who gave me a copy of a classic little book A Life of One’s Own written by Marion Milner (under the pseudonym Joanna Field). It’s been reprinted dozens of times since it was first published on New Year’s day in 1934.

I remember that Jenny offered the book timidly, noticing well before I did that I was trying hard to be a good priest of an earthly Catholic institution, often suppressing my own thoughts, feelings, beliefs and plans in favour of whatever good Catholic doctrine and church leaders (both bishops and parishioners) expected of me.

A eulogy published soon after Jenny’s 2006 death (in a NZ journal of psychotherapy) highlighted her depth of awareness:

Both in her life and work Jenny consistently demonstrates her faith in the human capacity to enter fully into life and to trust that this will enrich and heal the individual, the community, and ultimately, the world.

Jenny was encouraging me to go deeper, higher, broader, to shift my focus from my own life, my faith, my belief, to the community and the world.

She was nudging me to accept that my dissatisfaction with life as a good religious person was a healthy disquiet. and to seek Jesus who was patiently waiting to be discovered in the depth of my being, or to use the profoundly insightful language of the Church, in my soul.

Here I realised that my primary vocation was not to be a good religious person, a photocopy, but a unique creation in the divine image.

What a freedom.

What a joy.

What a relief.

What an adventure I was now beginning with a new-found need for the full reality of Christ, no longer satisfied with rigidly fixing to the signs that pointed to Christ but needing to live with Christ more intimately.

Now I felt the call to live with Jesus as an original presence, following the divine desire for me, with Jesus, and (perhaps ironically) even more deeply connected to and in the heart of the church.

Too often we forget that the Church is a sign which points us to, and brings us into, relationship with Jesus Christ. Without the church I would probably never have met Christ. Yes the Church is an essential sign, but we need to go to the relationship to which this powerful sign points.

As maturing Christians we soon become frustrated with the external forms and rites and rules of religion. Perhaps the rule says no dancing no singing no laughing or crying and we become so programmed to obey that we ignore the fact that the pipes are playing and calling us to dance, and the laments are being sung calling us to grieve.

I’m reminded of the homily-reflection I included as the final piece of FFF – the book: (available at this link)

Therefore the healthy response to denial of freedom, repression of creativity and inflexibility of structures is to become (as others see it) unwell. Such break-down is really more of a waking-up. And until a person lives through this shadowy night they remain a good religious person rather than a faith-full and mature disciple of Jesus Christ capable of embracing the height and depth of abundant life.

So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote:  It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory.

Take an initiative and send me a date time and place for a FFF cafe-catchups john@fff.org.nz. I’ll advertise these on each morning’s post throughout Advent.

Monday 16th December 11.00am with Gillian
Cypress Café 10.00am  St Heliers Bay Road
St Heliers, Auckland

Tuesday 17 December 10.30 with Catherine
Colombus at Mitre 10 MEGA
25 Bouverie St, Petone, Lower Hutt.

Thursday 19 December 10.00am with Joan
Stumble Inn, 200 Mangorei Road
Merrilands, New Plymouth