LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Listening love: An underlying value of pastoral counselling
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
Listening love: An underlying value of pastoral counselling
Even if in any given society all of its social and supportive institutions were functioning at
their ideal conception, we as human beings would, from time to time, struggle with our
experiences of our human limitations, unfulfilled aspirations and ways by which our
relationships with other people leave us frustrated. Balancing the fulfilment of our need for
intimacy and connectedness with time to be alone is a part of our dance of life. Any number of
things can interrupt and/or obstruct our efforts to live a meaningful life. Making meaning of our
lives and discerning our own essence and value and coping with the reality of death is a part of
our ongoing human agenda that we cannot attend to alone. We are always selves-in-
relationship to other people and to nature itself. We become who we are as a result of our
relationships with others. In this sense, we are made and healed in relationships just as we can
also be destroyed by relationships (Rosenberger 2014; Streets 2014).
There will be a need for pastoral counsellors as long as these human situations exist. We
need others to speak to and listen to us. Our need to listen and talk to one another and the
healing that we can derive from having such conversations is becoming increasingly important
as we allow technology - and our preoccupation with texting and emailing other people whilst
we are physically with someone else - to intervene and sometimes interfere with our need to
pay attention to one another. The space that the counsellor and counselee shares that is
uninterrupted by technology facilitates their communication with one another.
Tillich (1963:28) describes this listening aspect of our relating to one another in a helping
relationship as 'listening love'. I consider this one of the essential acts performed by pastoral
counsellors. Tillich (1963:28) writes that listening love is: 'one of the decisive characteristics of
love that listens sensitively and reacts spontaneously'. His use of the word 'spontaneously'
refers to our natural and immediate response to those situations and people in need of help. I
interpret Tillich's use of the word 'spontaneously' as applied to pastoral counselling as the
ability of the counsellor to be fully present with those he or she is counselling and allowing their
empathy for the counselee to facilitate the pastoral counsellors' disciplined and informed
immediate response to his or her counselee's concerns.
Pastoral counselling normally focuses on individuals, couples and/or families and not the
wider social context that may also be contributing to the counselees' concerns. Tillich (1963)
further advances the idea of Max Wertheimer that 'things cry'. By this, Tillich (1963:28)
indicated that 'situations have a voiceless voice'. I take him to mean by this that, like an animal,
who cannot communicate using human language, we have to therefore develop techniques and
methods of examining the animal to determine its physical condition. The pastoral counsellor
has to use his or her listening skills, knowledge and experiences and what the counselee has to
teach them about who they are and what it is that they are struggling with in order for them to
see, hear and interpret the conditions or 'situations' in which the counselee find themselves
and how these are impacting their lives. We are not only selves-in-relationship with others but
we are also selves-in-relationship to our environments.
This kind of listening love guards us against the danger of objectifying those whom the
pastoral counsellor seeks to help. This is a problem in all of the counselling and helping
professions where the professional refers to the client, patient or counselee as a symptom, or
by the name of the disease from which they are suffering instead of as 'Mr or Mrs Smith' with a
certain diagnoses or condition. Tillich's (1963) warning to social workers can apply to pastoral
counsellors of being seduced into becoming a 'dilettante psychoanalyst' by having a
mechanistic view and approach to understanding and helping other human beings. Such an
orientation:
... made the social worker into a dilettante psychoanalyst, just as the minister in the
alliance of religion and psychological counseling is in danger of establishing himself as a minor
psychoanalyst - an attitude against which I have warned my students of theology for thirty
years now. (Tillich 1963:30)
Listening love requires that the pastoral counsellor give up trying to control or determine
the course the counselee will take in addressing his or her problem, or the feeling that he or she
must have and provide all of the answers his or her counselee may ask. Their listening love
implies that the counsellor not only sees similarities and differences between those whom she
or he counsels but also recognises the right and freedom people have to make choices about
how they will live their lives. This affirmation of the counselee by the counsellor can facilitate a
feeling of mutual love or 'positive resonance' (Fredrickson 2013:17) between the two of them
and can lead to a possible transformation in both the counsellor and counselee. A real
connection to the counselee, or what Tillich (1963:30) called 'a point of communion', is what
facilitates their counselee's healing and/or further thriving. Jackson (1999) observes:
... The attentive listening of a concerned and interested healer has frequently had a
compelling effect on the sufferer . The very process of the sufferer's confiding, in turn,
commonly has had a compelling effect on the listening healer. The listening and the talking, the
talking and the listening, have had a mutual attachment effect. (p. 94)
Through either Tillich's notion of communion or Jackson's idea of mutual attachment
mentioned above, the healer and the sufferer learn more about themselves in the process of
talking and listening to one another.
Jesus seems to never have had a minor or trivial conversation with anyone with whom he
spoke, as reported in the New Testament. The Gospel writers never depict Jesus as just talking
with others about the weather. Every dialogue between Jesus and someone else mattered both
to him and to the person or group of people with whom he was speaking. A conversation
between two people can result in each of them being profoundly impacted by what they say to
one another. The power of such communication and how it connects us to one another and to
ourselves and to God is remarkable. It is also somewhat a mystery as to how human dialogue
can negatively impact us or promote our well-being.
Some of the aims of a pastoral relationship and conversation as an expression of love are:
to bring some sense of relief to the one who is suffering, to encourage human agency, for the
counselee to foster a healthy sense of self and interdependence and for the counselee to
consider that he or she is an image of God (the imago Dei).
Pastoral care: Coping with and transforming trauma
Just as a theory of love and nonviolence can become embodied in people, our belief in God
can become a personal experience. Love, nonviolence and justice are attributes of pastoral
caring that the counselee can experience as real. This healing work is extremely important
when the pastoral counsellor is helping someone who has been traumatised (Jones 2009). Van
der Merwe and Gobodo-Madikizela (2008) remind us of the powerful impact a traumatic
experience can have upon individuals:
Narrating one's life is about finding structure, coherence and meaning in life. Trauma, in
contrast, is about the shattering of life's narrative structure, about a loss of meaning - the
traumatized person has 'lost the plot'. A fundamental issue concerning trauma is the regaining
of meaning after trauma, the rewriting of one's life narrative to incorporate the traumatic loss
in the new narrative. (p. 6)
Individuals, families, communities and entire nations can be impacted by traumatic events
such as mass murder, civil unrest, disease, famine and war, as well as by events of less
magnitude that are embedded in the vicissitudes of our common life, or our existential
condition as human beings (Epstein 2013). Being able to talk with someone whom we sense
cares about us and in an atmosphere that is safe can help us feel supported and some relief as
we carry the weight of what burdens us. This feeling of buoyancy can lead to creating options
for how we might handle the problems we are facing and this can increase our sense of being
empowered. The thought that we should be able to resolve many of our life's challenges alone
reinforces the narrative of being the 'rugged individualist' that is prominent in parts of the
world. Helping the counselee to see our mutual dependence upon one another as an asset
rather than as a personal liability or weakness can foster their capacity to ask for help and see
the value of being in community with others. Our failures and disappointments can blur our
self-value, detracting from the creation of a healthy self-image and making it difficult for us to
remember that we are created by God whose image we as human beings reflect. When the
counselees experience pastoral counselling as love, or when its aims as indicated above are
seen as values that guide its practice, then pastoral counselling and care as a form of love,
according to Tillich (1963):
.... transcends the limits of its techniques. It is certainly understandable that this aim is not
always conscious to those who have the burden of the daily work. It may be of inspiration to us
to think that we contribute to the ultimate aim of being itself in our small way - and every
individual's way is small ... In helping every individual to find the place where he can consider
himself as necessary, you help to fulfill the ultimate aim of man and his world, namely, the
universal community of all beings in which any individual aim is taken into the universal aim of
being itself. (p. 65)
I like Tillich's (1963) notion of 'feeling necessary', which he qualifies in the following way:
Being necessary is, of course, never absolute. Nobody is indispensable. Nevertheless,
somebody who does not feel necessary at all, who feels that he is a mere burden, is on the
edge of total despair ... There are many reasons for every effect, but one of the reasons for this
is that in our secularized society one thing is lost, namely, that, whatever their external destiny
may be, people no longer have an eternal orientation, an orientation which is independent of
space and time. It is the feeling of having a necessary, incomparable, and unique place within
the whole of being. The easy way in which politically we are playing now with collective suicide
is analogous to the phenomenon of individuals who have lost the feeling of a necessary place,
not only in their work and community, but also in the universe as a whole. (p. 30)
A personal conversation that has as one of its objectives to help the counselee to feel
'necessary' does not exclude exploring the limitations, weaknesses of our human nature and
how religion - any religion - understands human sin.
