Christianity: A History of Therapy and Silence

An image of Christ called The Blessed Silence (Isaiah 9:6)

I go to therapy. I know other Christians who also go to therapy. I know friends who have kids who were adopted out of horrible situations who go to therapy. My girlfriend goes to therapy.

I have heard from many that there is no need for such things, that "faith" is enough to get a person through anything. This inquoted faith should be enough. You should lean on Christ and nothing else. It has even been argued that such a lack of faith is a sin.

But is it so? Even within the scriptures we see that people come to other people to handle disputes. We may think of this as early law. But the contexts of why they come is more so counsel. In
1 Kings 3:16-28, when Solomon is handling a dispute between two women regarding a child; this is hardly a spiritual matter. Whereabouts also when the prophet Nathan confronts David about his sin, it is handled with allegory and story and in a way that David would confront himself (2 Samuel 12:1-13).

We should also not simply rely on what we or a small group of fellow Christians believe that we inevitably surround ourselves with. It can be easy to think that what we think or how our group interprets things is the correct way. Here in America, Evangelicals are of course the largest Christian group. But let us also remember that they are less than 20% of the global Christian world and a far smaller fraction of the total of Christian history.

I fear that such a narrow and cutoff understanding of the history of our religious traditions has led us to create theology that adheres more to culture and less to truth. Can an autistic child heal herself by faith? What of an amputee? Things like depression and anxiety can be mapped with brain scans as physical anomalies. Do we then treat them as if they are ethereal temptations that must simply be overcome or as illnesses and symptoms to be treated?

The Christian tradition shows as a whole how monastics have always been the place of refuge for counsel for all walks of life. In The Shepherd of Souls, we see a man coming to the elder Cleopa distressed at how his life is falling apart, how his boss hates him, his wife wants to leave him and his son won't speak to him. 

We see also in Seraphim's Seraphim, the mother of Saint Pelagia take her to St. Seraphim, not for healing necessarily, but for counsel because the thinks she is not right in the head.

We also have the Desert Fathers, of whom thousands traveled from all over to receive even a word or sentence of counsel for what they should do to gain salvation.

Do we not also in the west, have pastors, shepherds, literally "elders" in Greek in the bible to guide us not only in when it comes to morality and scripture, but throughout ever walk of life?

Have we cheapened the call of the pastor to that of a simple bible commentator? We have known, many of us have seen that memorizing scripture and believing enough in your head does not cure a child's down syndrome, it does not heal a broken heart from the loss of a loved one. We know this and yet at times we dig ourselves deeper into our self-righteousness. But it is only to the detriment of ourselves and those around us that we do so. God may heal others by prayer and faith. But we must not be so stubborn as to believe in only some ways while rejecting others. 

What then of silence? It is for good reason that I brought up monasticism. More so, that I brought up the Desert Fathers for they lived in the Egyptian Desert. There is really no one, no creature, no insect. It is almost completely silent. And out of that silence we see people flock to receive counsel. We should continue to pray for ourselves for this suffering from anything. But we should strive to do so from a quiet heart, one that does not attempt to prod and poke with the right words to get an answered prayer. Sometimes (most of the time) the answer is silence.

We can read the verses of The Holy Spirit being the comforter, and thereby dismiss the real need for others in our lives, but we can only do this with the great denial of most of the Christian world and most of our religion's history. To do so, we would have to look at the beliefs of a handful of Christians whose beliefs themselves broke off from the original liturgical belief structure of the proto-reformers. It is also the Holy Spirit that gives us what we should speak. It is also through the Holy Spirit that St. Peter says that scripture is not given over to private interpretation (2 Peter 1:20). The Church, literally "the gathering" is the foundation and pillar of all truth (1 Timothy 3:15). Let us therefore look to her in guidance of how we may navigate this life.

I fear that how we handle things will continue to produce a cultural illness, perhaps a by product of blind alliance to rationalism, perhaps the denial that almost nothing we do is out of pure rationalism, perhaps something else.