Appendix C: Ministry Experience Reports (Example 2)

Example 2

Background Information

The following conversation is a small part of several hours of discussion that took place between my wife and me and my parents during a three-day visit at my parents' home in Seattle two weeks ago. My wife and I decided to make the trip specifically to repair a severely damaged relationship with my parents that had been making our own relationship difficult for many years. Darlene and I had been working with a marriage counselor for many months, and had discovered that a major obstacle to improving our relationship lay in our feelings toward by parents and their feelings toward us.

Darlene had long felt a deep sense of rejection by my father, and I had grown to resent that, as well as her consequent rejection of him. In addition, my parents seemed to feel that we wanted little to do with them. These feelings had been suppressed for years but, of course, managed to manifest themselves periodically in many ways, which had led to bitterness and suspicion in our dealings with my parents and anger between Darlene and me.

Through our work in counseling, Darlene and I were able to break through my denial of the problem. We were able to talk frankly about it and discovered that to at least get healthy ourselves, if not repair the relationship with my parents, we had to express how we felt about the original incident and how we feel today.

The incident described here is but one of many that caused problems, but seems to be the most crucial.

My parents are strong, life-long Roman Catholics. My father is a proud man. Mom tends to be passive; she often defers to my father. Darlene is a life-long Lutheran. I joined the Lutheran Church after we were married.

The incident referred to in the dialogue occurred more than 20 years ago. Darlene and I had courted for two years, from 1966 to 1968, while I was a student at Minnesota. I was drafted into the Army in 1968, and we decided to get married during my Christmas leave. Initially Darlene had tried to arrange for a Catholic priest to participate in the wedding, but for his own reasons, the Catholic priest she spoke to refused to take part in the ceremony. She then made arrangements with her family's Lutheran church.

My father was outraged. He tried several times to stop the wedding and, by telephone, verbally abused and threatened Darlene. Our wedding took place in a Lutheran church. My parents attended reluctantly. For several years after that my father would occasionally pull me aside and ask when we would be married "in the (Catholic) Church."

This dialogue involved Darlene and my father. It was a small but important part of our discussions, as the incident referred to formed the foundation for Darlene's feelings toward my father and was a crucial and painful incident in our early lives together. Just preceding this dialogue, Darlene had explained that she found many things about Catholicism un-Christian—mostly in its rigidity, seeming intolerance, inability to accept the whole human being, and failure to be there when people need the church the most.

Dialogue

Father: Darlene, are you saying that you hate the Catholic Church and me for being Catholic?

Darlene: No. Let me try to explain how I feel. I have several Catholic friends. I like them very much. Their being Catholic is not a problem for me. I think that while I find it difficult to understand how they can agree with or believe some things about the Catholic Church I find incompatible with being fully human, that doesn't interfere with my friendship. They don't impose those beliefs on me or use them to interfere with my life. When you threatened to stop our wedding and so abusively threatened me, I saw it as you rolling up your religion into a stick and wounding me with it. The message I got was that my church was not good enough, that I was not good enough—somehow sinful—and that you rejected me.

Father: Darlene, I hope you can understand this. When Catholics marry, they make a promise to raise their children in the Catholic Church. It is wrong for a Catholic to marry outside the Catholic Church. At that time I believed that part of my responsibility to my son and to my church was to make sure he didn't make a grievous error, to make sure he married in the Catholic Church.

Mother: Sam, you went too far!

Darlene: I have never felt accepted by you as your daughter-in-law. It hurts terribly.

Father: Darlene, I apologize for causing you such anguish. I did what I believed was my responsibility at that time. I hope you understand that it was not a personal attack, but rather how I view my responsibility to my religion.

Darlene: I understand what you are now telling me and one of the things I must work on is accepting your unquestioning adherence to your religion without regard to how it is wounding your human relationships.

The Dynamic Reflection

I believe that without God's grace Darlene and I would not have found the courage to go to my parents and try to heal the relationship. We were there hoping to communicate our feelings honestly, without blame, and to achieve understanding of my parents' feelings. I think that we were somewhat successful in achieving a mutual understanding of one another. Much work remains for us to do about acceptance.

Theological Reflection/Self-Critical Appraisal

The dialogue illustrates for me some of the contrasts between what the role of the church should be and the dangers of religious rigidity. My father exemplifies how the Catholic Church is able to create unquestioning obedience to rules that are just, after all, man-made. Religious self-righteousness can create great suffering. In contrast, I see the openness and conscious desire for growth at our congregation as an acceptance of all people as they are, not as man-made rules have deemed they "should" be—acceptance as fellow members, part of the family of Christians.