In my youth I was a fervent Evangelical christian. Preaching on street corners? Done it! Casting out demons? Done it! Raised the dead? Never risked it! You have the picture. You’ve probably seen or heard -and avoided- my latter day selves in a market square near you. Saint Paul wrote “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face.” (1 Cor 13:11) I saw so little in those days. Spiritual things were clear. If something was Good, it came from God. If it was Bad it came from the Devil. So simple! but not enough. After 40 years of “people work” that view doesn’t hold. I choose to see things differently.

I look back on my adolescent self with mixed feelings. My intentions. and motives were honest. I had something that I wanted others to know viz “The Gospel”. (I have capitalised those words intentionally. They have so many different meanings dependent upon one’s theological understanding. They translate as “Good news” which I like. It allows me to see their meaning in a very broad context. One which encompasses all manner of healing activity. Not least psychotherapy.)

These days I tend to avoid the street corner preachers. I’m never persuaded about their motives. It always feels to me that they are there to meet a need in themselves and are not really interested in Me. (St.Paul has a lot to answer for in his injunction “Woe is me if I preach not the gospel.” 1 Cor 9:16 !)

Moving to another Paul, I like this comment by Paul Tillich “Sometimes I think it is my mission to faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.” To that quote I want to add another, again by Tillich. He writes “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness…. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted’.” This goes to the heart of the quote I have chosen for the title of this blog written by a psychoanalyst, Mike Eigen in his book “The Psychoanalytic Mystic”. That therapy can be prayer and vice versa. In existential terms, what Tillich is saying is that in prayer, in our relationship with God and our fellow man, we learn that we are accepted. The same is true in therapy and other healing work, where we learn that we are accepted. I do not judge my patients. They trust me with their “Souls”, their psyche (psyche: breath, soul, mind, spirit, life.) We neither of us know where this journey will take us. We trust the process- and each other. We hope that it will lead to a place of acceptance. Again for both of us. (In much the same way that we hope that God is changed by his encounter with us. As the author of Hebrews puts it “We have not a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities… ” Heb. 4:15 )

If this were a sermon I would probably finish with either an “Amen” or “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Choose your ending. But both these seem to me to be a way of acknowledging our involvement in something that goes beyond words. They express the hope that what has been said will find a home in our psyche. Which is what any good therapist or preacher can ask for.