Have you ever noticed that we describe ourselves in the terms that we expect our listeners to be interested in or understand. I'm not talking here about the fact that we talk about different things to different people, but rather that we describe the same issue differently when we talk to different people.
So we visit our doctor, and describe how we have so many headaches and are tired all the time. Next we talk to our therapist about being depressed. Then we talk to our vicar and say how hard we are finding it to pray. And then we come home and talk to our family and say how much we are missing our close friend, who died recently.
And so the doctor prescribes pain relief and something to help us sleep, the therapist helps us to change the train of thought that runs round in our head, the vicar talks about God being present even when we don't feel it, and the family member shares in our tears.
But if these are all expressions of the same issue - bereavement, in the simple example above - then no-one is hearing or understanding the whole. Who can we talk to without presenting just one facet of our experience; without limiting ourselves to the presumed realm of interest of our listener? And who is there that will listen openly to all that we are experiencing?
We live in a world where each professional is only an expert in some tiny fragment of human experience. But it's not just professionals' spheres of expertise that have become fragmented. I wonder whether this has led to our conceiving of our internal experience in equally fragmented ways. We subconsciously categorise our experience against some matching taxonomy: 'physical experience', 'mental or psychological experience', 'spiritual experience' - as if these are different and disconnected!
And by the time we have talked to all these different people and got such different kinds of help, we have almost certainly lost sight of the fact that they are merely facets of the one issue, and we wonder why all of these different problems have come along at the same time!
I am a therapist, so I would rather like to think that the therapist in my example above would do a better job than implied. Except that, by and large, most therapists don't 'do' God; they have got rather too sucked into the medical/psychological model of understanding mental distress, and so exclude the spiritual. Sadly, therefore, I am not confident that the answer lies in therapy.
I am also a Christian, so would really like to think that the answer lies in church. But, very sadly, my experience is that many Christians don't 'do' listening. I know that the kind of listening that is needed is difficult, and is in fact very rare to find anywhere. But how sad if it's not to be found at church. If churches do want their members to be open about the whole range of their experience, then this first needs modelling from the front (see: Who sets the agenda?) and we need to show a genuine interest in more than just "spiritual" things in church.
But perhaps the crucial question is this: when we come to God in prayer, what do we say then? What do we include and exclude? What do we assume that God is interested in? The trouble may be that we simply present a version of what we say to the vicar, somehow assuming that God is (only) interested in 'spiritual' things.
But, thanks to Jesus, surely God does understand and is interested in the whole of us - body, mind and spirit - the three in one? Where better can we go?
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