How are we to respond to our fellow Christians when they lapse morally? How do we relate to them? In light of my article last time on infidelity, how should we respond to someone we know who has committed infidelity; someone who has done great harm to their loved one?
Galatians 6 tells us that we, "who have received the Spirit" (Gal 6:1 NRSV) should restore those who have erred "in a spirit of gentleness". We are warned "not to be conceited" (5:26), nor to think ourselves something, lest we deceive ourselves (6:3). We are further called to share one another's burdens.
Last weekend I was running a weekend intensive with a group of 30 students who are training to be Christian counsellors, a weekend where the students are required to examine themselves in the spirit of Psalm 139, inviting God to show them any deceit in their hearts. One of the purposes of the weekend is to allow the students to know and examine their owns areas of sensitivity, wounding and sinfulness. The ethos of the course is that it is unethical to require clients to be open and vulnerable about their inner lives if the counsellor has not been prepared to expose themselves to the same scrutiny.
In the final reflections, after three days of prayer, self examination, tears, laughter and lots of coffee, one of the students commented to us, the trainers, "because you were prepared to be open and vulnerable about your own lives and failings, I was encouraged and able to look at myself honestly, to let myself go to deeper places than I would normally". This willingness to be a fellow traveller with someone who is struggling with difficult issues seems to me to be part of the message of Galatians 6, that we recognise our own struggles and weaknesses and be responsible for that, as we move alongside another who may have slipped morally.
One way that we can be the fellow traveller is to "present" to another. Neil Pembroke in The Art of Listening - Dialogue, Shame and Pastoral Care examines Gabriel Marcel's concepts of what genuine participation with each other really is. Pembroke says,
"What one brings to a genuine encounter is not first and foremost an ensemble of communication techniques, but one's-self (Marcel's term referring to the self of an individual), and to be more precise, the depth one has to share. The depth one has to share develops through a wholehearted engagement with others, with life and with God."
He expands the notion of a genuine encounter in pastoral care contexts, arguing that true pastoral care must be founded on more than empathy and acceptance, and must extend to what he describes as "compassionate understanding". He describes how this means that the pastoral carer in some way takes on the pain of the other and takes it within themselves. Is this what is required of us in the Galatians passage - being fully present to the other, as we aware of our own depths? Then, by sharing in the pain of their distress which we draw inside ourselves, we are bearing another's burden. It is when we are in this place of genuinely knowing ourselves and our weaknesses, and truly feeling the other's distress, that we are more likely to treat the philanderer with the gentleness of someone mending fishing nets (as the Greek word for "restore" is sometimes used for), to share their burden and so "fulfil the law of Christ" (6:2).
