For Some, Spiritual Counseling Shows the Path to Take

This week, Sister Rose Mary Dougherty kept her regular appointments with the men and women she sees once each month for spiritual counsel. Some of them have been coming to her for years. Usually, they air their personal questions and concerns. Lately, says Dougherty, “everyone wants to talk about the terrorist attack.” They need help making sense of it in ways that go beyond fear and anger.

Dougherty, a Catholic nun, is part of a network of trained counselors around the country who are in the business of guiding people through life’s daily challenges. Not with 12-step recovery programs or problem-solving therapy, but by looking at events from a spiritual perspective.

Sometimes, such counselors work one-on-one. Other times they meet with small groups. The conversation can be about personal details or world events, but the basic goal does not change. “I always go back to the same question,” Dougherty says. “Where is God in this, and how am I responding?”

Not all spiritual counselors are Christians, of course, nor would they all put the goal in the same words. But every religion appoints lay members or clergy to provide guidance about the spiritual component of members’ everyday lives. These counselors are being called upon now more than ever in the wake of recent tragic events.

The point of their work isn’t so much to help others figure out what to do next. “Rather than jump in and try to make it go away,” says Dougherty, program director at the Shalem Institute retreat center in Maryland, “I ask people if they have made time to sit with the news for a while and pray over it. Sometimes, a person has felt the urge to do something but hasn’t done it yet. In that case I ask what keeps them from taking steps.”

The first thing Dougherty did after the attacks was to close her office door for a few minutes each day in order to take time to remember the families of the victims. “It’s not problem solving,” she says of her work. “It’s more just being with God when there are problems, watching for any sense of new life inside us.”

Betsy Barber, an Evangelical Christian psychologist on the faculty of Biola University in La Mirada, offers spiritual counsel as part of her work. In the first few days after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, every person she meets with monthly shared a fear of dying.

“There is the question of how to die well, and, therefore, how to live well,” Barber told them. “Living well gets specific and concrete.” She pointed out a few ways to appreciate life. “My bed is warm and comfortable. In the morning, my coffee is hot on my tongue, and it feels good.”

As a result, several in Barber’s group took time to mend fences: one ended a family feud, another canceled an arbitration proceeding. “The letters and phone calls said, ‘I forgive you’ or ‘Please forgive me,”’ Barber explains. “Terrorism sharpened people’s focus, their priorities. Forgiveness has become a theme.”

Barber does not offer a lot of specific advice. “All I do is try to help a person pick up on what’s going on inside,” she says. “I’m a companion, watching for movements and changes within them.”

At the Zen Meditation Center in Los Angeles, the Rev. Kusala, a Buddhist monk who leads a weekly meditation group, said fate and destiny are now the center of conversation.

“Did the people who died have bad karma?” members of Kusala’s Wednesday night meditation group asked. He answered with a Buddhist teaching, that bad things happen for different reasons, including weather conditions and genetic disposition, not just karma.

“People weren’t getting the meaning of the event,” Kusala says. “Finally we came to this: Revenge and hatred only increase the suffering.” He gave them a loving-kindness meditation that he often uses. “May I be happy, peaceful and free from suffering,” it begins. The last lines ask for “patience ... to overcome the inevitable ... failures in life.”

A Hollywood screenwriter in Kusala’s group said his usual worries seemed smaller after last week’s gathering. “Before the attacks,” says Tom Hietter, “meditation was about working through my fear as a writer and having confidence. Now, it allows me to purge my feelings about those planes slamming into the World Trade Center. It’s hard to keep your spiritual grounding when violence is shoved in your face.”

Violence changed the conversation in a women’s Torah study group, as well. Last spring, the six-woman group began to read the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, searching for specific insights into their lives. “Earlier, the questions have been about why we resist change, or why we get stuck in our creative efforts,” says Tamar Frankiel, an Orthodox Jew who teaches religion at UC Riverside. She leads the women’s group at her home. Evil became the subject of the latest meeting.

One woman admitted with embarrassment that she is fascinated with evil. Another said she worries because she is often blind to it, even when it is right in front of her. Talking together, the reality sank in. “We looked at terrorism as the ultimate evil,” Frankiel says. “We looked at megalomania and how it affects people.

“We all say these gatherings are extremely helpful because of the bottled-up feelings we all have inside of us. Often someone will say that as a result of our gatherings, they’ve made a change. Counseling suggests that you’re telling somebody what to do, but I’m never sure what I do. I just try to empower people.”