[Type here] 2 Graduate Theological Foundation Foundation Theology 2014 3 30th Anniversary Edition Foundation Theology 2014 4 Graduate Theological Foundation Foundation Theology 2014 5 30th Anniversary Edition Foundation Theology 2014 Faculty & Student Essays for Ministry Professionals 30th Anniversary Edition Edited by John Moses ______________________ Graduate Theological Foundation 6 Graduate Theological Foundation Foundation Theology 2014: Faculty & Student Essays for Ministry Professionals 30th Anniversary Edition Edited by John Moses Copyright © 2014 All Rights Reserved Published by the Graduate Theological Foundation Mishawaka, Indiana 46544 USA Copy Editor: Lotus A. Wollschlager Printed in the United States of America on recycled paper made from post-consumer waste. Foundation Theology 2014 7 30th Anniversary Edition Contents Editor’s Note 9 Special Note on the 30th Anniversary of Foundation Theology 15 I Have Dreamed a Dream… 17 Howard Avruhm Addison Blessed are the Single-Hearted: On Doing the One Thing Necessary 41 Dennis J. Billy Pastoral Nurture through Psychotherapeutics: Opening Pathways for Wholeness and Connection within a Companioning Relationship 57 Beatrice H. Broder-Oldach Catholic Priests and Their People: Changing Dynamics 75 David B. Couturier Logotherapy & Existential Analysis: A Meaning-Centered & Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy (Applicable Across Clinical Settings) 93 Marie S. Dezelic Cultivating Collaborative Compassion in Palliative Care: Applying Logotherapy in Healthcare 123 Gabriel Ghanoum Tradition and Traditions: Explorations in Ecumenism 141 Robin Gibbons 8 Graduate Theological Foundation Common Ground for the Common Good 161 C. Anthony Hunt Chaplaincy in Oncology Palliative Care 169 Diane Kreslins Marriage, Family and Sexuality across Ethical and Religious Divides 181 Ronald W. Langham The Spinning of the Webs: The Dynamic Processes of Culture and Religion and the Potential for Religio-Cultural Synergistic Synthesis 197 William Moneyhun Clergy Stress and Satisfaction in the Workplace: A Comparative Study of Four Christian Traditions 225 John H. Morgan Pastoral Logotherapy: Man’s Quest for Meaning in Life and Death Issues 241 Jeremiah N. Murasso Dominus Iesus and Catholic Ecclesiology 257 James F. Puglisi Women at Work: A Catholic Feminist Theological Perspective 279 Barbara Riviello-Guerin About the Editor 299 Contributors 301 Foundation Theology 2014 9 30th Anniversary Edition Editor’s Note It is one of the great strengths of GTF that it draws its students from many traditions of faith. There are commitments and preoccupations which properly belong to our individual communities, but there is in my experience a growing awareness of the priority of the religious dimension to which our many traditions bear their distinctive witness. It remains the case, however, that the prevailing climate of opinion is profoundly sceptical – and at times indifferent – to the claims of faith. This situation is to be found in its most extreme form throughout much of Western Europe, but we deceive ourselves if we do not recognise the degree to which the adherents of all the world’s great religions are made to feel in so many situations that they are working against the grain. It is a commonplace to suggest that predictable responses are no longer sufficient. The accumulated problems of globalization, population explosion, urbanization, migration, environmental hazards poverty and international terrorism speak of a changing world order in which traditional words, traditional approaches, all too often lack a cutting edge. These things provide a global backcloth, but – nearer home – it is impossible not to take serious account of the moral vacuum in which lives are led, judgements formed and decisions taken. Those who are caught up day by day in the work of ministry – while they might properly rejoice in the good things that can be found wherever we look – know all too well the situations of despair where men, women and children find themselves increasingly alienated both from their true selves and from the world. 10 Graduate Theological Foundation Is there a word of hope, however, which is common to our several faith communities which enables theologians and pastors and evangelists to hold the faith in uncertain times and to do so with a quiet confidence in the God who transcends all our traditions? I believe there is, and l suggest that it might be found in what all traditions of faith – and not just the Abrahamic faiths – recognise as the desert tradition. The desert, of course, is not merely a place. It is a type of religious experience. The emptiness and the silence of the desert speak of the isolation and the desolation to which some are condemned at particular times. It tells of the struggle to survive. It brings its own predicaments and temptations. It involves a confrontation with the ‘devils’ within. I have been drawn back in recent years to consider again the importance of the desert tradition through my reading of Thomas Merton*, for whom the story and the wisdom of the desert provided the connecting thread that drew together his vocations as Trappist monk, writer, contemplative, social critic and ecumenist. It may well be that the physical desert has become a symbol of God-forsakenness, of emptiness, of abandonment; but the desert is both a place of testing and a place of truth. It speaks above everything else of the priority of God. There are other writers who, drawing upon a range of experiences, speak of the importance of these things. T.S. Eliot, writing in the aftermath of the First World War, captured in The Waste Land the sense of futility felt by a whole generation that had known ‘the agony in stony places’. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, drawing upon his bitter experiences of the labour camps of Soviet Russia, discerned a place ‘beyond despair’, where those who endure the desolation of the spirit discover that God might yet be found. R.S. Thomas, the Welsh priest-poet, explored constantly throughout his * John Moses’ book on Thomas Merton, written to mark the centenary of his birth, was published by Bloomsbury, together with a Foreword by Rowan Williams, in the summer of 2014 under the title DIVINE DISCONTENT: The Prophetic Voice of Thomas Merton. Foundation Theology 2014 11 30th Anniversary Edition poetry in his honest, sombre way the perennial experience of the presence and the absence of God, of the apparent emptiness of prayer. The desert takes many forms and those who work in the barren deserts of contemporary life will be familiar with all that it means in practice for people today; and yet the word hope remains the appropriate word in the desert experience because it speaks of the hidden life, of endurance, of testing, of self-abandonment, of the silent prayer of the spirit. Faith communities that understand the tradition of the desert will know what it means to hold the faith in obscurity and in silence, living with our brokenness and our incompleteness, watching and waiting. There is, of course, a word of caution that must be given. Articles that speak of the priority of God can so easily be vacuous; but the desert tradition is too rigorous, too searching, for that to be allowed. What the desert might mean in practice will vary from person to person and from place to place; but some possibilities suggest themselves immediately. First, the desert – whatever form it might take – is a place where everything that is peripheral or superficial falls away. It follows that there must therefore be a renewed awareness of the present moment. There is a temptation for faith communities to be preoccupied with either the past or the future; and the activist tradition, which has been so dominant in the western world, does not necessarily provide the space in which the living God can be heard. The man or woman of faith will find that it is only those who can stop and be still, embracing the present moment with all its possibilities, who can discern life’s deepest rhythms, making the necessary connections between past, present and future, and discovering the perspective – honest, at times sobering, but also compassionate – which properly belongs to any authentic faith. The present moment is both a time of judgement and a time of promise. Secondly, the man or woman who encounters the desert learns very quickly that the conventional platitudes with which we console ourselves do not often survive the test. The desert experience requires 12 Graduate Theological Foundation us to acknowledge the limitations of all definitions of faith. Authentic faith – like the authentic freedom we require for our own personal development – requires an openness of mind, which engages freely with life as it presents itself. Over-confident affirmations of faith can be seriously deceptive. Nor is it any longer sufficient to give answers to the questions we think men and women ought to be asking. Life is not so simple. What the desert requires is a new awareness, a new empathy, a new recognition of how much we still have to learn from others. Scripture, tradition and reason – together with our received patterns of prayer – continue to be important boundary markers, but the God whom we seek goes before us and invites us to follow. Thirdly, the desert leaves us in no doubt about our dependence upon others: for the necessities of life, for companionship, and for the affirmation of a common calling. Why else has the giving of the humblest hospitality to other desert travellers been so important? The desert is then able to open hearts so that we begin to look beyond ourselves and see humankind as one family, one world. It is one of the least attractive features of the contemporary scene that nation states, ethnic groups, and even communities of faith define themselves far too frequently by their separation from one another with the distortions, the caricatures and the scapegoating that inevitably follow. Men and women of faith – regardless of their particular community of faith – are supremely well placed, if only they can draw upon the desert tradition, to speak of the need for a broader vision, a deeper compassion, even perhaps for us today of the need for a global awareness, a global vision, a global ethic.