Wonderful Counsellor
I was 26 when I left my work as a country parson to take up the prestigious position as the Minister of Cheltenham Church of Christ Victoria. This Church had the reputation of being a very large and alive Church. But that was a mirage. The reality was quite different as this young country parson was soon to discover. The life of a suburban Minister has some real surprises.
I had not long settled in to the suburban ministry at Cheltenham when there was a knock on the door one night. She was an old, defeated-looking woman with grey haired and stooped shoulders who introduced herself as Mrs. Shauna O’Grady. From her accent I realised that she had come from Ireland, probably Northern Ireland. She was wondering if I could help her. I ushered her into my study by the front door. She came to the point immediately. “My only daughter hates me. She loves her daddy, but her daddy died eight years ago and ever since that time it has been nothing but a battlefield. She really hates me. Her daddy was wonderful. Oh, he was wonderful, and she dearly loved her daddy. But somehow or other she seems to blame me for her daddy’s death and she tells me I am too old, too crabby, just an old bag-of-bones school teacher who has no abilities as a mother.” She was a sad, defeated lady and I could not understand how a child could be so cruel to her mother who had only this one child and she being a widow.
I spoke to her at some length and she left the house somewhat encouraged. I arranged to visit her for a second interview and then to visit her young daughter Megan.
Megan was a surprise. I had understood she was only a young girl who did not seem to fit in with the aged mother, but she was in fact twenty and a very strong willed, spirited young woman. On my first visit she announced she was leaving home. She could no longer stand living with that “old crotchety woman who calls herself my mother”. I got nowhere with Megan. She seemed to be a very angular, spiteful and aggressive young woman. Furthermore she was about to leave on a trip to Europe where she was going to discover her roots in Ireland.
Over the next months while Megan was away I called regularly on Shauna and she enjoyed my visits. Not long afterwards she started to attend the Church and found a great deal of joy in sharing in morning worship and then becoming involved in some of the women’s activities. From time to time she brought me postcards that her daughter had sent just to let her know she was okay or else she needed some money. It seemed that Megan was having a good time. Then the postcards stopped coming and nothing was heard of Megan for months.
When Megan eventually came home she was in a dreadful state. Late at night Shauna called at my door and asked me to come urgently to see her daughter. She had been locked in her room crying all day and she had just had a dreadful explosion with her mother who eventually succeeded in getting her to unlock the door. I went with her immediately. It was about ten thirty at night. I was amazed when I saw Megan. She was just the opposite of the confident, aggressive, young woman who left for overseas. Instead she looked defeated, bitter, cynical and very cruel with her words.
I sat in her bedroom as she lay on the bed still sobbing and casting bitter aspersions on her mother. I signalled to Shauna to leave the room. I just sat there watching her for twenty minutes or maybe half an hour as she sobbed and occasionally burst into vitriolic condemnation of her mother. Very gently I started to ask her questions. “Which country did you like visiting most of all on your trip? What was Ireland like? Did you go all through Europe?” “Ireland was terrible.” The search for her roots led to nothing but bitterness and disappointment. She would never go to that country again but on the other hand I found her saying softer things about Europe. I decided to persist with my questioning about Europe to see if I could uncover the source of her bitterness. “You enjoyed France?” her response was “Only so so”. “Did you like Italy?” Again the same response. “Did you like Spain?” Again a negative response. “Did you go into Portugal?” At this she visibly stiffened and said nothing. “Was Portugal the most enjoyable country you visited?”
She sat up on the bed and looked at me. “It was absolutely wonderful.” I decided to try a line of direct questioning. “Was that where you met him?” She looked at me from the corners of her eyes. “How did you know?” she asked. I decided to persist. “Was he Portuguese?” She nodded. “What did he do for a living?” She muttered “He was a fisherman”. “Did you fall in love with him?” She nodded. “Was he married?” She nodded. “Did you make love?” She nodded. “Did you become pregnant?” She nodded. “Did he refuse to marry you?” She nodded. “Did you have an abortion?” She nodded. There was long, long pause and then she looked up. “It wasn’t what you think it was. It was beautiful. We really loved each other only his wife wouldn’t get a divorce. He promised he would marry me but his wife wouldn’t let him go. He told me I just had to go but I stayed for three months in the village but he wouldn’t see me or speak to me again.”
I let a lot of time pass before coming back to another issue. “Why is it that you are so cruel to your mother?” “Because she never told me.” “Told you what?” “That I was adopted! It was only when I was in Belfast and met some of my relatives that one of them told me I was adopted. She meant to. She just assumed I knew. But I never knew. My mother and father had never said a word about it. They just came to Australia and brought me with them and never told me I was adopted. It was only when my auntie told me all the troubles they went to, to adopt me that I realised that I was adopted. They never told. In all the years, I always felt I was different, but they would never tell me. I just knew I was different. My mother never loved me. I was only adopted.”
Once again I let a lot of time go past while she sobbed and continued to make similar statements. I then said to her “Megan I have known your mother now for more than a year and she has spoken to me of her deep and abiding love for you. I thought you might have been adopted because once when she was talking to me she told me of all the difficulties that she and your father had in having children and that she was really quite past the age of child bearing when you came into the family. I never asked her but I guessed you might have been adopted. Megan, whatever has gone on before, the important thing is that you are an adult woman with a lot of experience in this world. In some ways probably more than your mother. You have to just make up your mind to act in a mature way towards the woman who has cared for you and looked after you for more than twenty years, who chose you from an orphanage to give you a better life and has dedicated herself to you.”
Sometime after midnight in the lounge room in Magill Street, I stood with the two women hugging each other, crying and asking forgiveness of each other and with my arms encircling them both giving thanks to God that mother and daughter had for the first time been reconciled.
The news of that reconciliation spread. Shauna O’Grady made sure it did spread. She told everyone of the incredible counselling that I had given to her and her daughter which brought them together after years of fighting and bitterness. The more Shauna told her story the more other people thought they might come and seek counselling from the Suburban Minister.
Within a year or two, every week my diary was filled with people who wanted counselling on various personal and family issues. One day one of the local doctors whom I’d met two or three times in the course of visiting people stood at the study door. Dr. Rockford Stewart, a brilliant young physician in our community who was studying for his Fellowship for the Royal College of Physicians said simply “I’ve come to ask you a favour. I’ve heard you’ve had some training in psychology and that you counselled many people when you were at the Aradale Mental Hospital. I’m wondering if you could help some of my patients. They come to me for counselling and I recognise their symptoms but we physicians have only had about half a dozen lectures on psychology. For me the problem of influenza or tonsillitis or appendicitis is easy but some of this human psychology is just sheer guess work. I’m wasting my time and their time trying to help them out. I’m wondering if I could send some of my patients to you who need some counselling?”
I told him I would be happy to counsel any of his patients whom he thought might be helped by being sent to me but in return I wondered if he would take some of the patients I was seeing who needed some good old fashioned tender loving care from a physician. He agreed to do that and very soon we had a fine cross referral of patients going on.
Then Dr. Gerald Duff, a long serving Catholic Doctor in our community asked me if I could discuss questions of the ethics of contraception with some of his patients. He said “All of my patients know what they can do but the real issue is whether they should; they want to talk out the issues of being Catholic and using contraception. Father Bracken would kill me if he knew I’d advised them to use contraception. But I don’t suppose that would matter if they came and spoke with you.” So without meaning to I spent a lot of time counselling Catholic couples who had a conscience on the issue of contraception but nevertheless did not have any confidence in their ability to cope with additional children. In those days when there were no medical benefits or medicare such as we have today, Doctors did a lot of honorary work for the poor and I traded off some of the people who came to see me from Dr. Gerald Duff with the comment “I’ll do a deal with you Dr Duff. I’ll talk to your couples if you’ll do some calls on some of my elderly who need some medical care.” Dr Duff readily agreed and so I handled the conscience issue of contraception and he handled the issue of tender loving care.
It was at this time as a suburban minister that I realised that the lectures I had attended at Melbourne University and the Churches of Christ Theological College on psychology were not enough for some of the advanced problems that I was facing.
So I undertook courses in psychology at the Cairn Miller Institute under a magnificent group of psychiatrists. I then attended a course at Melbourne University in psychotherapy under the leadership of the famous American psychotherapist Dr. Freda Fromm Reichmann. I remember discussing a case with her after a lecture and asking her how long she would take to work through the issues in this counselling matter which was troubling me, which was very complex and which was taking a lot of my time. She was swift with her answer. “In a counselling issue like this I would anticipate spending at least two hundred hours with the patient”. She suddenly put my counselling into better perspective and I realised that some of the difficult people I was speaking with needed much more time than I had been giving them.
At the same time I was reading all I could on psychology and in particular the relationship between psychology and religion.
We were particularly blessed at that time to have an outstanding Methodist psychologist Dr L. Carrington giving lectures to the community. Another great leacturer was Dr. E. Cunningham Dax was the head of the mental hygiene department and his lectures expanded my knowledge and confidence in counselling people. And the books that began to fill my library shelves in those days continued to improve my skills as a counsellor. Particularly Dr Leslie Weatherhead, whose books “Psychology in the Service of the Soul”, “Psychology in Life”, “The Mastery of Sex through Psychology and Religion”, “Prescription for Anxiety”, and his masterpiece “Psychology, Religion and Healing” opened up for me very powerfully ways in which I could positively and helpfully counsel people with deeper needs. These were supplemented by more than a dozen books by the famous Swiss Christian Psychiatrist Dr Paul Tournier. Every book was read, marked and digested thoroughly. They stood alongside the writings of Jung and Sigmund Freud whose work “The Interpretation of Dreams” had meant so much to me as a student.
The load of people desiring counselling continued and my appointment book was filled up weeks in advance. I started making case notes of scores of people who had come to me for help. These notes were not for the use of anyone else but simply to record my approach with them and to enable me to ask myself questions such as When was I best able to help them? What were their common symptoms? What passages of scripture brought best results?
Everyone who came for a counselling session was sent away with an assignment. They had to work at a relaxing therapy which I would write out for them or they had to undertake confidence-boosting exercises or they had to write lists of personal and hidden sins which were then destroyed. At the same time that they were watching the list of sins being flushed down the toilet, they had to take into their own soul the fact that their sins had been taken away from them through God’s forgiveness. I wrote on cards spiritual exercises for people to undertake and then the following week at the next interview they would bring me their assignments completed. Many people found that they needed to do something like this in order to concentrate the mind and not allow the lessons learned in an hour of counselling to evaporate. I needed it as well so that I wouldn’t fall into the trap of being just a giver of advice.
As the work-load in counselling developed I realised that I would need to develop two new approaches to counselling. The first was what I called “counselling as preaching”. This was something totally new to me but which had been suggested by a study of the sermons of Norman Vincent Peale. People who don’t know this amazing American’s pastoral record tend to think of Norman Vincent Peale simply as the person who put together the “Power of Positive Thinking” but Peale was a past master at taking common problems and then preaching on those problems so that hundreds of people could be counselled at the same time. In fact through his television and radio talks each week he was counselling more than a million people at any one time on a common issue.
As a suburban minister I started to develop my sermons along the line of counselling as preaching. I would take a common experience – say, the sense of inferiority or a person’s lack of confidence, or a person’s uncertainty about how to cope with stress – and then develop the symptoms for causes and then look at the scriptural passages concerned with such issues, and then in turn from the scripture how we could cope with such an issue. I suddenly found these sermons really gripped people. Hundreds of people wrote letters and made comments about how they had been personally helped. I brought a great deal of insight from the pastoral care of the church into the role of preaching and developing the scriptural passages and looking at how the scripture guides us in coping with our deepest needs. Letters began to arrive in great numbers saying how for the first time people saw the relevance of scripture, saw their lives being changed because of what the scripture had to say in their particular hour of need.
I preached sermons on how to control fear, calm anxiety, handle anger and aggression, dissolve frustration, defeat depression, strengthen inner weakness, cope with pressure and so on.
Rev. Dr. Gordon Powell who was in St. Stephen’s Church, Macquarie Street, Sydney wrote a most encouraging letter that inspired me to go on. I then brought together some of these sermons and published them as little booklets. Thousands sold every month. Soon a hundred and fifty thousand of them had been sold. A number of these sermons I brought together in a book “The Secret of Confident Living” to which Alan Walker wrote the foreword and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale wrote to me “I have read with admiration your inspired book ‘The Secret of Confident Living’ and I am impressed by the wisdom, sound guidance and the creative inspiration which it contains. This book has the thought substance and the motivational quality to make it a truly indispensable aid to successful living.” My preaching found wings. People asked me to preach on various topics and requested that I show from the Bible further practical aid to Christian living.
I followed this by a series of sermons on how to create a positive personality, looking at the issues of self esteem, self control, self motivation, self image, self discipline and the like. Little booklets on these subjects sold by the tens of thousands and the book “Be A Winner – How to Create a Positive Personality” soon sold out. This was followed by another series which was also made into a book, called “Confidence in time of Trouble.”
I had discovered, as preachers had before me, that the Bible is living when it is applied to the personal problems faced by people. I also found that as a counsellor much work could be done not just one-on-one but talking to hundreds of people about the same issue at the same time.
The second thing I discovered was the importance of equipping counsellors from the congregation. The counselling load by now had become impossible for one man to carry. We already had three or four other ministers working in the ministry team at Cheltenham but I still couldn’t manage the load myself. But in the congregation I discovered people who were school teachers, a headmaster, a person trained in marriage guidance, two people who worked for a vocational employment service, two other people who were personnel managers in a large firm, a bank accountant who had extensive training in helping people cope with financial problems and between them these sixteen members undertook with me basic counselling courses, then used the skills they gained through their work to help provide counselling to people in our community.
Hence my role changed. I would now meet with people who wanted counselling, listen and redirect them to an appropriate specialist from the congregation. It would be my resource, my responsibility to get the resources so that we built a strong team of counsellors and then equipped and trained them.
As this work reached its height I concluded my thirteen year ministry in the Cheltenham Church of Christ and came to be Superintendent of Wesley Mission. There the same policy needed to be put into practice. Now through radio and television I would be speaking each week to hundreds of thousands of people across the nation. Many would come for counselling, so many that it would be impossible for one man. So I would listen and redirect them to specialists who were on our staff and trained counsellors from among our ministers. At Wesley Mission we employ a number of Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Marriage Guidance Counsellors and have over four hundred trained counsellors helping people cope with the pressures of life. It would be my responsibility to get resources and help to minister with such counselling.
So we have developed LifeLine to large new counselling premises, developed CreditLine and YouthLine, Street programs and other specialised counselling programs. We have built Wesley Hospital and purchased Wandene Hospital. These are the only free standing psychiatric Hospitals conducted by the Protestant Church anywhere in Australia. We have assembled one of the largest teams of psychiatrists to provide professional services to people in need. And it would be my task to train others in the arts of counselling. My series of twenty four lectures, “Counselling with the Insights of Jesus” has now been conducted more than forty times, each of these courses taking more than five months, to run and in doing so have trained and accredited more than two thousand counsellors.
When Jesus was to be born it was said by Isaiah that “His name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Prince of Peace.” In all the years of teaching “Counselling with the Insights of Jesus” I have come to realise what a wonderful Counsellor Jesus was, how practical His teaching is at helping people handle daily pressures and stresses, and what a difference this Wonderful Counsellor can make in the lives of people who turn to Him in time of trouble.
When Shauna O’Grady stood at my door and asked if I could help because of the way her daughter hated her, she was starting me on a suburban minister’s quest to become a Counsellor on behalf of Jesus.
That night in my study I spent some time writing up my journal and looking out of the window at the never ending stream of cars stopping at the traffic lights at the corner of Nepean Highway and Chesterville Road, that wide intersection that was dominated by the lovely white Church with the high white tower noting down the events of another day as a suburban minister.
GORDON MOYES