Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our April Association of Catholic Mental Health Ministries webinar. We are so glad that you've joined us today.
Um, Beth Lobsey is our presenter. She is the Program Director for the Fiat Program on Faith and Mental Health at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame. Beth leads the McGrath Institute's efforts to generate pastoral research, education, and formation opportunities on mental health and the Catholic tradition.
As a mental health counselor, Beth has provided therapeutic care for adolescents and adults with histories of trauma and adverse childhood experiences. Her therapeutic approach is integrative, attending to neural developmental influences and the intersection of spirituality and psychology. Beth obtained her Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Divine Mercy University and pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford in Christian Ethics.
Beth and her husband, Pete, treasure their community in South Bend, Indiana, and delight in visits back to the great outdoors of her hometown in Wyoming. So, I'm going to very shortly turn things over to Beth, but I want to let everyone in our audience know that there is no chat feature for the webinar. Instead, we have the Q&A option, and please submit questions throughout the presentation.
In our last 10 to 15 minutes, Beth will do her best to answer those questions. Thank you so much. Wonderful, Jen, thank you so much, and thanks to all of you for being together today.
Um, it is truly a great joy to join with you, and I've just for a long time now admired the work of the Association for Catholic Mental Health Ministers of Eugene and of Deacon Ed. I am so happy to get to grow in friendship as we seek to support each of you who are ministering within the church and building cultures of care for those who experience mental illness and for their loved ones. So, I'm going to go ahead and start screen sharing, and as we begin today, I'd like to invite us to begin in prayer.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Come, Holy Spirit.
Lord God, as we begin our dialogue together today, we ask that we might be humbly responsive to the promptings of your Spirit and the invitations within our hearts to grow in a spirit of charity and in those infused virtues of faith and hope in the ways in which we love and care for one another, for your body present in our midst today. I'll just read a few of the words of Psalm 127: "Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it. Unless the Lord guardeth the city, in vain does the guard keep watch.
It is vain for you to rise early and put off your rest at night, to eat bread earned by hard toil. All this God gives to his beloved in sleep. " Lord God, in the work of ministry and in our lives, and work and in family life, we can often feel wearied.
We can feel as though we're toiling under the burdens of this time and amidst our efforts to care for those who are suffering. Help us, Lord, to never put off the sleep, the rest of which the psalmist speaks—the rest that is afforded through being with you in prayer and attending to your loving presence in our lives. We ask that through our growth in relationship with you, we might grow in our relationship with one another to live more fully the communion to which you call us.
Amen. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Well, friends, um, that's one of my very favorite Psalms, and I find that it reminds me of what is my work and what is not my work, offering a certain opportunity to come back to the Lord to be with Him in quiet and in prayer as we seek to steward the various vocations that He has entrusted to us. So with that, I hope that our time together today can be a moment of silence and of stillness, though I will do some talking in the midst of silence, but a moment of stillness wherein we can really reflect on what is our call in terms of building cultures of communion within our church through which our Lord can express His care for each of us. To get started, I thought I'd just share a little bit about the Fiat program on faith and mental health, which I have the real joy and honor of stewarding.
As Jen mentioned, the Fiat program is based at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, but we have the joy of being really outward-facing and working with so many who serve within the church, whether at the parish level or a diocesan level. Our effort is really to support you all in your work of care for those experiencing mental illness and their loved ones. So our overall vision with the program is to decrease experiences of isolation and despair among those who live with mental illness and their loved ones by strengthening parish cultures of communion and hope.
That's what we'll spend our time with today—really thinking through how do we do so. Being based at the McGrath Institute, we have the joy of being able to draw from the wisdom of certainly a number of faculty members in theology, neuroscience, and psychology, but also from the wisdom of the experience of those serving in ministry like you—all of the members of the body of Christ living with mental illness in their families. Through drawing upon this community of shared wisdom, it's really from that that we seek to inform research that speaks into the human condition.
And how our parish communities can be places of hope, and then to build educational offerings for undergrad students, for graduate students, and for those working in ministry, whether at the diocesan, parish, or volunteer level. So let's enter into our time together today and reflect on what it means to work in our role as ministers in strengthening a culture of communion and of hope within the Church. I thought I'd begin just with a few guiding thoughts for our reflection.
The first is that no one is immune from mental illness. Why would we begin here? Because certainly, we recognize that not all of us experience mental illness; however, we aren't immune from illness in the sense that we're all vulnerable as people.
We come to recognize, even theologically, that the human condition is wounded. When we think back on Genesis and the fall of Adam and Eve, there was a wounding of our nature as people. Prior to the fall, we recognize that creation was created in, through, and for perfect relationship—perfect relationship with God, with one another, with creation, and within our persons.
But with the fall, there was this rupturing of relationship, this damaging of relationship that made possible sin, patterns of sin, woundedness, and illness. When we think about the reality of illness today, I think many of us ask why. That "why" can be a hard question because it's one we often can't get to the bottom of—there is a mystery of how illness develops—but it does trace fundamentally back to the fact that we're all vulnerable as people, vulnerable to illness and to woundedness.
When thinking about mental health in particular, it's also important to note that there are various elements about our current way of life that press into our vulnerability as people. Something I never thought I would get into is the field of neuroscience. I think I tried to avoid any talk of neuroscience with a ten-foot pole; I always really struggled in science classes as a kid.
But the Lord is funny in how He draws us back to these areas because He's inviting us to grow in ways that can ultimately be expressed through our vocation. I began to learn some about neuroscience because it has helped me understand mental illness. One of the things we've learned from neuroscience is that we have certain basic needs as people.
Neuroscience calls these needs neurobiological needs or expectations. I don't know about you, but if I were to hear the term "neurobiological need," I would think, "Okay, we have a need for basic things like food, water, and housing. " However, what we've learned, especially in recent decades through neuroscience research, is that one of our most fundamental needs as people is the need for relationship.
And it's not just two-dimensional connection over Zoom; it's the need for rich, three-dimensional relationships where I'm sharing presence with another. This aligns pretty well with a lot of the understandings of our faith, right? When we think back, especially on Church teaching, we recognize this understanding of the person as formed in, through, and for love, formed in, through, and for relationship.
However, neuroscience also points out that when our neurobiological needs aren't met to the extent that they should be, it presses into our vulnerabilities as people and can either exacerbate experiences of illness or make it more difficult to manage those experiences of illness, particularly mental illness. When we think about our need for relationship and the present climate in which we're living, we can notice different ways in which our need for relationships isn't met to the extent that it should be. We've come through the pandemic, a time of deep isolation, which really exacerbated this vulnerability.
As my internet cut out, we were just talking about the need for relationship and the ways in which our current climate—in terms of experiences of isolation and loneliness—being more pronounced, presses into our vulnerability as people and makes it much more challenging for us to experience well-being, even in the midst of mental illness. As we think about that, I believe another really important insight that has emerged of late is just this identification that relationships are the most important contributor to well-being in the midst of illness. So, this isn't to say that strong, solid relationships will take away illness or mitigate the possibility of illness, but this is to say that we're finding having a thick fabric of relationships—of folks who we can rely on for support, with whom we can break bread, share meals, and pray together—are the most important in terms of helping us navigate much of the difficulty and the challenging symptoms that come with mental illness.
There was a book that came out, I think just last year, by a gentleman named Tom Insel. Insel had been the director of the National Institute of Mental Health for a number of years, and during his time there, he really dedicated the work of the organization to looking into the biochemical correlates for illness and appropriate medications. But here's the thing: when Insel finished up and authored this book, which he called *Healing*, he said the thing that he'd overlooked in all his years of work with the National Institute of Mental Health was the importance of relationship.
He said if we’re really going to provide. . .
Better support for helping folks live well amidst mental illness: we need to be thinking about how, within our communities, we can create a better fabric of social support. He was giving a nod, then, to the role of churches, to the role of families and just other civic organizations, and organic ways of developing relationships, and how important that is. Um, so, if this is to say anything, it's to encourage you in your work of ministry about how critical your role is and how important the role of relationship is.
So, Jen, we can go ahead and move on to the next slide, and thanks again. As we then think about this, I was reflecting on that old adage, "It takes a village. " Of course, we can think it takes a village when it comes to raising a child; that's how the adage is generally used.
But it also takes a village in terms of our care for one another. I was speaking with a mother recently who has a child with serious mental illness, and she said, "You know, it’s a shame how so often the burden of reaching out, the burden of reaching out to seek friendship, to seek support, is most often on those persons experiencing mental illness and on their families. " She said, "What would it mean if we were to shift that burden from those experiencing the suffering of mental illness, for whom it's often most difficult to reach out, and instead shift that burden to the broader community?
" I think this is really said so often within the richness of our church teaching. When Pope Francis talks about generating a culture of encounter, of going out to those on the margins, he's really uplifting this vision of taking that burden, which in reality is really a gift and responsibility, upon ourselves to reach out to one another. So, a question for us today is: how can our ministries become an avenue for reaching out, whereby we are really connecting with those and providing an opportunity for relationship?
But how can it be that we just don't end there? How can our ministries become an entryway to further shared life within the parish community? To share another narrative, one of my very, very close friends experiences serious mental illness.
As we were talking, and she was sharing some of her experience with me, she said that after she had her first experience of a psychotic break, she was very, very lonely and so hungry for friendship. She was reaching out to try to find friends, to try to find social support because thankfully she knew that she needed it. But what was tragic is that she had such a hard time finding it.
This experience ranged from when she was hospitalized for the first time; she called a number of churches to ask whether a priest could come visit her in the hospital. Unfortunately, she called upwards of 15 churches in the area before there was a priest who was able to come and visit her and bring her the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick. So, on the one hand, that really highlights an important avenue for further ministry development when we're thinking about care for persons who are hospitalized for mental illness.
But as she reflected further on her experience and coming home from the hospital, she said that she had such a struggle in terms of finding friends that she eventually went to a website, rent-afriend. com, just to find active companionship of folks who could be present with her. Now, she did also find several avenues within the church that were really important life springs for community.
Stephen's Ministry is a beautiful ministry; now, the association didn't yet exist at the time when this young woman was looking for friends. But, you know, I believe that all of your efforts are so crucial to providing that outreach and care in a way that then can become an entry point so that someone can find other avenues of community within a parish. The third point I think just to think through here is the importance of identifying what might be those current barriers to the possibility for relationship within a parish or a person who's experiencing mental illness, or a family of someone who's experiencing mental illness.
Because oftentimes, the intensity of isolation that can be experienced by a person with mental illness, by nature of the symptoms, often extends to the family. So how do we begin to think through and identify what the current barriers might be? I think one just deepening awareness and understanding of mental illness is an important starting point to overcoming some of those barriers, because certainly stigma can be a barrier.
You know, misplacing responsibility upon the person or upon the family for the development of symptoms in a way that just doesn't recognize the illness—it’s not directly causal, you know; it’s not the fault of any one of us. So, generating understanding, and then generating support, can be a way of addressing barriers. But are there other barriers in terms of an opportunity for someone to participate in parish programming?
We find oftentimes that a direct invitation versus just a public announcement in a bulletin can be a much more effective way of helping someone feel comfortable enough and welcomed enough to take part in a faith-sharing group or a support group. Another barrier can be simply around timing and logistics. Another friend of mine who experiences symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome expressed to me how much she longed for community and for friendship, particularly within a parish context.
Where she could pray with others, but that timing was a challenge, so the fact that many young adult groups were meeting in the evening—when the fatigue for her was most intense—raised the question: How do we also attune to some of those barriers around timing or location that might present unique difficulties for those who are isolated by the nature of an experience of mental illness? Jen will go ahead and transition to the next slide now. So, within this context, I do think it's a special moment of opportunity for us to reflect on the unique calling of us as a people to cultivate communion that ultimately reflects our Eucharistic communion.
What do we mean by that? Because I think there's a real invitation here for us to grow in an understanding of what it means to be one body within Christ. This verse from Saint Paul's letter to the Corinthians has been a great source of inspiration for us here with the Fiat program.
Saint Paul is reminding us that we are one body within Christ, and as such, when one member of the body is suffering, it's not a suffering that only belongs to that member; rather, it's a suffering in which we too are called to share. We too are invited to be in communion with them in the midst of that suffering. And all at once, there's an invitation to recognize avenues for kind of increased hope and healing by the nature of our communion with one another.
So, I think that reflecting on this vision of one body helps us to be especially attuned to the suffering of others, but it also helps us to be attuned to the invitation at hand for the healing that is possible through the church community. So, I'm going to pause and slow down right here, though, because healing is a term that I think is often misunderstood and, because of that, can sometimes be a source of deeper hurt or misunderstanding within the church. So, what do we mean by healing?
Well, I found myself asking that question a lot when we started the Fiat program, and I found that actually within the richness of our faith tradition, there's a much deeper, thicker understanding of healing than I'd previously thought. So, I, perhaps like many of you, had thought of healing primarily in terms of cure—the cure from illness or the cure from ailment. And we see within the Gospels rich accounts of miraculous cure that were brought about through Christ, and certainly our church tradition upholds this vision of healing.
Healing can and does include miraculous cure. But here's the thing: our vision of healing within the church is not limited to this understanding. And so, as I began to study more the works of the church fathers, I found that our faith tradition upholds a vision of healing as a movement from isolation, from alienation, toward a deepening relationship—toward a deepening experience of communion and community—of being one body.
How incredible this is, because it suggests to us that in this life, we may not experience healing as the complete cure from whatever is currently ailing us, but we can still experience healing through deepening relationships with others. So, there's an experience that, in the midst of this suffering, I'm not alone; there are others with me, walking with me, helping me to experience the presence of Christ with me. With that, I can have a newfound experience of hope and even of meaning and purpose—of an ability to still live my vocation in the midst of this illness and in the midst of this ailment.
That’s a vision of healing and of church community that we really seek to uplift through the Fiat program, which opens us up to the question of how we, as ministers, can walk with one another and accompany one another so that we experience not being alone in the midst of suffering—and so that we can help another to see themselves more fully as God sees them; as their identity, not being determined by or limited to their symptoms or their experience of suffering, but that they themselves have a gift to share with the world. And that our journey is part of helping them to identify and express that—and to share their gifts with the community. I think it's so important for us to always attune our gaze and to seek to conform our gaze more to the gaze of Christ, so that when we're walking with someone who experiences mental illness, we are not just seeing them according to their illness.
Because there's such a risk; there's such a tendency for those experiencing illness, for their own gaze, their own sense of self and identity to become collapsed into that diagnosis. So, how can we, when walking with them, see them more fully—with a gaze of curiosity and compassion—to be able to recognize those gifts that they have, and to help them to see their gifts and to share them with others? So, we’ll go ahead and transition to the next slide, Jen.
Particularly in this year, the Year of the Eucharistic Revival, I think that this is a special moment of opportunity for us to deepen our reflection on what it means to live as a Eucharistic people. We learn from our faith that the Eucharist is the source and summit of our identity as a people. The Eucharist is the fullest expression of this self-giving of Christ and of His desire and longing to enter into the fullness of communion with us.
So that just as we consume our Lord's body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharist, we enter more fully into His being one body. And in and through that, we. .
. Knit more fully into being one body with one another, I’ve shared here a beautiful reflection from Pope Benedict XVI, who in *Deus Caritas Est*, was reflecting on the Eucharist. He writes that worship, being Eucharistic communion, includes the reality of both being loved and loving others in turn.
He shares that a Eucharist that does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented. This has really been something for me to meditate on, and holding this with the vision of healing as a movement toward deepening communion with the body of Christ, I think it's a special invitation for us as ministers to ask how, within our respective ministries, we can help our parish communities live out a vision of community—a vision of care for one another—that ultimately reflects our Eucharistic communion as a people and also pours back into that Eucharistic communion, so that really there’s a breathing back and forth between our sacramental and our communal life as people. Jen, I will go ahead and transition to the next slide, but what does this all mean practically?
In the day-to-day life of your respective efforts of mental health ministry, whether at the parish, diocesan, lab level, or within a school system, how do we begin to nurture this vision of communion? I'm realizing that, in some sense, it's simple, but simple doesn't always mean easy, because the simplicity of it is that it begins and ends with relationship, and as such, it begins and ends with presence. One of the things that I talk about with my students when I teach undergraduate classes is that we're first and foremost human beings, not human doings.
Any effort of ministry must first begin with being present with the other. It's remarkable that neuroscience is now coming around to show us the importance of presence. So, I'll just share one neuroscience term here, but I promise it will be accessible and easy enough to understand.
In neuroscience, there's this concept of co-regulation. Let's break that down: “co” meaning with another, and “regulation. ” Neuroscience has helped us understand that the nervous system is really important to our emotional well-being, to how we regulate stress, and to how we experience day-to-day life.
The nervous system plays a key role in our management of symptoms in the midst of mental illness. Often, when experiencing mental illness and the challenges of the symptoms that come with it, our nervous system can be pretty over-activated—it can become excited through a stress response—or it can be under-activated, as we often see in terms of states that coincide with an intense experience of depression. What neuroscience has helped us understand is that regulating the nervous system, regulating our stress response, is really important to our symptom management.
However, here’s the thing: we’ve learned through neuroscience that it’s very hard for us to regulate our nervous system by ourselves; hence this idea of co-regulation. We’ve found that through the gift of the presence of another—of them sitting with us, being with us, listening to us—it really supports our ability to co-regulate whatever emotions and stress we're currently experiencing. This gift of presence has science behind it, showing how important it is to practice that with another and offer the possibility of co-regulation.
We need to just attend to our own emotional life and our own level of stress activation, which sometimes can be pretty high when we're walking with someone who's in mental distress or experiencing a heightened period of difficulty in their life. So how do we begin to practice that awareness of what’s coming up in me as I'm seeking to walk with another? Well, our Lord has fashioned us in a beautiful way as embodied souls, and actually, our embodiment gives a lot of clues for what's going on in our emotional life.
Whenever I’m walking with students or ministers and encouraging them on how to cultivate this awareness of their own emotional life, we actually begin with the body. We take a few deep breaths—you’re welcome to do so right now—and we just notice, “Huh, what physical symptoms am I experiencing right now? ” I notice there’s a little tension in my shoulders, a little tightness in my chest.
This might have to do with the fact that we had a hiccup with our Zoom technology today, and that was on my end, so my stress response is a little activated. I’m just noticing that. Even as I’m walking you through this, you’re welcome to just take a few deep breaths and notice what physical symptoms you’re experiencing right now.
Where are you holding tension in your body or tightness or discomfort? Where are you experiencing ease or calm? As we begin to notice that with curiosity, we can then wonder, “Huh, I wonder if these are connected to different emotions that I might be experiencing right now,” whether of stress, tension, fear, anxiety, sadness, grief, happiness, or joy.
Just notice that right now. As we begin to notice that, one of our just kind of kickstart reactions is often trying to analyze or fix it. We have trouble just sitting with it, and there’s a goodness in that, but there’s also a trap in that, because too often we begin too quickly to try to fix, resolve, or analyze whatever is coming up in us, and we don't practice that gift of presence with our own person.
So, what I’d invite you to do as you notice whatever's going on inside you at the embodied level, at the emotional level… is to just bring that to our Lord in prayer, right? To invite His gaze upon it and to ask His help to see yourself a bit more as how He sees you. In that moment, I was reading recently this incredibly beautiful work done by a Nashville Dominican sister and a psychologist, and they were talking about this phenomenon of co-regulation.
They said, you know, our Lord is the ultimate co-regulator in terms of helping us regulate that nervous system response to stress and to emotion. So when we just practice, in the moment, bringing whatever is coming up in us to our Lord, we really do invite Him in a relational way to help us tend to that. By doing so, the vision is that this helps us then to be more present to the other in a way that is more regulated, where we can kind of offer the possibility of co-regulation and wherein we can also receive the other.
So, just an important thing to think through here: when we're walking with someone who experiences serious mental illness, how often do you think that they've been received as a gift by another? In the beautiful, beautiful friends I have who experience serious mental illness, they've shared with me how, in a number of circumstances when they are seeking to find a friend or seeking to find support or just sharing about their struggle, they experience not first being met by a gaze of love but, instead, being met by judgment, by analysis, or by an effort to just fix or solve whatever is going on for that person. These things all have their place, right?
Judgment and analysis of what's taking place has its proper timing and place, as does an effort to fix or address whatever symptoms another is experiencing. But it's important to just reflect on what is our first call in ministry, in a church community. How might our calling be that of participating in and reflecting the gaze of Christ to really receive the other?
I find that, for me, my own sense of nervousness or fear, which can come about because of the intensity of another's symptoms, can get in the way of my effort to just receive the other. I can be moved to immediately want to fix it or to solve it or just make it better. There's a time and place for walking with another to kind of help them think through it, to identify other resources and referrals, right?
But that process of walking with another needs to begin and needs to be sustained through the practice of receiving the other. We'll go ahead and move to our next and final slide in just a few more minutes, and then we'll transition to questions. So, how do we continue then in this active ministry, at once recognizing our own gifts but also our limitations?
I think here it's really important to think about the wisdom of counsel and the way in which we can build a community of support to support us in our ministry and those whom we minister alongside. I believe that many of you might be doing this already, but I’d encourage you, if you haven't yet, to identify a team of folks with whom you can consult and think, such that when a crisis situation arises or when a question arises—where you identify this is really beyond the realm and scope of accompaniment or pastoral care—you can reach out to someone. So, who are the mental health therapists, psychologists, or social workers in your area that perhaps already consult for your diocese, your parish, your school?
Do you have a relationship with them? What does outreach look like with them? Many dioceses have set up a role of a clinical liaison.
Sometimes this person works within Catholic Charities at a diocese, and their role would be helping refer folks within that diocese to therapists and other psychological professionals in the area. The clinical liaison is oftentimes the first point of contact for a priest or a minister who identifies a parishioner who's needing care greater than what could be offered through the accompaniment of a parish community. So, does your area have a clinical liaison?
It's also worthwhile, in conversation with that clinical liaison or others, to identify who are the good referrals in your area for psychological care. Catholic Charities are often that first point of contact for good psychotherapeutic care. I mentioned here, and I will also share these slides after the fact so that you have access to the links.
The Catholic Psychotherapy Association has a wonderful directory of therapists, and there's the Catholic Therapist Directory online, which includes a good number of folks who are wonderful practitioners. Another resource I've listed is a resource that many people don't know about, but it's a wonderful hotline: The Upper Room Crisis Hotline, a 1-800 number, and this is maintained by faithful Catholics who are serving in a crisis support role. So, this would be kind of like the faith-based equivalent to that second number there, the 988 National Suicide and Crisis Hotline.
So, it's again worthwhile, you know, to have these available but also to share them with folks who may be in need, because it's also very important to just identify what your limitations are also in the role of ministry and to be able to set a certain boundary or framework at the outset of knowing, you know, perhaps you won't be available late into the evening but that these numbers available through the hotlines are available late into the evening, or that other practitioners in your area would be better equipped to provide support and care for someone. One final moment before we. .
. Jump into question and answer. I would encourage you to just reflect on in what ways you are continuing to nurture a life of community to sustain you and your family in the context of your ministry.
So, it takes a village, right? As we think about nurturing a culture of communion and care within our parishes, wherein those experiencing mental illness can find belonging and can find support, it's also really critical to notice that we're not immune from the experiences of isolation and individualism that are so prevalent in this day and age. In what ways are you nurturing relationships with your colleagues, with your fellow ministers, and with friends and families within your parish, whereby we can continue to seek that nourishment together that's found in prayer and through shared life with one another?
With that, our final slide lists my contact information, as well as the contact information for the McGrath Institute. This slide, right before the final slide, is just a beautiful quote for us to reflect on: "Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself.
His life is senseless if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. " So with that, in the words of Saint John Paul II, I invite us to go forward in seeking to live out this reality of encounter with God, who is love, in and through our relationships with one another. Again, the final slide has my contact information, and if you're interested at all in learning more about the Fiat program on faith and mental health and about future offerings—we have online courses and we do a few webinars throughout the year—I encourage you to look us up on the McGrath Institute for Church Life website.
So, thanks again, Jen, for managing the slides. I'm very grateful, and to you all for your patience with me amid my technical difficulties. I'd love to share the remainder of our time for Q&A.
Thank you, Beth; so beautiful! Thank you! Okay, so in our Q&A, thank you for those who have contributed some thoughts.
First of all, we have gratitude, so always appreciate that. One of our attendees is curious; her understanding of the Upper Room Hotline is that it does not offer mental health ministry, but rather intercessory prayer and companionship. Hmm, so I'm very grateful for that feedback on the Upper Room Hotline.
I actually don't know well. There are various services, and so I think I'll kind of pause with that and really appreciate that feedback. I'll look more into the Upper Room Hotline, and I’d invite those who are curious to look into it to understand better what they offer.
Yeah, because I don't want to mislead anyone in terms of their services. Thank you! The same participant just shared her thanks and that she's fortunate to be located in a place where you have Divine Mercy University and the Arlington Diocese, and that she and her ministry are collaborating with that diocese on their annual Day of Prayer for Mental Health coming up.
Outstanding! Thank you for your beautiful ministry; I'm so glad to hear about that collaboration that's present. Another of our attendees brings up the fact that you didn't necessarily use the term "practicing self-care," and how that can sometimes equate to setting safe boundaries for ourselves within this ministry.
Yeah, just good insight there. Self-care I think is so important and is a term that's often misused and misunderstood in today's climate. So, you know, we're all familiar with ways in which self-care can be referenced as just another trip to the spa or an evening of Netflix, and I would say, in many cases, those may or may not serve as authentic self-care.
So what do we mean by self-care? I think as a lens for evaluating what is self-care, I think this practice helps me cultivate a deeper relationship with our Lord, as well as with others, and fosters an integrity of my own person in terms of my emotional life, my embodied life, and my spiritual life. Because self-care is always relational, even if it's just an activity we do independently.
So having that thought of whether this, in the end, is oriented toward a deepening relationship with Christ and others—even by being absent from others—it's helping me tend to my spiritual life so that then I can be more present to others. So, I just offer that in terms of helping us attune our gaze and judge whether it's self-care or not. The second point that you bring up, and I'm very grateful for, is that of boundaries.
I think it is incredibly important to recognize and honor our limitations as persons. I did begin with Psalm 127 about, you know, if the Lord does not build the house, those who build it labor in vain. Because it's important to recognize that we're ultimately stewards of this gift and invitation from the Lord.
But sometimes, when faced by the depth of need and suffering of another, we may be moved to give more than is actually healthy for ourselves and for the other. This is just to say that I am grateful to you for bringing this forward, and I would encourage each of us in our discernment to just practice that reflection of. .
. How am I continuing to cultivate quiet and spiritual rest within my life, in the life of my family, so that we can draw from the font of living Living Water? Thank you, Beth.
Um, another question is, in asking our broader community to help with outreach, how can we prepare them to be good listeners, which can be such a big part of being present? This is an excellent question, and it's something that I think we help others to be good listeners by affording opportunities for experiencing and practicing what it is to listen. So this is basically to say that we need to do so in and through relationship.
A question I have, then, is what are existing opportunities already within the parish whereby we can more intentionally practice listening? How might we, through our existing adult faith formation, catechesis, and faith-sharing support groups, cultivate a deeper attentiveness to the gift of listening and build that into how we offer the programs? When we teach listening within our courses, we really begin by just walking one another through this process of what I first mentioned: noticing what's coming up in my person when I'm present to another.
Because sometimes my own emotions or quick judgments or fears get in the way of me listening and being present to the other, we begin with that. Then we'll go through a process that can feel very artificial—just listening to another without saying anything but reflecting, through non-verbals, that I'm hearing the other. After we've done that, we would practice reflecting back what we hear without asking any questions—like, “Oh, I’m noticing that there is a lot of emotion in your voice when you shared that” or “I’m noticing your body posture changed when you shared that.
” Then, after that, we'd move to asking open-ended questions—questions that begin with "how" or "could you tell me more about that" versus just yes or no questions. Building in some of those practices of listening, which you could spend just 10 minutes on with those exercises in any existing offering of faith sharing or faith formation, can offer lightbulb moments for folks—like, “Oh, I’m noticing things I didn't realize before about the gift of listening to another and of being listened to. ” Thank you so much; very, very true.
Um, we're going to have, I believe, well, I don't want to go too much over our one hour, so we'll just take two last questions. Round one is: Are you aware of any chaplains who specialize in ministering to people with mental illness who may perhaps be assigned to a specific hospital to minister to those folks? Yeah, so thanks be to God, there is growth in chaplaincy for those who are hospitalized for psychiatric reasons.
I cannot recall; I've seen one or two programs being developed currently that offer formation for folks who are preparing for that form of chaplaincy. So that is an area of ongoing cultivation within the church, and that's a great sign of hope. Then our last question: Do you have recommendations for moving the burden of outreach off of the person with mental illness to the parish ministry, and how do we invite without judgment?
Thank you for framing it in that way; that's so important. I think it's vital when we are in communion with others to be attentive to the fact that there’s a lot about our life experiences that forms our gaze—how we pay attention to the other or how we don't—and we never know how another's life experience and background has informed their gaze. Practicing that posture with one another is really important.
I often think of two keys for how we talk about this: one is invitation, and the other is curiosity in terms of the other's response. Uplifting mental health ministry as an expression of what it is to live out our call as one body in Christ, I think, is such an invitation. This is the call.
To be blinded or not attuned to members of the body experiencing mental illness would mean experiencing an incompleteness of ourselves. How do we capture the invitation within this language? I think person-to-person invitation is really important.
There are so many beautiful avenues within the church where we can share information through bulletins, homilies, and other more public outreach. While taking advantage of those, we should never forget the possibility of one-to-one conversations with someone when walking out of Mass, or with another minister, beginning, just in getting to know them, to identify the needs of the church and where their longings are in terms of seeking to meet those needs. Then we can help speak about mental health ministry in light of what's coming forth for them—a great opportunity for us to grow in relationship with them instead of responding first with judgment.
Thank you so much, Beth. This is really my favorite thing about all that you share. The idea of co-regulation and being in tune with my interior presence before I try to offer that to someone else, so that co-regulation—this gift from God—will be beneficial rather than further distressing.
So really, that's so beautiful; thank you. And then I just want to assure everyone in our audience that once we clean up our video recording a little bit, it will be posted on the website along with the slides. Thank you to Beth for sharing those with us.
I did put into our Q&A that we are asking for your feedback about our webinars. We'd love to continue to offer webinars that assist you in your ministry and in your attempts to serve. So if you can download that and respond, we would greatly appreciate it.
Also, we are trying to continue to amplify this ministry to let others know that this is one of the ways we can serve our brothers and sisters and bring the love of Christ to our communities. So please consider looking at our Facebook page, sharing it, following it, and sharing our posts with others in your community, so that we can continue to grow the ministry in greater, broader communities. With that, I again extend our great gratitude to Beth for this beautiful presentation.
We all have a lot to pray about and think about after all that you've shared. Thanks to everyone who joined us today. We appreciate your engagement with the association and pray with you, encouraging you to continue serving in this ministry.
Thanks so much, everyone!
