Pie Martinez
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I showed up on a rare sunny San Francisco morning to Grace Fellowship Community Church for New College Berkeley’s first 1-day conference on the church and mental health. Pastors, lay leaders, and congregants from churches across the Bay Area gathered around hot coffee, bowls of fruit, and the question: What can we do to better understand and faithfully engage mental health challenges?
“This is not a conversation about ‘us’ and ‘them,’” Peter Lee reminded the room, referring to individuals with mental health challenges. Dr. Lee, Director of the San Jose State University’s School of Social Work, joined Angela Tang, Frances Joe, and keynote speaker Steve Binnquist in sharing stories, resources, and expertise throughout the day.
In small groups, we sat at tables and engaged with passages of scripture, looking for themes in Jesus’s responses to the relevant people and contexts: Jesus proclaiming good news to the crowds, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and raising the dead.
Together, we noticed that Jesus was consistently “moved by compassion.” Again and again, he took the time to stop and to pause, to see and to hear. He was willing to change his plans and his timeline because he felt that those near to and following him would benefit. Even when it wasn’t convenient. And even when those around him tried to silence or distance “intrusions” to the original plan or anticipated way of events unfolding.
What are the implications for the church on how we can engage with the close attention and genuine compassion of Jesus?
Presence in Practice
Keynote speaker Steve Binnquist shared stories with the groups, moments where his following Jesus was embodied in radically simple and equally profound ways. He described a colleague who was swinging by Binnquist’s car to check on it for him while Binnquist was in a meeting.
“The car is fine, Steve, but, um, there is someone in it . . . ”
Steve went to his car and, sure enough, found a woman experiencing homelessness sitting inside. He invited her to step out of the car, but she didn’t want to. He could have demanded she get out of his vehicle. He could have called authorities to have them enforce his right to “his property.” But he didn’t.
First, he got curious. Binnquist inquired about the woman’s situation, slowing down enough to acknowledge that this was not about him or his car, but about a woman looking for a safe, warm place. Eventually, as they talked, he invited the woman and him to grab a bite to eat. And so, instead of a law being enforced, a relationship was initiated.
That encounter didn’t solve the larger issues of homelessness or the layered challenges this woman may have been facing, but it moved the neighborhood and our communities, one relationship and one moment of dignity closer to the Kingdom of God. Mental health crises are rarely solely about mental health, but more often include multiple social dynamics and layers of inequality that have compounded over decades or generations.
Not all responses are as accessible to all people, and Binnquist acknowledged that his own positionality as a man with a stature of over 6ft does enable certain forms of engagement that may not be as accessible or wise for other groups. But there is something in the principle, heart, and posture of his approach that we can all learn something from. How to move one degree further in the direction of care and curiosity, of being “moved by compassion.”
We sat together as we listened to these stories, and we engaged with the scripture passages again. What keeps us from responding in this way?
“Fear,” one person felt.
“Ego,” voiced another.
We discussed together, confessed our biases towards “efficiency,” and how we are so often in a rush. In his essay, “The Revival of Philosophy,” G.K. Chesterton describes the danger of efficiency without a guiding philosophy, how it will lead to progressivism and pragmatism, void of the ability to judge between right and wrong. I would go one step further in arguing that more so than the ability to “judge” between right and wrong, what we are perhaps more sorely lacking is an ability to discern what is good, true, and helpful. This discernment is nourished not only by philosophy but by theology. When we theologically ground ourselves, we are better equipped to invert the cultural lens of efficiency and to create new concepts of efficiency and effectiveness that prioritize holistic well-being and genuine care, and to generate sustainable means of engagement that are attuned to root causes.
Efficiency on its own may not seem “so bad,” but the gravity of Western efficiency too often simultaneously chips away at our ability to engage in sacred presence — one that is not oriented towards our own agendas or those of a broader institution, but is instead attuned foremost to the needs of the individuals in our communities. Where the concept of presence in a Western context might simply refer to where we physically (or even digitally) “are,” sacred presence demands more of us. Sacred presence includes our spiritual attention; it includes a holistic “being-with” and attending to. “Attending to” is not the same as solving, but it may involve a voluntary extension of self that is not a prerequisite within the Western concept of presence.
Mental health and mental illness concerns are part of our church spaces. The question is not if these challenges are present, but if and how effectively the church will engage. What would it mean to see individuals with mental health challenges not as an external audience to be engaged, but as the church?
And further: how does this change how we think about what mental health is, and how personally we take it?
Tending the Inner Life
While much of the day was focused on our posture of engagement with others, it also included a meaningful breakout session with Frances Joe on how we can develop practices to maintain our own mental health and well-being.
Joe serves as President of the Board of the Mental Health Association of Alameda County. With an extensive background in counseling and mental health services, she walked through an exercise of reimagining how to engage in self-care and rest while engaging in demanding and emotionally-laden contexts. When thinking about the challenging emotions we carry or, at times, react to subconsciously, she provided the metaphor of a building security guard.
“If a guard saw the same person enter the building, then leave. And then come back and linger in the lobby for twenty minutes, and leave. Then come back a third time. Do you think at a certain point they might approach the individual and inquire, ‘May I help you?’”
Joe shared that we can engage our feelings and any reactive tendencies in the same way: by being curious about them and what they are trying to communicate. What needs might they reveal if we inquire? If we feel a spark of fear, it could be about safety, but it could also be about our own lack of familiarity with a given person or context. If we feel like we don’t want to get pulled into an extended interaction, it could be unease about how the interaction would go, but it could also have more to do with feeling an inappropriate degree of ownership over our time or control over our contexts.
Instead of condemning our own reactions or being buried in shame, we can partner with our emotional responses to the learning necessary to move towards our own and others’ flourishing. We can slow down enough to recognize our own needs and to make an intentional choice in our response, one that takes into account the common gap between how we have been socialized to respond compared with what we feel called to do and how we feel called to be, as followers of Jesus. As we hold ourselves with greater kindness and curiosity, we will build greater resilience to do so with others.
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Throughout the day, breakout sessions invited stories that sparked conversations, which continued over meals. New relationships were formed, contacts were exchanged, and we each walked away more equipped not only to think more intentionally but also to act more holistically in how we engage in loving our neighbors. I walked away, reminded that practicing deep love in challenging mental health situations is not a “generosity,” but is part of our core identity as the Church. It demands openness not only to enact love to the people and spaces around us, but to be transformed ourselves.
It is in this transformation that we are able to engage more as Jesus did: slowing down, surrendering our ideas of what is efficient or “best,” and instead opting into radical presence characterized by gentleness and truth, sacred communion-with, and a readiness to call to the center those who have been cast to the periphery. It is in our commitment to uphold dignity and to pursue this path that we remember that, in the way of Jesus, our mutual flourishing will always be inextricable from one another. To follow Jesus in the context of mental health is to exchange our proclivity to “fix” for walking forward in the recognition that God’s work is ongoing in all of us, and that when we journey with those struggling with mental health, we are blessed to walk among the blessed.
God of those on the edge,
those who not only see darkness, but feel it and experience it throughout their days and weeks.
Sometimes through months and years.
God who sees all,
who does not overlook a single experience or emotion we carry,
build with us an altar on which we can sacrifice our idols of efficiency.
Let us pile high the kindling of our ego, pride, and fear,
the excuses we have all-too-ready.
Let them reduce to embers.
Let the fire of your spirit take their place.
A fire which welcomes all to draw near
in safety and warmth,
to a space where the tensions, even those we do not realize we carry, ease.
A fire summoning community that does not operate according to a zero-sum logic,
but that believes in the abundance available to all.
If we allow our hearts, our hands, to open.
Grant us the willingness to be moved by compassion,
to walk within your grace,
to extend the bounds of your healing presence in this world.
In the midst of so many broken systems,
you did not fix every one.
You paid attention to who was in front of you.
You saw the fullness of who they were,
their needs, and who you had created them to be.
You intervened, in love, towards flourishing.
May we follow.
Jennyann “Pie” Martinez is a heart-centered seeker, sister, and writer. Based in San Francisco, she engages writing and creativity as a practice of faith and a means to rediscover the familiar in new ways. After the last decade working in higher education and public health, she is currently discerning next career steps with a focus on building healthy team cultures and mission-attuned communication practices. jennyannmartinez.com