The Poet, the Psychotherapist, and the Theologian
An Interdisciplinary Conversation
By George Hull
Editor, Pastoral Report - The Newsletter of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy
Gerard Manley Hopkins — As Kingfishers Catch Fire
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
Inscape
“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors which is itself;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.”
This stanza captures Hopkins's poetic concept of inscape: the distinctive and irreducible character of a particular thing, the peculiar way it is itself. Hopkins suggests that living things express something of their distinctive inner nature through the way they exist and act. “Self” becomes a verb: to self is to express oneself through one's way of being.
For our purposes in clinical pastoral training, inscape offers a poetic way of thinking about a person's inner life, the distinctive way a life has come to be, shaped and forged by one's experiences of love and loss, hopes, dreams, and disappointments. It invites us to listen for the particular ways a person expresses who they are, in relation to themselves, others, and how they show up in the world.
Yet one's inscape is not a fixed geography. What has happened to us can become so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives that we may no longer perceive it. The past begins to shape how we experience the present, often without our awareness. Freud called this the unconscious.
Here the poet gives way to the psychotherapist.
Sigmund Freud — The Past Is Always Present
Freud offers a strikingly concise formulation:
“Hysterische leiden meistens an Reminiszenzen.”
“Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.”
Although Freud was writing specifically about hysteria in Studies on Hysteria, the phrase points toward a larger psychodynamic insight: what belongs to the past can remain psychologically present. Earlier relationships, losses, conflicts, and experiences may become internalized and continue to influence how we understand ourselves and relate to others.
The past can, in a sense, telescope into the present.
An earlier experience of abandonment or rejection may shape how a person experiences a relationship in the present, as though they were still back there and then. A loss that has never been adequately grieved may continue to color the present, long after the events themselves have passed.
Rather than merely investigating the causes of the past, the primary task of psychodynamic practice is to attend to how the past continues to live in the present. Growing awareness opens up possibilities beyond simply repeating the same old patterns of behavior. What has unconsciously shaped us need not completely determine us.
Freud therefore invites the question: What from our past lingers and has become present in us?
And then, almost unexpectedly, the theological conversation turns in the opposite direction.
Jurgen Moltmann — The Future Becoming Present
Moltmann's theology of hope begins with the conviction that the future is not only something that awaits us and is yet to be experienced. God's promised future can already exert an influence on the present.
In his first book, Theology of Hope, Moltmann asserts:
“Hope’s statements of promise anticipate the future. In the promises, the hidden future already announces itself and exerts its influence on the present through the hope it awakens.”
For Moltmann, hope is fundamentally different from optimism. It is not a passive expectation that circumstances will eventually improve. Rather, hope arises from the radical conviction that the present does not have the final word. What is true of our lives now does not necessarily determine what they may yet become.
The future can, in a sense, telescope into the present.
What has not yet happened can nevertheless begin to shape how we live now. A hoped-for future can open possibilities in the present, allowing us to see beyond the limits imposed by our own history. The future does not erase the past; it opens us to possibilities beyond what the past has taught us to expect.
Moltmann puts the matter even more forcefully:
“Christianity is eschatology is hope, forward moving and therefore also revolutionising the present.”
For Moltmann, the future anticipated in hope becomes a force for transformation in the present.
Seamus Heaney — “Hope and History Rhyme”
And here Seamus Heaney gives us a remarkable poetic bridge between Freud's history and Moltmann's hope.
In The Cure at Troy, Heaney writes:
“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.”
Heaney does not ask us to forget history. Quite the opposite. Hope takes history seriously. The wounds, the losses, the injustices, and disappointments of the past remain part of our story. But history does not necessarily have the final word.
The Poet, the Psychotherapist, and the Theologian
One might suggest that Hopkins and Heaney offer us a way to hold Freud and Moltmann together.
Perhaps we can best understand this movement as an interdisciplinary conversation among poets, psychotherapists, and theologians, each bringing their own ideas and insights to our understanding of the past, the present, and what the future might hold. Hopkins invites us to attend to inscape, the distinctive shape of a life and the particular way a person expresses who they are. Freud turns our attention to history, asking what from the past has become present within us and continues to shape how we experience ourselves and others. Moltmann turns us toward hope, asking what from the future might become present through us and open possibilities beyond what our history has taught us to expect. And Heaney brings these perspectives together in the possibility that hope and history can rhyme, that the future need not erase the past, but may open the present to possibilities the past could not imagine.
In clinical pastoral supervision, this way of thinking can best inform how we listen, so that we are neither trapped in the past nor prematurely certain about the future. We listen carefully to the history that has shaped a trainee while remaining open to the possibility that their history does not exhaust their future.
The CPE/T supervisor cannot know what that future will hold. Perhaps the more modest, more faithful pastoral task is to remain present with our trainees long enough so that the future does not have to be decided entirely by their past.
