Liston Mills served as Professor of Pastoral Theology and Counseling at the Vanderbilt Divinity School from 1963 to 1998. He was named the Oberlin Alumni Professor in Pastoral Theology and Counseling in 1972. Dr. Mills is a graduate of Davidson College and holds the B.D., Th.M., and Ph.D. degrees from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Mills has served as a chaplain, pastor, teacher, divinity school dean, and pastoral counselor. He is Certified Supervisor in the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education. He is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee, Inc., where he served a term as President.

Life Crisis and Pastoral Counseling
Dr. Liston O. Mills

In the opening lines of the Divine Comedy Dante says: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” His is a common experience, for each of us find ourselves on occasion in a strange place, a place we do not recognize a place where the assumptions we have counted on in life are shattered. Regardless of the ingredients of our crises, we know that such times do not simply call into question our physical or emotional well-being. They also usher us into a time when the entire set of meanings which have undergirded our lives are called into question.

These crises of faith caused religious communities to be the places we turned. We became aware that the world raises questions for which there are no worldly answers. Pastoral counseling continues to understand itself in this tradition. Our indebtedness to the psychological sciences is deep indeed. It is essential that our practitioners are well versed in its theory and skilled in its utilization. But it also true that we adhere to a view of life which precludes our yielding to the cultural temptation to identify our selves with our symptoms. Persons are more than co-dependent, not simply single parents, more than a recovering alcoholic or a victim of abuse.

Pastoral counseling moves on the assumption that our lives are reflections of our efforts to come to terms with the alienation and powerlessness which frequently characterize our distress. For human life is by definition a quest for grace. Our lives reflect our attempts to deal with our incompleteness; what we seek is the gift of life itself. We often receive this gift in our daily interchange. It is the manner we support and sustain each other. Counseling may be a specific and particular instance of that care. It is our quest for grace, for life, linked with another's care, which is their willingness to participate in that quest.

When I speak of the risk and fragility of life, I have obviously gone against those who understand beatitude to rest in achievement, advancement, and accumulation. For our question becomes not how to deal with this or that problem or relationship or dilemma. It becomes instead, how can I be strong, how can I grow, how can I flourish in a world that seems bent on my undoing? In other words, it seeks to deal with our loss of faith and meaning as well as our distress and recognizes that the two are related.

What enables us to live with our fragility and vulnerability, to deal with the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” is the realization that our pain does not have to be our undoing. We can be sustained and even gain a measure of freedom when life is understood as a gift whose foundation is in God.