A Samaritan Story
by: Rev. Ann Ohlrogge Johnson, Executive Director
Last May, four days before leaving on my first trip to the beautiful continent of Africa, I accepted a call to join the Samaritan Institute. The African trip was an unusual mission trip because its purpose was to listen to the people of Cameroon, rather than give gifts of money or develop programs.
As I traveled over the vast Saharan desert towards the lush tropical south western part of the African continent, I wondered what I might learn in Africa that would apply to my new work at the Samaritan Institute. The answer to my question came as I prepared to assist in the leadership of a worship service.
In order to write the liturgy for the service, I asked Rev. Massaga, the preacher for the service, what scripture he would be using for his sermon. When he replied Luke 10, I asked with enthusiasm, “Oh, the story of the Good Samaritan?” And Rev. Massaga responded: “It is the story of the Samaritan—the scriptures do not label him good or bad. Your western Christian world has added the label good. What the story is about is a man being the person God intended him to be.”
In Rev. Massaga’s statement, I found the link between my new position and my first trip to Africa. Our mission, as the Samaritan Institute, is to help individuals, as well as couples and families, become the people they are created to be. Because our staff of therapists are all committed to, and particularly skilled at looking at lives from the perspective of faith and meaning, we welcome each new client as a unique human being, and as a “a human becoming” to use theologian Martin Buber’s wonderful phrase. Whatever labels the person may feel the world has attached to him or her are put on hold as a healing therapeutic relationship begins.
In the counseling and therapy we offer, we give people a safe space apart from whatever is going on in their lives where they can heal from emotional wounds, can make important decisions about their lives, and can learn to understand and cope with mental illness that may be a part of their lives. And we do this work with clients in a culture that rushes to label and categorize people and experiences, a culture that is increasingly shaped by the media to expect quick solutions to difficult issues. As a result, many who seek help at the Samaritan Institute are struggling with how to understand their psychological and spiritual pain, pain that is often difficult to label and cannot be understood as quickly as television and movie dramas would suggest.
Since we believe that both psychology and theology provide a foundation for personal growth and healing, we listen carefully for the life experiences that have shaped the individual and for the meaning faith, religion and spiritual have had, or not had, in each person’s life. As an interfaith counseling center, we welcome the opportunity to join our clients in seeking to understand God in a variety of ways, focused on the beliefs of the individual client. God’s name is never spoken in some of our therapeutic relationships; and in others the journey towards wholeness and healing is full of the person’s experience of God. As we work with a variety of people, God’s name is sometimes Christ, sometimes Yahweh, and sometimes Allah. No one name or label for the divine applies to all faith journeys, and we listen with our clients for the truth of their own journeys.
To those listening to the story of the Samaritan as it was told in the first century, the Samaritan man was the character they least expected to respond with compassion and care for the wounded man in need. But the Samaritan defied the labels applied to him, and responded as the person God intended him to be, with hope, help and healing.
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a beautiful poem in 1978, that speaks to the power of being known for who we are, and being called by our true names.
That poem ends:
“Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up
and the door of my heart
could be left open,
the door of compassion.”
It is our mission at the Samaritan Institute to listen with compassion and thus provide our clients with the opportunity to be known by their true names, to become whomever God calls them to be.
From Call Me by my True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hahn, Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, 1999.