Profile: Carolyn Brock

Carolyn Brock is director of Spiritual Life Ministries for the Community of Christ at its world headquarters in Independence, Missouri. She is a registered nurse and a spiritual director. From 1983 to 1987 she and her husband, Dave, now serving as an apostle in the church, lived in Nairobi, Kenya, where their daughter, Emily, was born. She was interviewed by editor Rich Brown.

How did the experience of living in Africa change you, especially in regard to your spiritual life?
It was completely transforming, particularly the sense of being out of our own culture, a minority, and exposed to a totally different worldview and life experience. You can try to imagine and talk about what that will be like beforehand, but to be in the midst of it takes away all your sources of security. All the things we thought were normal were suddenly different. Questions arose about suffering and why things are so different, including people’s view of reality, the meaning of life, God, and religious experience. It led me to question what I believed. Some of my more standard, traditional religious explanations didn’t make a lot of sense.

Had you done much faith interaction before that? How closed was your concept of church up to that point?
I don’t know if it was so closed in my mind as that I’d just never really ventured out much. I’d experienced some other cultural groups, having lived on a Native American reservation in Oregon for a couple of years. That was a new spiritual base to which I was exposed, and that helped me do some opening and pondering. Also I’d been around a lot of Hispanics in San Antonio, although they were primarily from our own church. Here and there I’d participated in interfaith worships and workshops.

There appears to be a direct tie between new experiences and new spiritual directions for you. Just to be someplace where everything is different has got to start some different wheels to turn.
I think that’s true of most of us, myself included. Often we don’t change our thinking or bother to go “outside the box” of our present thought processes unless some experience stimulates that. And in my case an exposure to different ways of knowing and being and living and worshiping pressed me up against the perspectives of others. I just couldn’t disregard their spiritual experiences, because it was real for them. I can’t say theirs is invalid and mine is valid. So I found myself forced to ponder that and pray and think over it.

When you arrived in Africa, how prepared were you?
I wasn’t at all. I have a natural propensity to be an adventurer and curious, along with being intrigued by other cultures, which helped me decide to go. But there were many different and disturbing things that made me uncomfortable. We arrived at night in Nairobi, so I could just make out glimmers on the way to the hotel. When we got up the next morning we found we were in a totally British world within the hotel. Then we went outside and down one of the main streets. Dave went off to get some money exchanged, and I realized standing there alone, looking around in every direction, that there was not one other white person for as far as I could see. It didn’t really scare me, but it was kind of a shock.

Is that when you knew all the rules had changed?
Oh yes. I was now the one who was different, who was outside the culture. Dave and I came to understand we were living inside a new worldview.

You were there as missionaries, but not in that old, traditional sense of taking the gospel to “darkest Africa,” to give rather than receive.
I think I’ve always been a bit of a caretaker, wanting to help people. That was a large part of my identity growing up and becoming a nurse. I have this basic desire to help in some way and assumed they might need more in the way of medical help or teaching. We had an enlightening experience traveling on the way over that helped change our thinking. We stopped in Zaire to spend a few days with our church people. We arrived late for a Communion service in a small, mud-walled church with a tin roof and dirt floor. We came in when it was quiet and sat in the back row. Other places we’d been it had been very loud, with an enthusiastic kind of worship. There was a deep sense of holiness and sacredness among those people. They brought a tray of dried bread crumbs and a common cup for us to drink from first. In that moment there came to me a very clear message: You’re not the one, Carolyn. You’re coming to a place where these people are already my people. I already know them. They’re already in a deep state of spirituality that you may not even understand.

What effect did that have on your own relationship with God to be confronted with this idea that you were not to bring them a sense of spirituality?
In some ways it relieved me, because I realized we were not starting from scratch. And this combined with an earlier experience of a time of struggle when the awareness came that God is everywhere, in every culture, and not limited to any one place or people. This reaffirmed that. I could then trust that whatever happened there, God was already in it. I realized I could end up being the person most blessed by it all. There was so much diversity everywhere. We met people with way higher IQs than mine, and even though their education level may not have been reflected in part of that, they were very bright, able people. In the context of their own culture they could understand their people and take the words Dave or I might say in a sermon or a class, and weave that into a story or an example that would cause the people to laugh or to go “Hmmm, we get it….” On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes we felt that culturally and educationally we were so different there was a chasm that couldn’t be crossed. Sometimes I’d get the feeling we’d been dropped on another planet. The landscape was so different, and everyone around us was wearing congas and goatskins.

Your life has taken different turns. What are you doing today, perhaps not so much your job description but your relationship with God? What kind of spiritual person are you?
One of my biggest struggles is to be a more contemplative or mystic type in terms of how I experience a relationship with God. The challenge is to be drawn that way with those kinds of desires while trying to stay connected with the ordinary, practical, day-to-day demands of work and family and culture. If anything, what I really believe about spirituality is that those two dimensions of the spiritual self need to be woven together with ordinary realities of the day, the earth, my family, the community I associate with, and the work I do. That’s a hard task in our culture, which does not call us to a centered or balanced life. Even our church culture, calls us into a frantic, production-oriented pace. But I need solitude and quiet and reflection. The mystic type has a yearning to be in union or deep relationship with God. The way that type tends to do that is by quieting oneself and letting go of personal egos, desires, and demands, as well as the identities our culture asks us to present. Underneath all that is a deeper reality, and I have to pay attention to the presence of God at some still point. To put it in different words, it’s about paying attention to the holiness within each of us.

How tough is it to do that, to “be spiritual,” when you work at a denominational headquarters?
It’s a very tough place to do that. Any time you have an institution, a system, there are a lot of expectations that get set into place that drive that institution and its sense of purpose and meaning. There are some practical realities to consider, too, in that we’re small and have a relatively low budget. We have a lot of very dedicated, work-oriented people—some probably bordering on being workaholic—who feel called to their work. There is a sense here that the church needs this, the church program needs that, the church system needs this other thing. We’re driven by those institutional goals and programs to the extent that sometimes we don’t have the time to pay attention to who it is who calls us to be and become, and to express God’s love and presence and feeling in the world. I know we think that and embrace that and say the words, and we are certainly wanting to do that. But sometimes the system itself becomes a self-perpetuating set of goals, timelines, and agendas that eat away at our time to directly be in relationship with God, to experience God as the source of those things we’re doing.

As in any institution, an employee’s value is often measured by how much he or she does. The more you do, the more valuable you are. How does a mystic-contemplative function in that kind of environment?
That’s the struggle, the balance issue again. I think we have to have all different kinds of people, because if you didn’t have the people who were driven and goal-oriented in some ways, then maybe the contemplatives would just sort of wander around a lot.

So if we had a church headquarters full of contemplatives, would anything ever get done?
Well, I think it would if you had the contemplatives who had the balance I’ve sensed and read about in various parts of Christianity. The whole idea of being a contemplative is that you let yourself go to the source of those experiences of God’s love and compassion and healing in your own being. Hopefully from that comes the voice of discernment as you actually listen to God and get a clue about where God might be calling you, and a sense of energy and clarity that sometimes doesn’t come with racing around and franticness. True contemplatives, I think, do both—Jesus being a prime example. They follow that model of going into God’s presence and listening and being refilled with God’s dream, God’s passion, God’s love. And then there’s something that impels them after they’ve spent time in contemplative prayer or meditation to go and do. And unless you go and do, then you haven’t really heard what God is saying to you. That’s the misunderstanding that sometimes comes with the view of the mystic or contemplative, that they just want to go sit in a monastery and chant all day.

Some people are, then, very much “in the world” precisely because they take time to draw apart from it.
Mother Teresa was definitely a mystic, a contemplative. She got up at four o’clock in the morning so she could spend several hours in that drawing-apart time. She knew who she was at a deeper level out of her relationship of being deeply loved and called by God, and that’s what fed her. She’d go into that place and hear that again from God every morning and probably several times throughout the day. As a result her whole day was framed in yielding herself to this larger sense of being and having compassion. We all know she spent the rest of her day touching and bathing and teaching and doing the really hard stuff in a very hard place. That’s the model I would like to embrace for my own life. Although I do it poorly, I believe in it. And I believe that if the church would embrace that model at a deeper level, many of the things we want to see happen would happen out of that place of profound communion we don’t often give ourselves time to have.

Mother Teresa had her critics, too. Some said she “just” helped sick people but did nothing to change the cause. There’s still disease, still suffering on a massive scale. These days we hear a lot about changing society, but what about the one person who is hurting?
That’s hard. I don’t know if you can do both. It can take an incredible amount of energy just to do one of those kinds of ministry. Maybe that’s where diversity comes in: diversity of gifts, of spiritual type, of skills and callings. It could be that we all need each other, and the body of Christ has all those different kinds of awarenesses so eventually we can do it all. Had Mother Teresa wanted to, perhaps she could have incorporated that into her ministry. Maybe we can, too. Maybe we can develop an attitude out of which we are present to whatever form of need comes into our awareness.

I suppose if one takes the position of wanting to overhaul society, that could somehow be justification for not helping individuals.
I have what I call a principle of proximity, which probably goes back to my African experience. Until your skin is up against the skin of a person who has dramatic physical, emotional, or social needs, on a certain level you don’t really get it and aren’t compelled to do something about it. But I don’t know how you choose one or the other. I suppose there are those who get locked into saying, “Well, I’m going to do the systemic thing, the political thing, the social justice thing, but just don’t ask me to go to those places, those neighborhoods.”

Another way to say that, perhaps, is that it’s a choice between healing society or healing individual human beings. What does healing mean to you?
Like anybody else, what I want healing to mean is that it all just goes away. And, of course, there’s the common thought that healing and curing are not the same thing at all. Curing is, in fact, making it go away. Healing is something different. It causes the self to have everything stripped away from it so we understand and accept ourselves as spiritual beings, children of God, which brings us to the idea of mystery. That part of us that is maybe the only real part of us comes to a place of safety, in relationship with something beyond itself. That’s not a very concise or easily explainable definition, I know. But healing comes even in the face of our own suffering, perhaps even our own dying. It brings a sense that everything will be all right, that Someone, Something, is holding us, is with us, and will never abandon us.

What does it mean, then, to be a healing minister?
I guess to somehow bring that experience to people, that gift of presence that God, the One in whom we all exist and are held, is the source of healing. It may sound naïve, but I believe it may be only as we are in an experiential relationship with “Mystery” that we can have a sense of our own wholeness and then help others find that, too. In a more practical way, a healing minister is someone who carries that presence. I can’t think of a better model than Jesus. From the Gospel stories, it appears that he was that one who expressed the divine presence, who brought a sense of hope and awareness to people that they were beloved, that whatever they were experiencing, God was with them and ready to lift their burdens.

But Jesus didn’t heal or cure everybody. It’s a natural question to ask why. Why are some people healed or even cured and others are not? Is there a definitive answer to that?
I don’t know. I think some of the answers we give are not good answers: Well, they didn’t have enough faith, or the person healing them didn’t have enough faith, or perhaps not enough other people were praying for them—that somehow we messed up, so therefore God couldn’t answer. My image of God is not some big male Someone who sits out there in the sky somewhere who decides, “I’ll bless this person and that person but I won’t the other one because they haven’t met the requirements.” I think of God more as this intelligent, loving, powerfully creative consciousness who lives in us. When healing doesn’t happen, it probably has more to do with not being open to that vast energetic, intelligent being. There’s a dynamic there arising out of our current state of evolution and awareness that we’re just not seeing what needs to connect with the healing possibilities. I think we have to choose healing. And sometimes we may choose to not be healed. We’re not ready to let go of wounds or illnesses or weaknesses because then we might have to be more responsible or work harder and take on more stuff. That’s the point where ministers of healing may be needed the most.