Counsellors and therapists are worth it

 

published in Muddy River News Oct. 14, 2025

One of my friends in the Franciscan Order recently celebrated 47 years of sobriety. It has been 47 years since he left a facility that helped religious and priests suffering from alcoholism to achieve sobriety.

Treatment like that was and still is expensive. It took my friend three months in that residential facility before its staff judged that it would be okay for him to return to a normal life. But the treatment was successful. The staff knew what it was doing.

There are many people who work in the mental health services who know what they are doing. Our problem is that we do not want to pay such people in proportion to the benefit that we receive from their services. When a recovering addict returns to society and is able to live as part of a family or church, and is working productively, we do not measure what we have all gained from their recovery.

We do not grumble about the cost of guns and fighter jets and submarines. In recent years we have spent hundreds of  billions of our hard-earned dollars to upgrade our nuclear capabilities, even though we know that if we were ever to use those capabilities, we would destroy the world for human habitation.   

We need to put our dollars where they will really do some good.  We need to use them to pay therapists and case workers and personal assistants. And not just people who help us with our aging bodies. We need to pay the people more who clean our houses or landscape our yards. The people who help us when we are ill or old contribute more to our well-being than material stuff that we buy. Too much stuff goes into storage before it goes to the landfill. We should forget stuff and think people. We need to put our money into helping each other live more fully and more abundantly.

 

 

Changing your mind

 

[published in Muddy River News on November 5, 2025.]

Learning means you change your mind.

Some people never learn. They keep making the same mistakes over and over. We say, “Will they never learn?”

Our two major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are dedicated to keeping us from changing our minds. Nothing the other side says is worth listening to. To a dedicated partisan, changing your mind shows weakness and lack of dedication to the cause.

Our social media are the perfect tools to keep us from changing our minds. The media reward eyeballs on the screen. They make their money by following the crowd.  

Face-to-face contact with other human beings is the best way to get us to change our minds. The most valuable thing that a school can do for students is to help the students get used to listening to living human beings who challenge what the students think.

My father quit school after seventh grade. He realized that he needed to learn things, so he took correspondence courses. After I started getting more education I had trouble talking with him. He seemed to think that if I said something he didn’t like, I was rejecting him. He never had teachers who could have given him the most important benefit of schooling: living teachers who can help you to welcome people who disagree with you.

Good coaches help players to change their minds. You think this is the way to do it, and the coach says, no, you are wrong. I still love you, but THIS is the way to do it.

We religious people experienced a movement in the last century called “ecumenism.” The movement was fueled by the idea that when Christian churches fight each other, they keep other people from accepting any church. The movement gave me a set of rules for talking with people who have different ideas about religion: 1) Keep quiet and listen while the other person states what he or she believes as clearly and forcefully as they can; 2) State your own ideas as clearly and forcefully as you can, and trust the other person to keep quiet and listen while you do that. 3) Let God determine what happens next.

When you let God determine what happens, you may have to change your mind. And we did. We Catholics learned from the Protestants that it is good to read the Bible. I think the Protestants may have learned a thing or two from us Catholics, but you will have to ask them.

The last thing Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew is “Go and make disciples of all nations.” A disciple is a learner. A learner is someone who changes his mind. To be a disciple in religion means to change your mind about what God is like and what God wants.

All of us who do religion are learners. So are all of us who do politics. We all have to get used to changing our minds, and the best way to do that is to communicate with people who don’t think like us. It’s uncomfortable, but didn’t Jesus say that the road to the kingdom is narrow?