Intro to Frank Lake

Frank Lake (6 June 1914 – 10 May 1982) was one of the pioneers of pastoral counselling in the United Kingdom. In 1962, he founded the Clinical Theology Association with the primary aim to make clergy more effective in understanding and accepting the psychological origins of their parishioners’ personal difficulties. However, the training seminars in pastoral counselling, which he began in 1958, eventually enlisted professional and lay people in various fields from various denominations. Many thousands of people attended the seminars.

In spite of our attempts to cure our ills we come to the realization that after all, we are merely human, we cannot address all the ills which afflict us, we come to the conclusion which is so succinctly expressed in the following quote from Frank Lane’s text on clinical theology.

‘The nature of the help God gives through His Church is to make what cannot be removed, creatively bearable. Paul's thorn of weakness in the flesh remained. Resting in the power of God, he could glory in his infirmity. It is natural, and it is, I think, spiritually desirable, that we should at first strive and pray, as Paul did, to have our weakness and negativities removed. But the utmost of personal effort and of professional skill may disappoint our hopes in this direction. What then? There are no lectures in medical course to inform the doctor of that paradoxical movement of the Spirit which can turn decisively away from the evidently vain hope of a cure, to a courageous bearing, and more, to a creative using of the pain and loss that cannot be cured. There is a strength which is made perfect in weakness. Without the prior weakness this particular endowment of strength could never be experienced. Pastoral practice, recognizing a certain inevitability of failure in this entirely laudable object, extends itself to ensure that the inward man is concurrently renewed from day to day.

The natural man in us tends to reject the paradox that mental pain and spiritual joy can exist together in us, without diminishing either the agony of the one or the glory of the other. The whole personality may be afflicted by a sense of weakness, emptiness, and pointlessness, without diminishing in the least our spiritual power and effectiveness. This is possible because Christ is alive to reenact the mystery of his suffering and glory in us. So far as our own subjective feelings are concerned, any inner directed questioning of our basic human state may produce the same dismal answer as before; the cupboard is bare. While we regard our humanity as a container which ought to have something good in it when we look inside, we miss the whole point of the paradox. We are not meant to be self-contained, but channels of the life and energies of God Himself. From this point of view our wisdom is to let the bottom be knocked out of our humanity, which will ruin it as a container at the same time as it turns it into a satisfactory channel.” Clinical Theology, Vol. 1, p. xxv.

Pray to God that he cure all those weaknesses that we are aware of and those that we fail to see, through his grace, we become capable of overcoming.

.