When I got married, my fiance really wanted to have a church wedding. Since we were both raised in the Anglican church, it was natural that we should find a church of that denomination for the ceremony. Unfortunately, the one we chose required that we take a marriage course before they’d do the ceremony.
The course was run over a weekend: a Friday evening, and then a few hours each on Saturday and Sunday. I was pleasantly surprised by the priest who did the course. He gave mostly practical advice about being married, including the most common contentious issues, attitudes, communication and the like. The only thing vaguely religious involved was a quick prayer he led at the end of each session.
So, good advice and presented in a pragmatic way that proved enlightening, from a priest. Contrary to my prejudices, too. Of course, we got divorced after ten years of marriage, so perhaps not all of it took.
I grew up with a close, loving, respectful relationship with my parents. After my father’s death, my mother said some things to me which were extremely hurtful. It was enough to pretty much destroy my relationship with her. The lack of love and respect on my part hurt me, as well. Finally, after a year or so, I went to confession. I admitted to the priest that I couldn’t forgive her. He asked me if I wished her ill. I said no. He said that relationships change, and the fact that I didn’t feel the same way wasn’t sinful, and could be healthy. Giving myself permission to feel that way also eventually led to my forgiving her. I’m very glad I did, as she died of a sudden stroke a few years later.
That was the most pointed example, but I’ve received much advice and encouragement from priests.
No, I definitely wasn’t expecting Goyo to say “my parents treat my youngest brother like your mother treats you and it makes me want to hammer them into the floor with a hardcover Bible - you need to walk out the door or you’ll end up jumping off a window.” Everybody else kept lauding my wonderful relationship with Mom, and what I went to ask for was advice on how to be more patient with her and grateful for having such a great mother (which, again, everybody kept telling me I had), not instructions to move out using the door, not the window.
Yes. When I was in graduate school, my minister advised me to drop out of graduate school and take a position teaching high school in another state. I took the position and I’m still teaching there.
The important point being that at the time, every other adult that I knew, I knew through the university, and most of them through the math department. None of them were able to understand that I was growing discontent with the fact that so much of professional math was utterly useless outside of professional math departments. All those who had become professors within the department had obviously made peace with the fact that they’d spend their lives writing papers with little or not applications outside their own small circles. But once I figured this out, I grew unhappy with it, partly because I couldn’t understand why people did it and partly because I couldn’t picture myself devoting my life to something so useless. My minister was able to explain that this was the way academia worked and that if I couldn’t accept it, then I needed to leave.
I’d also chime in against the idea that ministers are confined to a narrow range of advice. It’s a plain fact that clergy have the broadest range of experience of any profession. If you’re looking for someone who can discuss the influence of Aristotle on Renaissance thought, explain the roots of the English Civil War, and talk about how the idea of personal narrative influenced 20th century literature, you’d be more likely to find such a person in the nearest church than anywhere else. Ministers have to spend much of their life working with the extreme poor and homeless, convicted criminals, the dieing, relatives of those who have just died, and other groups of people that most of us prefer to ignore, so they have a much broader range of knowledge about the human condition than most other people.
Do nuns and Christian Brothers count? Because I got plenty of good advice (that I usually ignored) from the faculty at Christian Brothers High School & College back in…well…high school and college.
Untrue. I’ve gone to clerics for advice in two situations: When I was pretty sure I should do something unpleasant and was hopingto be told it wasn’t necessary; or when I honestly wasn’t sure where my duty lay in a given situation.
Continuing my long-standing practice of arguing both sides of every issue, that depends on the clergy and is often untrue. If you’re talking about, say, a Catholic priest, or a Congregationalist minister, you can generally get some intelligent discourse even if you disagree with them on many issues. But a minister from the Church in God in Christ, or another such Pentecostal or fundamentalist denomination? Piffle. They place very little value on any sort of intelligence beyond that required to memorize Bible verses, and none whatsodamnever on intellectual curiosity. Idiocy actually makes it easier in such churches.
I think it was more common in the early 80s and before that time. People though if you went to a counselor or psychologist or similar that you were crazy and would do anything to avoid the stigma of going to one.
So a priest, rabbi or similar was an acceptable substitute for many people
It’s not advice, but a rabbi did tell me that my mother- and father-in-law would come around to accepting me eventually (my wife is Jewish; I converted, but they still weren’t happy). He was right.
Yes, my deacon really helped me through a very bad time. I don’t want to get into details, but I was really in a very bad place, no money for counseling, and I needed someone to help me… and he did.
