“No More a Stranger, Nor a Guest, But Like a Child at Home”: Hostility and Hospitality in a “Non-Religious” Pastoral Encounter in Hospice

Abstract

With gratitude for the space-making oxygen she generates for so many as a blooming evergreen, for the tender care with which she as a gardener waters and prunes all her plants, including me, I offer this clinical essay for this festschrift in honor of my beloved advisor and doktormutter, Ann Belford Ulanov. Ann’s focus on applied or depth theology as an “eschatology of presence,” which fosters the God-given integrity and freedom of the person in relation to the divine, sets apart her writing and teaching. Depth theology is “faith” in the psyche, which in turn is “part of the flesh in which the Holy incarnates,” and, as she demonstrates, opens onto faith in God as experienced through the psyche, conscious and unconscious. For theology and psychology today, Ulanov’s work, which employs a “rigor of the heart” that demands heart, soul, strength and mind work together as advised in the shema, opens new vistas to receiving all of ourselves and others, and like Mary, to receiving God among us in the flesh