A guilty conscience does not improve necessarily when the minister uses 'supportive' interventions to ease the person's conscience.
A troubled conscience is one that is having boundary problems...should I do this or that?...how can I make reparation for doing what I did? An active conscience is our personal guide, our internal spiritual director, helping us make right decisions about how to act toward others, and how to correct mistakes when we make them.
Most ministers want to be 'supportive' of the people who come to see them. Often, a minister untrained in counseling interventions, will be 'supportive' when the person is acting incompetently in his or her life. For example, to tell a person who keeps shoplifting "you are a good person" changes the meaning of "good person" to include the troubling behavior.
But there is another side of the coin...the minister who is 'supportive' in a way that encourages incompetency when the person is acting competently. For example, a minister who was tempted to infidelity with a woman in a troubled marriage, and whose conscience was sorely troubled, acted competently when he sought spiritual guidance. He was encouraged by his supportive spiritual director not to be so disturbed at the idea because the woman's marriage was "on the rocks anyway."
The spiritual director's lesson was to diminish the role of conscience as a guide to moral boundaries in behavior. Instead of minimizing the troubling questions from the man's conscience...the spiritual director should have encouraged the minister to pay attention to and follow his conscience as a guide to behavior.
You can click on the link below to see how a young teenage actor, with a troubled conscience about a part he agreed to play, was also directed by a supportive spiritual director not to follow his conscience as a guide.
Follow the link to read the story...then go to our contact page and tell us what you think the boundary issue is when a minister deals with someone's conscience.
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