131 - The Struggle To Be Free: My Story and Your Story

The Struggle To Be Free:
My Story and Your Story
By Wayne E. Oates
Philadelphia, Westminster, 1983. 176 pp. $7.95.

The author, professor in pastoral care and counseling at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville for many years, and currently on the faculty of the University of Louisville Medical School, has written on a wide range of issues in pastoral care and related subjects. Now he turns his discerning eye on himself in this compelling autobiographical account of his life to date. The central theme that he discerns running through his life is freedom. In chapter after chapter, he recounts his struggle to be free from debilitating constraints, both externally and internally imposed. Personal poverty, "pack thinking" and "factory education" are the external constraints he fought against throughout his life, and feeling of inferiority, loneliness, helplessness, and slavery of overcommitment are the internal constraints. But these are intricately interwoven. Severe poverty in childhood caused feelings of inferiority, resistance to the "pack thinking" of his day exacerbated feelings of loneliness, the "factory education" milieu in which he taught, together with continuing fears of poverty, produced overcommitment and eventually a sense of overwhelming helplessness. This helplessness was, in turn, exacerbated by his son's involvement in the Vietnam War, his own chronic back ailment, and the prospect of forced retirement at age sixty-five.

Recognizing the intricate interweaving of personal and social forces in his life, Oates' account is free of acrimony, on the one hand, and self-congratulation, on the other. Yes, he does recount his disagreements with the policies of the Council for Clinical Training and his struggles with the administration at Southern Baptist Seminary over educational policies. And, yes, he does take personal credit for perceiving the need for "establishing the custom-made clinical approach to theological education within the very heart of theological curricula" (p. 98). But from his current vantage point, he seems to view his professional struggles and achievements with a certain benevolent detachment and absence of personal defensiveness or self-acclaim. What he continues to invest with considerable emotion are his acute experiences of helplessness, especially his sense of "political disfranchisement" during the Vietnam War, and his recurrent experience of loneliness. He uses the word "pain" over and over again in his chapters on loneliness and helplessness, and only in these two chapters. Oates did not coin the phrase "wounded healer," but there are few it fits better. And there are also few who would fight more strenuously against this self-description, for the explicit message of this autobiography is that the struggle to be free is one war that is, with God's help, eminently winnable.

Donald Capps
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N.J.