"Choose your Companions from the Best" (W. B. Yeats—"To a Young Beauty")

Abstract

Much pastoral care involves accompanying those who are grieving. This article suggests that regular, active engagement with the creative arts is a way of repairing the energy expended in sensitive pastoral care. Reflecting on the connection between grief and creativity in psychoanalytic literature, the author has coined the expression creative repair. Responses to a list of relevant questions from two groups of ordained ministers have supported the author's hypothesis. The author has identified a gap in the literature around the resourcing of those who minister. The author suggests implications for theological training and ongoing Continuing Ministerial Development and indicates that good practice could usefully be modelled by those in senior posts.

Keywords:

• creative repair
• grief
• mourning
• resourcers and drainers
• theological training