Lessons for Pastoral Counseling in "Another Bullsh*t Night in Suck City"

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a memoir written by poet and playwright Nick Flynn, first published in 2004. Last Fall, it was included as a source of reading in my class on Pastoral Care for Men.

Below are some of the thoughts I had drawn from Flynn's story, as well as some insights from the late pastoral counselor and Princeton Seminary professor, Donald Capps.

Nick Flynn’s memoir deeply explores his complicated relationship with his father, Jonathan. The difficulty of the relationships many sons have with their fathers is perhaps best captured in Flynn’s chapter, “Ulysses.” “Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left…even if around, most disappear all day, to jobs their children only slightly understand…some continue to yell at their sons from the grave, some are less than a tattered photograph." Throughout the book, Flynn traces his father’s alcoholism, failed projects, and eventual homelessness.

Another theme Flynn works through in this memoir is his mother’s suicide when he was twenty-two years old. He soon after adopts a boat in need of repair with a friend who lost his mother to cancer. This seemed to resemble Flynn’s process of grief or reluctance to truly grieve. Perhaps, this could speak to the trouble many men have in processing grief and feeling sadness, instead throwing themselves into projects and work, things they can control. Or, it might highlight a different way to process grief – Flynn’s several years of living on a boat may have been the very process he needed to deal with the loss of his mother and the absence of his father.

A pastor might use Flynn’s story to gain insight into the process men in their congregations are going through. Flynn, for instance, realized how his father’s alcoholism affected his family, yet began binge-drinking and doing drugs from a young age. One might explore how addiction tends to impact whole family systems, not just one individual in it. Sons, in a way, carry their fathers’ addictions, if not as their own addictions, then the scars inflicted while in the path of the addict. The book ends with Flynn and his father having a deeper connection than in previous years, but Jonathan still seems deluded and the relationship is certainly not fully reconciled. Perhaps, this is another lesson for the pastoral counselor – most relationships, especially in families that struggle with addiction, dysfunction, and shame, do not see “full healing” (whatever that means). Instead, a pastoral counselor could embrace that “walking with a limp” is part of the human experience and that helping congregants and counselees may look more like helping wounds heal to scars than miraculously erasing the wounds altogether.

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Another writer, Donald Capps, the late pastoral counselor and Princeton Seminary professor, wrote an essay about Jesus' childhood. In Capps' view, Jesus (like Nick Flynn) had a difficult relationship with his father, Joseph. Capps explores the possibility of Jesus' precarious relationship with his earthly father, since Jesus was conceived illegitimately in the eyes of everyone not privy to the angel's conversations with Mary. A child conceived of the Holy Spirit?! What this meant to everyone, including Joseph, Capp says, is a child conceived outside of wedlock with a man the community may or may not have known. Capps asks the questions: How did this affect Jesus' view of himself as a child? How did it affect his relationship with Joseph?

Capps articulates the need for exploration into Jesus’ and our own childhoods in order to gain greater insight to our lives, including our decisions as adults. Capps draws attention to how the imagination of the child “awakens people from a mass hypnosis, restores their powers of perception…and mercilessly exposes the emptiness to which rulers as well as masses have fallen victim." It is this child’s imagination in Jesus that allows for seeing and relating to God as intimate father.

Capps is ultimately interested in a "religion of love" (rather than abuse) and his consideration of Jesus as someone who understands what it is like to be an illegitimate son is powerful. However, much of it is conjecture. We simply don't know a whole lot about Jesus' childhood.

Still, Capps' connection of Jesus' rocky relationship with Joseph to the intimate relationship Jesus had with Abba God could give much to those who have experienced abandonment and shame in their own families of origin. This could be a great gift to give in pastoral counseling, as well.