Non-Professional, Amateur...and Proud of It!

In Magnificat Home we are entirely uncredentialed, non-certified, lacking in expertise, degrees and status. We happily provide a home for over 50 women. Many of them suffer psychiatric conditions (bi-polar, schitzophrenic, etc.) and almost all deal with serious anxiety or depression. In large part, our own residents...themselves dealing with mental illness...manage our homes, drawing on a humble wisdom that comes from suffering, poverty, family life, and faith.

We are "amateur"...a word whose root is "love"...we do it because we love it. We are "lay": ordinary, without special competence or training, not members of a status-embued elite. We are "vernacular"...treasuring the ordinary, common sense, untutored prudence, faith and church, life experience and especially the school of family/marriage/parenthood.

I myself have always ambitioned to be an amateur psychologist, servant of the poor, theologian, Church leader, catechist, cultural historian...not to mention father, friend, brother, husband, cousin and uncle. I LOVE all of the above: but have no expertise, credentials or status. Additionally, I harbor an (Ivan Illich inspired) resentment of expertise, credentials, and professional status. Over 50 years ago my mentor Illich taught me that our technocracy of specialization, "science", expertise, regulation, and bureaucracy has largely paralyzed us in the exercise of our own agency in caring for ourselves and each other. So yes, I am passionately "amateur" and viscerally anti-professional! I try to follow Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day and do not trust careerists.

At the beginning of our work at Magnficat Home one of our founding fathers, a dear friend and generous soul, himself an accomplished pharmacist, argued that we would need certified mental health professionals to screen our residents. This for me was a life-or-death issue that struck at our very identity: NO! We are amateur, lay, vernacular and we will draw upon our own experience and wisdom. More recently a successful social worker, who is also a Catholic married deacon, told me frankly that I was myself crazy for gathering such a group of unstable, dysfunctional people into homes without licensed professionals. I listened quietly and realized how completely he is blinded in his professionalism to our charism and work. Just this past weekend a resident had gone off her meds, was hearing voices, and decompensated to a state of mental incompetence. A friend of our home, a volunteer with a doctorate in psychology who visits and has a good relationship with this woman, came in generously to see if she coud persuade her to get back on her meds. The effort failed. But then her (over)valued professionalism kicked in: she insisted that the woman was not safe in our home without a professional presence. Well we called the Crisis Unit who brought her to the hospital to get her back on track. Three cheers, of course, for the psychiatric professional who intervened! But I enjoyed a frank exchange with our doctorate friend: I was offended by her negative evaluation of our home, and she herself was less than thrilled when I told her I valued her kind heart and generous friendship but not so much her "expertise" and her low estimation of our vernacular, humble wisdom.

To be clear: I am not an absolute Luddite. Our homes have flourished largely through the generosity of family/friends who freely provide services involving law, psychology, accounting, architecture, finance, and other. Our number one rule is that our residents comply with doctor's directions. I work happily, every day, with social workers, counselors, psychiatrists. My daughter is a doctor in psychology; another an MSW in social work. I number about ten mental health professionals among my nephews/nieces. I am proud of all of them. And yet, I insist upon the primacy of common sense, ordinary prudence, and the wisdom of tradition, faith and life experience.

More than anything I despise the cult of "safetyism" that surrounds expertise, science and technology. Covid has occassioned a crippling hysteria and a desperate dependence upon "science" for safety. I have come to hate the word "safe" and "safety." In one local parish (where they currently require masks at daily mass), the pastor ends the liturgy with the exhortation "Be Safe." I must supress the urge to jump up and shout "No! I cannot live safely, defensively, in fear! I will be fearless, reckless, and not-safe! I will roll the dice! I will live freely!"

Someone said: "The safest place to be is in God's will. If God wants you in the middle of the battle with bullets whizzing by your ears, that is the safest spot for you!" THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!