A narrative approach to Christian pastoral care for chronic illness patients: contemporary forms of TV narrative as metaphor

ABSTRACT The field of narrative medicine, or medical narratology, has opened up an exciting and creative range of ways to help medical practitioners understand more deeply patients’ accounts and thereby offer more effective patient care. The insights offered by medical narratology remain relatively unexplored in Christian pastoral care literature, yet hold much wisdom for those who care pastorally in contexts involving illness. This paper draws on the medical narratology of Arthur Frank to suggest an approach to pastoral listening that allows ‘breathing space’ for the multiple strands or ‘plotlines’ of experiences of those with chronic or long-term health conditions. It critiques the application in medical narratology of Aristotelian plot structure as too reductive to speak truthfully to the multiply-stranded narratives of chronic illness, and instead suggests the British television soap opera as a contemporary narrative form offers a metaphor which can help Christian pastoral carers to position themselves as long-term listeners to those with long-term illness.