After more than four decades as a staff therapist at the Psychotherapy & Spirituality Institute (PSI) and serving as a former Executive Director, Dr. Gary Hellman is transitioning from his New York office. Yet, he remains an integral presence within PSI. We honor his legacy and look forward to many more years of soul-centered work together. The following is his full homily, delivered at St. John’s in the Village as part of a healing liturgy, where he reflected on spiritually informed psychotherapy, sacred mystery, and the currency of the soul.

In the name of the Holy One, source of life and love,
In the name of the Sacred Mystery who is beyond all names,
In the name of the Spirit who moves within us and among us—
Let us gather.

Many thanks to Fr. Graeme and the St. John’s community for this opportunity to share a few reflections about ‘Spiritually Informed Psychotherapy,’ in a theological and liturgical context. This is a therapy process I have never stopped learning about and seeking to practice since I began as a therapist, and it is the ongoing work of the Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute.

As I am taking my leave from this wonderful community, I am honored to have been a part of it for all these years. So here are a few reflections:

We gather this evening not only to remember these lessons, just read, but to ‘RE-MEMBER’ ourselves—to draw the broken pieces of our lives, our faith, our soul, into a living body, here in this community as ONE of the many places and actions of the living God.

This is the sacred task of Eucharist, this ‘giving thanks’ and tonight it deepens as we enter here as a healing liturgy. We will come forward not only to receive bread and wine but also to receive anointing with oil—a visible sign of the healing, an invisible grace, already alive and stirring in each of us.

This moment—of hands laid upon us, of oil placed upon our foreheads—is not magic, but mystery. It affirms what ‘Spiritually Informed Psychotherapy’ knows to be true: that healing is not just a medical or mental-health intervention—it is a spiritual movement of remembrance and return.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells Peter to go fishing. But he’s not fishing for food or pleasure. He’s looking for a coin—to pay the temple tax. Odd, isn’t it? A mundane civic need is answered not with logic nor labor, but with a moment of quiet miracle. He says, “The first fish you catch—look inside. There you’ll find what is needed.”

This peculiar image is, I believe, one of the most psychologically rich moments in this Gospel. So often, what is most essential is found not by striving upward, but by casting downward into the depths. The soul that seeks healing doesn’t speak in abstract theological formulations. It speaks in images, in symptoms we can label as pains and life’s difficulties and strivings. Or it may be revealed in dreams we too often dismiss as upsetting residues from dinner, or in gestures or reactive harsh or insensitive words, or in tears not understood as dark grievous pain.

The fish. The coin. The sea.

But these are not empty symbols—they are initiations to descend, regularly, into the living waters of the psyche.

In ‘Spiritually Informed Psychotherapy,’ we do not aim to “solve” or “cure” such problems of the soul, but to listen down deep into their depth and walk into them, together, as shared witnesses.

A panic attack may hold a deeper message.
A dream of falling may reveal a buried, forgotten, important grief.
The coin may be there, lodged in the mouth of a fish … we fail to catch the metaphor, not caught, much less understood, neither the fish, nor the coin.

That is the ‘sacred dignity’ of psyche suffering—it is not meaningless. It is, as Jung said, the “language of the soul.”

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, offers a warning that feels especially resonant today: “What can be known of God was made plain, but they have exchanged the truth of God for a lie… they worshiped the creature rather than the Creator.”

This is not just a theological statement—it’s a psychological diagnosis. When we lose touch with the sacred center within ourselves, within our depth, we begin to orbit and seek other sources of meaning—we may seek social status, security, more money, higher performance, even sacred doctrine—and call them each ‘gods.’

But truth is still waiting. Grace is still hidden. It may not be found in the temple. It is most likely alive in the sea of longing, in sinking into dark unconscious places we usually prefer to avoid. Or we try to fix rather than feel our way into them, much less share them within a trusting secure relationship.

And tonight, that feeling of trust and confidence may be found in the oil pressed to our forehead. In the warmth of a hand laid gently on our shoulder. In the silence that follows a whispered prayer.

Here tonight at this table, we take ordinary things—bread, wine—and we enter into mystery. And if we can believe that Christ is present in this bread, then surely, we can believe that soul is present in our suffering. That our trauma carries meaning. That our longing and pain is indeed holy. That even our doubts are a form of devotion.

Jesus does not tell Peter to climb a mountain or write a theological treatise. He says: cast your line. Go fishing into the depths. Look inside.

In this very human act, in the mess of it, in the fishiness of it, something holy awaits us in the lives we lead every day.

This, too, is our calling—to fish our depths. To walk beside others as they do. To treat our wounds not as shameful flaws, but as altars where we return over and over seeking recognition and acceptance.

To pay what is owed… to ourselves… not only with silver, but with honesty, with reverence, with love.

So, tonight we may dare to honor this path of ‘Spiritually Informed Psychotherapy’:

– to cast our nets not only upward toward transcendence, but downward, inward, into the depths.
– to honor the strange, even painful, living places where our deep truth hides.
– to practice a process that listens for the soul’s longing voice.
– to worship not the creature, but the Creator—who hides coins in fish and grace in our wounds, and hope in our risking together.

And may the bread we break, the oil we receive, and the hands laid gently upon us remind us:

That the depths of our pains are the deep holy ground.
That the fish you dare pull up from the depths may carry the coin of your healing when it is heard and cared for.

Thank you. And God bless the ongoing soul-seeking work here in St. John’s life and community.

Amen.