Student Chaplain P

Student Chaplain P's interview reflects in different ways a social-minded position to the surroundings and the environment, which they talk with the students about. When trust is present, it creates possibilities for taking in something new, for taking one's understanding further. As one chaplain stated: "there is resurrection in pastoral care conversation"— new beginnings. The new can start in that which is quite basic and ordinary. It can also start in embodiment: holding hands, crying, eating, laughing, maybe praying together.

This is part of the stress relief of a caring community. The third step in a psychological repertoire relates to being able to learn from those who have a precise and personal understanding of you as a person (Fonagy et al. 2017; Bateman and Fonagy 2019). If I feel understood by you, I will open myself up to you, so that I will be able to learn from you about things. This helps change fixed and persisting convictions. The reopening of the potential for understanding by feeling sensitively reacted to may set off more trustful and new relations outside the pastoral care room. This may thereby open the student to new understandings of various social situations when these appear outside the pastoral care room.

When the student relaxes, the ability for trust increases and the student may discover new ways to learn about others and new settings. Such positive social experiences now

have the potential to have a positive impact. In other words, the student may begin to experience social interactions in a more benign manner and see their social situation more precisely. The change that happens between the pastoral care sessions is a consequence of changed attitudes towards learning brought about by the pastoral care. In this sense, the changes owed themselves to the transformation of the ways in which the student uses their social environments rather than by things happening in the pastoral care. In the case of Student Chaplain H, this means that the transformations begin in the pastoral care practices and that the students bring them further by expanding their awareness of their entanglements in belonging to the world outside the pastoral care context too—becoming "friends" with birds, moss, and flowers, and learning a praxis of handling plastic, foods, clothes, woods, and so on.

According to McFague, friendship is the most elementary form of bond, a relation created by one's own choice. The image of the third person of the Trinity, "God as Friend", represents a God who sustains, whose immanent presence is the faithful companion, who operates with us in reciprocity in generating healing in all parts of the world's body (McFague 1987, p. 167). We are God's auxiliary force in that mutual project that embraces the whole creation. The basis for friendship is freedom; when friendship is chosen, one of the strongest bonds is created: the bond of trust (ibid., p. 162). Friends are absorbed in a shared interest in the world. However, friends in shared, collaborative projects do represent another aspect of friendly interactions. Collaboration on large projects means that many friends are needed with many different abilities. Of course, one can be friends with anybody across gender, race, class, nationality, age, conviction, and religion (adding species). To be like-minded—across forms of life (and ontological distinctions) is the primary thing. In that sense, one can indeed be friends with God, especially as part of a large-scale collaborative project, such as caring for the Earth really is. In that sense, friendship is the most allembracing form of love. It means a willingness to take responsibility for the world. Thus, God as Friend can be taken as a model of hope, defying despair (ibid., p. 169).

Enhanced epistemic trust and dismantling of the student's rigidity, by which social experiences are interpreted and reacted to, opens the way for the student to change their views in a safe and secure way; it releases the opening of an "epistemic superhighway" (Fonagy and Allison 2014). All in all, this may serve to nurture a growing resilience in life, whereby the student is able to find new ways of moving forwards through their various difficulties and distress. In short, the experience of feeling understood in pastoral care makes the student feel safe enough to think about themselves in relation to the world. It enables them to learn something new about the world and how to operate in it in a positively responsible manner.

The chaplains' interviews are filled with narratives about students who seek roads to walk by. Student Chaplain C expresses this need for the caregiver to act as a wise person, to give advice on life's conditions, to understand how life is for the young student, and how to take life's problems one piece at a time:

"I talk with the students about living in the moment and being present instead living only in the future 'Also try to live now and grasp the day instead of just putting all your strength and courage and hope and faith and joy out in the future. You don't know if you are going to be here tonight or tomorrow, and neither do I'. Try to ge<sup>t</sup> them to relate to their life. If they constantly try to calculate it in advance, say: 'Are you to figure it out beforehand?' I turn to action: 'Just do it!' 'The plastic wrap is to be saved now!'."

Finally, the core of McFague's model of God as Friend is the joy of being together. An image of eschatological completion is Lord's Supper: sharing a meal. Strangers are welcome. The guest's requirements are what is needed in all human life: food, shelter, clothes, and company. *Koinonia* applies to every life: openness towards what is different, unexpected, and alien (McFague 1987, p. 174). This represents a community of all creation united in the source of life—enacting together just that: food, shelter, cloth, company, birds, moss, and plastic wrap, too.
