Author Archive
HOLY PEOPLE WANT LESS!
By suggesting an alternative to wants-versus-needs thinking, which seems to pit rationality against emotions, I am not suggesting that no difference exists between needs. Surely some needs are more important than others. I want to challenge the notion that there is some simple objective way of determining my needs, and that, being objective, it’s evaluation requires no input from emotions. (As a side note, we seem to have this odd notion that our emotions were badly damaged in the Fall, but that our intellect came through nearly unscathed, so that we can trust the latter more than the former). There are things I clearly need, some for my body (food, water, shelter) and some for my soul (love, interaction, forgiveness). Those things I need for my soul should never be forfeited for the sake of another, because I am foremost responsible for my own soul, and I never do well by another when I forfeit myself. God is responsible for their needs.
I don’t mean that we never forgo some food for the soul as a benefit to another… just like skipping a meal, such choices are good for us if they are in the context of a steady, nutritional diet. The key I think is my own health, for which I am responsible. One can be spiritually glutinous or spiritually anorexic… in the first, the intake regularly exceeds the output and in the second the output regularly exceeds the intake. Both are bad for the soul. The first is characteristic of those we would call “selfish,” but is also characteristic of those who are starving (or feel as though they are starving). The selfish individual has the emotional resources to do more for others, but chooses not to, while the starving has no such resources. None of us knows another’s heart well enough to make this determination about them.
I Know What I Need!
My effort to bring false and true needs into the discussion fits here. I believe the problem with those who are “selfish,” is not usually that they imbibe too much or more than their share, but that they fill up on Twinkies and Pringles, and since this does not meet their true need and they remain hungry, they continue to stuff more in to fill that gnawing hunger. No one turns to alcohol to satisfy a need for alcohol. They do it to reduce the pain from true needs that are languishing. It is easy to make folks feel better by satisfying their false needs (it makes the giver feel better as well, so we are inclined to do it without thinking), and sometimes it is the best approach for many reasons, but I think it is good for us to realize we are not providing a remedy for their genuine needs. Their unsatiated need will remain, stimulating their desire for another bag of popcorn.
Another Piece?
I could give a hundred examples in my own life of misunderstanding my needs and trying to satisfy my hunger with plastic pizzas and wooden fruit–the hungrier you are the harder you chew. It has a profoundly disrupting spiritual effect in one’s life. I have had a desparate need for acceptance all my life. I felt unworthy as I was and thought I could not be loved unless I “got my act together.” I could not trust any acceptance that came from someone who tried to overlook my faults, because such acceptance was undeserved. My felt need was for holiness… greater and purer and more constant than I had so that I could be worthy, but no matter how much higher I climbed, my thirst for acceptance remained, driving me deeper into the desert. My growth in “holiness” (as I undertsood it), instead of fulfilling me, was actually dragging me away from realizing and satisfying my real need, which was to discover and embrace God’s grace. I’m glad my search was a cul-de-sac or I would still be climbing that mountain.
From one of my all time favorite books, written by a non-christian with deep insight: Expecting Adam by Martha Beck, a married Harvard student who discovered her fetus (Adam) had Down’s Syndrome.
With Adam, I had more fears than usual to plague me during those long, long nights. The problem was that it was impossible not to fall in love with him. It is a frightening thing to love someone you know the world rejects. It makes you so terribly vulnerable. You know you will be hurt by every slight, every prejudice, every pain that will befall your beloved throughout his life. In the wee small hours, as I rocked and nursed and sang to my wee small boy, I couldn’t help but worry. Will Rogers once said that he knew worrying was effective, because almost nothing he worried about ever happened. That’s a cute statement, and I’m glad Will’s life worked this way. But mine hasn’t–at least not where Adam is concerned. Almost everything I worried about during the nights after his birth, almost every difficult thing I feared would come my way as a result of being his mother, has actually happened.
Thank God.
…….
What my fears all boiled down to, as I sat with my tiny son in the days after his birth, was an underlying terror that he would destroy my own facade, the flawlessness and invulnerability I projected onto the big screen, the Great and Terrible Martha of Oz. You see, I knew all along that there wasn’t one label people might apply to Adam–stupid, ugly, strange, clumsy, slow, inept–that could not, at one time or another, be justifiably applied to me. I had spent my life running from this catastrophe and like so many other things, it caught up with me while I was expecting Adam.
In this regard, as in so many others, my worst fears have come to pass. But as they do I am learning that there is an even bigger secret, a secret I had been keeping from myself. It has been hard for me to grasp, but gradually, painfully, with the slow, small steps of a retarded child, I am coming to understand it. This has been the second phase of my education, the one that followed all those years of school. In it, I have had to unlearn virtually everything Harvard taught me about what is precious and what is garbage. I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul.
Now I think that the vast majority of us “normal” people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, onmiscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered. The irony is that we do this to be loved, all the time remaining terrified of anyone who seems to be as perfect as we wish to be. We go around like Queen Elizabeth, bless her heart, clutching our dowdy little accessories, avoiding the slightest hint of impropriety, never showing our real feelings or touching anyone else except through glove leather. But we were dazed and confused when the openly depressed, bulimic, adulterous, rejected Princess Di was the one people really adored.
Living with Adam, loving Adam, has taught me a lot about the truth. He has taught me to look at things in themselves, not the value a brutal and often senseless world assign to them. As Adam’s mother I have been able to see quite clearly that he is no less beautiful for being called ugly, no less wise for appearing dull, no less precious for being seen as worthless. And neither am I. Neither are you. Neither is any of us.
FEED ME SEYMOUR!
All of us are concerned that when we give others enough freedom, they will take advantage of us. They will think only of themselves, and we will get left with too few resources–whether money, time, attention, benefits, or what have you. It is a realistic concern–watch any playground with children (… or adults), but our desire for boundaries against the incursions of others seems to smack against the command to love, to be unselfish. We have often tried to sort through this tension by making a distinction between “need” and “want.” What we need is legitimate to fight for, but what we want should often go unfulfilled for the sake of another.
I think our distinction between need and want slowly worked itself into a spectrum represented at one end by absolute necessity (what we need to survive) and at the other end by mild wishes. We tend to assign “needs” an objective value (actual need) and “wants” a subjective value (just a feeling) and to downplay our desires. No matter how intense your feelings, I will judge them as only a “want” if they do not pass the objective test for “needs.” My attitude will be “get a grip!”
With this approach I determine how much to give or support someone by making an objective comparison between their need and my own need. When someone asks for money, I immediately consider whether they “need” this or just “want” it. I compare their level of need to my own, and if their need is greater, I feel obligated to help out. If I don’t give, I feel under a great deal of pressure to justify my decision (they don’t deserve it, they are not my responsibility, it would be bad for them, etc.). But this rarely works to fully relieve my conscience, so I feel guilty of selfishness. I tend to assume the equation: their (genuine) need + my ability = my obligation.
THIS IS NOT A NEED!
Given this perspective, I must constantly evaluate whether my desire is a “need” or a “want.” But I find that nearly impossible to determine except for the extremes (physical survival and slight desire). When I take this route, I find myself using “objective” evaluation of my need to constantly critique my subjective feelings, my wants. The more it is tied to my feelings, the more likely I am to be dismissive so that my self-care is constantly under attack. The more conscientious I am, the more I tend to minimize my own desires, downgrading them from needs to wants, interpreting self-care as selfishness (a lack of adequate concern for others). But shushing our feelings is a pretty sure way of losing touch with our true heart. God gave us emotions for a reason, so it seems to me ignoring them is going to get us into trouble (I know it has done a great deal of damage to me personally).
I think the “objective” distinction between needs and wants as I presented it here can be a dangerous interpretation of selfishness. Leaving aside superficial desires that cost me little to miss, I’d like to propose an alternative distinction: true wants/needs versus false ones. The stronger my desire, the more likely it is to have its roots in an important need, and it is vital for myself and my relationships–for health and growth–to satisfy that need. Regardless of how trivial my desire looks from an “objective” view, my emotions are cluing me in to an important need.
The major problem I find with this perspective is that I often misconstrue my true needs. I mistake applause for love, success for worth. I mistake conformity for community, popularity for acceptance… and the list goes on. My main problem is not selfishness that results in satisfying my desires, but confusion that results in “satisfying” my false desires and neglecting my true ones. If I am hungry for applause, it is a genuine and important hunger that is calling out, but the true need is not approval, so no amount of praise will satisfy my hunger (as no amount of dry leaves will satisfy my empty belly). I may think the solution is to “humble” myself and stop seeking applause (to basically deny that I have a need). I tried that all my life and my genuine hunger remained. What finally worked for me was identifying my true need (that was tricky) and finding a means to satisfy it with God’s help.
I would like to suggest that it is never a good moral decision to sacrifice my true needs/desires. I am ultimately responsible for my own health and growth, to receive the grace of God for my needs. God, not I, is responsible to provide the grace for everyone’s individual needs. I may or may not be a channel of his grace to others, but it would be morally wrong for me to choose to forgo meeting my own true needs so as to meet another’s needs. That is not selflessness, it is self abuse, and it confounds God’s role with mine. I suggested earlier that physical survival was an obvious case of objective need, but is it truly? I believe I can sacrifice my life for another without injuring myself, but I may never choose to sacrifice my soul. I believe we are best alerted to our deepest objective needs by our emotions rather than our logic, and through reflection in the context of true community we discover their true nature.
HAPPY HAPPY, JOY JOY!!
I suppose an illustration at this point might help clarify our marital dance. I have many to choose from! Like most American women, Kimberly has a higher standard of cleanliness (or lower comfort level with dirt) than her husband. So how do we determine what is “fair”? Do we decide that her standard is “right,” and that I should do 50% of this? Do we decide that my standard is right, and that if she wants it to be cleaner, the rest is up to her? Or do we settle on something in between so that both of us are doing more than we feel is fair? There are many other considerations–who has more time or energy, which tasks do each of us prefer or hate, how much emotional cost is involved, is resentment building up because either of us feels the other does not care enough about our feelings to do more?
We try to talk… or rather I try to negotiate and Kimberly tries to share (I’m a fixer, she’s a relater). It seems to me completely useless to clean underneath or behind the sofa. No one sees it, not even us! But she feels it! It bothers her. Now here comes the rub. When she tells me about her emotional needs, she is simply sharing. She just wants me to understand, listen, empathize. She’s not indirectly asking me to change, but that is what I hear: her expectations, what she thinks I should do. That’s what “sharing needs” always meant in my family of origin if the person we were telling could actually do what we wanted. So I argue against her unreasonable demands (as I see it), but she is not coming from a place of expectations, so my resistance to her sounds like I am rejecting her feelings, telling her that she should not be bothered by the dog hair under the loveseat.
She completely separates sharing about her needs from my obligations regarding her needs, but I instinctively unite them, so the only way I have of protecting myself from demands that seem unreasonable is to talk down her feelings (which are loaded with expectations as I suppose). If I could separate empathy from obligation as she does, I could listen compassionately without feeling threatened that my needs are being shoved aside. But my feelings are so deeply ingrained around this relational dynamic, that even after I intellectually grasp where she is coming from, even after believing she really is not imposing expectations (both of which took years for me), I still struggle with my deeply ingrained emotional reactions.
However, the more we talk, the more our mutual understanding and acceptance grows. Since I am released from a sense of obligation, I have much more emotional space to empathize, and my love for her responds easily and gladly in this context of freedom, vulnerability, and trust. Now I can choose to clean under the sofa and actually feel good about it, because I am motivated by love rather than obligation. Still, we give each other the right to take care of our own needs, so if I feel burdened by the thought of vacuuming, I let it go, and Kimberly, because she genuinely has no expectations, is glad for me to do so. This does not mean I love her less, I simply have a need just now that it would hurt me to neglect. We have learned that if we do not honor our own needs, we not only suffer personally, but ultimately hurt our relationship as well.
Cleaning under the sofa might be a trite issue for many, and if the feelings it raises are slight, then resolution is easy. It doesn’t really matter who cleans, and the issue of “fairness” is rather meaningless since nobody is asking the question. The real conflict for us was not over a five minute cleaning job. That was simply a porthole into the deep waters, the very fundamental question of every human heart, “Do you care? Am I loved? Do my needs matter to you?” Emotions are surprisingly consistent and accurate in telling us what really does matter to us, though the “why” is often hard to interpret and is often best teased out in a supportive, accepting relationship. I am so incredibly blessed to have such a relationship.
SORRY! IT'S ALL MY FAULT!
Oh, the bumpy ride out of the marriage gate! Kimberly and I both came from families that saw the world divided into right and wrong, but I bought into it and she didn’t. She valued understanding and accepting each other as is. I valued changing to meet one another’s expectations: decide what is right and do it. But how would we decide what is “right”? The only guideline that made sense to me was to let fairness determine basic expectations, and then each of us could feel free to be “more” than fair as an exercise of grace. How could I even understand grace if I did not start with fair expectations? If we agree that we both should do 50% of the dishes, then my doing 75% is an extra 25% of grace, but if fairness (all things considered) expects me to do 75%, then I have only done my duty and nothing more. Have any of you married folks tried to decide what is fair? What I thought was straightforward proved to be indecipherable.
A PRECISE CHART OF FAIRNESS
Consider our budget. Take something as simple as grocery shopping. How much should I buy of what I like and how much of what Kimberly likes? 50-50? But being a good bit bigger than Berly and having a faster metabolism, I eat more than she does. Should we factor in how much we each love, tolerate, or hate a certain item? How do food allergies or dietary necessities weigh into the mix? If one of us does the shopping and/or cooking, do they get an extra slice? If one of us brings in more income, do they get more of a say in the spending (or is it based more on hours worked… only occupational time or household chores….)? If 9 brownies are in the frig, how much can either of us eat before the other one feels cheated? (Yes, this has been an issue.) Even I could see that my views of fairness smacked of legalism.
You may find all of this a bit silly, even childish. Shouldn’t each of us simply choose for the sake of the other person? This is the way I was raised, but you can imagine how poorly it works when I believe we are each responsible for the other’s needs and Kimberly believes we are each responsible for our own needs. From my perspective, the only way to resolve unmet expectations is to “encourage” Kimberly to meet them (or live at a deficit). But from Kimberly’s perspective that is imposing my wishes on her and making her take up what she feels is my responsibility. From my viewpoint, we should focus on expectations, what ought to be done for the other. From Berly’s viewpoint, we should focus on what each of us needs to do for ourselves. For her, self-care must precede other-care just as a mother must put on her airplane oxygen mask before she puts one on her child. I said, “I have expectations. They are reasonable. If you don’t meet them, my needs will go unmet. I will feel you don’t love me. I will become hurt and resentful.” She said, “I have no expectations for you to meet my needs. I take full responsibility for my own needs, and I do not want you to neglect your own needs so that you can satisfy mine. I want you to take care of yourself, to take care of your emotional needs as you do your physical ones. I wish you would do the same towards me. Your need does not establish my responsibility, nor mine yours.”
IT JUST LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT FROM MY ANGLE
I think my trouble has always been connecting expectations, reasonable expectations, with responsibility. If my expectations are legitimate in a given relationship (clean up your own messes, repair what you break, do your fair share of the work) and you don’t meet those expectations, then you are simply wrong, and need correcting. What else could it mean to be my brother’s keeper if not identifying the problem and urging the right path to take? Only… the real reason I am pushing this is not for your sake, but for mine. I feel inconvenienced, disrespected, hurt, unheard, overburdened, and it is because of your negligence. I need you to change so I can feel better and our relationship can smooth out.
Clearly for relationships to work at all there must be some standardized expectations. If my friend may respond to a dinner invitation by punching me or turning in circles three times or offering a breath mint, then I am at a loss to know how to relate. His behavior does not make sense to me. If he reacts in an unexpected way, I think him odd or worse (based on whether he seems to know or not know what is expected of him), and this starts us right off in the wrong direction since I believe he is the one who needs changing. What we really need is mutual understanding, talking through our differences, but if either one of us assumes our own “rightness,” things are likely to go awry, and we may part ways with less clarity and an extra helping of acrimony. I have understood him, and what I understand is that he is mistaken. So I will do the “loving” thing and “forgive” him, which means I still think he is to blame for the tensions in our relationship.
Kimberly supported her dear friend Lisa as they visited Ground Zero 3 months after the attacks. Lisa’s father was a fireman who died in the inferno. This is her recounting of that visit.
“Sixth and Houston,”
…said my friend, Lisa, as we slid into the back seat of the New York taxicab, shaking the snow from our scarves. “There’s a fire house there.”
The driver pulled away from the curb, and the sights and sounds of the city night flooded our senses. It had been a long journey already—driving to New York from Virginia, and taking the train into the heart of Manhattan–but we knew it was only the beginning. I silently asked God to calm my nerves so that I could be a support to my friend through this night.
Handing the cab driver the fare as we stood once again on the snowy pavement, and turning toward the brick building that housed the FDNY 2nd Battalion, we were faced head-on with our mission. There, among 8 or 9 others on the glass window in front, was the striking portrait of Richard Prunty. It was the same smiling face that stood framed in the curio cabinet of his widowed wife’s living room, next to the honors and medals he had received during his career as a fire fighter.
Upon entering the building, we were greeted by several gregarious uniformed men. We shook their hands, and Lisa introduced herself.
“Hello, I’m Lisa—Richard Prunty’s daughter.”
We were taken through the station house to the kitchen to wait for our “escort.” We walked past brick and steel walls covered with cards, letters, pictures, and posters scrawled with children’s disarrayed letters: “T-H-A-N-K Y-O-U F-O-R H-E-L-P-I-N-G U-S.” and red, white, and blue hearts, angels, and crosses adorning them.
As I passed the racks of helmets and huge burn-proof jackets with the familiar reflective yellow stripe across the middle, I kept reminding myself that I was not on a movie or television set. This was real. I had seen the “Third Watch” special episodes in September…and I kept expecting to see cameras and TV stars waiting for the next “take.”
Then, I felt like I was drifting somewhere above the floor…and I couldn’t feel my body. Was I real? Was this a dream? Why was I here? What was I thinking? Who did I think I was, this naïve, insignificant girl from the Mid-West… Suddenly, I needed a bathroom. I was directed to a dirty, tiled room with a urinal and toilet, and I closed the door slowly, so as not to alarm Lisa. Then I bent over and allowed my stomach to empty itself into the toilet. Immediately I felt connected with my body again. I prayed that God would help me …for Lisa’s sake.
I joined Lisa in the kitchen where we sipped coffee for a few moments until a tall, sandy-haired man in his thirties came in. “I’m Mike Simon,” he said as he warmly shook our hands. “Please come with me.” He fit every ‘New Yorker’ stereotype I could imagine: the thick accents, the dark-skinned ruggedness, and the loud, matter-of-fact way of speakin
g.
We headed back out into the blustery night, and stepped into the big van marked with a yellow and blue “Fire Squad” insignia. Lisa and I piled into the bench seat behind the driver, who greeted us with a warm smile, and Mike Simon settled into the passenger seat up front. Then, we were navigating the slush-covered streets once again—our final leg of the journey into this night. We drove further on, passing a point marked, “Only WTC Vehicles and Deliveries Beyond This Point.” The police guard waved at the van as we moved on past, and we drove toward what is known to rescue workers simply as “the pit.”
The snow seemed to pick up as we exited the Fire Squad van and followed Mike through a series of scaffoldings with spray-painted instructions and warnings. Then we entered the Command Post—an actual old firehouse that was now the nearest intact building to our journey’s end…Ground Zero itself.
Finally, we began to ascend the stairs that would take us to the 4-story rooftop for our closer-than-bird’s-eye-view of the disaster site. This was the place where Lisa’s father had spent his last moments, and the taking of family members to this place was hoped to bring some kind of closure to the ongoing grief…perhaps some reality into the hundreds of images running through the minds of loved ones.
From our four-story vantage point, my eyes took in a scene that would forever be etched in my mind. A large area on the ground level was clear of debris, and roads and ramps had been constructed in what looked like a whole separate world. A four-by-six square block area of the city had been transformed into a world of steel and concrete piles. Hundreds of orange-vested workers scanned and roamed on foot, while scores of construction cranes, dump trucks, and other machinery moved along the dirt roads, picking up mountains of steel and moving it to smaller piles to be sifted through.
At the heart of this newly created world was a downward sloping dirt ramp. It began at the ground level, where three demolished buildings (there were seven destroyed in all, with others missing tops and floors) had been completely cleared so trucks could drive easily around the sorted piles. The ramp then spiraled down. Trucks drove slowly downward to where the city streets were now high above them. The cranes there were still tearing at walls that towered over them. These were the walls that were once hundreds of feet above the city streets.
The fireman explained that every foot of debris at that level comprised approximately one floor of each World Trade Tower. Each floor was still on top of the others as they should be…only compacted down to a mere foot of rubble. Mike pointed to a landmark on a building across the way and told us that was how high the rubble originally stood.
“When the debris was that high,” I asked, “…how did you begin clearing it? I mean, I see the cranes now picking up the piles, but what did you use when the piles were higher than any piece of equipment could reach?”
A SECOND IWO JIMA
He turned to stand directly in front of me, feet shoulder width apart, and stretched out his hands, palm up. That had a deep impact on me, and I only stared at him. “Equipment and tools were worthless then.” he explained to me. “People just went right up to it and started tearing at it with their hands.”
I looked at Lisa, her eyelashes covered with snowflakes as she drew her scarf closely under her chin to shield her from the wind. As my arm went around Lisa’s shoulders, I asked, “What do you need, Lisa? Is there anything you are going to wish you had done when we leave?”
Mike seemed to be inspired by that question, because his face softened, and then became serious as he looked Lisa straight in the eye. “I worked with your dad a lot. He was an amazing man.” He paused briefly, as if to get the courage to say what he was thinking. “He was in the lobby that day, Lisa. He had heard the call to evacuate. He was calling his men back down the stairs. He knew he was in danger…but he would not leave his men there. He was not that kind of chief. He wouldn’t leave them.”
Then, there was nothing more to say. Mike looked at the face of his chief’s daughter…standing in the dark night overlooking that fateful site…and had nothing left to say. “Could you give us a few moments alone?” I asked him softly, and he nodded thankfully. “Sure,” he told me. “Take as much time as you need.”
I knew I could offer my stoic friend no words of comfort now. This was way beyond words, and because of that, I hesitated to do the next thing I did. But I also knew that the Presence of God is deeper than words, and calling upon Him now was what we needed. “Lisa,” I said softly as she stared straight ahead. Her face glistened in the lights from the wetness of the snowflakes. “Can I pray now?”
She nodded without changing her expression. Then, my eyes moved from her face back to The Pit. I had no idea what to say, but I threw self-consciousness to the wind. Neither of us would remember any words spoken now. I simply wanted God in the experience of this night.
When my eyes turned back toward the piles of debris below, suddenly there was an unmistakable impression upon me. My view was transformed. I had been staring at a pit of destruction a few minutes before, my mind clouded with questions and sorrow. But now I could not see any of the things I had just looked upon.
My eyes fixated on the lights. Large, football-stadium lights had been erected all around The Pit, shining down into it, a light that was brighter than day. The light snowfall emphasized the path of light as it came down from the sky and shone over the work below.
What had been mountains of rubble and trash months earlier…the tomb of thousands, with chaos and fear…overwhelming images of destruction…had been transformed, as I had said earlier…into a whole new world. What I now saw below was human resiliency. I saw order. I saw people volunteering their time to sift through piles piece by piece, to drive trucks to and fro, clearing the chaos. I saw the pieces being picked up, and life moving along.
And the glaring image I was receiving into my senses now was that it was only possible to do this around the clock because of the light from above. A power source greater than these mere people was surrounding the entire area, making forward movement possible in darkness.
Lisa and I stood in silence for a moment, watching the beams of light cut through the dark, snowy night. The ground was covered with a fresh blanket of white, not slowing down the workers, but giving onlookers a sense of freshness. Pure white now covered the place that was once blood red.
Only one word was fit to be spoken, then. “I can see,” I whispered reverently into the night air, “Redemption.”
LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS
I am very thankful that some of our core values as a culture still have much of their life from the deep roots of Christianity. We have a long history of befriending and helping those who have fought against us. I’m impressed that as a whole we remain so accepting of Islam. Many have commented how 9/11 was a “game-changer,” and it is true since that day I have an easily triggered anxiety about large scale terrorist attacks, almost expecting it to happen. I remember watching on TV as the towers collapsed and the wave of disbelief that washed over me with a new sense of vulnerability. It may have changed us in some significant operational ways, but it did not change our values. 
We were not sucked into intolerance and hatred of Islam or Middle-easterners. As any individual who is attacked by another, we naturally became suspicious and cautious, but as a whole we worked conscientiously and hard at maintaining our value of equality and acceptance. I know I personally worked at learning empathy for the the terrorists and those behind them, to try to see things from their perspective. As a country we have a history of reconciling with our enemies–Germany, Japan, Russia. I love this ability our society has owned of leaving bygones behind instead of teaching every future generation to hate. Of course, we have usually been in the position of winners, which makes such a position so much easier, but we have done so in the case of the Viet Cong as well. In some ways it is a value that is easy and costs little for the powerful and privileged, but it is still an attribute for which I am grateful.
I can also understand the hugely insecure and vulnerable perspective of those without power and the anger springing up from feeling deprived of what they would choose for themselves if they had more control. Like individuals who have little power in a relationship, the only recourse to stand up for themselves is not direct confrontation, but guerrilla warfare. From one angle, perhaps 9/11 did what was intended by the terrorists and was for our ultimate good, an opportunity to see how our positions in power are hurtful to others. Some have suggested that Muslim youth are starting to take a new approach which does not embrace terrorist acts. I hope for all concerned that that is the case, that somehow a new mutual respect, understanding, acceptance, and even support however limited, might characterize our futures.
Sometimes I wish my brain didn’t complicate everything, or that I could at least relate my thoughts in a simpler way to others. Everything seems interconnected to me, so I find it very difficult to share anything without sharing everything… I know that because of what I leave out, what I leave in will be distorted. In my effort to include all that needs to be said for clear communication and still keep my comments short, I seem to pack thoughts in too tightly (so my wife says) and this creates a different distortion. And what is clear to me may be totally misunderstood by others. So I’d really appreciate anyone posing questions, offering different perspectives… basically interacting with the thoughts I offer. Whether or not we agree, it helps to clarify what is being said. My warm thanks to those who do interact with my words on FB or my blog.
CAN I PLEASE JUST HAVE THE BONE?
It seems to me that if we do not find in God the ultimate answer to our needs, we become dangerously dependent on others. If I think my wife is the sole channel of God’s grace for any substantial need and she fails me, then my only recourse is to force her compliance. I might cajole, argue, bargain, threaten… there are a hundred ways to get her to “fall in line,” but this manipulation undermines her sincere love.
Genuine love must grow in an atmosphere of freedom, not control. That is frightening because freedom allows my friend to choose to be unloving and uncaring, refusing to help with my needs. If I make no demands, but offer unconditional love, he may take advantage of me, take all I have to offer and give little in return. And if my needs go unmet, I cannot survive. So when I sense a disparity between how much I give and how much I get, I react to protect myself. If I protect myself by giving less, I feel bad for my selfishness, for my lack of generosity, and I feel a distance growing in my heart towards him. So instead I subtly (or plainly) push him to give more.
This approach did not go over well with Kimberly. She felt the pressure of my expectations and recognized the conditionality of my love. When she chose not to do as I wished, I felt unloved and became resentful, critical, and demanding. This in turn made her feel unloved. I tried to pressure her to comply, to prove her care by meeting my expectations. She insisted on a more honest path to resolving our conflict, one that made room for both of our needs and for genuine rather than forced expressions of love.
I thought love was proved by what it gave—if folks didn’t give, they didn’t care—and this was intolerable to me because it inflated my fears of unworthiness. I gave to others with the expectation that they would reciprocate and so prove my lovability. My mind tightly bound together loving motivation and helping behavior, and I desperately needed Kimberly to prove my worth by setting aside her feelings to meet my needs. Through long conversations and consistent responses, Berly expressed her care for my needs without yielding to my pressure to change her behavior (and so abandon her own needs in favor of mine). It took years for me to believe she loved me in spite of not coming to my rescue. I slowly realized that someone can love without helping and help without loving, that sometimes the truest and hardest love is one that does not give when giving would beguile the loved one into a false security.
I wanted to stop feeling my insecurity and Kimberly wanted me to embrace it, understand it, work through it. If she helped me to avoid those feelings, it would undermine our relationship. For her part, she was afraid of my resentment, and wanted to act in a way that would hold it at bay, but she knew living out of that fear would keep her from sharing herself honestly and vulnerably with me. Things might go smoothly between us, but we would be sacrificing substance for façade. Slowly we both stepped into our fears and broke through to a deeper understanding of ourselves and one another, a deeper trust, and a deeper freedom to accept who we are. We encourage and help each other to find a way to meet our needs, but do not take the responsibility for this on ourselves. Of course, sometimes our needs conflict, but that is another story altogether.
I lived the first 40 years of my life with the assumption that if someone had a need I could meet, I was obligated to meet that need. No matter how much I gave, I was still being selfish if I had any resources left for myself. Such a view leads to spiritual and physical self-destruction. In grad school I knew that 12,000 people a day starve to death (no doubt that figure is higher today), so how could I spend any more than the absolute minimum on my own needs? If I used resources for myself that would cause one more person to starve, was I not killing them? Was I less responsible because they were half-way around the world instead of on my doorstep?
With this thought I calculated the cheapest possible way to survive so as to give more money to relief agencies. Since tea or coffee had no nutritional value, I thought drinking it was simply a sin… so was jelly on toast (although it was so dry I used margarine sparingly, or rather a cheaper margarine substitute, and felt guilty for it). I must eat nutritionally, for which my mother gave me the simplest advice as I left for grad school , “Eat one green and one red or orange vegetable a day.” I knew I also needed protein, starch and fruit. The cheapest fruit was to drink orange juice each morning with a piece of toast (starch).
I prepared my dinner one month at a time. The cheapest protein was a chicken whole fryer (39 cents a pound), and the cheapest green and orange vegetables were beans and carrots. At the beginning of the month I would cook one whole fryer, one bag of string beans and one bag of carrots. I then mixed a bit of each into golf ball size clumps, twisted six into a row inside my used bread bags, and froze them, making a month’s supply. I would warm one of these up to put on rice each evening when I came home from school.
I saw time as another resource to share, limiting my sleep to a bare minimum. I lived in Chicago for six years and never visited the famous sites, which seemed an unconscionable waste of time. But I could not strip myself of every resource, so I lived with a pervasive undertone of guilt for not living on less and giving more. That person’s need constituted my responsibility, and the needs of the whole world lay before me to meet at whatever cost to myself. 
Something was deeply wrong with this picture. Whose needs am I responsible to meet? If I shave it down to the bare minimum, I would say I am responsible to meet my spouse’s needs… but is even this true? Doesn’t my wife have many needs that I cannot fulfill? After all, no individual has all the spiritual gifts for meeting another’s needs. The problem lies here–whether I took on the needs of the world or of only one other person, I was still trying to play the role of God, and it was crushing me.
Over time I came to the conclusion that if someone has a need, it is God’s responsibility to meet that need, and he may or may not use me to do it. He is not dependent on my help. It is not the other person’s need which constitutes my responsibility, but the invitation of God to become involved (and he does invite, he doesn’t force). If I choose to live by grace rather than law, then someone else’s need is a potential opportunity rather than an obligation. But whether or not I get involved (and to what extent), it remains completely God’s responsibility to meet that person’s need.
My own wife must ultimately look to God and depend on him to meet her needs. If she makes me the final point of responsibility for her needs, then her needs are going to regularly go unmet and she has no recourse. She is trapped in a life that is unworkable and has no means of escape because she is dependent on me, and I am a flawed creature. She and I must receive the grace of God for ourselves, either directly or through whatever channel he uses. We cannot restrict his grace for us to one channel, not even our spouse. No human relationship was designed to bear such a burden.
Over a long time, I was able to shift the weight of the world (and every individual in it) onto God’s shoulders and off my own. I still struggle to let the burden go, and tend to blame myself if another person’s needs go unmet, but I now know that to carry such a weight will break me. I discovered that I can care without taking responsibility, that mourning the loss of another does not require me to jump in and “save” them. In fact, when I am always in “fix-it” mode, I tend to be distracted from loving and caring, especially if I am pushing myself with obligation rather than letting my involvement flow from a deep settled nest of God’s grace.
Janathan Grace Reflections 