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A couple of days ago I received the same one-line email from my dad about 20 minutes apart, the second with an apology in case he already sent it and forgot. He turns 88 in September and this summer his short-term memory has started to lapse appreciably. As his memory fades, he slowly loses parts of himself that will never return, gone forever, except as those thoughts and perspectives, emotional reactions, explanations and stories carry on in the lives of his children, adopted or adapted consciously or unconsciously. Like physical DNA, family culture is passed down generation to generation–reproductions of the mind–and the most persistent are those aspects least noticed or recognized. When a man dies, or loses his mind, he is not lost to this earth. His voice and thoughts and outlook persevere in those he has touched, most profoundly in his children, like data downloaded from an old to a new computer (though the updated software may configure it differently).
None of us are “self-made” people, but each is made up of bits and pieces of everyone who has impacted our lives, directly or indirectly. In a real sense our memories are not our own, springing up from our independent interaction with our environment. We do not experience the world in isolation, but see it through the eyes of significant others who dramatically shape our valuations, expectations, and understandings. Even as individuals we are radically communal in nature–I am not simply “I”, but the self that I perceive is largely composed of others, a mosaic, a smorgasbord partly chosen by me and partly plopped onto my plate without my knowledge or choice. We are all creative, coming up with our own unique elements of self, but even a genius borrows most of the building blocks of his invention from others who passed on to him the wheel, lever, and axle.
This gives each of us great advantages in life, but it also creates life-long cumbrances: we are given both wings and chains, and we can only find our way to a better place personally and corporately by identifying and taking apart each aspect of the heritage we have been given to determine if it benefits or binds. Some would suggest that we honor our elders by remembering and praising their attributes and passing over their failings, but that certainly isn’t the Bible’s approach to the heroes it lauds. It is only true honor of another to acknowledge the whole of who they are, anything else is only honoring a false representation. Remembering the dark side of each person gives them the 3 dimensional character of a real person, though we should see that side with eyes of love and patience, understanding and humility… especially humility since we always fall short of accurately estimating others (our memories are all tainted).
I offer those few paragraphs as an introduction to an exploration I want to take into my father’s legacy in my own life, to use the impact I felt from him to pull apart and consider how that has shaped me into the person I am and want to be, an ongoing blog series.
Irritation has been bubbling over for the last few days, quick sparks of anger at things and people that don’t work right. This morning I wanted to heave the piece of 2×4 in my hand through the TV screen. I pictured Kimberly seeing the broken set and asking what happened and my anger then turning on her. I have too much sense to actually break anything valuable or start unnecessary quarrels, but my imagination runs wild with clubs and bricks, torches and car crashes. And my anger, bridled and checked though it is, still leaks out in an unresponsive, tight face.
Ongoing irritation is always a tell that I’ve got a burr in my soul. Sometimes I can find it and pluck it out, but other times it is hidden down in some forgotten niche. A sharp emotional memory was poked, some reminder of past failures or insults, and it threw me into defensive mode to parry the assault on my sense of worth… but the picture faded before I recognized it and only the feeling remains.
Lord knows I have enough failings in my past to keep me trapped in shame for the rest of my days: memories that sting every time they rise up to my consciousness–people I have hurt or ignored, good advice I scorned, blindness to obvious faults, arrogance and criticism and foolishness of a hundred kinds. I have discovered that I can only apply grace and forgiveness specifically, a balm for a particular wound. For best results, I need to identify the thing that is niggling my heart and bring that to be bathed in God’s love.
A parent or spouse may say, “I don’t care what you have done, I love you anyway,” but we fear that if she knew THIS evil of ours, it would create a barrier to her heart. Something whispers inside us, “She only loves me because she doesn’t know how bad I have been.” We need to hear the words of God’s grace applied to each individual failing, for as many times as it rears its accusing head in condemning us. It is so reassuring to show Him that fault with our doubts, and hear his resounding, “Yes, I love you still!” Blanket forgiveness is a weak alternative to working through the details of our wrongs both internally and inter-personally.
But sometimes like today I don’t know the cause. Perhaps it was a slowly accumulating list of smaller incidents or a subconscious sting, a dart that zipped through my heart leaving behind only the pain. It is hard even to love myself if I don’t know what is blocking that self-compassion, to look that specific failing in the face and say to my heart, “Yes, you are still loveable in spite of your brokenness.” Unlike shame, grace calls us to grow better from a place of full acceptance rather than out of a striving for acceptance.
I think part of my problem is failing to deal fully with each remorse as it occurs, but instead feeling bad about it and then letting it fade into the random fog of my emotional context. I should rather recognize the full weight of it on my soul and take the effort to deconstruct and sort out the turmoil stirring beneath. I will take some time to do that now with the last few days cache of self-blaming, a very bad habit of mine.
I woke up today with a sweet dog snuggled up to me and a loving God looking down on me with a good-morning smile. I lay there talking with Him for some time, and then sat up and all the good feelings drained away like cascading water. This is a regular occurrence, and I’m not sure what to make of it.
I’m like an emotional preschooler, unable to understand my own emotions–what I feel and why I feel that way. I have the emotional theory down pretty well, but like passing a written driver’s test, knowing the answers on an exam doesn’t help much behind the wheel. Trying to interpret the principles into practice is still largely a conundrum for me. I’m not sure approaching it like a science is the best route anyway. If I thoroughly studied gravity, balance, muscular response and tried to apply that knowledge to learning to ride a bicycle, I think I would find it more a hindrance than a help.
But that analogy fails to capture the complexity and variability of emotions, and the experiential feedback I get is not like falling off a bike—it is not immediate, clear, and simple. Occasionally I know straight off that I got it right–that my gentle response to a harsh retort came from a healthy place and felt emotionally rewarding. But that immediate and clear reading of my heartbeat is rare and comes after a great deal of struggle, trial, and slowly growing insight into some facet of my heart. Often my response is partially unhealthy (which part, and how?) and my emotions are conflicted–a dash of fear, a sprinkle of false guilt, a slather of confusion, a pinch of hope.
We all ride bikes the same, but our emotions play out uniquely for each of us. So we learn basic principles about emotions, but using them to understand ourselves (and others) is a complex skill that must be learned the long, hard way by practice, regularly skinning our knees and running into things in the process. It takes fearlessness, tenacity, and commitment.
Had I been taught as a child to notice, validate, understand and respond affirmatively to my feelings, I think I would have learned the process and developed the skills by now. In our inescapably fallen world, I was rather shaped by society directly as well as through its influence in my family and playmates to ignore, judge, and control my feelings. Anger was forbotten, sadness was curtailed, fear was mocked. Meanwhile love, hope, and joy were pushed as the acceptable feelings to manufacture and share. And in turn I too became a spinner of these lies. In short, a great deal has to be unlearned and long-ingrained reflexes untaught, in the process of discovering what is true and good for our hearts. So we misplace our true selves early in life and get further lost with our borrowed and faulty compass and map.
What might come naturally, like learning to walk, now requires much deeper insight to untangle our confused legs, clear up our bleary eyesight, and reorient our backwards direction. Unlearning is far more difficult and involved than learning fresh from scratch. The whole outlook must be re-oriented before individual bad habits can be addressed and a healthy direction taken, and all of this must be done in the face of constant opposition from the world around us.
Society says, “Don’t worry, be happy!” and ostracizes us when we frown. The church agrees with “Worry is a sin against faith!” and judges us if we share our fears, especially tenacious fears. How then can we find a way to validate our own experience and feelings, to be understanding and empathetic with ourselves? It often feels as though we are on our own, swimming against a very strong current.
So I write this to those of you on this long journey with me because it is so easy to get discouraged and lose hope. The road to recovery seems to be so hard and take so long. Weariness and doubt and confusion drag down our resolve and steal our hope. Let those of us who wish to take this way encourage one another. I believe in you!
If your life is happy or satisfying so that simply living feels good and worthwhile or if your life is integral to something that you believe is an important endeavor, then life has meaning for you. I have lacked the first for twenty years and the second for ten years. It makes me feel lost, directionless, without purpose. I cannot make sense of my life. Why am I here? The only goal-oriented living I do is my personal growth. But for various reasons that doesn’t seem a focus I can organize my whole life around… for one thing, it is self-absorbed. I feel like a screw that is always sharpening its threads and point but never being used to screw things together.
Many would suggest that our purpose is to be connected to God, but unless I became a monk (and I’m sure Kimberly would object with good reason), I’m not sure how to organize my life around that either–that objective describes the person with whom I do life more than the activities that fill up my life.
The old Calvinist theology of “calling” suggests not only that one may have a purpose, but that it is a purpose for which God planned, designed, and equipped us, not one randomly chosen. After all a screw might decide to act as a light bulb, but that would have obvious drawbacks.
In that regard, I do feel particularly equipped and effective at preaching/teaching, but I have no avenues for exercising that gift… and have almost no emotional energy for seeking them out. So, it seems I must become emotionally energized (and I’m at a loss to know how) or some opportunity must be dropped in my lap. Neither of those has happened in ten years. So I sit waiting, filing my little threads. Perhaps the right moment will come, or perhaps I will die of old age waiting. But the question remains, “What is the point of it all?” as I daily suffer the sharp pain of feeling useless to a vast, needy world.
Matthew 1:7 “David fathered Solomon by Bathsheba who had been the wife of Uriah.”
The story of Bathsheba and David is a royal cover-up that almost succeeded as they pulled all the strings in the shadows to hide their lust, betrayal and murder. A successful subterfuge would have rotted out their own hearts as they ran from grace. Grace can do amazing, unbelievable things, even with what is worst in us, but it must begin with the truth about us. It cannot work with the fog of self-deception. Whenever we do wrong and hide it from ourselves and others–make excuses, minimize it, compare it to worse sins in others–we trap our shame inside our hearts like a festering wound, and the pathogen slowly seeps throughout our souls and stains our relationships. God rips off that wrapping, exposing the gore, not to repulse us with our wounds, but to heal us.
Shame is to sin what pain is to injury–an alarm to wake us to crippling harm and push us to act. It is the blinking light God designed for our inner dashboard. Unlike God, we tend to use shame against ourselves and one another as leverage to force (or stop) change just as someone might use physical pain (or threat of it) to coerce others. In our society, shame is a weapon that parents use against children, preachers against congregants, and friends and spouses against one another to force compliance just as a bully might use his fists. It is psychic assault. I am often guilty with accusing frowns or glances that say silently, “You are an idiot!” My message is “Be different so I can love you.”
The divergence between the use and misuse of shame lies precisely in grace. We turn shame into coercion, weaponize it, by anchoring it to conditional acceptance. I will show you love (sympathy, support, companionship) or withdraw love based on whether you yield to my expectations. I may even get God on my side, so to speak, spiritually legitimize my demands by arguing that they are actually God’s demands and prove it through reason or scripture or a tangle of both. But bad methods ruin good goals. Though God has given us guidelines on how to live in healthy ways, he doesn’t force our hand and never uses love as leverage. He loves us fully at all times regardless of what we do or don’t do, even at our worst… even when we are unrepentant, he loves us with all his heart.
The shame he built into our bodies is a warning light, not a threat–he tells us what bad things sin will do to us (tear us and our relationships apart), not what bad things he will do to us. (Of course, in the Old Testament where law prevailed as a system, God seemed to be a punisher to force compliance while grace lingered in the shadows, but then Christ came to reveal the face of God in the full glory of grace.) God always acts in grace, though grace sometimes is hard and painful rather than pleasant (like setting a broken leg). He designed shame to wake us, not to coerce us. When we use shame to drive us to change our behavior, it simply feeds legalism: the idea that if I try hard enough, I can live in such a way as to rise above shame. God wants shame to drive us to despair in ourselves and turn instead to his grace. The healthy remedy for shame is always grace, never more effort. You cannot earn forgiveness, even with godly sorrow; you can only open yourself to it as it is freely given.
And so David and Bathsheba were caught by grace, their attention riveted by a dying newborn and their betrayal and murder called out by a prophet, exposing the shame that leads to salvation. They were rescued from being lost in the darkness of hidden sin and becoming a tragedy rather than a story of redemption, actually the story of redemption through their son, the Redeemer Jesus, born many generations later. No sin is too great for grace to resolve into beauty and goodness once it is brought into the light of God. We avoid the light, thinking that when God sees our failures, he will love us less like others do, but it is our spiritual wounding that draws out his love and concern even more. He cannot love us less because his love is completely independent of our goodness. In a miraculous twist, he can even leverage our sin into greater intimacy and spiritual depth, and like Bathsheba, our darkness can be turned into light to show others the way out of the shadows for many generations to come. Not only hers, but every redemption story of ours is inextricably connected to the redemption story, making us not only part of redemption, but of redemption history. By receiving his grace, we become channels of God’s redemption for the world.
Wherever father’s day is celebrated, it is packed with emotions, sometimes simple and straightforward (at either end of the spectrum), and often a complex swirl of thankfulness, regret, delight, anger, pain and comfort. Relationships are always complex, wonderful in a hundred ways and awful too because our flawed humanity leaks out on everyone around us and distorts even the good that comes to us from others. There is no “right” way to feel about any relationship, so do not demand of yourself or others some prescribed emotion. Today is culturally designated as a time to think of the good in our fathers, and if you are able to do so honestly, then by all means join the festivities. For those whose heart is not in the celebration, that is okay too. Be gracious to yourself and others as best you can.
Healthy emotions are mixed emotions–it is okay to laugh over some memory of a loved one whose funeral you are planning and it is okay to be somber at a birthday party, even your own. Feelings ebb and flow, mingle and separate, clash and fuse. Try to foster a context of safety for your feelings to find a voice within your heart, even if not expressed outwardly. Giving them a space of their own is especially difficult on occasions when certain feelings are assumed, expected, or even demanded because we have a false notion that feelings must compete and the right one must win and and squash its rival. Those who are happy feel threatened by sadness in others, those at peace feel threatened by the fearful or angry (and vice versa), and so we try to coerce or barter or cajole them into having feelings that agree with our own (or at least pretending to). We even do it to our own feelings.
Unfortunately, this process feeds an unhealthy loop–assuming emotions are competitive, we feel threatened by the “wrong” feelings and push for conformity, and in so doing we create even more tension between feelings that could otherwise peacefully coexist, not only within a group, but within a single heart. Life is complex, people are complex, and so we should expect a complex mix of emotions.
I have many, very deep reasons for being grateful for my father and his impact on my life. I have issues around that relationship as well, but the very fact that I am honest about those with myself and those close to me gives me the full emotional resources to set those aside for a time and simply celebrate my father, who is a good man, flawed (like all of us) but good. It is the practice of listening to my own feelings compassionately that builds my emotional security and maturity so that my heart is able to embrace other flawed humans with compassion and understanding.
So today I celebrate with you or grieve with you, whatever your heart needs. We are in this together, this crazy dance called life. We often get it wrong, even with the best intentions, and that has to be okay. Let us give grace to ourselves and to our fathers on this day and find ways to celebrate the broken beauty of who we are.
All my life I have tried to pursue God and his ways. I’m just now waking to the possibility that this was working against my very nature. A rose does not set out each morning doing rose exercises, studying rose botany, planning how best to scale the trellis at its leafy tips. It has within itself the seed of becoming, God has placed it there, and it simply becomes, living out of this true center until it slowly grows into the fulness for which it was designed.
My approach to spiritual growth was far more rational, organized, and disciplined. I analyzed God into various character traits–patience, discipline, purity (a long list)–and then, seeing that I came up short, I worked to gain those virtues, add them to myself like so many prosthetic attachments. Instead of understanding my own impatience and what drove it and why and how and discerning the particular shape patience might take were it to grow naturally from my own sanctified perceptions, inclinations, history and personality, I tried to adopt wholesale the patience I saw in others, force it on myself. But like transplanted organs the body rejects, my soul did not know how to incorporate these foreign traits.
I didn’t realize that the meekness in Jeremiah is dramatically different than the meekness displayed by Moses or David, so I kept trying and failing to squeeze my soul into a shape not my own, find a champion of each virtue and imitate that rendition. Learning to play another musician’s song is quite different from finding one’s own song, even when they are both acoustic ballads about love. I can certainly be inspired and instructed by their example, but I must find my own voice.
I always understood Paul as saying, “Be not conformed to this world, but be conformed (to godliness)” and never noticed that his change in verb not only changes the goal, but changes the means to that goal: do not be conformed, but be transformed. And this is effected not primarily by force of will (discipline), or miracle of faith (prayer and hope), but by a renewed understanding or insight (Romans 12:2). Surely it takes focus and work to refine who I am and scrape off the accretions of sin that deform my true, God-given self, and it takes faith since I am completely dependent on God’s intervention to bring my soul to fruition, but this process integrates with who I am as a unique creation of God. It is an affirmation of who I truly am, not a rejection of it. I am discovering that spiritual growth is about becoming rather than adding, understanding my true self and setting it free into God rather than squeezing it into a virtuous mold.
A video on bullying I watched today sparked memories of my own childhood spent running from troublemakers at recess. Only once was I seriously punched and had to go to the emergency room for stitches (my right eyebrow still has a slight split on the outside corner). But harassment was constant during gym class and recess–I was pushed, punched, threatened, chased, tripped, mocked. There were other danger zones as well: the lunch room, the hallway, the breezeway waiting for our school bus, and the bus ride itself was tormenting, bad enough that I started riding my bike the 10-mile round trip to middle school. Among boys, the only mark of prowess was aggression… and girls were liked for their looks.
Kids reflect the values of a culture with a clarity unobscured by the social camouflage that adults master. That’s why I like children’s books–bold, plain, and real. Because of family values, I admired intellect as a boy, but that was the stuff of nerds, not heroes. The lead actors from all my favorite TV shows punched and shot and muscled their way into glory… and they always got the pretty girl (first prize). Of course, their violence was validated by the justness of their cause, though that cause was usually self-defense, an arguably selfish motive were it not juxtaposed against the villainy of the other. The “other” was evil, right down to the color of his clothes.
Aside from the cowboys and cops and colonels, we had a few “nice guy” actors, but no one aspired to be Andy Griffith–you liked him but didn’t want to emulate him. Pacifists were cowards, courage was in the fists. The hero never picked a fight, but always finished it by beating his opponent into submission. Be it kung fu or fighter jets, we all admired the warrior, not the lover, who was just a wimp if he showed up without his six-shooters. The ultimate virtue was conquest, not love… even love was gained by conquest.
And so I set about life as a loser determined to fight my way into the trophy circle. My goals slowly shifted from physical prowess to spiritual prowess, but success was still my path to prove my worth. I focused all my energy to become a champion for God, which is to say, having a wide impact on others. Success is just as strong an addiction as gambling, even if you’re not a winner… especially if you’re not a winner. But unlike other addictions, it reaps praise, not shame, and moral validation, not warning, both from the world at large and from the church itself.
Cultural values that co-opt religious faith are the most pernicious and blinding of our defects. When church and society link arms, escape is nearly impossible, and far from looking for an exit, us losers are desperate to launch ahead. Unfortunately, as success grows, it clogs up the opening for grace. Success would have obviated my need for grace, a pitfall of all self-made men, even those who ostensibly credit God. But grace blocked my chase after success. It shackled me to loser-hood until I was forced to admit that my accomplishments don’t validate me. Apparently God doesn’t need my efforts any more than a father needs the help of his 3-year-old to change a tire. The toddler is not valued because of what he does, but who he is–a son.
Success still holds a little place in the corner of my heart–just in case–sort of like the spot reserved for a Porsche convertible that someone’s rich uncle might give me. Both daydreams would likely be a burden rather than a blessing. I trust God’s path for me, and I’m content just to hold his hand… most days anyway.
“Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.” –Elizabeth Alexander
That is profound.
The greatest pain arises from the profoundest joy. To eliminate loss, one must abandon love since in this broken world suffering and death are not simply a risk, but a certainty. Love inevitably leads to sorrow. As C. S. Lewis so powerfully explained:
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
Elizabeth Alexander originally wrote to mourn the loss of her young husband to sudden death. “The story seems to begin with catastrophe,” she wrote, “but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story.” She is no Christian, but her personal journey reflects powerfully the great story of which we are all a part. Anywhere we open our book, we find tragedy–brutality, abandonment, hatred, violence, suffering–so that we must go back and back to the very start to discover that all this pain springs up from the love that inspired creation, and to understand that all of our suffering is borne in the great heart of God himself, who willingly embraced all our agony to gain the inexpressible joy of loving us. The cross is a tragedy, but it is more fully and deeply and finally a love story, and the end will be glorious.
Matthew 1:7 “David fathered Solomon by Bathsheba who had been the wife of Uriah.”
The world is not halved into heroes and villains, angels and demons, righteous and sinners. David is the truth that demolishes that lie: an adulterer with remarkable faith, a murderer specially anointed by God, a law-breaker who wrote Scripture.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Since we cannot sort humanity into upper and lower, we settle for before and after: we were all filthy rags before, but some of us have gone through the conversion wash cycle, and now we’re clean. Except David doesn’t let us off so easily since he was “a man after God’s own heart” long before his debauchery with Bathsheba and treachery against Uriah. We are fallen creatures, all of us, always in need of more forgiving and saving grace to redeem our fresh failures.
But we don’t need David’s example to reveal the cracks in our souls over which we daily stumble. I know my sins, it is my acceptance I doubt. And that is the startling truth of David’s story. The deep failings of God’s favorites astounds me. How can God put up with such flawed followers, not to speak of using them as his champions and spokesmen. As the inimitable Alexander Whyte once suggested, who knows but that David wrote earnest psalms during those nine months of self deception as his illegitimate son formed inside the belly of his stolen wife until the prophet of God came to strike a blow to his bunkered conscience.
How could such a man be chosen as God’s mouthpiece? Unless the very truth meant to be shared was of the unquenchable grace that God lavishes on us all. If God’s central message is the gospel, that every human, however flawed, is loved forever, is offered the open heart of God in spite of repeated rebellion, then what better messenger than one who so clearly illustrates this grace in his own life? The “man after God’s own heart” was a pleasure to God not because of his goodness, but because of his childlike faith and humble resting in God’s unquenchable love–the Gospel According to David.
Janathan Grace Reflections 