Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category
Oliver Sacks is dying. This brilliant and eloquent neurologist is one of my favorite authors, and reading excerpts from his autobiography this morning reminded me of one large reason–he is a man of profound, lived, empathic grace. I have often tried to forgive others by brute force, knowing it is the right thing to do and willing myself into a gentler mindset, but without off-setting any of the blame I levy against them. This “forgiveness” requires no understanding, empathy, or reconsideration of my valuation of them and their behavior. They are bad; I am good–so good that I even forgive their sin against me. Instead of using their failure to reflect on my own shortcomings, on how we are similar, I use their faults to contrast with my virtue so that I understand neither them nor myself any better than before. I “forgive” from a place of moral superiority rather than from a humble view of our mutual sinfulness so that my very forgiveness becomes a source of distancing and shaming rather than true reconciliation. Their role is to humble themselves, admit how bad they are, and then I will magnanimously agree with their estimation–“Yes, you are bad, but I forgive you.” As long as I don’t hold a grudge or wish them ill, I can claim to have forgiven them even if I continue to think badly of them.
But Sacks, by just being himself in relationship to others, showed me how inadequate my supposed grace is. He not only forgave those who had deeply wounded him, but showed his understanding of their human struggle. He could see why they reacted to him as they did and could empathize with their situation and viewpoint. He did this without devaluing his own pain or pushing himself to engage more deeply in a wounding relationship than his soul could well maintain, but he found a way to protect himself without maligning those who injured him. To understand and empathize with others does not require us to then subject ourselves to ongoing harmful behavior. In fact, it is when we keep healthy boundaries that we are most able to empathize freely with those who behave in hurtful ways. I learned first from Kimberly that the justification for my boundaries lies in my own needs, not in the other person’s faults. Assigning blame is an entirely different consideration than what boundaries I need for my own well-being. Taking full responsibility for my own boundaries frees me up to give grace with much more abandon because my love is no longer an opening for their hurtful behavior. Forgiveness is not a moral power struggle, it is an acceptance of our mutual frailty and fallenness.
I was raised on clarity like Iowans are raised on corn—it was the staple that nourished our grip on reality, giving us security and power, confidence and perseverance. Dad gave me all the answers before I had even stumbled onto the questions, saving me the trouble of sorting it out myself, and he shared his take on life with a degree of certainty that silenced doubt before it even had a voice. My parents, being deeply religious, anchored all this clarity to God himself so that doubt was not only foolish but dangerous, a personal affront to the Almighty.
As a child I was handed the blueprint for life, the map and compass, and I followed it faithfully each step, landing in Calcutta as a missionary at 30 years of age, having somehow escaped the indignity of adolescent questioning.
Unfortunately, life is not so neat and tidy, but constantly pokes through our carefully boxed up constructs, threatening the whole structure. “You can do anything if you try hard enough.” Really? “Thankfulness leads to contentment.” But if it doesn’t? Reality seems to stubbornly resist fitting into our prefab structures, challenging our paradigms. So we fight back—pretend there’s been no breach, or try to block up the gaps in our worldview by tweaking the architecture, or construct awkward explanations for the exposed holes, the received truth that doesn’t play out as we’d expected. But for me to make substantive changes, to move around the support beams, would force a complete rethinking of reality as I knew it, a stroll into insanity, so I clung to my views, blaming myself for failing to make it work. It took four years of unrelenting depression to shake my grip on my framework of truth.
And so, at the age of 40, I stumbled into the adolescence I soldiered past in my teens. Discovering my basket was full of unworkable answers, I set about looking for the right ones. I still wanted certainty, just not a defective set. But honesty is a bitch, fertile though she is. Once you let her in, she barks at every discrepancy and won’t be shushed. Each fresh answer I uncovered brought more questions. I was in a fog of confusion that I could not escape, stuck, unable to follow a path I could not see. I kept walking, but I seemed to be going in circles. I kept praying for clarity, but she had abandoned me and obscurity had firmly grasped my hand.
Facing confusion with calm is a plus, and parts of Christianity outside my heritage even find obscurity beneficial, oddly enough. Books like the fourteenth century “Cloud of Unknowing” and “The Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross warned against leaning too heavily on reason and intellect, which could obstruct as well as open the path to insight. Just this morning I read two psychologists discussing a client in that conundrum:
“You know, that’s the thing about intelligence. It can really get in the way of wisdom, the mind being such a good place to hide from all the messiness that comes with our feelings. Maybe what your patient needs to do is get out of his head and get into his heart. Stop thinking so much and let his feelings get the better of him, let loose with a good cry or a fit of anger, whatever it is that’s stirring down there at that mysterious place he’s afraid to go to.” (Eric Kolbell in “What Jesus Meant: The Beatitudes and a Meaningful Life”)
The thing is, I don’t mind feeling my feelings, but doesn’t my progress depend on then understanding them in order to resolve them? For me the key was still clarity. But what if it wasn’t. What if clarity at this point was the problem instead of the answer. It was just this discovery John Kavanaugh made in my adopted city.
When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at “the house of the dying” in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, “And what can I do for you?” Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. “What do you want me to pray for?” she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: “Pray that I have clarity.” She said firmly, “No, I will not do that.” When he asked her why, she said, “Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.” When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.” (Brennan Manning in “Ruthless Trust”)
Fear or desire may drive us to demand answers, but Pandora learned that trying to pry open life’s box of secrets leads only to trouble. God has his own time frame for sharing his insights with us, and patience is the truest mark of trust. I have not yet found my way through the fog, but often the way has found me, working into my soul silently, healing and growing me on the sly, startling me with its results: humility, patience with myself and others, empathy, sensitivity, endurance, faith. Obscurity comes with a sleigh full of good, though it doesn’t feel like Christmas. As a friend once opined, “It’s too bad life’s lessons don’t come in a box of chocolates.” The best work is often the hardest work and longest to complete, but it is the most rewarding.
I’m not completely in the dark. I find some general directions to take, the fog sometimes lifts, but lack of lucidity can be freeing, opening up options I would otherwise avoid because I was locked into an inflexible clarity—rationality that blocked thinking, faith that hindered trust. The grace of God is so much bigger than I ever imagined.
We are often warned not to get stuck in the past, but it is just as common a problem to get stuck in the future. Both viewpoints can pull us away from living fully in the present. But unlike our past, our future is a mystery, which could drastically change in an instant. Since we have no control over our past, we feel our only security is in controlling our future, but those expectations can be miscalculated in a hundred ways and so can hijack our present. In this sense we can lose control of our present by the demands of our planned future, so that, ironically, in thinking to gain more control over our lives, we lose control.
The answer is not in control of our past (by trying to ignore its impact) or control of our future (by careful planning and decision making), but in learning to live in the present by faith. Good plans and decisions are worthwhile, but our security lies rather in the hands of God. As the Good Book says, “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.”
–some words I shared on Facebook yesterday
Monday I was hiking with my doggies in the Blue Ridge Mountains and noticed my neck cramping on one side. To stretch out the kinks I started rolling and rotating my head, wondering what I’d done to my neck. And then it dawned on me. instead of pulling ahead as usual, Mazie and Mitts had fallen in behind me, and as the path was narrow, I held both leashes in one hand. My right arm swung freely, but my left arm was pulled back by the leads, and over a couple of miles that tension worked its way up to my neck.
I spent decades paying little attention to my body, and so harming it. I have only learned in the last few years to listen to this complex, integrated structure–I would never have guessed that a sore neck could come from an arm slightly skewed. When an injury’s throb is felt in a separate body part, it is called “referred pain.” Those are the trickiest to self-diagnose and so misleading that the real problem often escapes us.
During those years I listened no better to my psyche than my body. I shouted down my feelings and became emotionally deaf, unable to decipher its most rudimentary language. Emotions were to be embraced, vanquished or transmuted according to an accepted moral code. I thought every feeling was a straightforward response to external stimuli. My anger was incited by “stupid” drivers. My anxiety was the result of critical bosses. My shame was the direct product of my tardiness. Emotional “referred pain” was not even a speck of consideration… until the conventional interpretations became so convoluted in the telling that even I recognized something was fishy. They rang false, though I couldn’t detect the crack in the bell. It was my indecipherable, unrelenting depression that forced me to finally admit my emotional cluelessness and rethink my psychological map.
I discovered that my pride was tangled up with fear, my affection enmeshed with insecurity, and a seeming calm and patience was simply an emotional disconnect to protect myself. I realized that my anger ignited from inside, not outside, that it was a cover-up for shame, and my shame was grounded in a legalistic denial of grace. It was all so much more complex than I realized, but this self-reflection, softened by grace, opened me to a remarkable level of integrity and clarity and personal growth. My whole sense of spirituality and relationships was reorganized. I finally had the tools I needed for fundamental transformation instead of the spiritual strictures of a flawed system.
I have been working for years to learn my emotional ABCs. Slowly I untangled the knots so that patterns stood out in relief and dynamics materialized. What is the real reason for these feelings? What leads me to freedom and understanding rather than fear and blindness? What does my soul need in the way of support? What pulls it down or picks it up? I wonder–do any cultures teach their children to be heart-interpreters rather than heart-controllers?
I have always been a highly disciplined person. This has been unfortunate from so many angles. It has made me arrogant and judgmental towards those with less “will-power” or commitment. It has made me focus excessively on behavior and choice and see them as the foundations for goodness rather than its fruit. It has made me self-abusive, both in driving myself past any reasonable limits, resulting in self harm, and in condemning myself for my shortcomings (because of the unbridgeable gap between highly disciplined and perfectly disciplined). Like all coping mechanisms, it played to my natural strengths and inclinations and offered me protection from the fears that snarled and snapped inside, but like a protection racket it kept me permanently bound to those same fears.
So here is the wretched conundrum of every coping mechanism: the very thing that protects us blocks us from a real resolution. We cannot give up suddenly and entirely on our coping mechanisms or we will be unable to cope, trampled by our fears and dragged away from the grace that comes to save us. Except for miracles–and by definition those happen rarely–we must grow into grace, beginning with small steps. We speak of a “leap of faith,” but that is best seen as a change in direction rather than a sudden and complete transformation of our psyche. We make a deliberate commitment to a new vision, a new allegiance, a new God of grace instead of the old god of legalism, but learning to live out that commitment is a long, slow process, full of missteps, confusion, and doubt–ask any newlyweds… or oldy-weds. Trust is a tree that matures from a sapling, not a full-grown log dropped at our feet.
Coping mechanisms are both necessary and limiting, helpful and ensnaring. They cannot be shaken off in one go, cold-turkey, like one might give up alcohol or drugs, because they sustain us in a vital way. The struggle for health is more aptly compared to an eating disorder, since we all must eat daily, so the solution cannot lie in abandonment (which seems much simpler and easier to me), but in rehabilitation. That is, I cannot simply chuck discipline, since some discipline is necessary for life and growth. I can certainly moderate self-discipline, but that does not resolve the root of the problem, which is not the amount of the discipline, but its role and purpose. “Why?” is the all important question to snag our inner gremlins. “Why is self-discipline so important to me?” Because it is the gauge by which I measure my worth, it is my source of validation. As long as I do the right thing, I think, I am in good standing with God… which is the quintessence of legalism.
I’ve been at this for years, rethinking my knee-jerk criticisms of the “lazy and irresponsible” and trying to be a little more “lazy and irresponsible” myself as a means of practicing grace towards others and myself. I’ve worked hard for over a decade to recognize my real reasons for doing good and avoiding evil and to realign those with the gracious God I serve. I’ve been focused on this, disciplined. Oh, snap! Yes, it’s true, I can even drive myself to grace or shame my lack of it, trying to force grace to grow but ending up frustrated and impatient, which helps neither me nor my relationships. Old habits die hard, and often rise up in new guises. But I recognize it, take apart my viewpoint and reorganize it. Wash, rinse, repeat. By God’s grace I am not who I once was, and by God’s grace I will not be who I am now.
Good Friday was the triumph of grace over law. Law was unmasked, over-ruled, dethroned. Forgiveness triumphed over judgment, love and mercy over just desserts. Do your worst to God, torture and kill his own son, and he will love you still, he will reach out to you, offer you a way out of your lostness, bitterness, hatred, and misery. God will never stop loving you with all his heart… or your neighbor… or your enemy, which is the hard part for us. He does not love us more than them… he does not even see them as more wicked and deserving of damnation than he sees us. That is the tough news of grace–it embraces everyone or it succumbs to the law, loses its whole nature of undeserved love. Once any small degree of deserving enters, grace disappears. The amazing, wonderful news is that grace is not partial, it covers every evil we have done or will do without flinching. No act, no person is beyond its reach… which is also the hard news. It means the world is not divided between a good us and a bad them. There is no them, just us fallen human beings. We’re all in this together, broken and in desperate need of grace.
But the tough news is the good news, because we finally have a solution to our fractured and destructive relationships. Our resolution to the anger, hatred and aggression of others is not to overpower it with our own righteous judgment and coercive power–for when we try to stand on our own righteousness, we ultimately judge ourselves. The law condemns all equally. The only resolution to hatred, whether self-directed or other-directed, is more love. In other words the true solution, the only solution, the only possible way out of our lostness, is grace. And that grace is ultimately, finally, completely poured out in the life and death of God’s only Son. Grace has come and triumphed over all, breathing life into death, flashing hope into despair, filling our crushed hearts with love unconquerable.
So, yes, I did sort of blandly confess yesterday that my life is a useless dead-end. If my dispassion came from fatalism or apathy, it would likely be a sign of spiritual stagnation, but instead, my sharing it with such ease and openness (not stuffed with caveats or apologies or explanations) is a very real sign of spiritual growth for me. It has taken years for me to slowly come out of the closet as a failure, a nobody, and grow into the faith that God is in control and loves me with an unfettered grace. He is famous for using asses (both the donkey variety and the human kind) to accomplish good on this earth, even those totally resistant to his purposes, like Jonah at Ninevah and Peter with the Ethiopian eunuch, so he can surely use someone like me who, though deeply flawed, is eager to be his instrument.
I no longer cower under the withering suspicion that my flaws keep me on the bench, but It is not easy to feel useless, to feel as though my gifts fall to the ground like rotting apples in a starving country. It requires faith and patience in the mystery of God’s will and work in the world. I’m getting better at that… I have to get better at it because the longer I live, the more clearly I see the wreckage around me. As I told Kimberly yesterday, this wretched world gives no rational proof of a good God. The balance sheets of justice (let alone beauty and goodness) cannot be reconciled on earth. As Paul said, “If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable.” Forget the world around me, the world inside my chest is so slow in growing towards God that death will catch me long before I’ve lived into half the truth I’ve come to see.
God has a lot of explaining to do to justify his creating this muck-up since he knew the disaster that would come, but I expect one glimpse of his beauty will obliterate all our questions and doubts and captivate our hearts. Until then, we live by faith in a beauty we cannot see, in a grace we cannot well absorb, and in a love that guides us through the dark and home to his heart. May we all find our way by grace and en-courage one another with compassion.
Patience was a virtue before the industrial revolution, but we’ve developed beyond that to aim rather for efficiency. Waiting is passe. In the old days we had to gather wood and build a fire to boil water, but then we invented electric stoves, followed by microwaves, and now (since we can’t wait 90 seconds) we have steaming water on tap. We’ve discovered that frustration breeds progress–impatience is the new virtue. All the important people are doing it. I know I felt important–and righteous–when I was hurrying to do God’s work, but I think I missed a turn somewhere, because I seem to be stuck in the slow lane in God’s Kingdom… although, since I’m not even inching forward, maybe I’m in the back parking lot.
As I shared in my last post, I have never been good at waiting. When God scheduled practice sessions, I played hooky, so I finally got sent to Waiting Boot Camp where I’ve been for a long time now because, apparently, I’m a slow learner. How ironic. Waiting well is an art, and no one advances in it without first understanding its value. What good does waiting offer? Let me start by pointing out problems that come from not waiting.
First of all, there is the bad alternative solution, the shortcut that ends in a mess (ask Abraham about Hagar). If the best solution requires more time, then every quicker solution is going to be defective. It turns out that God’s not in a rush because he has all the time in the world (literally), and he’s savvy to the best rhythm. being both the composer and conductor of the symphony we call history. In fact he IS the rhythm of history, so it’s kind of important that we get in sync with him. The point is to experience the music, not get to the end as quickly as possible. To play his music well, we must be as faithful to the musical rest as to the beat. Timing is fundamental, good waiting is as crucial as good working.
Second, there is our own arrested development, the shortchanging of our own experience and growth, missing what God wishes to do in us and for us by having us wait. When God has us wait, it is always for our benefit, never for our deprivation. God does not have to bilk us in order to bless others, because his resources are limitless. His one unwavering motivation for delay is expressed in his Son: “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.” We cheat ourselves when we rush ahead because our growth and fulness depend as much on our stillness as on our striving. The first is just as active in shaping and satisfying us as the second.
Finally, there is the impaired relationship, because when two are out of step, their dance suffers. Our motives for pushing ahead of God hurt our bond with him, whether that comes from doubt in his wisdom and love or from being too willful and inattentive or from fear or pride. All of those pull us away from a trusting relationship. The motives erode our connection and then the actions we take widen that fissure. That is to say, capitulating to our fear is relationally harmful, and so are the actions we take in living out that fear. When Abraham bedded Hagar to get a son, he not only side-tracked God’s plan and undercut his own faith, but he also distanced himself from God. He was less able to hear him, to trust him, to receive from him, to delight in his presence.
So failure to wait hurts the objective, the person, and the relationship.
But if you are like me, God doesn’t speak clearly and audibly to give specific directions, so how can we know if we are missing his timing? It is a dance. Dance partners don’t have a running monologue, “Step to your left… step back… on the count of three, dip.” Through a lot of practice and experience they learn to feel one another’s rhythms, patterns, and tells, and it is always more about moving together than getting the steps precise, more about trust and response than about rules and conformity. But if we do not embrace the pause, the waiting, as well as the stride, we will likely miss our partner’s gentle guidance and stumble in the dance. Waiting seems like doing nothing, but it is pregnant with power. Doing and waiting are the inhaling and exhaling of life’s rhythmic progress.
I hate waiting.
I hate it on the telephone, I hate it at the traffic cone;
I hate it at the DMV–I’m what? two hundred eighty three?!
I hate it now, I’ll hate it then. You say I have to wait till WHEN?!
I hate it here, I hate it there; it chafes me like wool underwear.
Waiting is worse than death. When you’re dead you don’t know you’re stuck in the universe’s time-out corner, suffocating on your current meaninglessness, accomplishing squat. Time squandered at least brings pleasure, but time waiting, minute by minute, is a complete loss, like setting fire to money… slowly… one bill at a time. If you tolerate delays, you clearly don’t value time. Unless you have the silly notion that waiting is itself a benefit, which is as crazy as valuing an empty wallet! I’m sure you’ll get a lot of people buying into that motto. What would your bumper sticker say, something cockamamie like “Blessed are the Poor”? Next you’ll tell me that being comfortable with waiting is not a vice of the lazy but a virtue of the wise, and that pre-moderns called it “patience.” Well, patience will get you nowhere, and it will get you there late. If you want results, try yelling.
Is there any benefit to me for being patient, or is it just to benefit God because he’s tired of hearing me whine? Is God losing his cool with me, telling me to shut up, impatiently demanding I be patient? Does calm waiting do more than give me brownie points with God? If virtue is its own reward, what reward does patience give?
For instance, as a hypothetical, suppose there is a lady in front of me in the fast lane at Food Lion and she waits until all her groceries are sacked and each sack placed in her cart before she thinks about her payment. She opens her pocketbook and rummages around, shoving things this way and that until she pulls out one crumpled bill, straightens it out, and hands it to the store clerk. She dives back in looking for another bill. After she passes that over, she re-checks the total on the display, and goes looking for her change purse. There must be a dime in there somewhere, she’s sure of it. A quarter will not do. She pulls each coin out of her purse to get a closer look before putting it back to scrummage for another. Then the receipt must be carefully folded and the right spot found for it in the pocketbook and a place for the pocketbook in the cart. Pretend that my smile slowly turns into a clenched jaw, my friendliness grows sullen, and my thoughts uncharitable. Can waiting really be beneficial? How is postponing good ever a positive? Patience is simply an unwanted chore if I cannot find a reason to value delays. I have some thoughts to share, but you’ll have to wait 😉
My memory is like cellphone reception in the sticks–very iffy. I am a full-spectrum forgetter, from the trivial pen to the crucial time sheet submission, and everything in-between. I’m so good at misplacing things that I’m surprised to find them where they belong–the cupboard is the last place I look for my coffee cup. I have a whole strategy for dealing with my incompetence–jotting myself reminders and propping them in key places (my computer keyboard, my Honda dashboard) or leaning things against the door so I can’t leave without them. I am totally prepped for the onset of Alzheimer’s!
Along with my other inveterate shortcomings, It is my wild forgetfulness that wakens my memory, that keeps me aware of my own inadequacy. Some folks are so successful or competent or busy or distracted that their memory needs to be elbowed into recalling their own failings. They get good grades at work and church and family and pick up extra credit volunteering at the mission downtown. Their lives, unlike mine, constantly point to their virtues and accomplishments, and it is their failings that they forget. They need reminders, blacked out calendar days, time set aside to reflect on the noxious embers that still smolder in their bones. They need Ash Wednesday.
But I need Resurrection Sunday. I live in the ash heap of my own failures, reflecting back on them not for 40 days, but 40 years. I don’t need reminding, I need rescuing. What I need to remember, always remember, is Easter, the joy of forgiveness. My hope cannot be in outgrowing my faults or in forgetting them, but in living my present messy life in the full embrace of God, the God who not only accepts me in spite of my past failures, but also in expectation of my future ones, who is not put off by my need, but is drawn to me because of it. We all fall down, constantly fall down, but may we land in His grace, not in our own self-loathing. And may the ashes on our foreheads be the sign of our mutual poverty as we hold one another’s hands and dance together in the glorious light of His redemptive love.
Janathan Grace Reflections 