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I say that tongue in cheek… sort of. Many of us have so confused self-care with selfishness, that we think it is holy to mistreat ourselves in ways we would never think to treat another. I am one of those who feel I must neglect myself in order to help others, but at least for me, I am surprised by the opposite happening. As I found myself able to be kind to myself on my drive to D. C. yesterday, I spontaneously began feeling kind towards those around me.
A woman tailgated me for a while and then cut in front of me. Instead of thinking, “You jerk!” I thought, “I’ve been in big hurries before. I know how that feels. I hope you make it in time.” I had empathetic, even appreciative thoughts for slow drivers, confused drivers, and wacky pedestrians. I even had an open heart to the one person in Arlington that made my life miserable when I was pastoring there.
Who would have thought that taking care of myself, even putting my own needs first, would have such a positive impact on my outlook and behavior towards others? It seems I may help others most by taking care of myself first.
I am in the D.C. metropolis right now (Arlington, actually) to get a passport and visa to India. As you may have read in an earlier post, India was my spiritual Titanic, and preparing to return there has opened up some very deep gashes that I have tried hard to ignore for the last decade. I was already scheduled for an appointment at the DC office a month ago because I thought my passport was over 15 years old. The morning I was to leave for Washington, I discovered a newer passport in my “legal id” folder and cancelled my appointment, only to realize some time later that my unmarried name was in my current passport and had to be updated.
While I was still trying to deal with the stormy emotions rising out of my impending trip to Calcutta, I banged up our car and was handed a warrant of arrest for hit-and-run. For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to settle my quaking mind and heart. It really was a huge hit to my sense of vulnerability to a completely unpredictable world.
I left at 6:10 a.m. this morning to come here to the District for my noon appointment at the passport agency. I’ve barely left enough time to get the passport, Indian visa, and plane ticket and complete the trip to Kolkata before my library work starts in late August. As I drove this morning I thought about my stupidity in not realizing I had to change my name on the passport. I was tempted to berate myself for waiting so long to take the necessary steps in preparing. I know it will be hard for my Indian brothers if I can’t go until the winter school break. I was stupid, I was late, it was my fault, others might suffer… it was a prime circumstance for shaming myself, something that would, in the past, have consumed my whole trip to D.C. That practice of self-shaming often made me more careful and conscientious in the future, but in the process damaged my soul, pushing me away from grace into legalism.
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But this time I discovered with some pleasure and relief that I was not castigating myself for my stupidity and lateness, I was purposely seeing myself with as much compassion as I would feel for another in that situation. Yes, I am more scatterbrained than most. I easily miss or forget or misconstrue some pretty obvious things that most others would probably notice. That is who I am. I take steps to compensate, but when I fail anyway, it is not from malice or negligence. Being “stupid” in that way is one of my weaknesses, and it is going to trip me up more often than it will most others. My friends will need to exercise more patience towards me in this regard as I must exercise more patience for them in other regards.
Allowing myself the human right to work through my high-decibel emotions over the criminal charge was an important healthy direction for me. In the past I would have denied my own needs in favor of others, told my emotions to shut up, and marched forward with grit and determination. In my experience, peace and good do not spring from such a mindset. I gave myself the time I needed to settle down before facing another emotionally charged task here in D.C. My coming late here was a very positive step in my learning to rest in God’s grace for my weaknesses. Instead of shame, it is a joy to see myself moving further into the ocean of grace, and I trust God to care for what outcomes may follow.
Yes, Mardi often writes very long letters and emails!
And as for my assertion that my life is essentially unsuccessful, you really do have to accept standard methods of measuring success. It has to be one or more of the following :
1) the quantity of people affected by your work or personality – the greater the number the greater the success
2) the quality of people impressed by your work or personality – the higher the level of expertise of the persons doing the evaluation the higher the success
3) the amount of money, recognition, or power achieved by your work or personality – the greater the financial, acknowledgement or power achievements, the greater the success.
4) the number of things which you attempt to do, which you actually do.
So you really can’t honestly place the achievements of my life anywhere near the top end of any of those measures of success. But if that isn’t a problem for me it shouldn’t be for anyone else. In fact you should be really grateful to the Lord that He has given you the privilege of having a member of your immediate family be given a non-successful life trajectory. There are things which can only be learned from that perspective, truly valuable and meaningful things which cannot be perceived from the perspective of the successful life trajectory. By being included in my life, there are things that you can learn that you could never learn from your success-intensive life style!
Each person is given certain things in their life in order to learn some unique and individual aspect of the True Reality, not the perceived reality of our cultural environment. Learning that particular thing your life has been designed to teach is the purpose of every person’s individual life. And as each of us spends a life-time learning that one thing we have been given the advantages to learn, all of us – as a culture and as humanity – move forward toward our corporate goal.
Now you say, but what has all of that got to do with God’s plan for us. Well there is one overall general plan he has for everyone – to turn from ourselves and surrender to Him and to begin the journey with Him and for Him and to Him. However within the context of that universal plan there is a unique individual set of gifts given to each person. And those gifts include the disappointments, the pain and the difficulties of life as well as the blessings. Our weaknesses are as much a gift from the Lord as our strengths; our failures are as much a gift as our successes. And the purpose of all of it is to teach us something special and unique; and through us to bless the wider communities of which we are a part.
Success has no intrinsic value in itself as such. The experience of failure and success can both have value if you begin to learn from them. And by that I do not mean that we learn from our failures how to avoid failure in the future or from our successes how to increase them in the future. That whole business of putting a value on success as something to attain and a negative value on failure as something to avoid is totally illusory. Are you believing me yet? Failure has taught me the absolute illusion of the idea that success has value. It has freed me from the dominating tyranny of the need to succeed. So failure has a lot more value to me than success.
Why don’t you see what Buck Hatch [Christian psychology professor at my alma mater] thinks of this theory! I’ll bet he likes it! But you’ve got to present it as I have and not your personal bias on what I’ve said!
And as for my argument that art is a skill that anyone can learn. If you came to stay with me for one month and took lessons from me for 6 hours a day (2 three-hour sessions a day) and practiced in the hours remaining, I could have you drawing as well as me. I’m really not that good compared to the average working artist in America today. I’m at the low end of mediocre. That’s not a problem though. I was a bit discouraged when I first began to honestly appraise my work on a number of levels and had to admit this about it. But now that I’m inculcating my own philosophical perspective of the uselessness of success, I’m a lot more comfortable with honest appraisals of my work and my life that don’t turn out so attractively.
You can think about my theory and send me your rebuttal when you’ve got it all worked out. But you have to have a workable theory that pertains to anyone – like mine did. You can’t just say you don’t see my life in that light and try to prove how my life doesn’t fit that pattern. You’ve got to come up with an alternate theory of all of life that applies to anyone and addresses all those issues and resolves them with your theory!
Mardi’s letter to me continued:
I began to think of life as a school in which each person who is born is given a unique curriculum especially designed just for them. It includes many gifts that will give pleasure and gifts that will give pain. There will be things to strengthen and things to challenge. There will be things that seem to help and things that seem to block us. But the purpose of everything is not to become or to achieve or to acquire any of the things we end up using our lives to become, achieve and acquire. They are all given to us in order to teach us something more, greater, something of Real value.
People who are successful have been given a curriculum that includes success in the things they attempt. But the purpose is for them to learn something through the experiences of success. They cannot take credit for their success. It was given to them. What counts is whether they learn that thing of Real value that success was given to them to learn.
And non-success can be given to others for the same reason, to learn something Real that only the experience of non-success can teach. That thing is the real purpose of the experience – the real purpose of all the experiences of our life.
Everyone seems to think that success is not only a thing of great value, but it is perhaps the thing of greatest value in life. In fact it appears to be such an absolute necessity that everyone gets very upset when I assert that I am unsuccessful and they try to come up with a definition of successful that will allow me to be included. They don’t seem to understand when I try to explain that success really isn’t valuable. We don’t need it. We can live very happily without it!
But how does this relate to your pursuit of your own dreams. Well, when I came up with this theory I decided it wasn’t so important that I figure out how to overcome my non-success and achieve the great American dream of success. I thought perhaps it was more important to sit back and thoughtfully evaluate the experiences of my life so far. I think you need to be at least in your mid-30’s before you have enough life experiences to begin to recognize your individual pattern. It seemed clear that for whatever reasons, my life was being exemplified by large amounts of non-success. So instead of fighting a pointless battle to achieve a dubious goal, I decided to accept my gift of non-success and begin to try to explore it’s potential for leading me into an even deeper spiritual awareness.
So perhaps for you, you might want to take a look at your life and see what degree of success you can expect given your track record so far! I like to call it a success ratio. It’s a ratio of the percentage of our efforts that have been successful as compared to those that have not been. If you’re having only a moderate success ratio, or a low success ratio in the various areas of your life, then perhaps you won’t want to pursue the more elaborate and intense version of your dreams. You might want to scale down your expectations and re-think your dream in terms of what you might be able to achieve.
I don’t know if you like that idea. I can hear the high-power achievers calling it “defeatist”. But is it defeatist for a guy who is 5ft.2 to decide that maybe he should try to be a jockey instead of spending his life trying to get into the NBA? You could mention Muggsy Bouges. But in addition to being given a short body he was also given extraordinary skills, great speed, a consuming passion for the game of basketball and a high success ratio. In evaluating our potential in life we need to consider all our gifts, gifts of strength and gifts of weakness. If success is something that is given to us in order to learn something of greater value, isn’t it simply wisdom to accept our personal success ratio, learn how to live with it and learn from it.
Well, since we couldn’t finish our discussion on success ratio, I thought about it on the way home and polished up my argument a bit more. I realize that everyone is so uncomfortable with my ideas on success because our Reformation Protestant European work ethic perspectives have equated success with our personal value, our meaning in life and our fulfillment as persons. We think we must have success to have value, meaning and fulfillment. In fact none of these are actually connected to success and most other periods of history and other cultures understand this much better than the average American who has put them all in the same computer file.
So to say I am not successful – and probably never will be – does not mean that my life has no value. My life derives its value from the fact that I am made in the image of God. Every life has the same value. No life, however successful, has any more value than another, no matter how desperate a failure. The value of each life is, incredibly, as valuable to God as His own life! If I am feeling devalued or being treated as of no value by those who have misunderstood the nature of the value of life, I have only to meditate on the true value of my life. Value is not something you can be more or less successful at. It’s not in the same category as things which can be rated as successful or not.
Lack of success also does not mean that my life has no meaning. My life has been given meaning, a purpose and a goal by Jesus who came to show us God and to make a way for us to return to God who is our only true Love and only true Home. And he made himself the way, so that we have not just a sure pathway but a loving companion. That is all the meaning any life could need – to walk with God, through God, in God, to God. And once again that is not something I can be successful at, it is simply something that has been given to me and I enter into the gift.
And fulfillment in life cannot be attached to success either. That which produces fulfillment in life is love – giving love and receiving love. Love is something that comes out of your heart, it’s not an accomplishment which can be achieved in varying degrees of success. It is like your breathing – you breathe in the love of others and you breathe out love to others. And the ultimate source of all the love we have to receive and give is God from whom we come and to whom we are returning through Jesus.
Success not only does not produce value, meaning or fulfillment, it also cannot affect these things. They are totally independent of success. The imaginary value of success in our culture is purely illusory. It has no real value at all. And yet people assume it holds the very key to a valuable, meaningful, fulfilled life. This illusion is so pervasive that even Christians get uncomfortable when I assert that my life is essentially unsuccessful. They do not want to listen to my happy acceptance of this assessment.
I may be ready to share what has been tormenting me for the last two weeks. I don’t know. When I share my fears with others before I am ready, I increase my fears, but sharing my fears with others is also a big step toward releasing my fears. So I guess I will find out how posting this will affect me.
As I climbed from our car after our accident on the 4th, I was still in shock and not thinking too clearly, but I did consider whether I should stand the pylons back up which we knocked down. I decided that I didn’t know where they should be placed, so regretfully would let the owner put them back (it was a commercial lot, and no one was there). The next morning I called our insurance company and filled out a report online. Some hours later a cop came to my door asking about the damage to my car. I told him the story. He said, “You know you should have completed a police report?” I responded, “I thought that if the damage is under a certain amount, that was unnecessary.” “That may be the case,” he answered, “but whenever there is property damage, a report should be filed.” I said, “I didn’t think there was any property damage.” I called the property owner right away to apologize and called my insurance agency to report the additional claims of damage.
The upshot of it was that the trooper not only gave me a traffic ticket, but charged me with hit and run, a criminal offense (though it is a misdemeanor rather than a felony). I never could have imagined something like this happening to me. I’m a criminal. And in my current tenuous job situation I find myself, that is a pretty big mark against me if I need to find a job in the future, especially in the helping field. I have a hearing July 28, and the trial will probably be set for September. It has sent me for a huge tailspin emotionally.
Every time I hear a car door close or footsteps outside the house, every time my phone rings, every time I get in the car, my heart jumps with the fear, “The cops are after me!” I want to catch my breath or run and hide or curl into a protective ball. This fear of impending doom is constantly twanging its chaotic tune around each daily event, and though I can soothe myself into a surface calm by focusing on the truth of God’s compassion and care, I know the least prick will bring it back full force.
The fear is much bigger than just the potential for the trial’s outcome. Now that my life has crossed the line of the inconceivable, all future disastrous possibilities have opened before me. It is a fear that I might at any moment, without warning, be hit by some major loss, something that tears a deep gash in my sense of worth because it was my fault… I could be fired, I could lose my house, with the best intentions I could step on a hundred legal landmines, and my apparent innocence would be meaningless. I have this constant feeling, “What am I doing wrong? What might happen next?” Now that the unthinkable has happened, every catastrophe seems possible, and I have no way of protecting myself. I know the fear will decrease with time, as it has a bit already. But that doesn’t change my experience of today and tomorrow.
Our accident brought some of my handicaps into the spotlight. First of all, I am not a multitasker in any sense of the word. I do very well concentrating on one task, but if a second is added, one of them will get seriously neglected. Furthermore, I get trapped in the mazes of my own brain. If I am reflecting deeply (which is mostly the only kind I do), I better be engaged in a physical task that can be accomplished on auto-pilot. My problem is not drinking and driving, but thinking and driving. I’m being quite serious.
I can’t turn off my brain unless the activity I am involved in requires my complete mental attention (such as taking a test). I have often come close to stuttering to the roadside on empty because I can only force myself to think, “Stop for gas!” for about 30 seconds before I am off in some other world. On the way to the lake last week, my wife suddenly asked me if I had taken the right exit… I couldn’t remember.
I guess this has been a problem for some time, since Kimberly tells me that when we first met, I drove straight through a red light without realizing it… I don’t remember. The one area where it has come out most prominently in my driving is failing to notice things ahead that require me to slow down or stop. I do fairly well on my own, though it regularly calls for an uncomfortably quick stop, but when I get further engrossed by conversing with Kimberly, I am downright dangerous. Many times Kimberly has had to warn me of things up ahead which I am approaching too quickly.
The accident forced me to realize that it is not enough for me to try harder to concentrate on driving, but I really have to take a serious action step. I haven’t talked to Kimberly about it yet, but I think when we are driving in traffic together, she needs to be behind the wheel. I usually drive because she prefers not to. Also, as I told her on the way back from our accident, “I’m only 50, but I’m going to have to start driving like a geezer.”
A second serious handicap of mine is that I don’t notice the need for a change (in practical matters) unless I am forced to see it. I will be semi-conscious of a problem, but will keep performing the same old routines without ever consciously making a decision to do so. It niggles somewhere on the outskirts of my mind, and may take a very long time, sometimes too long, to burrow up to the level of conscious deliberation. I “should” have realized this driving issue as a real problem and looked for a solution long ago. We knew it was a problem, but it never occurred to me to make a significant change… I just kept trying to do better using the failing system.
I’m not beating up on myself. I put “should” in quotation marks because I don’t really think it was negligence on my part; it is part of who I am. We all have handicaps, and we do well to recognize them. God not only gave us all strengths, but he deliberately created us with weaknesses as well. I think this was his way of making us interdependent, of tying us together in community. Our weaknesses are not “bad” things, they are just part of who we are and who we will always be. I may be able to improve or compensate for my weaknesses, but if I try to quash them or force them into conformity, I am being false to the way God created me. I have believed this very late in life and have suffered a great deal for not recognizing it earlier, but that must wait for another post. As L’Arche says, the world is not divided into those with handicaps and those without; we are all disabled and badly in need of the gifts of others.
In case you haven’t figured this out yet, I’m a very screwed up person. More screwed up than most others? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. More aware of my own issues than most others are of theirs?… I’d be willing to bet on that. It makes for a sense of isolation and loneliness. I am eternally grateful for my wife. The two of us make a great community.
After reading “Tattoos,” Kimberly and I drove an hour to visit a friend of hers at Smith Mountain Lake, and we continued talking about unconditional love. Why is it so hard for me to extend grace to those who show no remorse for the bad things they do? Why do I so naturally feel grace for the victim and balk at gracing the aggressor? Why am I afraid to love? What am I afraid of? Why does it make me feel so vulnerable?
As I talk this out with Kimberly, I suddenly realize the source of my fear. From the time I was in diapers I learned that transgressors can only win back a good standing by feeling very sorry for what they have done. To offer grace to those who are unrepentant is simply enabling their bad behavior. Instead, show your unhappiness and disappointment, give them the cold shoulder that they deserve so they will be motivated to change. When they change, embrace them fully. Giving grace to those who are hurtful is a sure way of giving them a green light to hurt again.
During the school year, I supervise student workers at Lynchburg College library. I was amazed at how my boss Belinda could be friendly to someone she was about to correct, asking them with genuine interest about their studies or family matters. This was not my style at all. I was sure that being friendly when someone was late to work or cut corners would simply encourage their irresponsibility. But the students listened to Belinda. If anything, her friendliness made them more inclined to do what she asked. She was for them, even if she had to let them go, and they sensed this. I could see her way of relating was better than mine, but it directly contradicted decades of thought patterns and emotional systems I had grown into.
I was sure that if someone disrespected or mistreated me and I was kind in return, they would continue their behavior, and I would slowly, inevitably grow more resentful and angry. I only saw two choices: I could be friendly and let things slide or I could be unfriendly and challenge them. I could not imagine squeezing care and confrontation into the same interaction or relationship.
I think one major problem is that I tend to evaluate behavior as right or wrong, and then try to enforce the right. It sure makes things appear simple and straightforward. However, I realize that conflicts with Kimberly are really personal and relational issues, and if I try to make it about who is right and who is wrong, we get lost in defensiveness and the argument simply escalates. When we try to approach a problem with sharing and understanding instead, we resolve the conflict and both grow from the interchange. I can support her feelings and experience without abandoning my own if I do not insist that there is only one right perspective.
If I suffer because of another person’s behavior, I can either determine that they are wrong and must change or I can see it as a relational problem that needs to be addressed. “You lied and that is wrong. Don’t do it again.” Or, “When you lied it hurt me. What was going on with you that you felt the need to lie?” I find grace is lost in the shuffle for me with the first approach, and grace is a very natural part of the second approach (though I have an uncanny ability to inject dis-grace into any situation, even with a tone of voice). When I assign blame and push for change, I turn the situation into a showdown and we square off. A boxer may have tensions with his manager, even irreconcilable conflicts, but the manager is always in his corner, he is not the opponent in the ring.
Because Xanga makes it hard for folks to leave comments, I have decided to switch my reflective posts to janathangrace.org. I may switch my informative blogs to a different site as well, but I will let you know.
Wow, it was great to get 5 responses to my first post! Thank you guys for commenting! It feels good to know you are out there reading. Since this blog site is for reflections, I may keep another site for happenings, perhaps switching my Xanga to Blogspot (advantages anyone?).
My wife and I have been reading together “Tattoos on the Heart” by Gregory Boyle, a wonderful book of grace for the gang members of L.A. among whom he works (warning: rated R for language). It inspires many self reflections and long conversations between us. Sunday morning Father Boyle charmed us with descriptions of his young friend who was trying so hard to make good choices in a hellish world. He deeply loved this boy who is one day murdered senselessly in a drive-by shooting, a random target of a rival neighborhood. He speaks of the near impossibility of his calling–to give grace to the hardened killer, to love him just as he does the victim. I had a gut reaction to this suggestion.
“Isn’t shame a good thing to foster in those who need it, those who are hard-hearted?” Kimberly reminds me of the distinction she makes between shame and guilt, and for her, shame is never something we should promote. We have had this discussion many times before, and I never quite understood her. I always thought the difference was that guilt is internally directed (motivating us out of a guilty conscience to reform) and shame was externally directed (motivating us out of fear of others’ judgments to reform), the first based on internal mores (self-criticism) and the second on external mores (others’ criticism). For Kimberly, guilt is feeling bad for what I have done and shame is feeling bad for who I am.
I realize why I have always been confused by this distinction–for me there is no real difference between what I do and who I am. If I do bad things it proves I am a bad person. Kimberly responds, “The world is not made up of good and bad people. Every individual has both good and bad in them.” I agree… sort of. I know in my mind this is true, but don’t we have to make some distinction between criminals and law-abiding citizens, trustworthy and untrustworthy employees? Doesn’t society need to enforce minimal social norms by motivating wayward members with shame? Isn’t shame sometimes a good thing?
Then she makes something click for me, “What people need, even those who are jaded… especially those who are jaded… is love and grace. It is never good to shame others.” “What about the Pharisees?” “There is great value in helping others get in touch with the shame they already have and are suppressing, which is very different from imposing shame from outside. The self-righteous are not free of shame. In fact, their shame is so intense they have to keep it away at all costs, repressing it by tight behavioral conformity and projecting it by shaming others.” I stew on that. It finally makes sense to me.
I still think like a Pharisee in many ways: I feel bad for who I am, a miserable sinner and my behavior proves my character; the only way to escape this shame is to change my conscious thoughts, motivations, and actions to be good; I shame myself and others into this conformity. But finally the light blinks on. I am bad, flawed, sinful (like every single person on earth), and I automatically equated this with being worthless or at least worth less. But my value has nothing to do with my behavior. God loves me because I am his beloved, and nothing I do can change that. My worth as a person is completely based on God’s love. I believe it is legalism to try to establish someone’s worth by excusing or ameliorating their sin, “You really are a good person, and therefore have worth.”
When I returned from being a missionary in Calcutta, I felt like a terrible failure, and because of my legalism, I believed this proved I was unworthy, unacceptable. But if I exhausted every twitch of energy to be a “success” in God’s eyes, and still failed, then I was without hope of ever getting on God’s good side. I stumbled off that gerbil wheel, not because I had a better path to follow, but because I was convinced my efforts were useless. Some folks, hearing I was discouraged, tried to lift my spirit by telling me that I really had been a success in spite of what I thought. Instead of cheering me up, this darkened my heart even further since their insistence on this point fed my fear that I really did have to be a success to be of worth. This underlying fear plagues me to this day, though daily I pull further free of its hold as I believe more fully in God’s love.
So, friends, what are your thoughts and experiences around this dialogue? Feel free to disagree with me or one another, but please do so with as much humility and grace as possible.
Janathan Grace Reflections 