At my dad’s funeral, my sister Amy shared how dad planned great trips for his children and grandchildren, taking them on real adventures that created memories for a lifetime. Pop took me on a trip to Washington D.C. when I was twelve, and it was truly memorable. For Amy, this “extravagant love” was the epitome of her recollections of a loving father.
Yet true love may not show itself in extravagant gestures or great sacrifices. Sometimes the power and glory of love infuses the mundane. In fact, the grand display can easily be a cover to hide our unwillingness to love as we should. There are foolish and useless sacrifices… even selfish sacrifices. A mom can pay dearly to send her boy to college in an effort to run from the shame of her own inadequacy. A father can give everything up to make his son a great athlete.. but is this love for himself or his son? The ultimate sacrifice of true love is not in giving to the other, but in receiving them into our hearts, inviting them in to reveal their real selves, delighting in their oddness and mystery, allowing them to shape the very direction of our soul’s growth.
We tend to be so self-oriented that we equate our view with what is normal and right, even reading Scripture with that lense. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” does not mean that we treat others as copies of ourselves, assuming that what pleases or saddens us, what excites or frustrates us is the same for them. Each of us is unique in our experiences and perceptions. True love is not simply making room for the differences of others, but valuing those differences, trying to see and understand the world as they see it, gaining a new perspective and value system and appreciation for life that we did not have before. I cannot truly love without being personally transformed by it.
This is especially difficult for parents because they have responsibility for teaching and training a child, helping them mature into kind, insightful, responsible adults. But if the child is not given the freedom and encouragement to find out who they really are apart from, in distinction from, in contrast to their parents, then their lives will be hollowed out, learning good behavior but divorced from their own hearts. Is a parent able to learn profound truths from their little ones, a new outlook on the world, a new way of being? A real relationship in contrast to a coercive one empowers each other’s uniquenesses, especially when those differences are a source of conflict since those are the secret keys to unlock our own spiritual insight and growth.
The beauty and glory of true love is that it enriches the giver far more than the recipient. It is the pathway to our own daily salvation.
We scrimp, we jerry-rig, we do without to make ends meet. The driver’s window in my truck has been broken for two years… purposely in the down position so that it can pass inspection. The rain pours in on the seat and floor and cups in the door pocket, then it dries out again… the door handle has started to rust tight. My wheelbarrow is a 55 gallon barrel that I scavenged, cut in half, and bolted to a lawn mower chassis. I buy my clothes from Goodwill, keep my shoes till the insoles wear through to the pavement, and cut my own hair.
I piece together my income from various sources. 8 months out of the year I work part time at a college library and try to make up the summer months with cutting lawns. I also work at Home Depot part time year round. I tried also working as a substitute custodian in the Lynchburg school system, but I rarely could make it fit between the hours of my other two job schedules. Kimberly is usually working as well in a low-pay job. We have somehow managed over the last 6 years, occasionally dipping into our meager savings.
Since we have not been able to find better jobs here, we decided to try our luck in Asheville, NC where Kimberly has wanted to move for years. We put our house up for sale in April, hoping to sell it this summer. Since I was busy fixing the house in preparation, I had to cancel my mowing jobs for the summer. Kimberly also left her job, partly in anticipation of moving. Now it has been three months without an offer on our house, and we have exhausted our savings on getting the house ready, our only income being my part time job at Home Depot. My first paycheck from the library is still two months away.
We put Kimberly’s student loan payment on hiatus, postponed eye doctor visits, and cut our food budget in half. Then we started brainstorming about how to make it through two more months of bills. I had some vacation time from the library I could collect in wages (I usually use it to cover the Thanksgiving break gap in pay). We could take a cash advance on our credit card (with a hefty interest rate). I could take a loan from my retirement fund. But borrowing from the future only works if you have some prospect of improvement–neither of us have jobs lined up in Asheville. Kimberly had added up our average monthly bills, and even with my vacation pay, we weren’t going to make it through.
Over the weekend we started smelling a strange stench all through the house. On monday I discovered that it was our hot water heater which had rusted through.
That same day we received an envelope from my dad’s widow with a check from my father’s estate, enough to get us through the summer and restore some of the savings we had spent on fixing up the house, including a new hot water heater. Isn’t that just like God?
For those of you who find encouragement from challenges to fight on, here’s a great video:
I got choked up when a friend posted this John Milton poem to my page, a poem written as he was losing his eyesight. It so perfectly reflects my own present struggle that it resonated deeply with me in a way it never had before.
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
If your life is working out reasonably well, I am happy for you. It is not my experience, though I daily put my heart and will into doing my best. I feel like a dog chained to a post and told to fetch. Most of my life I thought the whole exercise was about figuring out how to get loose so as to fetch. That’s what smart, resourceful dogs would do. I tried various strategies–twist to loosen the chain or pole, pull to break the chain. I was apparently doing it all wrong, because I was a failure at fetching. I saw other dogs retrieving all sorts of things for their master. They had various schemes for getting free of their chain, but none of those worked for me. I don’t have a life verse, but Kimberly one day laughed at spotting my life meme: “Well, that didn’t &#%! go as planned.”
Finally I decided that I had misunderstood my master’s intentions, and he just wanted me to sit and wait. But what should I do while waiting? If I were eventually going to be let loose to fetch, perhaps I should practice the skills needed… except those skills were only relevant for a retriever, and maybe that was not my purpose after all. I was waiting for something. What? Was I supposed to simply learn to be good at waiting? What does that even mean? Patience and trust, I suppose.
Okay, so that is what my attitude should be, but what do I DO while practicing that attitude? Is there a better way to sit or lie? Inside the doghouse or out? Do I keep my eyes closed or look at something… at what? I was sure there were better and worse ways to wait. Slowly anxiety overtook my patience–I need to be a better waiter!! Apparently the one thing I do really poorly is wait. And I am so legalistic I can even turn doing nothing into a standard to meet.
But look at all those other dogs doing their thing! Dogs have legs to jump and run and mouths to grab and hold… they weren’t designed to just sit. Are these joys of life the rewards for getting good marks in waiting? Or is waiting well its own reward? It doesn’t feel rewarding. It feels like being forgotten, or worse still being rejected, like I’m not good enough to fetch. As you can see, I still have a long way to go in learning trust and patience. Doing nothing is really hard!
We humans are deeply flawed. The Bible calls it sin, the evil and brokenness that infests our whole world, right down to the roots of our own heart. It not only distorts our hearts, but our minds, our volition, our self-understanding… it taints every part of who we are. One of the primary ways this plays out is to make each of us the center of our own universe, both perceptually and morally. We have a default to justify ourselves while blaming others.
Self justification may at first glance seem like self compassion, being on my own side, but it is really a Trojan horse, the gift that keeps on taking, because it is rejection of the truth, and that never leads to health and strength. Fleeing our shame makes us no freer than the prison escapee who is running for his life. Our only hope is to embrace our shame, our failings, our faults, with the arms of grace, to openly confess our flaws from within the safety of God’s unconditional love.
I’m sorry to say that I often find it easier to see the failing of others than my own, and to then fault them for it as a moral flaw. But fixing that tendency to blame others by trying instead to justify them leads to equal disorder in our minds and hearts and relationships. Grace ceases to be grace when it avoids the truth. Being generous-minded (assuming the best rather than the worst) certainly has its place, especially if our default is to blame (as mine sadly is), but our aim is to seek out what is true, not what is nice. Flattery is deadly, especially when it is sincere.
Our response to our parents often falls into this unfortunate dichotomy–we either blame them or exonerate them, justify ourselves or justify them, and both responses are equally damaging. In the complexity of processing through our emotional entanglements, we will likely go through stages of both blaming and justifying, I certainly did, but these should never be an end in themselves. We seek to know ourselves through the dynamics of our early upbringing so as to find truth and freedom in which to grow forwards. Things need to be unlearned or re-organized or re-evaluated or put into perspective. Getting stuck in blame or justification cuts off true transformation.
One key tool in growing into a gracious outlook towards others is to separate the impact of someone’s behavior from its sinfulness. To say that my father or mother impacted me in a certain way is quite distinct from saying that they are to blame. They may have been doing the best they could. We do not ultimately know what internal resources they did or did not have, the motivations for their choices, and so on. “To his own Master he stands or falls.” However, we have the emotional and spiritual obligation to carefully evaluate behavior as itself beneficial or harmful, otherwise we will mindlessly carry on those relational patterns into our own families by adopting them or by reactively adopting their opposite.
Every father’s day I wrote Dad a long email about what I appreciated about him. He had many good qualities: his commitment to God and Biblical teaching and virtue, his discipline and pragmatism and organization, his handiness with tools and giftedness in communication and leadership. The one attribute that was especially beneficial to me was his analytical mind and commitment to honest, rational thinking. It took me half a lifetime to discover that others are not like him but make decisions based on unexamined emotional responses and use logic, if at all, to justify conclusions ex post facto.
Everyone including Dad has biases and faulty assumptions and blindspots that hinder rational processes, but he was remarkably honest in his search for truth. He told me that Moody Press had turned down his book, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, because it was not sufficiently conservative. I thought at the time that he meant not sufficiently dispensational, but later I noticed such things as his very limited critique of abortion–basically saying that we can’t know if a fetus is a human soul, so we should err on the side of caution, a stand at clear odds with current inflammatory claims from the right. He followed the truth where it took him rather than follow the prevailing winds. His logic was not always accurate or unbiased, but it was as honest as he could be, and in that example I found an invaluable source for my own search for truth, although I have learned, especially from Kimberly, that I must temper logic with truth gained in non-logical ways such as intuition.
It is the tools we are given that shape our life much more than the specific patterns that are handed down, and this was perhaps the most unique contribution Dad gave me. His commitment to God was more valuable, but fairly typical among believing families. His analytical mind was a pure gift to me, one that was passed on without being weighted with baggage, and by that I was profoundly shaped and am deeply grateful.
From a blog I follow by David Anderson:
On the Monday following the terrorist rampage in Orlando, a dozen Golden Retrievers showed up in the Disney city. They were part of the K-9 Comfort Dogs team, a ministry run by Lutheran Church Charities. The dogs had come to give the kind of love and comfort that come only from a furry friend.
There was a time when bringing in dogs to care for the emotional needs of the traumatized would have seemed odd. But now it’s common. K-9 Comfort Dogs came to the emotional rescue after the Boston Marathon bombing, after the Sandy Hook shootings. “We’ve had a lot of people here that start petting the dog, and they break out crying,” said Tim Hetzner, president of the charity. “Dogs show unconditional love.”
…. Our love comes with a lot of conditions, a lot of strings. It doesn’t mean we’re bad people, it just means we’re human. We know that mom or dad love us, but they love us more when we visit more often, stay longer and discipline the kids a little more. Same with husbands and wives. There’s a baseline love, but more can be earned in all the ways we know.
Yet the one thing every soul seeks is simply that unconditional love, where there is nothing to be earned. So when I read stories about Golden Retrievers being flown in to offer stringless love to grieving humans, I can’t tell whether that’s a beautiful thing (how we’ve finally understood the emotional and spiritual capacity of our pets) or whether we have outsourced our love needs to animals because we can’t find a way to do it ourselves.
[Read the full text here]
I’ve been muddling over a question for several days: why did Dad’s inability to understand himself so significantly affect his own children and his relationship with them. I finally settled on a typical childhood scenario to sort it out in my mind: being late for church. In stark contrast to Dad, Mom was a spontaneous, disorganized soul who was not very good at time management. Sunday morning she was inevitably running late. Dad would finally stump out to the Oldsmobile and sit fuming, eventually honking the horn to try to hurry things along. He hated being late. It made for an icy car ride which suddenly transmuted into a smiling hand-shake with church folk, because Dad took charge of all our emotional exchanges, and he’d decided it was time to move on. Yes, he was very organized, even with his emotions, and very take-charge, even with our emotions.
While Dad was in our driveway tapping his fingers against the steering wheel, Mom would be in the bathroom madly trying to finish fixing her hair and putting on her make-up. Of course, traditional roles exacerbated this situation–Dad only had to get himself ready while Mom had to make breakfast, feed the clan, and make sure all us kids were presentable. But she still would have accomplished all this punctually if she’d had the same personality and value system as Dad. And since her promptness depended largely on certain unreliable munchkins, she would have had to heavily impose those time values on her children. There would have been as much impatience, tension, and condemnation inside the home as in the station wagon outside. Instead of a kind “where did you last see your shoes?” it would have been, “How many times have I told you…” And we children, fearing that condemnation, would have worked very hard to conform.
When two people have similar values, perspectives, personalities and emotional responses, conflicts are drastically reduced, but when these vary in important relationships, such as with Dad and Mom, some sort of system must be worked out for negotiating the conflicts. Those like my dad who have a behaviorist approach to life and relationship see growth as a process of adapting one’s behavior and language to avoid conflict rather than discovering a deeper understanding of oneself and the other. In other words, the underlying perceptions and dynamics remain the same, but one’s actions and words are tweaked to avoid offense–speaking more softly when angry or driving separate cars to church (my dad’s final solution). Being late is clearly wrong, so either she fixes her behavior so he’s not mad, or he tries to be patient with her as the failing one.
At first glance it would seem that the first approach is somewhat legalistic and the second somewhat gracious… except in both cases the late person is in the wrong. There is no option available for non-judgmentally trying to discover why this value is so important to one and not to the other–for instance that Mom put more value in accepting her kids than rushing them, that her immense creativity was enabled by not having a highly organized life, and so on. Instead of differences leading to deeper self and mutual understanding, they lead to the slotting of behaviors (and individuals) into good and bad.
Clearly, if there is a disagreement and Dad was unwilling to reconsider his own position, then he could not in any meaningful way make room for the legitimacy of the other person’s perspective of herself. If he was right, then she was wrong, and even if he is kind and sympathetic, that judgment sticks. It is not possible for someone to come to a truly gracious acceptance and understanding of the other person without questioning his own underlying perspective about himself and his views. In a remarkable way, lack of self-understanding prevents us from understanding others because we cannot shake free from our own blinders and so we distort our own perceptions.
Now, being over-zealous about lateness is a small issue that can be overlooked. Everyone has their foibles and it is part of grace to overlook them. The amazing thing I have discovered is that differences, even on small matters, can open the door into a huge cache of personal information that has never been discovered. Our inner selves are well integrated, so that one concept enforces another in a web that makes up our worldview. Punctuality is a small corner of the much bigger idea of efficiency, which is in turn a portion of the worldview that puts a premium on accomplishments. I have struggled my whole life with a sense that my value as a person depends on what I accomplish, that God values me for what I do for him rather for me. Most of my life I didn’t know this was at the root of my relationship with God–I thought all my zeal was out of my love for him. Or I could follow punctuality down a different trail, one that leads to the importance of meeting a wide array of standards and how perhaps I am not loveable unless I pass a certain moral bar (while naturally holding others to that bar). Or I could follow punctuality down a different path that connects it to respect, and what makes me feel respected or disrespected and how I respond to those feelings in my relationships.
Rubbing up against someone who experiences the world differently than I do is a great opportunity for that soul-searching. But if I default to my unshakeable worldview, I not only fail to understand myself better, but fail to understand the other, having placed us both as characters in a world of my own assumptions. Being blind to who I am inevitably makes me blind to who others are–their gifts, insights, and beauty.
I read this piece in tears the day after my dad’s funeral where we were all dressed in black dignity, smelled of shaving cream and lilacs, and spoke in polite, quiet voices. This story by Anne Lamott, one of my favorite authors, is raw and real and connects with the deep places in my heart that long for grace in the messiness of living. The truest bonds come from sharing our brokenness with one another.
Then I called my Jesuit friend, Tom, who is a hopeless alcoholic of the worst sort, sober now for 35 years, someone who sometimes gets fat and wants to hang himself, so I trust him. I said, “Tell me a story about Advent. Tell me about people getting well.”
He thought for a while. Then he said, “OK.”
In 1976, when he first got sober, he was living in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, going to the very hip AA meetings there, where there were no fluorescent lights and not too much clapping — or that yahoo-cowboy-hat-in-the-air enthusiasm that you get in L.A., according to sober friends. And everything was more or less all right in early sobriety, except that he felt utterly insane all the time, filled with hostility and fear and self-contempt. But I mean, other than that everything was OK. Then he got transferred to Los Angeles in the winter, and he did not know a soul. “It was a nightmare,”he says. “I was afraid to go into entire areas of L.A., because the only places I knew were the bars. So I called the cardinal and asked him for the name of anyone he knew in town who was in AA. And he told me to call this guy Terry.”
Terry, as it turned out, had been sober for five years at that point, so Tom thought he was God. They made arrangements to go to a place Terry knew of where alcoholic men gathered that night in the back of the Episcopal Cathedral, right in the heart of downtown L.A. It was Terry’s favorite gathering, full of low-bottom drunks and junkies — people from nearby halfway houses, bikers, jazz musicians. “Plus it’s a men’s stag meeting,” says Tom. “So already I’ve got issues.
“There I am on my first date with this new friend Terry, who turns out to not be real chatty. He’s clumsy and ill at ease, an introvert with no social skills, but the cardinal has heard that he’s also good with newly sober people. He asks me how I am, and after a long moment, I say, ‘I’m just scared,’ and he nods and says gently, ‘That’s right.’
“I don’t know a thing about him, I don’t know what sort of things he thinks about or who he votes for, but he takes me to this place near skid row, where all these awful looking alkies are hanging out in the yard, waiting for something to start. I’m tense, I’m just staring. It’s a whole bunch of strangers, all of them clearly very damaged — working their way back slowly, but not yet real attractive. The sober people I’ve met back in Berkeley all seem like David Niven in comparison, and I’m thinking, Who are these people? Why am I here?
“All my scanners are out. It’s all I can do not to bolt.
“Ten minutes before we began, Terry directed me to a long flight of stairs heading up to a windowless, airless room. I started walking up the stairs, with my jaws clenched, muttering to myself tensely just like the guy in front of me, this guy my own age who was stumbling and numb and maybe not yet quite on his first day of sobriety.
“The only things getting me up the stairs are Terry, behind me, pushing me forward every so often, and this conviction I have that this is as bad as it’s ever going to be — that if I can get through this, I can get through anything. Well. All of a sudden, the man in front of me soils himself. I guess his sphincter just relaxes. Shit runs down onto his shoes, but he keeps walking. He doesn’t seem to notice.
“However, I do. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose, and my eyes bugged out but I couldn’t get out of line because of the crush behind me. And so, holding my breath, I walk into the windowless, airless room.
“Now, this meeting has a person who stands at the door saying hello. And this one is a biker with a shaved head, a huge gut and a Volga boatman mustache. He gets one whiff of the man with shit on his shoes and throws up all over everything.
“You’ve seen the Edvard Munch painting of the guy on the bridge screaming, right? That’s me. That’s what I look like. But Terry enters the room right behind me. And there’s total pandemonium, no one knows what to do.The man who had soiled himself stumbles forward and plops down in a chair. A fan blows the terrible smells of shit and vomit around the windowless room, and people start smoking just to fill in the spaces in the air. Finally Terry reaches out to the greeter, who had thrown up. He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder.
“Wow,” he says. “Looks like you got caught by surprise.” And they both laugh. Right? Terry asks a couple of guys to go with him down the hall to the men’s room, and help this guy get cleaned up. There are towels there, and kitty litter, to absorb various effluvia, because this is a meeting where people show up routinely in pretty bad shape. So while they’re helping the greeter get cleaned up, other people start cleaning up the meeting room. Then Terry approaches the other man.
“My friend,” he says gently, “it looks like you have trouble here.”
The man just nods.
“We’re going to give you a hand,” says Terry.
“So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet,walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn’t covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship. And that is what we mean when we talk about grace.
“Back at the meeting at the Episcopal Cathedral, I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn’t have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong. So I’ll tell you what the promise of Advent is: It is that God has set up a tent among us and will help us work together on our stuff. And this will only happen over time.
Janathan Grace Reflections 