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October 12th, 2010

Not all guilt is good guilt.  Good guilt is temporary.  It alerts us to spiritual danger and provides us with a way back to God.  Good guilt is not a way of life.  It is a way back to life.  That’s a good thing.

Bad guilt has nothing to do with God’s desire for us.  It hangs around, makes a home, and drives us away from God.

There are at least two kinds of bad guilt.

One kind is false or unreasonable guilt…a sense of remorse or responsibility for things we have no power to change.  People who suffer with chronic illnesses often “feel guilty” about the work they cannot do, for example.  People who are gifted care-givers will often suffer from guilt when they confront circumstances beyond their control.

Another kind of bad guilt is projected or carried guilt.  In spiritual direction, I often find myself listening to the struggles of people who labor under the burden of false guilt.  Women will often confess to a sense of shame; men will admit to a sense of inadequacy.  When I begin to ask questions about those feelings, my directees often discover that the origin of those feelings date back to their childhood and to a time when they could not have possibly done anything to deserve reproach for their behavior.

More often than not, that is when they discover that the guilt they experience is actually not about them at all.  It is — more likely — about the struggles of their parents:

  • mothers who have never addressed the sense of shame that they feel (or the shame that yet another generation projected on them)
  • fathers who have never faced their own insecurities (or the insecurities of their fathers)

Bad guilt of this kind is almost always about someone else’s struggle — or need for control.

Both unreasonable and carried guilt are dramatically different from good guilt and they can be recognized:

  • Bad guilt hangs on, it doesn’t allow us to move on.
  • Bad guilt is almost never about our own wrongdoing, but about something else — a sense of responsibility for things beyond our control, a sense of shame or inadequacy that really belongs to someone else.
  • Bad guilt never offers an opportunity for confession and amendment of life, but traps us.

Name it.

Let God free you from it.

Take refuge and comfort in the knowledge that God has set you free.

And then allow God to help you build the kind of life that bad guilt has kept you from building and enjoying.

Your struggle with bad guilt may come back around.  Often the watershed experiences in our lives set up a dynamic that cannot be conquered all at once.  But if you name the bad guilt that has been undermining your spiritual growth, it will get easier over time to recognize it and dismiss it.  God loves you better than you love yourself and you were meant for glory.

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October 11th, 2010

We are wired to maximize good feelings and minimize the bad ones.  Guilt is a case in point.  But guilt can be a good thing — if what it does is draw us into deeper communion with God.  Psalm 32 provides an excellent sketch of the experience:

1 Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,

whose sin is covered.

2 Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity,

and in whose spirit there is no deceit.

3 While I kept silence, my body wasted away

through my groaning all day long.

4 For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;

my strength was dried up* as by the heat of summer.

Selah

5 Then I acknowledged my sin to you,

and I did not hide my iniquity;

I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’,

and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Selah

6 Therefore let all who are faithful

offer prayer to you;

at a time of distress,* the rush of mighty waters

shall not reach them.

7 You are a hiding-place for me;

you preserve me from trouble;

you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.

Selah

Good guilt is emotionally unpleasant.  The Psalmist doesn’t describe it “head on,” but the emotions are here in vivid imagery: “my body wasted away through my groaning all day long…your hand was heavy upon me…my strength was dried up.”

Good guilt isn’t just about what we feel.  It is about:

  • the misuse of the freedom we have been given,
  • the violation of what we know to be the will of God
  • and about the need for confession and the amendment of life (i.e., repentance)

It has an objective character that isn’t just about the emotions we experience, but about the “fact” of the distance between the lives we live, and God’s will for us.  That’s an important corrective in a culture where we are wired to maximize good feelings and minimize the bad ones.

The goal of the spiritual life is intimacy with God. And when we live in intimacy with God, we learn that God loves us better than we love ourselves and we are meant for glory.  Good guilt alerts us to the fact that our choices have put that intimacy at risk — or, put another way, the lives we are living lead to a counterfeit glory that will rob us of the genuine article.

God is not “laying a guilt on us.”

It is not the nature of God to traffic in guilt.

Guilt isn’t even God’s doing, it’s ours.

And it isn’t a place where God wants us to live perpetually.

It is temporary.

It is meant to alert us to danger.

And with confession and amendment of life, it gives way to freedom and peace.

That’s a good thing.

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October 9th, 2010

In the July-August edition of the Harvard Business Review the editors featured an article by HBS Professor Clay Christensen.  Entitled “How will you measure your life?” the article was something of a phenomenon.  Hundreds of thousands went on line to read the article and journalists around the world picked up on themes from it, including David Brooks, who writes for the New York Times. The editorial staff of HBR was so taken with the response that they chose to leave the article on their website through the month of October.  They went on to observe that since his article was published Professor Christensen has faced even bigger challenges than those posed by the world of commerce.  He was diagnosed as having follicular lymphoma and, a short time later, suffered an ischemic stroke.

What struck me was the way in which the editor introduced the on-line version of the article:

“Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use.”

The “though” or “although” in that sentence is something that I often hear when people talk about religious convictions and it could and often does mean a lot of things:

“Although you might not be religious, you may find something helpful here.”

“Although I am not religious, I found something helpful here.”

But it can also mean:

“Although it’s religious, it’s still helpful.”

In all fairness to the editorial staff at HBR, I have no idea how many of those implied meanings might have been hiding behind the language.  But there are other times when I have no doubt that what people mean is, “Although it’s religious, it’s still helpful.”

The problem with this language is that “although” is not the same thing as “because.”  When people like Professor Christensen write out a deep faith, they arrived there “because” of their convictions, not in spite of them.  I don’t know him, but I suspect that is also what sustains him in these days of recovery.

There is wisdom to be had from religious convictions that cannot be achieved by any other means.  Believing something about the existence and nature of God — and with it, a number of other things about the nature and purpose of human life — profoundly re-shapes the way in which we see the world.  It isn’t a disposable vehicle for achieving insights that can be had some other way.  There are times when you are either religious or you aren’t, and you get it or you don’t.

Too often our culture fails to grasp this elemental point, privileging anything but religious wisdom.  No one would say, “Although Professor So-and-So is a secular humanist, there is something of value here.”  There is ideological resistance to religious convictions that approximates a religious conviction of its own kind, and it is often as intolerant and unwilling to listen as any religious fundamentalism ever dreamed of being.

Could it be, then, that readers won’t entirely understand the wisdom of Professor Christensen’s article without taking into account his religious beliefs?  Probably not.  Although is not because.

http://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life/ar/1

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October 5th, 2010

The September issue of the Harvard Business Review offers statistical confirmation of something that mothers have known for a long time.  Having children does them no good in the work world.

According to Amanda K. Baumle at the University of Houston, who analyzed the 2000 Census “Having children tends to result in higher wages for men, whether they’re straight or gay, married or partnered…Most mothers make less than childless women.” And “Only lesbians get a salary bump from having kids.”  What is her explanation?  Baumle theorizes that, “In employers’ stereotypical view, lesbians maintain a work trajectory after having children that is more like that of a childless woman or a man.  Meanwhile, employers’ perception of straight women’s competence drops when they have children.”  (HBR vol. 88.9: 26)

I am sure she is right.  What is more distressing is to know that this trend is not just characteristic of business practice, it is characteristic of the church’s practice as well.  Have a baby and you will hear bishops and Commissions on Ministry castigate ordained mothers for working their responsibilities for the nurture and care of their children into their work schedules or they will privately shake their heads and argue that for mothers who are ordained, their ministries are just a hobby.  And, it doesn’t amount to harmless prejudice.  Judgments of this kind come with very real strictures on the positions available to women and the support their bishops will give them.  There might be as many or more women in seminaries around the country, but the stained glass ceiling is still firmly in place as far as ordained mothers are concerned.

What’s wrong with this attitude?  Put it this way — the church may lionize the American family, but it doesn’t make room for mothers to have a ministry (apart from the tea and crumpets circuit) and, as a result, it models behavior that is no different from the world in which the church supposedly witnesses to the importance of the family.

Is it little wonder that “The Boys in Black,” aka “The Girls Have Cooties Club,” still reign supreme in many parts of the church?  Hardly.

You can change structures and formal cultures all you want, but when prejudices of this kind exclude a group — in this case, ordained mothers — from active service, the informal dynamics will always trump the formal changes.  Moms will be ordained, but they won’t find jobs or the jobs they are given are perceived as soft assignments — religious education, family ministry, pastoral care.  I have even heard rectors (senior pastors) introduce the male staff with whom they work by their titles, only to introduce the ordained women on their staff by their first names.

In such circumstances the formal changes in the rules surrounding the ordination of women actually dampen the pressure for real change, giving the impression that the problems have been fixed and giving ecclesiastical leaders a means of excusing themselves by allowing them to point to trends in ordination to excuse the situation (or at least absolve themselves of the dealing with the deeper issues).

I wrote a book almost fifteen years ago on the struggles that women face in ordained life called A Still Small Voice that distinguished between formal and informal cultures and in that book I argued that informal cultures are infinitely more powerful than the formal structures.  That was true then, it’s true now.  I expected the book to be out of print and irrelevant by now.

Sadly, it is neither out of print, nor irrelevant. Commissions on Ministry persist in asking women who have small children how they expect to be able to manage the demands of family and the demands of ministry.  They never ask that question of men who have small children.  Women get asked by the church hierarchy to work for free because, “Your husband makes a lot of money and you don’t need to be paid.”

Meanwhile, in the offices of dioceses, presbyteries, annual conferences and other places where groups of men sit and determine who should be ordained, they lament that the church is the last place where family values are protected and upheld.  But is it, if we fail to model an appreciation for the importance of nurturing our children?

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October 3rd, 2010

Over the years relatives have shared church bulletins with us, thinking that we might find what the churches are doing of interest.  That’s understandable, considerate, and sometimes we do find them interesting.  There are other times when they are just crazy-making.

For example, my wife’s parents sent us a bulletin from their church in Exeter, New Hampshire announcing a new fall film festival.  The subject matter?

“Fresh”….according to the bulletin “Fresh” celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system….Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and planet.”

“Botany of Desire” is the second film on offer and “presents case studies that mirror five types of human desires that are reflected in the way we selectively grow, breed, and genetically engineer our plants.  The apple reflects the desire of sweetness, the tulip beauty, marijuana intoxication and the potato control.”

Finally, the fall series concludes with a film devoted to the “Natural History of the Chicken.”  The bulletin reads: “Most people best know the chicken from their dinner plates — whether as thigh, wing or drumstick.  Consumers barely pause a moment to consider the bird’s many virtues.”  In response, the film promises to expand “the frontiers of popular awareness and delightfully reveals that this small, common and seemingly simple animal is as complex and grand as any of Earth’s creatures.”

Well, isn’t that special.  Just reading this bulletin made me want chicken potpie.  But I wasn’t looking for a plane ticket to New Hampshire.

Why not?

First — this has nothing to do with the mission of the church.  The purpose of the church is to form Christians.  Its mission is not about improving the reputation of the chicken.

And far from advancing the work of the church programming of this kind trivializes its role rendering it the one place where you can have grave, serious, unfocused conversations about anything, but its mission.

It also completely confuses people who might be asking themselves why they should go to church.  It’s true, based on what I have heard in pulpits around the country, it is not clear that clergy know anything.  But presumably, they were taught something about biblical studies, systematic and historical theology, church history, spiritual formation, and pastoral care.  Why would I waste my time learning about farming, botany, and chickens from the church?  When clergy offer up programs of this kind what I hear is this:  “We don’t know why we are here.  We aren’t interested in talking about what you would think we talk about.  So, we thought we would talk about chickens.”

But there is something more profoundly amiss here.  People once died to be Christians and own the name of Jesus.  They still do in many parts of the world.  Is our grasp of the faith and its significance so feeble that we are prepared to turn the church into little more than a curator of quaint conversations?  Did the martyrs of the faith, past and present, die in order to make the world safe for conversations about chicken potpie?  If so, we should not be surprised to find that churches of this kind are attended by shrinking numbers of the aging alumni of Woodstock.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.  Unless you just don’t have anything worth talking about anymore.  But remember…if that’s all we have left to offer as a church, then there isn’t anything here people couldn’t get more comfortably and pleasantly through Netflicks.

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Cache directory "/home/content/f/w/s/fwschmidt/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache" is not writable.From the Directors Chair: On Feelings

October 1st, 2010

We tend to think globally or categorically about emotions, lumping all of them under one heading.  But, in fact, each of our emotions vary enormously in character and origin.

For example, not all anger is the same in origin:

It can arise out of the disparity between what we want and what is.  And what we want can be a healthy and good thing to want — and it might not be.

Our anger can arise out of the disparity between what is and what should be.  And we can be wrong or right about what should be.

Our anger at circumstances can be in accord with the will and ways of God.  And it can be all about us, acting like God.

What instantly becomes obvious is that when we run from a feeling like anger, or we fail to ask ourselves important questions about the particular shape of our anger, we are closing the door on important information — information about ourselves, our relationship with God, and the world around us.

In working with a spiritual director our emotions can be an important ally, but only if we are willing to sit with those emotions long enough to learn from them.

When did I begin to feel this way?

What prompts this feeling?

Is my first explanation for the way I feel, the real explanation — or are there deeper, unspoken reasons for the feeling I am experiencing?

What do those feelings tell me about my relationship with God and about the needs of my soul?

Are these feelings born of deep congruence with the will and ways of God, or are they born of the impulse to make my own will felt?

If they are congruent with the will and ways of God, am I being invited into some kind of new effort?

If my feelings are all about me, what do they say about unhealed needs, or unacknowledged sin?

Questions of this kind will recruit our emotions as important allies in spiritual growth.  Finding time in spiritual direction to recruit them in this way can be a healthy way of exploring them, even after the fact.  We can be less defensive and more open.  We can explore them thoughtfully and prayerfully in God’s presence with the help of a spiritual director.  And over time the practice of exploring our emotions can make it easier for us to evaluate them in the moment.

Our emotions are not all the same and they have things to teach us.

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September 29th, 2010

Not so many people.  Why?  In part, apparently, because we are doing an increasingly poor job of explaining to the people who come through the doors what it is that we believe, why it makes a difference, and how it differs from what others believe.

A recent Pew Research Center report concluded:

Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions. On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.  For a complete report, see:

http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx

Telling people why you believe what you believe and why it makes a difference does not need to be mean or abusive.  Presumably we all believe a few things deeply — certainly mature people who are guided by any principles at all do.  So why not believe something deeply if you are going to bother going to church?

The problem is, it’s a short distance from “bring your questions, we don’t believe in anything in particular” to “why bother going at all, if all I have are unanswerable questions and all you have is the tolerant ignorance to sit with me while I ask them?”  Why would I need that kind of church?  Companionship?  There are better ways of forging intimacy.  Tolerant space?  We should all be working for that in a country where freedom of speech and belief is paramount, why add another institution to the complexity.

The creeds and beliefs that are the hallmark of churches is the means by which spirituality gets traction in people’s lives.  They provide people with a common vocabulary and understanding of the God they follow, a shared approach to worship that lies at the heart of the spiritual pilgrimage on which they have embarked, and a means of communicating the faith they have embraced to others and across the generations.

But for that to be possible, people need to know what they believe.  A church where people know that need not be a church marked by unthinking dogmatism, nor do the people who attend need to subscribe in a rigid and uniform way to the faith a church of that kind professes.  And people with questions need not be banished.  The characterization of churches as believing or open as the only two alternatives available is unreal at best and a mean-spirited rhetorical device meant to crush only some convictions.

But once institutionalized agnosticism is privileged by that kind of language, it isn’t long before people rightly conclude that there really is no reason for going to church at all.

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September 27th, 2010

Years ago I had a life-changing experience in a nursing home.  I was visiting an aging parishioner and, as is so often the case, she was sharing her room with another resident.  Both ladies were out having tests run, so I was left on my own to wait.

While I did, I noticed that my parishioner’s roommate had a photo on the dresser.  Given the vintage of the picture, it was clearly a picture of my friend’s roommate, but  what was captivating was the subject matter.  Taken when she was a young woman, it included her twin sister.

Both women were clad in leotards and hung by their legs, side by side on a flying trapeze.

That image has stuck with me for over thirty years.  It taught me to never make categorical assumptions about people, never assign behaviors or perspectives to them, and don’t ever fail to honor the individual pilgrimages they have made through life.  Not everyone with white hair is a grandmother or grandfather.  No one who is can be reduced to that role.  Each is a real person with hopes and dreams — some of which were realized, some of which were not.

The same could be said of endless numbers of other groups.  Labels simplify life, but they are as dangerous as they are convenient.  Texans, Bostonians, gays straight, conservative, liberal….these and many other labels may lend simplicity to the world, but none of them capture the totality of the life that each bears and none of the labels possess definitive, predictable content.

I have conservative and liberal friends, old and young friends, friends who have a considerable amount of education and those whose education was shaped by experience —- the differences and complexities are endless.  More to the point, each of their pilgrimages are singular, undermining the value of the labels.

Yet, far too often we prefer the self-righteous and smug value of labels to the richness of the conversation about our respective journeys.

Why does it matter spiritually to resist that kind of labeling?

One, it is a flight from love.  Too much of the labeling that we do is rooted in a desire to establish what we do or don’t like about someone and then dismiss them.

Two, it feeds arrogance.  To label someone else is to say, “I am the arbiter of good and evil, right and wrong, sophisticated and clueless.  I stand in the right place, you stand in the wrong one.”  We can and should engage in critical dialog about what we think, but labeling has nothing to do with being critical.  Labeling should alert us to the sin of self-righteousness — and sloth — because labeling people is not simply a function of arrogance, it is the child of laziness.

Three, labeling closes you off to what God can teach you through others, foreclosing on the stories of spiritual pilgrimage that can enrich our own.  Labeling has a way of narrowing the permitted story lines in life, refusing to be surprised, educated, or broadened.

Where is this in Scripture?  In the Book of Jonah, in the calling of Jeremiah to be a prophet to the nations, in the teaching of Jesus, in the churches of Paul as they spread out across what was an alien world to the fledgling faith.  It always has been the invitation of a church that preached the gospel to whosoever will and who found a place for people – even those who persecuted her.

When I listen to boomers talk about inclusion and diversity as if we are the generational originators and guarantors of something new, I am always a bit bemused.  The church has always been inclusive and diverse.  Oh, there have been those who were forced to the margins and refused entrance, but that has always been at odds with the Gospel and those who closed the doors on others were never as like-minded as they supposed.

And then there are those who freely wield the language of diversity, who, in truth, are prepared to embrace only a few, preferring the love of categories to the embrace of real people.

The fact of the matter is that Scripture has always preferred the language of reconciliation to the language of inclusion — and for good reasons:

Our end lies not in the special character of our journeys, but in God

God does not just invite us, God invites us with conditions.

God does not simply include us, God includes us with an eye to changing us.

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September 23rd, 2010

We had dinner with friends last night and we began talking about the emerging church phenomenon — the latest effort to re-boot the church by breaking ties with the long-established denominational structures that have dominated recent Christian history. In passing, one of our friends observed, “Well, I haven’t been hurt by the church, so I find it much harder to turn my back on the day to day reality that we identify as church.”

I was really jarred by the observation (though I didn’t say so), but that is precisely the point for a lot of people. Many — not all — but many who are ready to start over with church have been hurt by it.  So they are ready to tear the walls down, start over, or simply abandon it altogether.

And who could blame them?  Between the big-news-abuse and the small-world-cruelties, the institution that holds out hope to people in Jesus’ name is often the engine of just as much hurtful behavior, as it is healing touch.

The problem, of course, does not lie in the established structures themselves.  Oh, the structures have institutionalized some of the abusive behavior to be sure.  But over time, new structures, no matter how small, homegrown, or local in orientation will begin to manifest the same range of healing and hurtful behaviors.

“Wherever we go there we are.”

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

The fundamental difficulty in any reformation of institutions is that it is devoted to reforming the wrong thing.  That is why churches that are devoted to anything but God will fail and hurt us.  It is only God who can call the church’s behavior into question and the reformation starts with the people who attend it.

So:

Lay people need to take responsibility to call their clergy to account for their behavior.

Clergy need to hold one another and their bishops accountable for their behavior.

And together, lay people and clergy need to insist on the primacy of worship and devotion.

That last one may seem a bit strange, but if God isn’t a living reality for a church that calls the people who attend them into a life of vulnerable service and care for one another and those around them, then the church will do what people do when they are left to their own devices:

They will hurt one another without repenting.

They will live out of their own brokenness and pride.

And over time the vanity on display in individual lives will grow large and take on a life of its own.

That’s not an easy assignment.  It is certainly harder than pushing the old thing over and starting all over.  And the fact that starting all over won’t change anything should be no source of comfort to the powers that be.  But healing follows on acknowledging hurts.

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Cache directory "/home/content/f/w/s/fwschmidt/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache" is not writable.Did you find what you were looking for

September 22nd, 2010

Last night after a long evening of work I stopped by the grocery for something prepared to eat for dinner.  Regularly the clerks ask, “Did you find what you were looking for?”  It sounds like a casual question, but it isn’t, of course.  If the associates have been properly trained it is a spot inspection, a window into customer satisfaction, and a mission-oriented enquiry.

Are we meeting your needs?

Getting the job done?

Accomplishing our goal?

Selling you product?

Likely to see you return?

It occurs to me that the same question is something we could ask ourselves on a regular basis about the way that we live life.  But for most of us — at one time or another — and a lot of us — all the time — we are far more haphazard and unfocused in the way that we live.

But which matters most…the chicken scaloppini at Whole Foods, or the way we live our lives?  The spiritual life is an intentional life.  That doesn’t mean it is lacking in spontaneity, surprise, and play.  It does mean that we live with some sense that we have found what we are looking for.

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