How To Be Miserable … And Make your Kids That Way, Too.

I have been seeing a lot of couples, and doing individual counseling lately and I continue to see some ideas that I can’t believe people have put into action and I just want to say, “NO, DON’T DO THAT!”, but it’s not professional to do that, and it’s far more healthy to let people have realizations on their own. Some of the problems that individuals have come from decisions their parents have made, so I include those here, too.  If you want to avoid the pain of therapy that so many people fear, don’t do these things and you’ll stand a much better chance. These are things that people can control so I thought I’d just give them early warning.

I’ve tried to arrange them in developmental order so people can know what (not) to do next.

1) Don’t go to school.

2) Have sex at a young age.

3) Drink at a young age.

4) Do drugs at a young age — any and all of them

5) Join a gang.

Do any of those things and you can pretty much guarantee trouble by the time you’re 14 or 15. Do all of them and make a mess of your life pretty much forever.

6) Don’t graduate from High School. Most likely guarantee poverty for the rest of your life.

7) Don’t ever get a job. See above.

8) Don’t do things for others or think about the wider world. This one is kind of sneaky. If you do this one, you can lose perspective on people and things, you can gain no empathy and have no sympathy and stay focused on your own problems without ever meeting someone who might have a solution.  That pretty much guarantees a miserable life because, even if you have a really decent life, you won’t know it.

9) Engage in criminal activities just for the fun of it — or to support your addiction.

Do these and you can mess your life up before your twenties.

As an adult, in order to be mentally ill or miserable…

10) Worry far more about what people will think about you having a problem than you do about fixing it.

11) Keep up with the Joneses, even if you don’t like the Joneses  or  you don’t know why you should.

If you want to then be miserable in marriage:

12) Choose a partner that you want to change to spend your life with.

13)  Stay with a bully.

14) Stay with someone who’s never the same person twice — or is never who you’d expect them to be.

15) Live for drama. Say mean things on Facebook to people you barely know. Keep it going after you do know them.

16) Spend lots of money you don’t have.

17) Pay no attention to any warning signs that there are problems — especially by focusing on things that don’t matter or don’t make you happy.

 

(Be warned: if your parents did these things, you probably have to see me to undo the damages).

Now, to affect the next generation, do these things:

1) Most important of all: choose from a specific gene pool — one that guarantees trouble. Have children by someone in jail or in an asylum, or has a history of physical or mental problems.

2) Once the child is born, physically, emotionally, or sexually abuse them. If you can’t manage that, do those things in front of them.

3) Teach your kids to do drugs or drink.

4) Bring your friends around to drugs or drink. Make sure your kids befriend these people.

5) Keep your kids poor.

6) Neglect or avoid them.

7) Tell them it’s their fault that you did any of the above.

8) Don’t make them go to school. Don’task or  figure out why they don’t want to.

9) Tell them to be who you want them to be, rather than what they have talents to be.

10) Frighten them about the outside world.

11) Tell them nothing about how to live.

12) Never admit to a mistake.

13) Tell them that having a problem will make life difficult for you.

14) Move them to a bad neighborhood.

15) Leave them to go to jail and blame it on them.

16) Make sure they know that looks are more important than acceptance.

17) Never let them get help — or keep interrupting the help they get.

Do these things and you can set them up for a world of hurt.   Avoid doing these and save yourself and your kids a world of hurt.

 

Peace,

 

John

13)

 

Lent and Trayvon: Wrong Is Wrong — Who Hurts?

The backlash has begun … or continues, maybe. In response to the Trayvon Martin shooting and all the ruckus that has ensued in the media, conservatives and White supremacists are showing their wounds — or perceived wounds. The Huffington Post reports this morning that some conservative columnist wrote a response to the idea that Black parents have to talk to their kids about how to behave so as not to get shot by saying what he “has to” tell his (White) kids about not getting shot by Blacks. In addition to this, some White supremacist organization is “patrolling” the streets of Sanford, Florida to “prevent” race riots from happening. Their stated reason is something like “Al Sharpton gets to do it. Why can’t we?”.

Also, this week, NBC has fired the man who seemingly edited the original 911 call and seemingly started the whole thing.The person who covered the editorial for the Huffington Post responded by explaining why the article is “racist” and saying that the man’s experience isn’t enough to have him ranting like this.

So let’s get down to facts — or at least my opinion of them.

1) Trayvon’s name is apparently spelled with a “Y”. I have spelled it without one since this whole thing began. I checked it in a couple of sources when I first wrote about it. I’ve seen it spelled both ways, but it seems to be spelled with a “y”. I was wrong, I guess. Still, if that’s the biggest mistake I make here, I’m ok with that. Should his parents ever read this and be upset because I mis-spelled their son’s same, I apologize. Having seen my name mis-spelled since forever I know that it’s kind of depressing. To those who say that I shouldn’t claim to speak for someone whose name I can’t even spell correctly, there might be some merit to that statement, but I have come down on the side of trying to understand the whole scenario, and that’s where I hope my post is different.

2) Yes, NBC’s editor caused a furor with his (or her) decision to put out the tape edited this way. He (or she) deserved to be fired.

3) Based on the article the conservative man wrote, there are apparently times when his life was threatened by Black folk at an amusement park. This is real, and for the reviewer to discount it is to say he shouldn’t complain because his “near-death experience” wasn’t scary enough or bad enough or difficult enough. Assuming that’s true, blaming him for being a victim on that day is wrong. Blaming the victim is always wrong.  It just is. The reviewer had no right to discount the conservative man’s experience.  It is in discounting people’s experience that we keep hate alive. By telling people they shouldn’t feel that way, we traumatize them, and it explodes later — in this case, on the internet.

3) Apparently, both Travon and Zimmerman felt afraid of the other and one of them is dead, the other injured. Irrational fear is not our friend. Rational fear might be good for us, but if we fight others because of it, there’s the chance that people will die.

4) I would be happy to arrest Trayvon for assault and Zimmerman for murder, and let the legal authorities sort this whole thing out, but that apparently isn’t going to happen — and can’t now, at least in part.

5) Young Mr. Martin’s injuries seem worse than the older Mr. Zimmerman in that he’s dead. Martin didn’t carry a weapon, let alone a gun, but Mr. Zimmerman didn’t know that, and didn’t bother to find out. He assumed that he was in danger, when he apparently wasn’t.  If the legal test of danger is “feeling unsafe”, we might have a problem here. If the legal test of danger is “actually is dangerous” or “reasonably perceived to be dangerous”, then we  have less of one, and Mr. Zimmerman should be in jail.  Martin was not — by any reasonable standard — a danger to Mr. Zimmerman, at least originally. Zimmerman was, by reason of having a gun and perceiving threats where there weren’t any, a danger to Martin.

6) The White supremacist group that is protecting against race riots is also perceiving a threat where there apparently isn’t any. In all of the marches, all of the comments, all of the youth movements about this case, I haven’t heard of one race riot. There are no burning cities. There are no calls for military to comb the streets at night by the government. In short, people with a real history of violence are saying they’re afraid of people with no call for violence. We call that “projection” in the clinical setting — I hate you, so I fear that you hate me. In the political world, we call it “posturing” or “bullying”. It’s the same logic that has Wall Street feeling scared when people say — in some non-violent way — that it hurt to have their house taken away from them. The people who took their house say “they hate us, “they are violent”,  ”they should be put in jail” and “they are being unfair to us“. Yes, there’s violence. Yes, there’s hate. Yes, somebody should be put in jail. Yes, somebody is being unfair. It’s not, however, the person sitting in the park or marching in the street. Deep down, everybody knows this. The Wall Street people know this consciously or unconsciously. The people in the park know this consciously.

During the period from Good Friday to Easter we see what happens when this trend is taken to it’s logical extreme. People arrest and kill an innocent man while all-the-time claiming he’s the scary one.  And, in fact, I’m sure Jesus was scary to the powers-that-be. That doesn’t mean there was anything to be afraid of. The most violent thing the gospels record Jesus doing is wrecking the selling area of the Temple. I’m sure that was a pretty scary thing if you were at the Temple.  Once, he also killed a fig tree by staring at it.  Thirty three years of life, and he has one bad day and one mean moment. Where does he end up? Jesus is whipped, beaten, stripped, jabbed in the side with a spear, and given vinegar on a stick.

On the other side of the coin, there are people who live a lot longer, make their money by stealing from the poor, keeping widows at bay with the laws they set up, trample on people’s lives, let alone their freedom. They have a bad day once at Temple or are anguished by the things they do during the day for the Roman military and they put up a public fuss because they feel threatened by a man who says he’s the king of the Jews but  has no army. Should Jesus have destroyed the money-changer’s business place? Probably not. Was it scary to be there when he did? Yup. probably.

In the long run, looking back on it, maybe the wrong people won on the Good Friday. Maybe the “victims” of the day weren’t the real victim. Maybe they were just bullies. In any case, next time Jesus visits, who do you think he’s going to understand best and sympathize with? And who is he going to have the harder time forgiving?

Are there people in the park who bought houses they couldn’t afford? Possibly. If there are, they know this as well, but they are loudly protesting that the banks hate them. Are they wrong to be complaining? Yes. Do they know this? Yes.  The more they feel guilty, the louder they yell. The inverse of that is not necessarily true. Just because someone’s yelling loudly doesn’t mean they’re guilty of something. They could just be in a lot of pain.  Guilty people who yell, though, yell loudly.

7) Guilty people yelling loudly. Bullies yell loudly, to squash their victim’s voice.  They do so because it works… for a while. Then it really doesn’t. Buried pain comes back louder than it did before it was suppressed. The fact of the matter is that the KKK- type people are right — there could be race riots. People have the right to be really mad about their hurts and having your son be dead is a pretty major hurt. But they haven’t rioted because they only want justice.  They don’t want revenge.  If Trayvon’s parents — and the whole African-American community — doesn’t get justice, if it festers and they keep quiet about the loss of this child — this thing will take on a life of its own for everybody. White Racists will worry more about The Truth coming out. Victims will want The Truth to come out and  will act in ridiculous ways to make sure it does.

So here’s the thing: People are hurt on both sides of this issue. Let everyone have the justice they deserve in the measure that they deserve it, not based on volume, not based on irrational fear, but based on truth. Then let’s see who the real victims are. We’ll see if the system works, we’ll see if racism exists. We’ll see if life’s consequences get unjustly applied.  But let’s get real justice for all.

Peace,

 

John

I Finally Get It! — Newt (and Others) are 10!

I was reading something in the Huffington Post the other day and it said that Newt Gingrich had called President Obama “something childish and unprofessional”. I couldn’t imagine what it was, so I did a little research and apparently Mr. Gingrich had called Mr. Obama “chicken”! I thought to myself, “What is he, ten years old?”. Then it struck me, that’s exactly it! Remember the cute, pudgy in grammar school who called kids “chicken”? Newt Gingrich is that guy — all not grown up!  He’s Dennis the Menace! He’s Huck Finn! He’s one of the Little Rascals!  And that’s what we like about him: he says the things we would have said when we were young and innocent and boyish. I’m clear on that “boyish” thing, by the way. I have a 10 year old girl and she’d never call someone “chicken”. She might taunt someone another way or about another thing, but the fact is that saying “you’re not aggressive enough” would never enter her mind.

But back to Newt: honestly, I think I’m on to something here. He plays up the boyish charm and we think he’s cute, somehow. He’s a rascal, a rabscallion, he’s impish… and he’s as simple about politics  around him as a ten-year-old.  When he says something goofy, we all think “He’s just being honest”… As honest as any ten year old ever was.

There’s a reason, though, why we don’t let ten year old boys become President. A slingshot is not foreign policy. Putting frogs down a girls dress isn’t the way to handle say, Hillary Clinton, or the dissident who won a Nobel prize. Laughing at nerds doesn’t make for a good economic strategy. We all want to remember innocence and misunderstanding as “those cute things kids say”.  I, anyway, like innocence as much as anybody. But misunderstanding and, say, nukes, don’t bode well for the world. The Kid in all of us is cute, because his (or her) world is the playground. How much damage can they do there? Only a playground’s worth. Then the big people take over, because Junior could get run over by a car.

I wonder, as I think about it, whether Sarah Palin wouldn’t think it were cute if a ten-year-old put a frog down her dress. I think she’d think it was cute in the same way building a tree fort that said “No Girls Allowed!” was.  She’d giggle and think, “He can’t possibly mean that!” but he would, because — at least in my childhood — ten-year-old boys thought girls were “yucky” and “mushy” and stuff.

Bill O’Reilly has started (or maybe I just noticed) with the same thing, taunting Mitt Romney saying, “Are you a tough guy?” . I wonder how many other professional Right-Wingers think the same way. President Obama looks way too serious to be playing with those boys. He acts like a Big Person if you’re ten.

By the way, I hear that Mr. Gingrich is a very smart man — an intellectual of sorts — or he fancies himself one. I have no doubt that Bill O’Reilly, as much as I dislike his opinions, is also very smart. He certainly makes more money than I do for what he does, and that kind of success requires a certain intelligence. Sarah Palin was governor of a state, for goodness sake. Clearly, she’s got something go on in her head. But I can picture her putting on lipstick in front a “big girl” mirror wearing her mother’s fake pearls, just to see what it’s like.

The problem comes when the 10 year old walks around in a however-old-he-is body. One doesn’t really expect an adult to leave his wife while she’s got cancer because the girl around the corner likes him. One doesn’t really expect an adult to quit her job just because the job gets hard or because she’d like to do something else now. I hope Bill O’Reilly’s never stuck his tongue out at a guest, but — if I’m right — I wouldn’t be surprised. This is  where the scandals come in — when that cute little child is asked to always Act Like An Adult, which is the job of the President. If they can pass that test, then they can qualify to run.

I don’t mean to pick on Gingrich, Palin, O’Reilly (or Limbaugh or Bachmann or Herman Cain) because that’s who they are. What I’m fascinated by is that we, as Americans, take such delight in them.  We are (or maybe it’s just the media) “hooked” by them somehow. Maybe they represent a simpler time, or “pure” innocence. They represent something in us that we genuinely liked — at ten. They represent something we miss in ourselves now. Nor do I mean to just pick on conservatives — I bet Bill Clinton’s got a little of that boyish charm thing going, too, but look at his scandal. And Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, so he’s no intellectual slouch either.  The idea, though, that “boys will be boys” — and I mean real boys — is an acceptable idea to some people in politics is an idea worth considering, but it’s one that will get us in trouble once we’re called to deal with adult issues.

 

Peace,

 

John

 

 

The Ten Commandments and Politics

I made the mistake of listening to talk radio today in my car — left-wing talk radio (WHMP in Northampton, Mass), but talk radio nonetheless. They were discussing the Republican candidates and the most recent charge against Herman Cain, why it means this for Newt Gingrich, or that for Mitt Romney, and why this candidate or that candidate should or shouldn’t be included.  They were discussing whether Cain’s private life was the problem or whether his allegedly lying was the problem, and so on and so forth and I thought to myself, ” Does it really have to be this complex? Isn’t there some other way to decide who’s a good choice for President or elected official.  Taking really basic guidelines, here’s my proposal.

From Exodus 20: 2 -

² “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  –  The elected person should not put their constituents into any type of slavery — emotional slavery of any sort —  or literal  slavery (i.e. you work very hard for someone else for no money at all).

³ “You shall have no other gods before  me. – The elected person should not take an oath to any person, ideology, (maybe party?) other than serving their constituents and/or the country as a whole.  This means no pledges to “Never Raise Taxes”, no pledges like the Contract for America, no pledges to the NRA or PETA or anybody.

⁴ “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. ⁵ You shall not bow down to them or worship them” —    The elected person should not pretend they are something they are not. They shouldn’t craft an image of themselves as pure in any form that they are not. They shouldn’t pay anyone else to craft an image of themselves as pure in any form that they are not. They should let someone else craft an image of themselves as “pure” in any form that they are not.  This means no “spin doctors”, no PACs, maybe no soundbites.

⁷ “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. — The elected person should not ever claim to be doing things because God told them to, unless it’s actually true. In that case, the person should be tested for sanity. If they are sane, and they’re telling the truth that God said it, they should use God’s name.  If it can’t meet both of those rules, it’s blasphemy for religious types and just plain a lie for secular ones.

⁸ “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. ¹¹ For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. — The elected official should take time off to reflect as often as necessary.

¹² “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you”.  – The elected official should remember their history, but also honor their forebears by being able to meet the challenges of their own day. I want my kids to be respectful of me, but I also want them to be themselves. Let’s take that to the national level.

¹³ “You shall not murder” — Murderers need not apply, in general. People who like war should not be elected. The term often used is “kill”, but the actual term is murder – planned killing. War is planned killing in a larger scale. I understand that countries need to do things at times in self-defense. But war as “conquering” — nope.

¹⁴ “You shall not commit adultery” — straightforward.

¹⁵ “You shall not steal” — in any way , from anybody — especially your constituents. In addition, maybe no lobbying after you’ve left office.

¹⁶ “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. — also straightforward — but so far from the debates and the ads.

¹⁷ “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” — The elected person should not taking what’s not theirs, either from countries or from other people. They shouldn’t  abuse their power just because they have it. No sexual harassment, then.

The text continues:

¹⁸ When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance ¹⁹ and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”

²⁰ Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.”

²¹ The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.

We are in such a mess right now, because we are so far from where we should be. Yeah, we’re afraid of God, and yeah there’s a thick cloud between us and God — not because we created that cloud, that thick wall between us and the way things should be. Our government ought to be afraid of a truly just God if this is where we’re at.

By the way — last thing.  Because it’s only my opinion, nobody should ever use this as some kind of litmus test. It’s not anything else to pledge allegiance to.  But it’s a place to start.

Peace,

John

Huh?!…. When Really Nice People Do Really Horrible Things (For Cathi)

My friend Cathi Chapin-Bishop, as wise and compassionate and fiery a person as I have ever known, is struggling with deep things today that many people deal with personally every day. She has dealt with it professionally for years on a daily basis, and left the profession of psychotherapy. Today, she’s also dealing with it personally. It seems, from her Facebook posts that someone she knew professionally as a minister allegedly  committed child sexual abuse at some point in his life and she is having trouble reconciling the two things — friend/minister/decent guy (I assume it’s a guy)/professional decent guy and evil/taker of spirits and lives/not-at-all-decent-guy/serious abuser of God’s name in his professional capacity.  I thought I’d say something about the situation to see if I could help her make some more sense of it, while I, too, wrestle with the issue.

I am in a position where I deal with the same things — decent people who have done really horrible things — both in psychotherapy and in ministry (I serve on a Committee on Ministry where we have dealt with pastoral misconduct as well as being a psychotherapist).  In addition, I work with addicts on a near daily basis so I hear about the stupidest and most vile behaviors on a nearly daily basis. Sometimes they are committed by the same person and sometimes the same person is on both sides of the coin — perpetrator of stupidness and victim of evil. In fact, those are the greatest number of my cases, I think, by far.  Person X is the victim of the most evil, insidious, devious, planned and disgusting behaviors and now can’t seem to get out of their own way, “snatching”, as Lincoln said, “another defeat from the jaws of victory” in any number of ways in their lives.

The number of women (and men) I know who have been sexually abused, physically abused, emotionally abused, domestically violated, legally harassed, and addicted by some evil scumbag (yes, that’s how I see them) grows everyday as I continue in my chosen fields.  They sit in my office and tell me stories that no one would believe and — for years — no one has, and they think something’s wrong with them. They are some of my favorite people in the world. It’s my job to tell them that, no, they’re not crazy.  No, things are as bad as they seem, and even though there frequently is no justice, they are still good people. And they are.  I tell them that they, statistically, they make life better for the rest of us.  For every twenty things that happen to them, there are twenty people out in society that don’t have to put up with that kind of grief.  All things being equal, though, I’d rather society shared the “wealth” so that no one had to walk around with their lives.  Actually, I’d rather there weren’t so much “wealth” of trauma at all, but this is what we’re given.

Do these people do incredibly stupid things often? You bet they do. They sleep around without birth control, they can pick a loser out of a crowd at a 1,000 feet away (and then date them), they fall back “off the wagon”, they spend their hard earned not-enough cash on easily available, extremely expensive, poisonous evil and they get called things like “drunks” and “druggies”, “whores” and “borderlines”,” thieves” if they steal to pay back their dealer and so much more. And — by any objective matter — they are those things.  But I swear to you, those people are not evil. They do things that — to the untrained eye — seem evil, but there is no maliciousness behind them.

A friend of mine this week differentiated between a woman who stole diapers and formula for her child (because the baby was hungry and wet) and a man who steals enough to drive a Mercedes. Both are thieves, truth be told. Both may go to jail, but will probably get a slap on the wrist by the court system. Both have good and bad in their personalities — nowhere near the dichotomy of Cathi’s friend, but it’s still there.  And yet, my friend knows that one of them is evil, while one of them does wrong things.  While I have police friends and ministry colleagues who swear there  is no hope for people who do wrong things, I tend to disagree.  I differentiate based on the only things that help me make sense of it all — trajectory, love of image, and grace.

When I served a church in Bridgeport, a couple asked if I would marry them, even though they’d “lived in sin” for some years prior (their term, not mine). I explained to them that — by anyone’s standards — they were going in the right direction and that it didn’t seem right to stop their “progress” by refusing to marry them.  I still use that standard. If a person is trying to get better, that’s totally different than someone who doesn’t care about anyone and isn’t even trying to get better.  I still expect progress after a they have the idea of what’s going to work but wanting to get better’s a great start.

The next thing I see is what I call “love of image” as a way to differentiate the evil from the not-quite-right-yet.  Evil people care far more about their image than they do about their reality. It doesn’t matter that they deal drugs or weapons of death or that they molest children — they look good. Doing scummy things and intently looking good is one of the signs of evil I see frequently. For these people, there is a sense of entitlement, a sense of self-love, a caring about things — especially reputation — far more than about people. People like that just creep me out.

Given the choice of the high living drug dealer or the low-living addict, I’d choose the addicted person every time. There are people who go into ministry for the adulation, for the entitlement and the privilege, for the feeling of intellectual superiority while they “save” their flocks  from minor sins. Those people are not — in the final say — ministers. They are egotists with a job that says “minister” on the door.  Real ministers have consciences, real ministers have guilt over things they’ve done, real ministers want to be better, even if they just aren’t right now.  They are human beings capable of absolute lunacy as much as the next person and whatever it was they did seemed like a good idea at the time. These people are humans whose jobs require them to put the “minister” sign on the door, but they think, “if those people only knew how messed up I was, they could fire me now”.  There but for the grace of God go they. God calls them and they don’t know why.

At the other end of the spectrum is the person whom God didn’t call, but secretly or not-so-secretly thinks God should have called them, so they could have all the worship due them.  In their mind, they are doing God a favor by acting the way that they do. There without the grace of God go they, but you’d better not tell them that. Here are people that get into it because of the family name,  or because of some genetic predisposition to narcissism, or because — gosh darn it, they look good in a suit. Needless to say, this is not a reason to go into ministry (or anything else for that matter). The minute a baby spits up on them during a baptism or someone calls because their loved one died at 3 in the morning or someone argues over theology or their salary and there’s hell to pay.  Ministry is such an odd profession — it requires such different rules than other jobs, such twisting and turning with boundaries in order to stay professional,  questions of friendship, being “in community” but not “of the community”, questions of appearance, style, taste, etc…. If you expect to constantly receive attention and support, you will be greatly disappointed. Remember that the model of ministry we use originally was killed by the very group he was trying to save and you can see how far distant from narcissism the job is.

And yet, the distance from “I’m set apart” to “the rules don’t apply to me” isn’t very far at all. Plus, because the image part of ministry is so important to people, it’s not hard to see how people could be fooled by the image of  a pastoral narcissist. The distinct nature of the job, the importance of public image, and a perceived connection to the Ultimate Power in the Universe makes ministry a breeding ground for narcissism.

On the other hand, Freud and Jung might have been onto something when they talked about people being afraid of parts of themselves and projecting it onto others or warping it into being super nice. The people who are most afraid of their “Shadow” (the Jungian concept of the part we don’t want to see in ourselves) — the people with the most evil to hide — end up looking The Very Best in their actions or in their clothes because that’s where they’d rather spend their energy.  We all have good and bad in us, it’s part of our nature. It makes me worry about the Perfect Pastor who leads The Perfect Church of The Perfect People because perfect people don’t go to church. They don’t need to have a pastor at all, let alone a perfect one.  And a perfect pastor isn’t going to understand the kinds of people who actually come to church because he or she won’t understand the problems they’ve never had. So, the perfect looking, perfect sounding, perfect acting, always-able-and-never-having-a bad-day pastor is a myth. If you see one or — more to the point, are told by said pastor/priest/imam/guru that you are — beware that there’s something wrong in the scenario.

While especially true of ministers, it is true of all kinds of people. The abusive spouse or intimate partner, for instance, is well known to vacillate from sickeningly sweet to mean, violent, and all around nasty. Salesmen, actors, investors, unemployed garbagemen can all have some deep dark side.  Heck, even Gandhi got angry and semi-violent with his wife (at least in the movie).  But Gandhi wasn’t concerned with image. He was concerned with being his best self and living out his own expectations of himself.  People who are first concerned with how things appear really worry me. People who worry about how things actually are, are great human beings. Cathi knows this all too well from her days as a psychotherapist and, I suspect, other places. The tricky part is people who actually manage their own image while appearing not to.  Those people are beyond narcissists and all the way into psychopathic. No one goes far in the psychotherapy world without running into them as clients or family/friends/lovers of clients.

So there’s the first two parts of the scale of good and evil people: 1) are they headed in the right direction and 2) Are they interested in hiding their humanity from others? Worse yet, are they good at it?

The third part that keeps me going is grace. Given that any person who comes to see me (any person at all, really) has a bad side and has chosen to deal with it, can they be forgiven? I know a man who seems to have done horrible things to his daughter — but only once, by all accounts. Can he be forgiven by his daughter? I have no idea. Would he love to be forgiven by her? Yes. Can I forgive him? Actually, yes. I can forgive him because I think, given the person’s own humility, God can forgive him. I know the legal system says “once a perp, always a perp”. I know that many psychologists and many clergy consultants think the same way, but I have to believe in grace and growth and forgiveness if I am to have any hope for humanity. If there’s no growth, no change, no possibility for them, then there’s no reason to do my job — either of my jobs (therapist or minister).  And if I have to believe in growth and change as possibilities, I have to consider the possibility that this person — the one in front of me — is the one who can change and will.  Sometimes I’m wrong, but most often — whatever the deed is — I’m right.  How far change is possible and whether trust can be re-established enough to guarantee the safety of the people around them is another question.  But if grace exists, I have to consider that it might be possible in my client or the pastor in front of me.

Does any of this mean that my heart doesn’t get sickened from some of the things I hear at work or see on the news? Not at all.  As I hope I have shown here, evil is still evil, and people can do great and irreparable harm to others with it.  But people who want the truth and follow it wherever it goes, people who try their best, and people who seek real grace, even though the world may not want to give it, people who choose not to endanger others keep me going. That, and a lot of sleep, some anti-depressants, and a God who doesn’t leave me alone through it all. With these tools, I can make it through.

Cathi, that’s all I’ve got. I hope you — and anybody else in a similar situation — are able to hurt less when all is said and done.

Peace,

 

John

[BTW, for those of you that know her as "Cat" and wonder why I call her "Cathi", it's an old habit from our days in High School. But beyond that "Cat" sounds too short to me. The "t" sound seems too aggressive while the "th" flows more -- like she does. Under no circumstances should you assume that she's one of those "girls" who makes a smiley-face or a heart as the dot over her "i", though.  She's not now and she never was.]  : )

 

 

 

 

Can I Just Throw Up Now?

(Editor’s note: every once in awhile in my practice, I see the perpetrator of violence like this. If you’re in my office, you are not the problem anymore. You are trying to get better. You are doing the right thing.)

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the human condition in America has gotten worse.

Over the last few months, I have seen clips of people at the Republican/Tea Party debates yell incredibly disgusting things. I don’t mean the candidates, though I worry about them as well. ” First there was the person who said that the uninsured man should die when Ron Paul asked rhetorically “what can we do? Let him die?”. Then there was the person who yelled, “Kill ‘em!” about people who don’t or can’t work. Again, I don’t blame the people on stage or their party for what was said, but I worry that they think the bully in the audience is somehow their target audience — the voters they “have to” get in order to win. If that’s your core constituency, you’ve really got problems. I get that people are frustrated, but that’s inhuman and evil. Which leads me to Penn State.

Are you kidding me?! Really?! What kind of people think that football is more important than rape of children?!!! Seriously?? Someone does? And it’s not just someone… No, it’s a LOT of someones — protesters, rioters, staff, lots of staff over the years. Colleges like Penn State owe their existence to the reputation of their students. I can say now and forever, I would never, under any circumstances, hire a Penn State student who took place in the protests and riots against Joe Paterno’s firing. I don’t care if they go on to get a doctorate in anything, I will not hire them, because they have no morals. In fact, they have, sadly, less than no morals. They have anti-morals.

What kind of a person rapes a young boy? How about more than one? That’s some sick son-of-a-….. What kind of a person sees it and doesn’t stop it? That’s some spineless person, at best. What kind of board knows about this behavior and keeps the molester from… the shower room? Seriously? What does one call that? Institutional evil? I don’t even know what to say. Then finally, someone shows up and says, “This must end!”. Sanity survives in one person, at least, and whatever board they have making this decision. Adults who should have known better are forced to take responsibility for their actions.

Paterno, to his credit, accepts the decision after letting the rapes happen. Who could take away his right to be a responsible adult and role model to thousands of people? Why, of course, the lugheads who protested the decisions! And I, for one, don’t want to hear, “they were drunk”. Drunken inhumans are not better than sober inhumans — they are just drunker.

Is it possible that we have somehow created a group of sociopaths big enough to do all of this? The lone psychopath is bad enough. Groups of people who choose a game — yes, it’s still only a game! — over adult, responsible action on rape are just so far out there, that I could not conceive of them. Sodom and Gomorrah used to be just a story. Now, it’s America — and not just idiots, this is supposedly educated people, the leaders of tomorrow, all those things we say at their commencement speeches.

How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? What kind of a system produces this? What, in God’s name, is going on here?

I’m sorry that this blog offers no solutions, or answers. It offers nothing but a rant, but dang! Events like this are the reason that people print things in “all caps”! This blog should probably all be in all caps, but I just can’t believe it. I hope it gives voice to other people’s thoughts and it’s the best I can do.

People who have been raped frequently suffer from it for years, sometimes the rest of their lives. They live with shame, they live with guilt, they live with shame if something bad happens to their perpetrators. Where ever Penn State is, it must be horrible for them. If the protesters\rioters knew that, I’d hope that they wouldn’t do what they are doing. But then I’d have hoped that long before now.

Having said that, I will say here what I frequently tell my clients: I pray for those who have been raped — in this situation and elsewhere, male and female. I am soooooo sorry that this happened to you. If you’re a victim, it’s not your fault. I can assure you that, no matter what the circumstances. I also pray for those who commit rape, that they might find their way back to a life they can live with, by taking responsibility for their actions. If you’re still alive, there’s time to change. Those who think football is more important than people’s physical, mental, and spiritual health — I’ll pray for them, too — right after I throw up.

Not at peace at all,

John

Some Demands

People keep asking me “What does Occupy Wall Street want exactly?”  The various news organizations say that OWS won’t be taken seriously until they have a list of demands. I don’t know anybody actually involved in “Occupy” (fill in the blank. I saw the tents in Hartford from the highway yesterday, and I read the actual liberal press, so I know a little bit, but that doesn’t qualify me to speak for them.  I don’t know what their demands are, but I can say what I would demand if I ran a movement and it will include some of the other things I read in other people’s columns. So here they are:

1)  I never want to hear that “The Golden Rule” is “He(she) who has the gold makes the rules” again. The Golden Rule is “love your neighbor as yourself” or “Do unto others as you’d like done to you”.  There’s a big difference between the two and it’s important.

2) There should be a maximum amount an individual can have — and a minimum people have for working.  The minimum should include food, clothing, and shelter, and real access to  necessary medical care and access to medically (psychologically, as well)  necessary medicines, as well. The maximum should be “when you don’t know how much you have or care how much you spend, it’s too much”.  If it’s not contributing to your welfare, you don’t need it.

3) No one should be removed from their home if the bank or institution that is doing the evicting can’t prove that they own the house.

4) The maximum fee for an overdraft should not be more than the actual overdraft and what it actually costs to process it.  That processing cost  should be published — and monitored by the government, so that the banks don’t say “it costs a thousand dollars” when it actually costs a nickel.

5) Adding on daily fees or interest to money owed (overdraft fees, taxes, child support) to an institution should not be legal. If we already know a person doesn’t have the money, adding more to what they owe is going to discourage their payment. Let’s stop that.

6) Banks should create jobs by hiring tellers at least  as often as they install an ATM. Any fee the bank would have charged for the transaction can pay their salary and insurance costs.

7) Immediate repeal by the president and congress of the “Citizens United” decision of the Supreme Court in whatever way that needs to happen.

8) Further legal description of “usury” (exorbitant interest on a loan) and stiff penalties for committing it.

9) No war\”police action”\ military attack should be contemplated without a way to pay for it in advance.  The US can defend itself without worrying about money, but it cannot attack others without doing so. “Defense” stays on these shores. “Attack” takes place elsewhere.

10) All people who don’t complete High School should be trained to — and expected to — do a craft\work for the greater good. In exchange, they should be given enough income to have food, clothing, shelter and medical care.  If this seems too much, consider that it costs $80,000 per year to keep them in jail.  Two jobs to avoid one incarceration seems a better option for people who could go into gangs, or feel they have the right to steal for a living.

11) No one should be given a house loan without documentation of income.

12) Planning to make money on a planet that doesn’t exist is absurd. All economic growth must be environmentally sustainable.

13) White collar crime should carry the same penalties as blue-collar crime.  If a person steals $1,000 worth of material and is given a 5 year sentence, for instance, then a a man who defrauded a million dollars should be given the same ratio of value to years served — a 5,000 year sentence.  Laws should be equally enforced across socio-economic strata.

14) All communities in America should have fire equipment, police,  rescue teams and Post Offices. They don’t need to be much, but they need to be enough to service the needs of the community. Perhaps people who drop out of school should become volunteer fire-fighters in exchange for their living wage.

15)  All loans should be given by local banks and people giving loans should know the people they are giving the loans to.

I f we did all of this, things would be closer to equitable. It’s assumed that we’ll never get it totally right, but it’s a start.

Peace,

John

Democracy Makes A Comeback But the Vision Never Left

I have been struggling with what to say about President Obama lately. His jobs bill is a very good thing on a practical level. His desire to tax the rich at a fair rate is too slow in coming, but also a great thing that starts to address the issue of fairness. In short, the President has become — in the last two months — the man I voted for four years ago.  What he doesn’t get, however, is why I voted for him in the first place — which leads me to be cynical now and for the foreseeable future.  Jon Stewart was right , “Campaign Obama is back”.  The problem is that I believe he’s only doing this now because he’s campaigning again.  What he’s done is target the biggest people who will vote for him — unions, teachers, etc.  and attempted to give them jobs, which he believes will be enough to restart the economy. I don’t know if it will be enough, but it’s a good start. As a matter of “what he’s done in 8 years” if he’s re-elected, he may well be remembered as a great president. Ending the war in Iraq, ending it in Afghanistan, ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, getting more general acceptance of gays and lesbians,  getting more Americans health coverage, bringing Detroit and the Auto industry back from the brink — these are all good things — very good things. But none of those things are what I elected him for, really.

What I elected him for is what’s happening in the streets of New York — and now elsewhere.  The reason that I voted for Obama was that he was a great speaker, a leader, a man with a vision of America who — because of his vision, told us that we could have a vision. I didn’t vote for specific policies. I voted for vision — a dream of who we could be.  I voted for a man who would make it fashionable to engage in politics again — in our cities and towns, in our states, and in our country.  I voted for a man who could help us remember what being citizens meant and what democracy felt like.

Years ago, when Elizabeth Horton-Scheff was leaving the Connecticut Conference staff of the United Church of Christ, I said about her that she was like a motorboat whose wake left progress easier for those who followed with their own dreams. That is what I voted for Obama for.  For years, there had been a sense that we were choosing between the lesser of two (of ten) evils when voting. In 2008, I actually felt like we had voted for the best man America had to offer.  We knew quality when we saw it, and we were going to exercise our right to choose for our own best interests.  It wasn’t about him, but about us. We had a vision of fairness and goodness and being involved in things that mattered  and we finally found somebody who could take us towards  it.

After years of wanting one thing (peace, truth, justice) and getting the opposite (war, lies, and division) from elected officials that I didn’t expect much from in the first place, here was a chance to say to future generations “this is what it’s like when a bunch of people agree. See how great it is to be an American? Now go out and be one!” It was the fact that my $5.00 donation counted for something along with millions of other $5.00 donations that gave me hope — for a change.

But the Supreme Court made it nearly impossible that fairness could win the day when they said “corporations are people”.  Then the Tea Party arrived and started yelling insanely. Then Congress fought every day with the President. “Yes, We Can” became “Oh no, you don’t!” And — when the President had the chance to be visionary, he backed down time and again. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. People couldn’t get a job, couldn’t afford a house, and now have to choose between buying  food and paying their bills in more and more places. Obama’s tax on private jet planes fell on deaf ears. Seriously?  Do a lot of people out there have private jet planes?  There weren’t more people who could agree to tax them than had them? Seriously?

That’s where we were two months ago — people in their homes, watching their democracy do nothing, not represent them, making things worse.  We still knew where the problems were, and what they were, but we had learned we were helpless to do anything. We watched as democracy took root in the middle east (without a war!) while our own country slipped away.  The economic recession reflected our psychological depression.

Then something weird happened –Canadians got involved — and not even political Canadians — artistic ones! Adbusters magazine is one I see every once in awhile. It is made by artists and it parodies and twists the current vision of  ”Capitalism for all!” and “Buying stuff makes us happy!” enough to make us think about what we do and who we are.  And somehow, maybe because they’d seen the protests\occupation fo the Wisconsin state capitol, Adbusters came up with this idea — using twitter and other things — “# Occupy Wall Street!” — and frustrated people did.

Then “The Establishment” refused to cover it.  Washington didn’t talk about it, the media didn’t talk about it and — since image is supposed to be everything — it was supposed to fade away. But the vision of a fair America, where things worked for most folks, kept creating more frustration with the way things are.  The Spark was there and it didn’t simply extinguish itself. More people heard about it and decided to get active. Still no mass coverage. People who are sick of not being heard yell louder — it’s a natural human tendency.  So more people came out and got support. Then 700 people got arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. That was too big to ignore.  When representative democracy no longer works, the people will represent themselves.  This past weekend, non-violent protests like Occupy Wall Street popped up around the country.  The New York Times reports that “these people are in it for the long haul”.  NPR reported on the arrests of people on the bridge. Some transit workers refused to help arrest their fellow citizens. Citizens are not dousing the Spark of Democracy anymore and it is a good thing.

People are once again active in their own lives, active in their own political system, active in their own economic lives. To say it is a political  ”movement” right now would be to say that there’s a leader and specific goals — and there aren’t.  Even Adbusters just wanted to see what would happen, I think.  To say that it is a spiritual movement, however, would be right on the mark. It is “an outward and visible sign” of our desire for fairness, housing, a chance to have work count for something, a chance for one-person-one-vote.  FOX can’t blame it on President Obama, because neither of them matter here. This is not about them, any more than Obama’s election was about him.  This is about us, with hope, demanding change.

How’s that hopey-changey thing working for us? We don’t know yet, but it feels a lot better than no hope and no change.

Peace,

 

John

Signs of Hope

I woke up this morning to an NPR (maybe only in CT NPR) story about a new state law that gives restaurant workers and others paid sick days.  The story continued that polls said that there was bipartisan support for the bill (among citizens) and that people who voted against it were viewed  ”unfavorably”.

Yesterday, the Hartford Courant had an article about the riots in Britain that said there was widespread problems with morality there. It was not just that the vandals and looters showed no respect for property or others, as the Prime Minister had said recently. Both a conservative paper and a liberal paper there had written op-ed pieces that said there were problems everywhere — at all class levels, at all ages, across color lines, etc.  In short, these papers said that there had been moral bankruptcy at all levels of society and it wasn’t working well for anybody anymore. “Perhaps”, said one of the articles, “the era of ‘Greed is Good’ is over”.

In more national news,  more than a thousand people, including friends of our family, Tom Carr and Judy Allen have been arrested protesting the Obama administrations decision to send tar sands (a controversial method of getting oil) to Texas from Canada. Likewise, environmentalists who are upset that Mr. Obama decided to wait a few more years to lower emissions standards. Robert Redford, who supported Obama, is now re-thinking that decision based on environmental concerns.  Obama apparently decided to stall the emissions changes to help businesses.  Regardless of how you see Obama’s decision, there are real changes in the wind.

People are starting to think of others. People are starting to look at themselves and take responsibility for their own failings. People are starting to  realize that, politicians in Washington are not the end-all-be-all of getting things done.  In a year when every known catastrophe has happened in some place we don’t normally expect, people outside of Washington think there’s something wrong with the environment. Politics and economics and arguing who’s right/who’s wrong don’t much matter if we’re all dead or there’s not a planet to put industry on.  And in Washington itself, people are starting to demand that those who govern actually do something, rather than posturing about various issues.

It’s not just the actions that people are taking, it’s that people are taking action at all. They see that it’s up to them to make a difference rather than politicians doing it for them (even if, like me, they wish politicians would help). In addition to that, there seems to be an attitude change. Maybe enough people have become poor or unemployed now that they understand how hard life is for those who need assistance.  Maybe now, enough folks have compassion because they’ve been there. Maybe people are trusting their own experience more than what they’re told by people with a chance to make a dollar.  Whatever it is, these stories tell us we are caring more about the big things like each other or the planet, rather than little things like who wore the same dress or how much money Donald Trump is giving to his most recent wife.

I know that this is a random sampling of news and that things may actually be getting worse, but I like thinking there might be more to it.

Peace,

 

John

Sabbath? What Sabbath? — How We’re Killing Ourselves

Exodus 20: 8 – 11 (NIV translation) “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹ but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.  For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

Deuteronomy 5: 12 -15 (NIV) “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the LORD your God has commanded you.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work,  but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do.  Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the LORD your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the LORD your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day”

This morning, I preached in different wards in a mental hospital and got the same response — a sense of longing — so I thought I’d share my thoughts here, just in case anyone else needed to hear them.  After I read the two passages above, I read from the gospel of John, various verses that show the crowds coming toward Jesus or the disciples coming to Jesus and Jesus going away from them to be alone — on a mountain, on a lake, on a boat, later to the Garden of Gethsemane … alone.

“For a guy who had three years in which to save the whole world”, I told them, “he sure took a lot of time off”.  And it’s true. Throughout the gospels, the people keep coming to — or at — Jesus, and he keeps getting away to be by himself. Why? Because he needs to hear himself think. Jesus goes away because he needs to listen to God, because he needs to just rest, because he needs sleep, because he needs to pray. If Jesus is like God, maybe he needs to time to admire the created world. In any case, he needs to be restored — and so do we.

I had a client who wen to detox the other day because he was overwhelmed with a million problems and his addled brain was the only thing he had left to cope with.  Scheduled for a five-day detox, he left after three. When I asked him why, he explained that visitors had told him of drama at his apartment so he was worried. “And”, he said, “I felt like I wasn’t doing anything there. I was just taking a rest. I was just resting.” When I pointed out that he was supposed to be doing that, he said, “Oh, yeah”.

While most of us would like to think otherwise, we aren’t really that different from my client. We feel, like him, that’s there’s something wrong if we’re resting when, in fact, God commands us to rest. Not only is resting not wrong, it’s the opposite of that. It’s the right thing to do. In this society today, we have come to believe that we’re somehow bad if we’re not working or busy doing something. If we’re not producing or consuming, there’s something wrong — but look where it’s gotten us.  We’ve gone insane. Our planet’s a mess, our lives are a mess, our children are — egads! — bored. We work and we work and we never get ahead. Maybe the reason we never get ahead is because we work and work, as odd as that sounds.

When we don’t stop to hear ourselves think, we go off without thinking. When we don’t stop to let our heads stop spinning with to-do list after to-do list, we feel like our head spins and we wonder why. Schools are getting rid of recess because “our kids need to be more productive”. I and my peers had 1/2 day kindergarten and I ended up with two Master’s Degrees, so I have trouble seeing the link. Our businesses are open more often, and yet the economy falters. Our families now have both parents and any teenager working, but our families are falling apart. Our employers tell us to work harder, advertisers tell us to work hard so we can buy more. This new “toy” is replaced by that new “toy” so we work to get it.  In the world of addiction, a person spends $50 on a drug, then $100, then hundreds in a night on their drug if choice and — before their brain can clear  – they have already decided to and acted upon their next spending extravaganza.  In short order, they end up someplace in their lives they can’t have imagined.

For the rest of us, it takes a longer time to end up at that place, but we end up there nonetheless. ten or twenty years of new technology and the old pay grade and we end up some place where we can’t imagine and we can’t figure out how we got there. For myself, I now often take my iPod with it’s “Lectionary” app to the hospital to impress the kids there — and to lighten my load, somewhat from carrying that big, thick Bible and “only carrying” the scriptures I need for the day. When they turn off the Wii on the ward, I can say that my family has one of those. And when I go home, I plug that same iPod into the cassette player in my car and listen to whatever I’ve already programmed.  One of my children has a cel phone and we all have our computers and of course there’s the TV with Netflix. In our house, we all play one form of computer game or another on a fairly regular basis. There is no end to the possible distractions we can use to also not rest while we “come down” after a “hard” day’s work or school. It goes on and on. My kids think there’s something wrong if they’re not plugged in on waking — because they saw me playing on my computer when they went to bed.

I consider myself a fair-to-middling Christian most of the time, but Sabbath is hard. Stopping and doing nothing is hard. And by “nothing”, I mean the actual nothing, not the “plug and play” nothing that I usually do. For the last few weeks, I have been trying to cut down on my electronics time, and have found myself with extra time to get caught up on paperwork, extra sleep to meet the day, extra brain cells not lost to sleep, time to make lunch, not buy it on the road and so on. I find myself actually seeing my wife — if she’s not too busy working. The other day, someone apparently used my debit card numbers in the midwest somewhere and I had to stop using my ATM card, which meant going back to the old-fashioned: checks!  I can only use them when the bank is open, so one more piece of slowing down has happened and it’s excruciating until I realize that I have more money left at the end of the week.

But back to the Sabbath: the Sabbath has two parts. The first is simply not doing any work. It is resting and doing nothing because our bodies weren’t designed to “go” 24/7.  This allows the troubles of the week, the thoughts about work and kids and clothes and sports and what-activity-to-do-next stop.  Our brains can clear up and — as a special bonus — we don’ t get ourselves into more of the trouble that our activity has already caused.  If addicts took a day off of their drugs every week, their lives would go to hell 1/7th slower at least. They stand a chance of getting clean because they have a day where the poisons in their system aren’t getting in the way. Their spouse doesn’t yell and their kids don’t cry and they might have enough money for bread and cereal before the weekend’s over.

The second part to the Sabbath is focusing on what’s important. For Christians, Jews and Muslims (I think), it’s a day to focus on God, whether through worship and a sermon to think about, experiencing holiness and remembering there’s more to life than we normally see, taking a walk in nature and actually seeing a sunrise or a mountain. Sabbath is time with your children and family, renewing the relationship just by being there, seeing how goofy your child can be telling knock-knock jokes or how tender your spouse can be when they are relaxed.

Sabbath is about listening to yourself, and hearing yourself think. It is about connecting with that “still small voice” within you — the Spirit of God that gives you the best advice of all because it speaks directly to you in a way that no one else can.  Now that your brain is clear, you can put life in perspective, and with that perspective, you can see the direction your life is going. You can decide whether or not you like it going that way. If you like what you see, you can do more of that. If not, you can do less of it — or none at all.  You don’t get to a place you can’t imagine — or at least you don’t get there quickly.

That’s what we’re missing when we don;t take Sabbath — Energy, because we haven’t stopped working; Clarity, because we can’t hear ourselves think over all the other voices in our lives — the “shoulds”, the “to-do’s”, the mindless moving from this to that and the distractions that keep us from seeing reality;  Perspective on the “same-old-same-old”; Awe as we stop to look around us; and Choices about what to do when we re-enter the “normal” busy-ness of life.

Can you imagine what would happen to you as a person — and society in general — if we had more energy,clarity, perspective, and awe? Can you see how different our lives and our civilization would be? Can you imagine how much better our choices would be if we just “kept the Sabbath” ?

Why is it so hard to do?  What’s a Sabbath? We need to start remembering.  Amen.

Peace,

John