Estrangement

For decades I was afraid of anger. I didn't mind a little righteous indignation on behalf of another person now and again, but I would go to great lengths to not get angry with the people I loved. I excused, ignored, justified and rationalized bad behavior so long as the naughty person was someone I loved. It was exhausting.

I did not know that love and anger are companions; I had rarely witnessed anger as a normal response to loving one another. When we were first married Pete would sometimes express normal and appropriate anger. It would totally freak me out. He learned over the years to deal with his anger in ways that did not scare me, which basically meant trying to figure out how to handle conflict in ways I could tolerate - which was really unfair to him. We're lucky, I suppose, that we survived my anger-phobia. Getting angry is part and parcel of intimacy and love. Paul certainly knew that when he wrote in the book of Ephesians, "Be angry but do not sin...Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ as forgiven you." (Ephesians 4 and 5 is a good read.)

Anger is an emotion that is beneficial so long as we learn how to use it for good and not evil. It serves as a signal that we need to pay attention to something. Maybe there is a threat - or perhaps, a perceived threat that is actually no threat at all. Maybe anger is trying to teach us something we need to learn about ourselves - like, hypothetically speaking, we need a good therapist to help us sort through why anger freaks us out. Anger gets our body ready for a response. Often anger is just a good cover for fear. Whatever. They are both trying to get our attention.

Denying anger is the way I tried to cope; I can tell you, it is a short term solution if you're uncertain how to proceed but a lousy long term strategy for caring about yourself and others. Virtuous living is a beautiful thing - but no where is it considered a virtue to numb yourself from feeling your feelings.

As I said yesterday, Jesus is not trying to break people up but he does offer us ways to see and be in the world that allows for authentic human expressions of all kinds. Are there any emotional barriers between you ad your own authentic living?

Family and Faith

In a very public Father's Day letter published in the New York Times Anna Quindlen once wrote, "We might as well have a universal support group: Adult Children of Parents." The gist of the letter was a bit of a commentary on the challenge every child faces: to wake up to the reality that they are individuals, not extensions of their parental units. Most of us do not have to hate our family to differentiate ourselves from them. But sometimes our families do hate us when we try.

Jesus knew this. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus speaks of the gut-wrenching work of choosing for ourselves who we want to become. He compares and contrasts those who follow Jesus and those who don't - including a controversial passage that says that if we love our families more than Jesus we are unworthy. I suspect that Jesus and Anna Quindlen were making similar points. All families are complex webs of interconnection. From the smallest details (Duke's or Hellmann's?) to larger issues like politics, our family beliefs, customs and idiosyncratic ways are engrained in us. This is not a good versus bad thing; it is a complicated dance toward maturity and choosing for ourselves how we want to create the next generation of 'family.'

Following Jesus was a sure fire way to get you scratched from the holiday party back in the day. This idea of 'hating' your mother and father was not Jesus' idea; it was the reality for anyone who chose to follow Jesus at that time. Today, we understand this, right? How many families do you know that have survived unscathed their voting records in 2016 or their various positions on the Black Lives Matter movement?

Jesus is not trying to break people up. What he is saying is this: love me best. And, if that is true, then he promises us this: no matter the ups and downs of our relationships and life as a result of choosing him - whatever we lose for his sake, God will breathe new life into. We will lose if we love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength because it will require us to jettison old habitual ways of believing, thinking and being. People won't like that. But God will love us and continue to breathe on our dry, dead bones.

Me, Me, Me…

In the classic movie Hook, Captain Hook thrives on despair. He hates. He wants others to hate as well. But Maggie, Peter Pan's sister refuses to buy into his worldview. Her brother Jack, already brimming with resentment is a big easier to trick. Here's some of my favorite lines from the movie:

Captain Hook : You, the cute little urchin in the front row, won't you share your thoughts with the whole class?

Maggie : Yes! I said mommy reads to us every night, because she LOVES us very much!

Captain Hook : Loves you? Isn't that the, uh, the...

Smee : The 'L' word, Captain.

Captain Hook : Ooh, yes!

[grimly chuckles] 

Captain Hook : No, child, Your mother wants to read to you every night in order to stupefy you to sleep, so that she and daddy could sit down for three measly minutes without you. And your mindless, inexhaustible, unstoppable, repetitive, and nagging demands: He took my toy! She hit my bear! I want a party! I want a cookie! I want to stay up! I want, I want, I want, me, me, me, me, mine, mine, mine, mine, now, now, now, now!

[inhales deeply] 

Captain Hook : Can't you understand, child? They tell you stories to

shut you up.

Smee : And conk you out.

Maggie : That's not true, Jack!

[to Hook] 

Maggie : You're a liar!

Captain Hook : [laughs]  Lie? Me? Never.

[inhales deeply again] 

Captain Hook : The TRUTH is far too much fun.

I think the world looks an awful lot like Captain Hook's world right now, filled with folks trying to convince other folks that they are unlovely or unloved, trying to turn friend against friend, family members against one another. The illusion of an ugly truth is indeed far more fun to spin than living with the complicated, plodding, big T truth of who we really are - people who are capable of reading endless bedtime stories, even when we are tired; people who respond to both the wants and needs of children especially when it is difficult and inconvenient. Why? Because we love them.

So, yes, Captain Hook, the truth is far better although I would argue it is not always fun. You just do not happen speak it.

Giving Up and Starting Over

I only know one way to keep the faith - and that is to find a way to understand my life through the lens of scripture. I have a ton of favorite authors; I practice various spiritual disciplines with about as much regularity as I imagine you do; I have thousands of quotes (many inspirational) that I love and store religiously in notebooks that my children will discard over my dead body. These things are helpful. But for me, and I know I'm a weirdo, but it's the way it is - the scriptures are the thing that usually turn my desperation into a decision to carry on. I blame John the Baptist for this.

While Jesus was living in the Galilean hills, John, called “the Baptizer,” was preaching in the desert country of Judea. His message was simple and austere, like his desert surroundings: “Change your life. God’s kingdom is here.” Matthew 3:1-2 The Message

In a previous blog I shared Barbara Brown Taylor's perspective on John's call to repentance. She believes that John's followers heard hope for a new beginning in his call to repent. She suggested that more of us need to repent of our despair than our arrogance. (Can we have both?). This reminds me of my experience with the 12 steps. Both the steps and the gospels invite us to move away from our compulsion to stare into mirrors and bemoan our fate.

From John's perspective, this other way of viewing repentance is healing, not shaming. It asks us to turn from needless recrimination and see the intentions of God's heart - to work with what we give him - even our worst mistakes.

Taylor says it like this, "Those of us who have committed ourselves to a life of repentance and return will not give up on ourselves, no matter how many times we have to repeat the process." (p. 25, Teaching Sermons on Suffering, God in Pain). Why do we not give up? Because we believe in a God who will not give up on us.

Jesus Wept. Why?

In John 11, Jesus does an amazing thing: he raises Lazarus from the dead. But not fast enough for Lazarus' sisters Mary and Martha. When Lazarus falls ill, the girls call on their good friend for help. Jesus EVENTUALLY shows up but by that time Lazarus is buried and Jesus is four days late for his funeral. The girls are royally pissed.

They still believe that a miracle is possible but both would have preferred to have simply had him healed, not raised. Interesting isn't it? That Jesus, who will be the next to die a horrible death, chooses this particular time to teach his community that for those who trust him, they can begin their eternal life right now - in real time. He is not promising some future great deal - entrance into heaven - so much as he is opening a door on earth to walk into - a new life, a new way of living.

Jesus of course knows that this is going to happen and he will call Lazarus out of his little hole-in-the-wall tomb to rejoin him on earth. But everyone else is weeping and wailing - focused as they are on preventing death.

Jesus cries too. But according to Barbara Brown Taylor his tears are for a different reason. He realizes that these, his dear friends, still do not understand who he is and what he is offering. He is teaching them that trust in him results in "outliving" death (again, according to Taylor). This is a very different way of seeing.

No one knows, except for Jesus, that the rising of Lazarus will guarantee the death of Jesus. The power brokers in Jerusalem could not allow Jesus to continue to reveal his way of seeing and being in the world. This would break the system, the system that preyed on people's fears and focus on not dying. Surely if people understand that Jesus came to relieve of us our obsession with survival, our lives might become so much more abundant as we choose to cast off those chains and live a life of meaning and purpose.

Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life." Now, to quote Mary Oliver, "What are we going to do with our one wild and precious life?"