O, What A Tangled Web

Watch House?

You know, the misanthropic medical genius who diagnoses weird diseases on Fox? It's the only program on that network I watch, and only then because my misanthropic son recommended it.

Well, the poor folks who come to him are put through tests verging on torture. You have to be pretty sick and really desperate to need him and to put up with that battery, which word I use in both meanings - assortment and as in "assault and."

Anyway, this convention I am attending usually gives me the feeling of being assaulted. As I wended my way here I told myself I would ask why; that is, reflect on my mixture of feelings that make me want to go and at the same time want to flee. I would give myself the Gregory House treatment.

You saw a piece of that in my last post. That happened on Wednesday and I wrote about it on Thursday.

On Friday I had another moment, equally unpleasant, disturbing and instructive.

I was at my seminary alumni/ae dinner. Gosh it is good to see the people, and so touching to see us mellow as we age from young turks into old coots. Sentiment is a powerful opiate, easing the pain of age and folly, gently fogging our wincing hearts when we contemplate plans unfulfilled and goals unmet. We all need it as the analgesic for the moral and professional arthritis that comes upon us all.

Anyway, that's not what snagged me.

At the end of the evening the school thanked those grads who have been especially supportive financially. Having helped host a fund raising event the night before because we (my spouse and I) are among those who give generously - our names were so listed in the program that evening - we were surprised when our names were not mentioned last night. So was the colleague next to me by the way.

Now, the mechanisms of this are not what matters. What I am writing about is how irrationally angry I felt about it. It took real effort not to become visibly irate. There was no reason for me to speak to the organizer then and there, but I could not stop myself. Even as I couched it in a question not an accusation she could sense my displeasure.

I fumed as we walked home, and thanks to the tender offices of my dear spouse, teased out part of why I was so exercised by this small act.

Abandonment. There is a trail of moments throughout my life when I felt left out, overlooked, forgotten, ignored, invisible, and otherwise abandoned. No question this goes back to my very earliest memory which is when I was sitting in the back seat of the family car as we brought my baby brother home. I was alone in the back seat and they, the three of them, were up front.

Like ducklings who believe that the first creature they meet is their mother, this ancient experience got laid down very early and became part of who I am. And as I said last time, fixing it would be as painful as enduring it, for what I am now includes it.

Truly, I need to get better control of the infantile outrage I feel when these things happen, but something tells me this wound will never heal completely. The best I can do is find ways to cope with it. Damn if being a grownup really sucks sometimes.

Once More To The Couch

I’m confused.

That’s not unusual of course, more normal than not. My moments of clarity are rare.

A friend and colleague delivered a very telling essay yesterday, strong in both insight and challenge.

The insight was that many people in churches, especially the kind I serve, are hobbled by a deep sense of shame. She, my colleague, deftly distinguished guilt I (the usual thing we associate with religion) from shame as saying that guilt comes from what you do and shame comes from what you are.

Shame is the deeper and more destructive of the two. I know this from experience.

She then went on to observe that shame ironically produces more shame, in that those who carry it then go on to give it, in which those who feel ashamed do not overcome it so much as try to bring everyone else in on it. Shamed people feel worthless, as it were, and so should everyone else. It’s a kind of existential nihilism that religious liberals see in the sometimes aggressive hostility to religiosity some of our folks display. They say they are only being honest, but in fact they are also relishing their power to shame others for their foolish beliefs.

I am not speculating here. Years ago I learned about Erik Erikson, and his revised Freudian scheme that said each stage in life was a series challenges. One was what he called “autonomy versus shame and doubt.” It emerges when we are toddlers and trying to master our bodies, especially our bowels. The admission price to belong to society as an autonomous individual is the ability to control our bowels.

Notice, though, the word “doubt.” Shame and doubt go together. To feel ashamed is to be in severe doubt of your own powers and autonomy. Those who live in a state of constant self doubt cannot but come to doubt everything else.

Lest you think those reared within liberal religion are spared all this I can assure you the shame and self doubt are equal opportunity afflictions. My sense of self doubt is profound, and as much as I have plumbed its depth and breadth (which includes therapy and study and recollections all the way back to my toddler days) it is now woven through my entire identity.

That’s why I am confused. She seemed to say we need to overcome our shame to thrive and I am not sure it can be done. As I told a colleague and counselor I consulted a few years back, I am not sure I even want to do it now. Much as a someone disabled from birth creates an identity that includes that disability, so my identity includes my shame and doubt. I have labored long and hard to accept my flawed and strugglesome self. To give that up would be a second shame and second rejection.

I suspect that we are all disabled spirits, some more and some less and a rare few with no scars. No question I feel an infantile resentment for those who are more at home in their skins and feel genuine schadenfreude when they trip a bit. But in my larger moments, when I know we are all walking wounded and that the real miracle is that we continue to hope and wish and wonder despite all the scoldings and contempts we have borne, then I take heart.

Would that I had more of those moments. They are too rare. As the unnamed man of scripture said so long ago, “Lord I believe! Help thou my unbelief.”

Between the Devil And the Deep Blue Sea

Lies Fort Lauderdale.

Maybe that's why it is so hot!

There’s a lovely little teapot tempest here because of the convention center where my conference is being held. It happens to be within the ‘perimeter’ of the Port of Fort Lauderdale and that means (in these hyper security conscious times) that we can be asked to show photo ID to enter, a condition not present when the convention was booked a few years ago.

A few of my co-religionists are in a state of dread and dudgeon about it, not without reason, but to my mind somewhat more pompously than righteously. What it means is that some have conscientiously refused to attend, and my minister’s association is meeting far away to remove the inferable taint of collusion.

How much should one do in response to injustice? Morally, anything less than everything is questionable. Realistically, almost nothing makes a difference. The fence that protects the convention center is a federal act, unbidden by the people here. Withdrawing the convention would not harm the federal authorities at all. They would not care if they even noticed. It would deprive the businesses here of business. As it is, attendance is markedly lower, though that may reflect some reluctance to go to south Florida in the summer. How often do our attempts to flog the wicked end up raising welts only on bystanders?

The key speaker this morning led us through an analysis of the two stories we inherit from the Bible – liberation from Egypt and purity in the temple. He tells us that the latter is what we live by, creating our society based on wealth, power, and privilege. The other is about faithfulness, justice and righteousness. Why do we choose the former and not the latter?

I do not know, but he also said protesting and militating are not the answer. That, ironically, is part of the system. To choose the other narrative is to choose not to take part in some way. I think he’s right. I also think it is deeply difficult to know exactly how. But since when was the spiritual life easy?