Month: May 2020

A society’s baseline economic and political principles tend to infect, or at least affect, interpersonal relationships. I’m reminded of “Paint Your Wagon,” the Lee Marvin/Clint Eastwood movie adaptation of a musical. The setting is a gold rush town in 19^th century California. A woman gets auctioned off as a wife (complicated story). The auctioneer is asked what the rules will be, and he answers, “She’ll be married by the prevailing law of this community, which is mining law, and she will be treated like any other legal claim!”

We live in a capitalist democracy, and so prevailing attitudes about love are capitalist in nature. (Please note I’m speaking of “love” broadly, including romantic, familial, friend, etc.) You love someone because of some value that they bring to your life. For example, maybe they share a common hobby with you, or they make you laugh, or they are your mentor or protégé, or they share a belief system. There’s nothing wrong with this, just as there’s nothing wrong with capitalism per se. But with this basic perspective, relationships are flat. They are simply transactional.

An alternative economic system is socialism, which I will caricature here. Bear with me. A socialist type of love is one that ignores differences between people and instead is shared with everyone equally. White, black, gay, straight, old, young, rich, poor—no matter, you are equally loved. Sounds great, right? And yet, this kind of love is just as flat and lifeless as what I described above. If you do not acknowledge differences, you are denying the basic humanity of each person. In a sense, you love someone despite their value.

There is a better kind. I don’t know what to call it exactly, except perhaps that it approaches agape. In this form, you encounter the whole person, and love them. Not because of or in spite of any particular attribute; you simply know and accept them as they are. Let me give you an example. A dear friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, is an amazing woman—kind, loving, Spirit-led, and all-around wonderful. And yet she is almost congenitally unable to be on-time. I don’t love her despite her lack of punctuality. I simply acknowledge it as part of who she is. Indeed, in a sense it is her ability to be fully present wherever she is that keeps her from getting where she “should” be.

Right now, there are protests and riots going on because of the murder of George Floyd. This latest incident has rejuvenated the #BlackLivesMatter movement. A common response from whites is that “All Lives Matter.” That’s the socialist response: everyone is the same, every life is equally valued. That response misses the point. In saying that “Black Lives Matter,” protesters are saying that systemic racism has effectively reduced the value of a black person, so in true capitalist form, things that have less value are discarded, mistreated, de-prioritized. Instead we should say, yes, all lives matter, and that includes George Floyd. Floyd was not just some random person who died; he was a black man from Houston who played some college basketball in Florida and recently moved to Minneapolis. He was a father and grandfather. He was arrested—as far as I know, the arrest itself was appropriate—and then pinned to the ground by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, until he died. Floyd’s black-ness matters; Chauvin’s white-ness matters. Everything matters.

Life is messy. People are complicated. Saying that you love someone because of some small part of them is transactional. Saying that you love all people equally is denying individuality and humanity. We should all strive to love as Jesus loved: particularly, but universally.

Consider, Jesus looked on someone in need and always loved them. But he loved them particularly. He knew them as God knew them. From the Samaritan woman at the well to blind Bartimaeus to the “good thief” crucified with him, Jesus always showed love of the whole person. He was unafraid to rebuke people who were failing in their duties to love God and neighbor, but did so out of love, not condemnation and hate.

I see this kind of love at The Mission every time I visit. Patrons of The Mission usually have hard lives, whether they are homeless or food-insecure or otherwise in a precarious financial position. These hard lives bring out the best and worst in people. When someone behaves inappropriately, the other patrons, volunteers, and staff gently correct them. Sometimes the behavior is unacceptable and the patron needs to lose some privileges, but they are still loved for who they are.

Let us strive to love each other, not in some bland “love everyone equally” way nor in a transactional way, but in a way that acknowledges the complex reality of each person.

Je pense, donc je suis.

Cogito, ergo sum.

I think, therefore I am.

René Descartes

Modern western thought traces its lineage through Descartes and his famous dictum. In essence, he created a mind/body dualism. Our senses may deceive us, so all we can really know for sure is what is inside our minds. Taken to the logical extreme, only the mind matters.

This is a false dichotomy. I will admit that I was once firmly in that camp. As a kid, I was basically the anti-jock. It wasn’t until the last ten years that I acknowledged the importance of physical fitness and health, and its close coupling with the mind. For what is the mind but a manifestation of something happening in the brain? And the brain is clearly physical, and is tied into the rest of the body. In fact, we continue to learn more about how much “thinking” happens outside the brain even.

A while back, I started using a Monk Manual, which is sort of a life planner. Each month, you pick a theme. My theme for May 2020 is “self-care.” These past few months have been very disruptive. It is time to care for my mind, body, and spirit. This pandemic has revealed how fragile our bodies are, and how much our mind and spirit rely on physical contact for renewal. I am fortunate to have my family with me in lockdown, so I don’t need to go without human contact. While I need some alone time each day to recharge, I also need the physical presence of those I love to feed my spirit.

I’ve listened to several audiobooks about wisdom, joy, spirituality, self-improvement, and seeing God in all things. In virtually every book, there is a focus on bringing your awareness into the present, and into your body. Indeed, the first step in meditation is to focus on your breath, the most fundamental autonomic process in your body.

The way I care for my body is to run. Running serves many purposes simultaneously. First, it gets me outside, which is inherently a good thing. Second, it gets my blood pumping so I’m more energized in general. Paradoxically, the less you exercise, the more tired you become over time. Third, running helps me get in shape for elk hunting. The season opens in 153 days, so I need to start getting serious about my fitness!

I am fortunate to be able to run, to have a basically healthy body. Many people, including my wife, are not able to use their bodies in the way they would like. While this obviously takes a toll on their general physical abilities—inactivity leads to other negative health outcomes—it also takes a toll on their mental health. Mind and body cannot be separated. The challenge is to find some way to maintain a connection between mind and body and therefore to feed your spirit.

I am also fortunate to be “straight,” that is, cisgender and heterosexual. In queer theology, there is much discussion about bodies. People who are gay or transgender have a difficulty reconciling what is in their minds—what they know to be true—with how their bodies are built and with the messages told to them by their families and society. Spiritual healing begins when they are able to repair the mind/body split that has been forced upon them.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … ¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

John 1:1, 14

God cares deeply about our bodies. God cared so much that God became human, so that God might experience just what we experience through the person of Jesus. Sympathy is an outsider emotion; empathy requires becoming like the other. God needed to become human to truly have empathy with us. Somewhere I read recently that Christianity is strangely esoteric and abstract for a religion that is based entirely on a visceral, tactile, intimate experience of a particular man in Judea and Galilee. If you read the Gospels (rather than the epistles), you get a real sense of a man who experienced everything we all do, and yet was able to live a faithful life.

Just as we need to care for our own bodies, we need to care for other people’s bodies. I am grateful that The Mission is open again, serving meals to those who are in need, and providing all of their other services. To an outsider, The Mission appears to only take care of today’s urgent needs, but in reality, it is a place of deep connection. A place where everyone, and most especially the dedicated staff, seek ways to fulfill each person’s physical, social, mental, and spiritual needs. It is not a “ministry,” per se, but as Ashley sometimes says, you can just feel Jesus’s presence in the building. Just as Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, The Mission cares for people’s bodies so that they can also be healed in mind and spirit.

We are gradually, as a nation, opening things up so that people can get back to work. In small part, this is an acknowledgement that life requires connections. As much as we can do online now, there is a real need for in-person interaction. My hope is that we will remember that our bodies are sacred, that our bodies are just as important as our minds, and that our lives are inextricably bound together through our shared physical needs.

Program Notes

First, you may have noticed that I re-named this blog. I’m going just a little more public now, so I wanted a more distinctive name.

Second, I created a Facebook page that is separate from my personal page. That way, people who like to get their news through Facebook and who want to read what I write can choose to do so; others who want to remain my Facebook friend without reading these blogs can do so as well.

Third, I linked my blog to that new Facebook page and to my Twitter account. Since I don’t tweet about anything else, I’m just using my personal account, @KimballJonathan. (All of my other tweets are re-tweets.) You can of course also sign up for email as before.

A common refrain in some circles is that we need more tolerance. We should tolerate people who look different, think different, act different. I think tolerance is just another word for weakness: being too weak to say what you really think, too weak to call out destructive behavior, too weak to identify actions that bring pain and sorrow.

No, wait. Tolerance is strength. Tolerance means being strong enough in your own convictions that you can tolerate someone having a different opinion. You know that they won’t change you, and so it doesn’t matter what they say or do. You tolerate their existence, even knowing that they’re wrong and possibly evil.

On Good Friday of 1998, an agreement was reached in Belfast that achieved peace between the UK and Irish governments. Northern Ireland would have a devolved government that shared power between the unionists and nationalists—or in short, the Protestants and the Catholics. In a sense, though, it was more of a cease-fire than a true peace treaty. John Paul Lederach, Professor Emeritus of International Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, visited some time afterwards. He wrote the following haiku:

Maybe, he says, this

is as good as it will get.

Peaceful bigotry.

John Paul Lederach,
as quoted in an interview with Krista Tippett

Given the choices of a hot war, a cold war, and peaceful bigotry, I suppose the peace that tolerance brings is sufficient. And yet, it remains far from true peace—shalom—and reconciliation.

You know what requires strength? Acceptance. Welcoming. Humility. Vulnerability. Being open to treating another human as your equal, no matter the differences between you. Welcoming them as a fellow child of God, an earthly vessel that contains a divine spark. Being humble enough to realize that another person may be more right than you are about something important, or to realize that if you had had the same experiences, you may believe as they do. Being willing to learn something that you don’t like about yourself, and then being willing to change it.

Tolerance is usually brought up in the context of racial and ethnic differences, or the LGBTQ community. In those contexts, “tolerance” means, “I recognize that you are inferior to me, but it’s OK that you are.” That’s a pretty low bar, and the fact that some people can only aspire to tolerance brings me sadness. If we, as individuals, as a community, as a nation, and as a species should aspire to anything, it should be to love.

Love is strength. Truly loving a person for who they are means that you’re willing to put their well-being ahead of your own, even if just in a small way. Another haiku from Lederach, this time written after a visit to Burma:

Don’t ask the mountain

to move. Just take a pebble

each time you visit.

John Paul Lederach,
as quoted in an interview with Krista Tippett

Love is having the courage and wisdom and strength to take a pebble of the load the other person is carrying. Love is being willing to see the world through another person’s eyes, to strive to understand who they really are.

Tolerance is weakness.

“God Friended Me” is a show on CBS that just ended. The basic premise is that this guy starts getting friend suggestions from an account named “God,” all of whom need some special help from him and his friends. It’s a little bit of a weak premise, but a decent show nonetheless. It’s very progressive in its characters—the main character, Miles, is a black atheist who is the son of an Episcopal bishop and whose sister is gay. The female lead character, Cara, is white, and of course becomes Miles’s love interest. In the series finale, a major story thread revolves around whether they should tell each other how they feel. Cara knows second-hand about Miles’s feelings but doesn’t reciprocate, yet doesn’t want to ruin the friendship. I know, kind of a cliche.

I started thinking about relationships more generally. The issue that Miles and Cara were confronting is this: everything that happens in and around a relationship affects it irreversibly. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but always the relationship is different afterwards.

I currently advise seven graduate students and one postdoc. We meet once a week to discuss their work, their progress, their plans, and anything they may need help with. For the most part, I’m pretty easygoing, perhaps too much so. Occasionally I need to get tough with one of them and push them to be more productive, or to focus more on one topic rather than another. Other times, they are struggling with some non-work-related issue and the discussion ventures outside the norm. In either case, the relationship is different afterwards. Usually, showing some humanity—on both sides—means that we come out with a greater understanding of each other and future discussions are better.

Sometimes, though, it goes sideways. I had an advisee a few years ago with whom the relationship soured. I think we were both at fault. Basically, our expectations of each other were not aligned with reality. After each incident, there was no going back. We eventually reached a point where we could not work together. He switched advisors and successfully completed his Ph.D. The problem wasn’t his ability to do work, nor was it my ability to advise students. Our relationship just didn’t work any more. There was no way to take back things we said and did in the past.

A few years ago, when Rhonda was dealing with facial pain and things were pretty bleak, our pastor, Lou Ellen, wrote me a note. She reminded me, among other things, that “the only way out is through.” We cannot change the past, and the past always affects the present and the future. There is no forgetting what happened–it remains in our subconscious. All we can do is trust that there is a way out, and that God will walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death.

And yet sometimes, there is rebirth. Consider the nation of Israel after their captivity in Babylon. They could have chosen to assimilate with their conquerors, but they chose instead to retain their identity. After Nehemiah returns…

¹⁷ Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, so that we may no longer suffer disgrace.” ¹⁸ I told them that the hand of my God had been gracious upon me, and also the words that the king had spoken to me. Then they said, “Let us start building!” So they committed themselves to the common good. ¹⁹ But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official, and Geshem the Arab heard of it, they mocked and ridiculed us, saying, “What is this that you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?” ²⁰ Then I replied to them, “The God of heaven is the one who will give us success, and we his servants are going to start building; but you have no share or claim or historic right in Jerusalem.”

Nehemiah 2:17-20

God was with Nehemiah. He knew that they could not turn back time and avoid the destruction of the Temple. But they could rebuild it. In so doing, though they never again achieved the glory of David and Solomon’s kingdom, they became a holy people, dedicated to God, a nation out of which Christianity would emerge to spread God’s name to the farthest corners of the earth.

We cannot reverse the damage done to our relationships, but with God, we can rebuild them.

²⁴ He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; ²⁵ but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. ²⁶ So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. ²⁷ And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ ²⁸ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ ²⁹ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. ³⁰ Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Matthew 13:24-30, emphasis mine

Anyone who has pulled weeds in a flower bed has had this experience: you pull a weed, and along with it comes a clump of dirt, possibly attached to another plant that you want to keep. Once it’s pulled, though, replacing the good plant is difficult, and the flower bed is never really the same.

In this parable, “an enemy” sows the weeds among the wheat. In truth, though, weeds grow naturally with no outside assistance. That’s what makes them weeds. Domesticated plants—wheat, corn, rice, etc.—need carefully controlled conditions to grow. Weeds, on the other hand, can grow naturally wherever their seeds happen to land.

Jesus is speaking by analogy about the good and bad things in the world. The traditional view, supported by Jesus’s explanation later in the chapter, sees the plants as people. This is the “hellfire and brimstone” view: the weeds are the wicked people who will be cast into eternal flames. However, I find it to be more helpful to myself and my own growth to imagine the plants to be different parts of a single person’s psyche, soul, and being.

When I look back on my life, I see that lots of people sowed seeds in my heart. Some were good seeds: seeds of love for God; seeds of kindness and generosity towards others; seeds of justice, mercy, and grace. Seeds of the person I want to be, and that I think God wants me to be. If I nurture them, they will grow into an abounding love. Sometimes I feel that coming out, even if just a little sprout.

Some seeds were not so good. For example, I have screwed-up priorities sometimes. Which is most important: God, my family, my community, or my career? In the abstract, I know the correct order; in my actual choices and actions, they get all jumbled up.

Yet pulling these weeds from my life might have pulled out some wheat, too. I definitely put too much emphasis on my career for a long time, until my family’s needs for me became obvious and overwhelming. My life has more balance now. And yet, that over-emphasis on career enabled my current life, in which I’m able to provide a house that is appropriate for my disabled wife and able to send my kids to the colleges that provide them the best opportunities. My career has also enabled me to meet many wonderful people, colleagues close at hand and far away who helped to make me who I am.

So, is my life full of weeds or wheat? Yes, both. And some of them are indistinguishable now. I can only hope and pray that in the end, looking back, I will see that God has planted good seeds that have produced an abundant harvest. That the weeds of worldly desires have not overwhelmed the wheat of God’s grace.

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Today, I participated in a class called “Spiritual Writing,” part of the LIFE program at Eden Theological Seminary. The class was taught by Bill Tucker, professor emeritus of English from Eastern Michigan. The above reflection was an exercise in lectio divina, in which the oratio step was done in writing instead of speaking. This was a wonderful class.

I should also mention that I’ve lately been receiving daily prompts from Saleika Jaouad called The Isolation Journals. Jaouad is Jon Batiste’s partner; he mentioned her journal project on The Late Show a couple weeks ago. I haven’t actually written anything in response to the prompts I’ve received, but my day is still enriched by them.