Spiritually Damaging Experiences

I’ve been reflecting on four years as your colleague in mission.  After my appointment had been announced four years ago I remember writing to all of you expressing my excitement at the prospect of working with you.  I have never, not once, been disappointed in that.

I also remember saying something about which I have thought many times since.  I said that working for the church ought not be a spiritually damaging experience.  I think I said it to begin with because I realized the enormity of the challenge ahead and I was trying to say words of encouragement to myself.  I’ve come to realize that is easier to say than it is to make a reality.  I’ve also come to realize that making it a reality is my own work to do.

What is true is that there will always be those who are challenging.  Sometimes there will be those who are just mean.  From time to time there will even be those committed to damaging others, but even then, I don’t doubt they do it with the best of intentions in a strange sort of way.  From time to time, we will be challenging, mean, and damaging to ourselves.  These things build up to run the risk of a very spiritually damaging experience indeed.  In a strange sort of way, it is to be expected when people care as much about an endeavor as they care about the church.  Family is the only thing that comes close.

This is what I’ve learned from you over four years of working together to focus The Episcopal Church on mission:  I can’t do anything about how others behave, well or badly, above board or underhandedly, transparently or not.  Yet, whether any of this damages my spirit is entirely up to me.  It threatens to, of course, from time to time.  But it only harms my soul if I allow it to. 

For me that means struggles with anger from time to time, and worse, acting out of anger, particularly speaking out of anger.  It helps me to remember that anger is in essence and at its root the same emotion as grief.  In fact, the word anger comes into English from the Old Norse word angra, which means to grieve.

I know more what to do with grief in a spiritually healthy way than I do anger.  I know that my spiritual well-being depends on letting myself grieve when I need to until I am ready to move on.  Grief is not fun.  It just has to be done.  Tears help.  Sadness eventually yields to something else.  Never, though, have I acted damagingly out of grief. 

I find it helpful to approach anger more like grief than anything else.  I just need to grieve until I’m ready to move on.  Tears help.  Sadness dissipates eventually while if I just leave it as anger, it tends to hang around longer.

So it is true that working for the church ought not be a spiritually damaging experience, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be wrongs, injustices, and hurts in this holy work of ours.  It does mean that what they do to us, and whether they damage us, is ultimately up to us.  Our spiritual well-being is in our hands alone.  And God’s.

Here’s looking toward the years ahead and the holy work we have been given to share.  We will make of it what we will and we will never let it damage our spirits.

Peace,

Political Correctness

I have been doing some thinking this week about “political correctness” for obvious reasons, as if “political correctness” were something new. It is not.

Speech, or at least safe speech, has always been politically correct. No one wants to get on the wrong side of the political powers that be. That is because there are negative consequences to doing so. I need not cite examples. What has happened to Donald Trump this week is that in his disparaging remarks about menstruation, he has gotten himself on the wrong side of the powers that be. The only thing that has changed is who the powers that be are, not the basic concept of power and the danger in offending it. What has disturbed Mr. Trump, I think, is not the concept of political correctness but the reality is that he is no longer part of the only class entitled to it.

 When people complain about political correctness, or at least when wealthy, white men complain about it, I think what they’re really complaining about is who holds the political power and not the idea of placating political power in general. After all, when people who look like me held all the political power, it never occurred to us to create a pejorative expression called “political correctness.” It’s not that we don’t like deference to power. It’s that we don’t like not being the sole object of the deference because we are having, albeit painfully slowly, to share the power with the rest of humanity.

As I have been thinking about all this this week, I came across quite a wonderful pamphlet published by the American Friends Service Committee in 1951 called, imperatively, Speak Truth to Power . Just when I began to fear I was too concerned with the political as opposed to the spiritual, I found these words: “Our truth is an ancient one: that love endures and overcomes; that hatred destroys; that what is obtained by love is retained, but what is obtained by hatred proves a burden. This truth, fundamental to the position which rejects reliance on the method of war, is ultimately a religious perception, a belief that stands outside of history. Because of this we could not end this study without discussing the relationship between the politics of time with which men are daily concerned and the politics of eternity which they too easily ignore” (p. iv). And also this: “The urgent need is not to preach religious truth, but to show how it is possible and why it is reasonable to give practical expression to it in the great conflict that now divides the world” (pp. iv-v).

And finally, at the risk of inundating you with quotations, the Quakers’ pamphlet also put me on to these words of Arnold J. Toynbee, which have something important to say about political correctness. “[O]ur age will be remembered chiefly neither for its horrifying crimes nor for its astonishing inventions but for its having been the first age . . . in which people dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available for the whole human race” ("Not the Age of Atoms, but of Welfare for All," The New York Times Magazine, October 21, 1951, quoted in Speak Truth to Power, p.1).

In other words, our time will be remembered, faith hopes, for exactly what Mr. Trump decries, that the deference he refers to as political correctness will be due to all and not just a few, will be due not because of some characteristic like skin color, gender, intelligence, or sexual orientation, or even because of what one achieves or deserves or possesses, but simply because one is human to begin with. That’s why it is not appropriate for Mr. Trump or anyone else to make disparaging comments about women or for that matter politicians who disagree with whom one disagrees. It is not about political correctness. It is about respect for other human beings. If it is disrespectful, it is not truthful. I am compelled to speak truth to power by my faith, as politically incorrect as that has always been. The issue, though, is truth, and truth does not reside where the dignity of all human beings is not respected.

Solomon, when contemplating the burden of government, asked God, “Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people? (I Kings 3:9) I am impressed by Solomon’s humility, as great a king as he was, as much an object of political correctness as he must have been. What Solomon knew is that humility is an essential part of humanity, the root meaning of both words being “of the earth.” I am also aware that it “pleased the Lord that Solomon had asked this” (v. 10). No wonder.

Political correctness is nothing new. The only thing that has changed is who gets it. From God’s perspective, it is the human; in other words, all of us and not just wealthy, white men. The more wealthy, the more white, and the more male, the more disturbing that admittedly is. God, who is none of those, is not so bothered.

Peace,