Lent

Give up meaning for Lent

It’s Lent.  What are you going to give up?  Alcohol? Chocolate?  

My intention is to post a few thoughts on giving up meaning for Lent. 

King Solomon in his quest for wisdom (spiritual journey?) arrives at a place of meaninglessness and maybe – giving up meaning is the central aspect to the spiritual journey. 

The idea of meaning can be thought of as  something that has direction and moves toward an ideal. Something that is meaningful touches upon the sacred, the pure, and creates purpose - right?

We might then think that spirituality would be intertwined with an embrace of meaning.  It would provide us with a common purpose to move toward such as peace, justice, or redemption. But we may fail to recognize that this pursuit of meaning is built on a background of dualistic thinking, and creates divisions between the present and the future, the innocent and the guilty, in-groups and out groups, religion, and science, and the sacred and secular.

So, the pursuit of meaning may divide rather than unify and may contribute to violence and enmity rather than leading us to love.

As within, so without

Suddenly, the divine had limits. 

On Sundays, I have a group of people over. We meditate, eat dinner together, and have a discussion that centers around prompts someone brings.  The topics are generally spiritual in nature, but they have veered into the psychological, the technological (AI specifically), the metaphysical, the quantum and more.

Tonight, before we even looked at the discussion prompts, the conversation veered into the political and what is going on in the US right now.  The fear we feel, seeing our rights like freedom of speech, and due process eroded.  Watching the rule of law seeming to disappear.  We talked about how everything is us vs. them.  Good guys and bad guys. We spent time wondering (or more accurately worrying) what’s next for our country. 

Our prompts this week were:  

“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” – Jesus

“Peace comes from within, do not seek it without” - Buddha

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul” – Trismegistus (Greek philosopher)

·       What goes on in culture today that takes away your peace?

·       What goes on inside you that takes away your peace?

·       What are some types of “talk” that are going on in culture today that you would change if you could?

·       What are some types of “talk” that go on in your head that you would change if you could?

We laughed that before we even looked at the prompts, we had answered the questions. 

We talked about how, if a group can villainize or dehumanize another group, it becomes easy to violate basic human rights, to kill. We can make them into a monster – and justify our desire to be rid of them. We talked about how we can dehumanize the dehumanizers and how one can beget the other.

Then we talked about how we dehumanize ourselves from within with our obsession to be “right". It seems to me that our obsession to be “right” seems to serve as the soil in which the current cultural and political jungle has grown – the fuel to the fire.  I know it’s human nature to want to be right.  The ego thrives on it. But in modern times, the billion-dollar self-help industry and social media have fed into this human characteristic. Not that it’s wrong to want to be the best version of yourself you can be. But the obsession with improvement can be experienced as a type of violence against the self. Hack your body, optimize your performance.  Find the right workout, the right meditation practice, the right supplements, the right make-up technique, the right home décor, the right affirmations and you’ll get life right. Ascribe to right ideology, the right religious viewpoint, the right politics and you will help right the world. 

Wanting to be right has been the nature of humankind for what seems like forever.  But having a device that is in our face all day, every day that is telling us what is right and what is wrong, who is right and who is wrong, showing us images of people who are “doing it right” and doing it so much better than we are - seems to be escalating this aspect of our nature. And if we are constantly feeding an internal dialogue that runs non-stop about what is the right way to be and what isn’t, it naturally follows that this will be the lens we look out on the world with. If they don’t fit the ideal, we must be rid of them.

The amount of unabashed posting on social media that is wishing someone dead is astounding. One side wanting Donald Trump dead because he’s a monster, another side saying that the killing of immigrants or protestors is warranted.

And while I admit that we must be able to say that there are right and wrong ways to treat others, it’s the mindset that becomes problematic. The  idea that surely we have been well informed and know what is right and they do not. The way of being that is centered on what’s right, who’s right, rather than – as one man in the group said, “seeing the divine presence in the face of others.”

“As within, so without.”

But what about the monsters? Can we see the divine presence in them? At the end of our discussions, we always do a little non-traditional communion where we have bread and wine, and anyone can say anything they want.  Several sentiments were shared, mostly about praying for peace in this world, being able to see the divine presence in others.  Then, I shared, “even seeing Donald Trump as the Body of Christ.”   But that took it too far. Suddenly, the divine had limits.  It couldn’t been seen everywhere.  Maybe Christ isn’t everywhere after all. Maybe if I descend into the depths of hell, the divine is not there.   

“As within, so without”

Charlie Kirk and the Great American Shit Show

Fight to let go

I wonder if, rather than fighting with an orientation to preserve life as we know it, or preserve life as we think it should be, we should struggle TOWARDS death.

Look, I don’t have any answers to the current shit show that is going on here in the States.  Most of the time I just want to bury my head in the sand a runaway from it all.  But there are people I love here, and things I love doing, so I stay.

I don’t know what the path is toward a better United States.  There are those who say our democracy is already long gone and I feel that is probably, in many ways true.  And I’m not a patriot.  I don’t feel any particular urge to preserve the United States per se.

I sense we are in some kind of deconstruction of the world as we know it (even though I usually hear “deconstruction” used in religious circles) and that’s kind of scary.  It’s scary to let go.  We don’t know what’s on the other side.  It could be worse than the current shit show after all.   

But I believe strongly that in order for something new to be created, something has to die. 

It’s true in my body, that cells have to be destroyed to keep me alive

It’s true in nature, that in order for one thing to live, another must die.

It’s true in relationships, that for them to remain alive and vital, we have to risk honesty and change – which could bring death.

It’s true in corporations and organization of all kinds, including churches, that if they are not willing to try doing it a whole new way, they will become irrelevant and die.

It’s true in social structures and countries.  No matter how scary it is, we have to let things die.

And death is not some peaceful slipping into the next thing.  At least not usually.

It can be bloody, and painful.  It can be a gasping for breath, it can be starving, it can be fighting against violence.  It is usually a struggle. 

And to me, it seems that’s what we are all experiencing, a painful struggle to hold on to the last shreds of life as we know it.

As biological creatures we fight for survival.  We are seeing that fight. Verbal fighting and any amount of terrible things being said to each other.  Physical fighting, gun violence, shootings, storming the US Capital, riots.  Intellectual fighting and endless social media posts trying to convince the other guy why our way is the right way. 

This ideology shoots Charlie Kirk, that ideology kills Palestinians, another ideology shoots LGBTQ+ folks.  There’s no end to who violence is enacted upon.  Immigrants, children, the innocent, the guilty. Bombs and wars all in the name of the survival of someone’s ideology. 

I’m not saying that all ideologies are equal or deserving of preservation (or destruction for that matter).  I’m not saying we should just sit on our thumbs while the powers that be do whatever they please to oppress the masses, but I wonder if, rather than fighting with an orientation to preserve life as we know it, or preserve life as we think it should be, we should struggle TOWARDS death.  Fight to let go so to speak.

I don’t have any answers as to how that might look or what we might do to enact such a fight, but I think about it. 

Freeze

Martyrdom can step outside of grace

Inside the context of grace, martyrdom and suffering are a “cup” that we may hope will pass, but that we are willing to accept as Jesus did in a “not my will but thine” posture. It is not a heroic act, or something to be sought after in order to attain a standing with God that grace has already provided.

When enduring trauma, freezing is another adaptive response. During trauma, stress hormones cause a loss in executive functioning that make the victim unable to choose a course of action. So we freeze.[1]

Freezing occurs in response to physical threats and also in response to social threats.[2]

One of the problems with freezing is that it can lead to guilt on the part of the victim as he asks why he did nothing.[3] It may also lead to confusion on the part of the victim about what happened.[4] Those who freeze may believe their lack of action proved willingness to participate.

So, when the victim of trauma tells themselves a narrative of guilt or willingness, that narrative gets tied to whether the trauma results in PTSD,[5] and trauma victims may formulate additional stories that help them cope.

It’s interesting to wonder if religious glorification of martyrdom and sacrifice is kind of narrative in response to trauma. Historically, early Christians faced an inability to fight persecution, either through lack of power, out of obedience to “turn the other cheek,” or simply as a freeze response. They may have created a narrative of heroism around their martyrdom as a way of making meaning of such meaningless evil – as a way to deal with trauma. Religion can be used as a coping mechanism labeled “spiritual bypassing.”[6] in the hopes of providing meaning to traumatic events.[7]

As this narrative caught hold in the Christian community, it evolved into an actual desire for martyrdom as a path to God. Ignatius “speaks of his martyrdom with great enthusiasm and begs the Roman Christians to do nothing to prevent it.” [8] He says, “I shall never have a better chance than this of getting to God.”[9] Polycarp makes meaning of martyrdom when he claims the martyrs, “purchased for themselves life everlasting.”[10] But with this claim, martyrdom and suffering can step outside of grace. Grace is a willingness to accept, be present and hospitable to circumstances, people, and ourselves despite the present conditions. Grace is an act of acceptance without forcing our will. Inside the context of grace, martyrdom and suffering are a “cup” that we may hope will pass, but that we are willing to accept as Jesus did in a “not my will but thine” posture.[11] It is not a heroic act, or something to be sought after in order to attain a standing with God that grace has already provided.

[1] Amy Arnsten, “Stress signaling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and

function.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 10:6 (June 2009): 412.

[2] Marret K. Noordewier, Daan T.Scheepers, Leon P. Hilbert “Freezing in response to social threat: a replication.” Psychologists Resources. 84:7 (October 2010): 1890.

[3] Sonya B. Norman, Kendall C. Wilkins, Ursula S. Myers, Carolyn B. Allard. “Trauma Informed Guilt Reduction Therapy with Combat Veterans.” Cognitive Behavioral Practice. 21:1 (February 2014): 5.

[4] Lori Haskell and Melanie Randall. The Impact of Trauma on Adult Sexual Assault Victims. Report Submitted to the Justice of Canada.(2019): 18.

[5] Deryn Strange and Melanie K.T. Takarangi, “Memory distortion for traumatic events: the role of mental imagery.” Frontiers in Psychiatry. 6:27 (February 2015): 3.

[6] Alejandra Motiño, et al. “Cross-Cultural Analysis of Spiritual Bypass: A Comparison Between Spain and Honduras.” Frontiers in Psychology 12:658739 (May 2021): 2.

[7] Kenneth Pargament, Margaret Feuille, and Donna Burdzy, “The Brief RCOPE: Current psychometric status of a short measure of Religious Coping.” Religions 2:1 (February 2011): 53-54.

[8] Andrew Louth, ed. Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth London: Penguin Books, (1987), 56.

[9] Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 2.5 Louth, Andrew, ed. Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth London: Penguin Books, (1987), 85.

[10] Polycarp, The Martyrdom of Polycarp. Louth, Andrew, ed. Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth and Andrew Louth London: Penguin Books, (1987), 125.

[11] Luke 22:42 NRSV.

Flight

The very incarnation of Chris steers us away from flight and steers us toward life in all its messiness.

We can also see flight as a response as a trauma response in Christian church history . Some Christians, in a type of flight response, retreated  from society into the desert, into monasteries and isolated communities. For many, this retreat became a lifestyle. Although we see an example of retreating to the desert in both Jesus and John the Baptist, we also see a return to public life and ministry from both. The exodus of Christians into solitude began primarily after the end of persecution and the professed motivation was to keep oneself from being polluted by society’s temptations. But sadly, the flight to deserts and monasteries made by Christians who were worn down from persecution provided scant respite since the monastic life often circled back to a fight response against the self as it went hand in hand with extreme forms of asceticism and self-torture as monastics fought against their sexuality, their appetites, their desires, and their humanity. We still see this flight response in Christianity today, not just in cloistered clergy, but also in more subtle forms such as Christian schools and communities that seek to remove believers from daily life with non-believers in the hopes they will not be polluted by the world. The very incarnation of Chris steers us away from flight and steers us toward life in all its messiness. Jesus not only entered into a human body, but while in that body, ate with sinners and tax collectors, and did not concern himself with being touched by those that religious society considered unclean. He prayed that we remain in the world (Luke 17:15-17, NRSVUE), and in doing so, imitate his kenotic act of descending into the world . (Philippians 2:7, NRSVUE)

Saving me with a lie

You are acting the role of the “savior” but in fact are taking away my agency.

Let’s talk about saving others.  I want to talk about this in the context of those who have secrets to keep from a person they are in a close, intimate relationship with.  Maybe they have cheated or stolen. Maybe they are drinking in secret.  In some way or another they have betrayed their loved one.

There is a popular idea that if the betrayer has quit the behavior and has addressed the problem within him or herself it is somehow selfish for him or her to “unburden” themselves to the person they betrayed.  They are performing an act of kindness and saving their partner from pain by holding guilty secret inside and live with it for the rest of their lives.

This sounds good. I heard Ester Perel, a world-famous, well respected marriage therapist say recently on a podcast that this is the way to go.  But is it? 

I have questions.

First of all, this approach assumes that what a person doesn’t know isn’t hurting them. I question this assumption. If I am in a close, intimate relationship with you and you have betrayed me and are keeping it a secret, I’m pretty sure it is hurting me.  I am wondering why, although everything seems fine, things don’t feel right.  I will feel the distance that the secret creates and will be robbed of the intimacy that honesty brings.  If my intuitions are online, I will doubt myself because my intuitions say one thing and the partner says another. And often, I will shut down my intuitions in an effort to quiet the dissonance I’m experiencing.  Shutting down my intuitions hurts me in a myriad ways.

Second, the dishonesty robs me. It creates a false pretense in the name of saving me from pain. It robs me of the opportunity to make an informed decision about our relationship.  Do I want to be in a relationship with this person - given the truth? You are acting the role of the “savior” but in fact are taking away my agency.  It’s very patriarchal.  If you are the betrayer, you are holding the betrayed hostage in a sense with your dishonesty aren’t you? They are in a relationship under false pretenses. You want the relationship to continue, despite your betrayal and you have made the decision for them. You have not been willing to turn the decision of whether or not they want to continue over to them. 

Thirdly, it robs the betrayer of the chance to be loved fully.  For the rest of his or her life when the partner says, “I love you” the betrayer will be thinking “well, if you only knew about my betrayal, you might not feel that way.”  This leads to all kinds of issues.  The betrayer might become distant, he or she might try to compensate for the betrayal and rather than being able to give to the relationship from a free and unfettered place of intimacy, gives out of guilt, fear, anxiety.  He or she may try to protect the self and the secret, or may try to make up for the betrayal in any number of ways.  I will be an attentive partner or lover.  I will be generous.  To atone. To make it right.  But is love given from this place really love?  Does the receiver feel it as love?  Or do they feel the anxiety behind it?

Finally, the betrayer is telling him or herself a lie.  They are telling themselves that they are protecting the person from hurt and pain, but that’s just not true.  They have inflicted the pain, they are simply trying to anesthetize, cover it up so that it remains below the surface and no one has to see it.  It reminds me a little bit of colonizers who took land away from indigenous peoples, then “saved their souls” to try to justify in some way that what they stole was for the good of the person. 

I’ve been on the receiving end of secrets.  I lived 17 years in a relationship in which I was being betrayed, and it was kept secret.  Believe me, I knew it.  I mean, I didn’t know it consciously, but my soul knew it.  I was lonely, I knew there was not the connection and intimacy I longed for but was gaslighted into thinking it was my delusion. I felt it but didn’t know enough to know what I was feeling.   And when the truth came out – which it very often does - the betrayal was double.  Not only had the betrayal occurred, but the lies and gaslighting were betrayal heaped upon betrayal. 

When we say we don’t want to hurt the other person by unburdening ourselves, we are lying to ourselves because you see, it’s too late - we’ve already hurt them with our betrayal.  At that point it simply a matter of whether we want this truth to be out in the open  if we prefer to keep it hidden even if that means it festers and robs us and them of joy and a chance for real intimacy.  

I guess it depends on the goal.  If the goal is simply survival - to stay together at all costs, and you’ve done something that jeopardizes that, then keeping  secrets might keep things together.  If the goal is something real, honest and intimate, then you’ve got to give it a chance by telling the truth.

It’s like so much of culture.  We prefer not to see or feel the hard, cold truths of life. We take pills to cover over our symptoms rather than get to the bottom of the issue, we have surgery to hide our aging, we smile and pretend that everything is alright even if we are grieving deeply.  We hide our shame and our vulnerability because we don’t want to do the hard work that is required to dig deep and deal with the real issues.  We don’t want to risk failure and rejection. And a lot of people will reject us if we risk honesty, and some relationships won’t survive it to be sure.  But I think it’s worth it to take the risk. It’s like the line from Steel Magnolias, “I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special.”

You see, I suspect that love – real love is only possible when we are willing to risk it all.  Willing to be so devastatingly honest that we risk losing it.

That’s the kind of love I want.

Judgement

When I’m in pain, I’d rather be with the one person who isn’t trying to fix it, judge it or reject it - me.

Today I had a conversation that left me feeling judged. To be fair, the conversation wasn’t about me and I shouldn’t have in any way made it about me because it was a conversation where someone reached out to me who was in pain and needed support.  It started out with me listening, asking  some questions to get them talking, offer a suggestion or two, let them know I’m always here to listen and to help however I can.  But at one point in the conversation, out of pain I’m sure, the person told me that I don’t allow myself to feel things.  Which is not true and not fair and left me feeling judged, and to be honest – hurt.

I feel things deeply, but I find that I feel them more deeply and can integrate them better if I process them in solitude and silence.  Because I process my feelings in solitude, people sometimes think I am an unemotional person.  Which is not true.

I spent the majority of my childhood being rejected in one way or another for how I expressed emotion.  I cried a lot as a kid.  This was not acceptable in my family, so I was sent to my room when I cried.  In my young adulthood, I was married to someone who shamed me for having needs and emotions, calling me unstable, needy and demanding, so I shoved it down.  Or at least I tried.  Not successfully I might add.  I spent the better part of the two or three years prior to my divorce angry and the two or three years it took to finalize the divorce crying from grief.  All the shoving it down actually caused me to be pretty emotionally dysregulated.  Like trying to hold a beach ball under the water – it just keeps popping up violently.

Now, years later, I’ve learned to embrace my pain rather than fight against it.  And I find that I’m angry much less.  I cry much less.  When I’m in pain, I try to get some solitude so I can feel the pain fully, open up to it and embrace it.  Sure, I cry, but I have found that the rage and the sobbing were more about the struggle against the emotions, than the emotions themselves.  I’ve learned to make the feelings my friends.  Sometimes dark friends, sometimes not.  But beloved regardless. I find that it is hard to embrace them fully when I’m with others.  I get caught up in their feelings which take me out of my own.  They try to talk about it, fix it for me, give me their analysis of it – and sometimes (as today) judgement of it.  They tell me I haven’t cried enough, I haven’t felt – or expressed feeling – as they think I should.  Sometimes they feel anxious and then need reassurance. So, when I’m in pain, I’d rather be with the one person who isn’t trying to fix it, judge it or reject it. I’d rather be with the person who is not anxious about my feelings – me.

It got me thinking that time and time again I’m shown that we have no idea what is going on inside a person, who they really are, why they are acting as they do. Most of us are doing our best to be the best version of ourselves we can manage - even when all evidence seems to say otherwise. Some people are just trying to stay alive and functioning. I attended a retreat a couple of years ago and over the course of a week, heard person after person’s story of pain and by the end of it my breath was just taken away. I looked around at all these people and thought how amazing it was that they were all still functioning given the burdens of pain they all carried. Life is traumatic, it’s difficult, it’s heavy. We need grace.

Exploitation

We just keep going with whatever shitty or exploitative behavior we are doing until the consequences force us to do otherwise.

This haunting sculpture was made by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo in memory of African ancestors who drowned as they were being transported across the Atlantic Ocean as slaves.

I read this last week regarding Juneteenth: I wish I had written down where I read it – I didn’t.

Today is Juneteenth, the national remembrance that it took two years (TWO YEARS!!) for white, land-holding enslavers in Texas to tell the people they held in slavery that Lincoln had set them free. They probably wouldn’t have told them even then, if it hadn’t been for Union Troops who marched into Texas two years after the Civil War was over. That instinct—to exploit until the last possible moment, and to only stop when accountability shows up—is ever-present, and we’re seeing evidence of it all around us. How long, Oh Lord?

I’ve been thinking about this aspect of human nature and why we are like this.  We just keep going with whatever shitty or exploitative behavior we are doing until the consequences force us to do otherwise.  We exploit the unseen workers overseas who are working at slave wages or worse so we can buy cheap goods. There have been no real consequences to us for it. We exploit the workers among us with less than a living wage with little to no consequences for it other than minor inconveniences like a longer wait for our food due to a shortage of workers in our local fast-food restaurant. We exploit women and minorities by paying them less for the same work, until they quit or revolt. We exploit marginalized groups by making them the targets of our unresolved fear and rage and the scapegoats for what is wrong in our society, until unrest breaks out. Women carry unequal workloads in the home, are ignored by their husbands, are exploited sexually, not just by strangers, but by men who claim to love them, until they leave or blow the whistle. We exploit our own bodies with junk food, alcohol, cigarettes or lack of exercise, until our bodies revolt with chronic illness or worse. We will continue to exploit the planet until our food and water supplies are so damaged that we can’t avoid the consequences to our very lives. Why?

Our mindset is so steeped in an economic and judiciary viewpoint, we can barely conceive of actions that are disconnected from reward and punishment.  We do what we do to GET. Our very theology of God is transactional. God is a being who rewards that which is good and punishes that which is evil. So, unless we are being punished, we often have no sense of wrongdoing. We are like a rebellious teenager, who is trying to break free from her parents’ rules, and we continue our shitty behavior until punishment or consequences are received.  We have not realized that God is not a parent. God is nothing but grace and love – not rules and punishment. We have not understood that when we love others as ourselves, love the planet as part of the incarnation of God, love our bodies as though they were the body of Christ, we step into the energy that is love. Instead, we have seen the whole thing as transactional.  An economy in which we do good things (including love) for rewards and pay-offs and might just do shitty things until we are punished. 

Fight

All of Life is a Trauma Response

The incarnation is a peacemaking act

The development of Christianity was trauma-based. .

The Fight response

The Jews of the time of Jesus were a people-group with a history of trauma; from their enslavement in Egypt, to the captivity of the ten northern tribes in Assyria, to Babylonian captivity. Trauma specialists tell us that trauma is not what happens to you but is the story that develops in you as a result of what happened.  The Israelites’ story told them that their law was the covenant that God had made with them to keep them from trauma, their suffering was a direct result of disobedience to God’s laws. God’s benevolence and protection depended upon keeping the law. They made meaning of the randomness of their suffering by narrating it within a system of order. Their scriptures promised them that obedience would protect them from disease, bad harvests, and would assure victory over their enemies. They would be God’s victorious people. To disobey the law would  result in terror, consumption, plagues, wild beasts devouring their children and starvation so severe they would devour their own children as well (Leviticus 26: 16-31 NRSVUE).  The first-century Jewish people believed that they were subjects of the Roman Empire because they had not been sufficiently faithful. This interpretation gave them a way to make sense of their suffering. Acceptance of blame and keeping pure gave them a feeling they could control their outcomes and thus reduce trauma. It was likely that any citizen in the Roman empire was a victim of or a witness to trauma and violence. Public and violent persecutions; crucifixions, beheadings, burnings, and being fed to wild animals in the coliseum, left a lasting imprint on how Christian thought and practice developed and has been lived out in the world since that time.  

One response to trauma was to fight. The fight response is a response to powerlessness that involves pushing back with power. It is understandable why Christians would be compelled to fight. The early church had risked much for their faith. Many had given up families, social connections and had risked persecution to convert to Christianity. It would have been important to feel that the sacrifice had not been in vain and thus important to defend their conversion with perceived proof, whether intellectual or spiritual. It is easy to see how living surrounded by threats would result in orienting oneself to life as a battle against one enemy after another.

One such fight was the defense of truth. Rather than a release of power and knowledge of good and evil, apologists have been fighting for centuries to give credence to Christianity through debate. Christians, rather than accessing grace by abiding in the weakness and vulnerability of Christ crucified, attempt to prevail through a demonstration of superior strength of knowledge.

The early church also made much of the fight over who was saved and who was a heretic – a fight that has continued to the present day.  We do not see an approach to the knowledge of good and evil, in which power through knowledge is relinquished but rather we see a reliance upon knowledge and dogma to limit and define who might be saved or lost.

The fight response was not just directed outwardly toward heretics and persecutors, but also toward oneself. In the early church, Christian asceticism often manifested as a fight against one’s own humanity and the quest to gain power over the impulses of the body - abstaining from sleep, bathing, sexuality, food and any other kind of human desire including grief, pleasure, and even laughter (Athanasius).  They abstained from speaking, joking, and laughing, and were encouraged to think of themselves as wretches and worms who are on trial before God (Benedict).

Even today, we see the leftovers of this fight response persisting in Christian practice and apologetics, purity culture, dogma and shame around our imperfections persist. Fights over correct belief contrast starkly to the apostle Paul’s example to “know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.” (I Corinthians 2:2-3. NRSVUE)

Fights against the flesh contrast starkly with Christ who embraced human flesh both in the act of his incarnation, and throughout his ministry as he embraced flesh that was seen as unclean. Rather than fighting against his humanity, Christ entered into it with all its desire, and chaos. Christ ate, drank, laughed, and cried with heretics and sinners. Christ did not see the body and its desires as a battlefield to be fought against, but as something to be loved and embraced. The incarnation is a peacemaking act, first demonstrating God making peace with the human body by becoming a human body, and then secondly by calling us to extend limitless grace to the other regardless of how offensive and unclean they may seem.

And that is the task for us – to release the fight response and make peace with unknowing, with different ideas, and with all kind of bodies and the things they do.  Including our own.

Democracy and grace

Instead - we let it go.

If you think about it, the idea of democracy is a political and societal practice of grace. 

In democracies, we have theoretically agreed to hold space for differences and disagreements.  You want your candidate to run government, I want mine.  But because there are different choices, we can’t all have what we want.  So, we have (in theory) agreed that we will vote and the majority will get what they want.  Those who don’t get what they want agree (in theory) that they will wait until there is another opportunity to vote and maybe at that time, the outcome will be what they wanted.  We have decided that there is no way that everyone can get what they want.  It’s not possible. Not everyone will agree, or be the same, or want the same things.  Democratic systems have made space for that disagreement and difference and have decided (at least at their inception) that it is better to have the freedom to disagree and to come up with a peaceable way to make choices than to be told what will happen with no voice and no opportunity for change. Democracy manages the conflict that is inevitable between people rather than suppressing differences because when differences and disagreements are suppressed, war breaks out. 

(I keep saying in theory because we all know that no democracy functions just as it was intended when it was founded)

Grace is like that.  There are things we don’t like about others. With grace, we don’t try to make everyone agree with our way of being. We don’t hold people hostage emotionally, or in any other way just because they have transgressed (in our definition of transgression).  Instead, we let it go - that’s what forgiveness is.   We don’t try to change others to make them like ourselves, or like an ideal that we believe in, but we live at peace with them (at a minimum) and maybe even love them as they are.

Even inside ourselves, grace lets us make space for the parts of us we don’t like and live with ourselves peacefully without an internal war of guilt or shame raging all the time.

Sure, sure there have to be SOME rules for society to co-exist.  We can’t just all run around doing whatever, whenever.  I need you to stop at a red light, so you don’t kill me, and I want you to get a ticket if you don’t.  I want there to be legal consequences if you break into my house and steal things or hurt me or those I love.  But these rules need to be decided together with grace. If you want consequence A and I want consequence B  for the trespasser, how do we resolve it?  Who gets to decide?  Putting it to a vote to discover what seems best in the view of most people or voting-in people we trust to make the call are both democratic solutions that hold space for this difference of opinion.

Even inside myself, there is a part of me that wants to eat chocolate and binge watch all day.  There is another part of me that wants to be healthy and strong and not have a stomachache.  How do I decide which part gets her way?  Most of us are democratic about it and we give both sides a chance to “rule.”  We do a little chocolate eating and binge watching but we also eat some spinach and walk or go to the gym a little.  We give grace to the chocolate eater inside us and grace to the healthy part of us and we live at peace with ourselves.

 – At least in theory