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The NY Times’ Nicholas Kristof’s Opinion of Christian Aid

March 2, 2010

Please take a couple minutes to check out this article by Nicholas Kristof. It is incredibly encouraging for me (Ryan) as a Christian leader! Recently I have been following Kristof’s consistent advocacy on behalf of the poor, voiceless, the marginalized as he writes for the NY Times. I’m grateful that he sees himself as an ally of the work that groups like Eucharist and others are trying to do for the poor and marginalized. A number of people around me have been praising his book “Half The Sky” as well. According to Wikipedia, Bill Clinton said in September 2009: “There is no one in journalism, anywhere in the United States at least, who has done anything like the work he has done to figure out how poor people are actually living around the world, and what their potential is….So every American citizen who cares about this should be profoundly grateful that someone in our press establishment cares enough about this to haul himself all around the world to figure out what’s going on….I am personally in his debt, as are we all.”

On Being Irrelevant…

February 12, 2010

“Relevance” is an extremely tempting idol for a church (and pastor). We are desperately afraid of people not finding God, church and our programs relevant. But the only thing worse than everybody thinking we are irrelevant is everyone discovering God, church and programs as a relevant way to make their own life, needs, desires the center of the universe.

This morning Arlen pointed me to this article in the Christian Century: http://christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=8195

The article is a refreshing reminder that our goal as a church is “not to make the gospel relevant to the individual, but to make the individual relevant to the gospel.” How does that work? I’m not exactly sure… but I’m pretty sure that it must be a Holy Spirit thing. We must be relentlessly committed to faithfulness to God over exciting results.

A False Self?

February 2, 2010

In reflecting upon my personal experience, the people that I truly enjoy being around have something in common: they live out of their “true self.” It doesn’t matter whether the person is religious or non-religious, politically left or right, old or young, introverted or extroverted… if he is living without a false “posture” he is someone I wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon with. But the person living out of a false self or false posture is someone that I find frustrating and downright exhausting (de-energizing) to be around.

You have no doubt experienced the “false self” in action (or perhaps been this person)… The guy who is not able to fully emotionally connect with people around him. Deep emotional expression (passion) seems impossible. There appears to be a lack of integrity between what the person says and other body signals being communicated. There is a sense in which she is not “comfortable in her own skin.” This person is strangely not fully present in conversations. Her mind always seems like it is partially somewhere else. Conversation is often evasive or just small talk - meaningless. There is a fear of vulnerability or self-expression and a reliance on clichés in conversation. There is a use of humor that conceals or downplays life. There is a sense in which the person is overly conscious of himself rather than free to connect with the other. All of these (and more) can be signals of someone living out of a false self. Have you ever struggled with this? I have…

Although I am not a psychologist I would describe a false posture or false self simply as a psychologically manufactured identity (conscious or subconscious) that does not reflect the true reality of what is going on inside of someone. A false self or a postured self is quite obvious to spot in some cases and not so much in others. Some people are masters of convincing the people around them (sometimes even themselves) that they are somebody they aren’t. The false self takes on many different forms. Some are quite familiar: A man who is arrogant and proud – always trying to inflate his own ego while making others seem small – is a classic type of false posturing. The flip side of the coin is the woman who is incredibly unconfident – who compensates with a public persona that is constantly self-deprecating, engaging people out of a sense of inferiority and inadequacy. We commonly refer to this behavior, either the pride or the inferiority / self-rejection (which are really just two sides of the same coin), as “insecurity.” Insecurity is at the root of the false self / false posture. To make things more complicated, our insecurity often causes us to operate out of multiple false selves / postures depending on the situation we are in.

Ironically one of the classic ways people “posture” or act out of a false self is to try to communicate the image of being “authentic.” Our culture loves to hype up uniqueness and non-conformity. (After all you can’t be average or “one of the crowd” and still be someone who stands out for recognition, right?) This posture of “authenticity” can look like the person we all have met who feels compelled to demonstrate to everyone else that she doesn’t conform to any of the standards of culture, whether that be shown through a hair style, clothing choice (or lack thereof), piercing, religious perspective / behavior, interest in obscure things, passionate pet peeve, etc. I’m not suggesting that every person who doesn’t conform to the cultural norm is living out of a false self. In fact, often the reverse is true; some people try soooo hard to belong, to be like the crowd, that they give up their uniqueness and take on a false self in an attempt to conform. It’s just that the posture of “authenticity” or nonconformist can just as easily be a false self that is attempting to cry out to the watching world that, “I have unique value and someone should notice.”

Perhaps the most insidious form of the false self is the “religious false self” or the “spiritual posturing” that happens in many faith communities. For many people the lure of a religious false self is that it gains a person a sense of respect or nobility, and possibly the praise and recognition of an entire community. This is not a new issue for humans (see Jesus’ stinging rebuke of the “religious false self” in Matthew 6:1-6, 16-17). Being able to speak in a way that sounds “spiritual” or being able to quote large amounts of scripture, give moral insights about life, pray with great flourishes, or recount astonishing stories about “the way I used to be” can all be marvelously effective ways of trying to convince everyone that I am deeply spiritual while all the while reinforcing a false self. This is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult if not most difficult false selves to eradicate.

Religion is supposed to be about personal transformation… and once a person is on their way down a road of adding layers of complexity, knowledge and postures to a false self through religion, it can be very difficult to stop. It is very daunting to deal with the true self after such an investment into the false self. Add to this the communal recognition that comes in many faith communities from appearing spiritual, and you can quickly see how difficult it is to abandon the “spiritual false self.” Many churches publicly recognize people as examples of “someone on the right road” which in the case of someone who is operating out of a false self can only add to the fear / shame of revealing a true self that is confused, disingenuous, chaotic, sinful or messy on the inside. Churches must work really hard at not creating a culture that merely rewards particular behaviors (such as giving, serving, scripture memorization or deeply religious sounding prayers) that could be reinforcing the false self – propping up a false identity. Even more importantly (on the positive side), churches must create a culture focused on continual repentance and divine hospitality (God’s offer of forgiveness & reconciliation) rather than external performance and posturing. Specifically, churches must constantly make room for people to name and deal with their messy, broken, and fragmented true selves in appropriate relational spaces where the temptation to posture is decreased. In our community (Eucharist) this is what the covenant community is for; more particularly, what the covenant triads are about.

But is living out of one’s true self with no posturing the end of the road? No, actually it is just the beginning of whatever road to authentic transformation there might be. Actually, our true self - with no postures - is not a very pretty sight in most cases. Some of our postures are what make us socially acceptable human beings. Seriously, do you really want to know how selfish I can be when I’m not addicted to people pleasing? Just being my true self could result in an ugly scene. So, the ultimate goal is not just to get on with life living out whatever I truly am (without the postures), because for most of us the real “me” is not something beautiful… it is an ugly mess. The ultimate goal is the transformation of the true self to become fully the person God uniquely created me to be. This a Spirit guided process. Again, as hinted above, this has to start with creating a culture of repentance rather than performance.

The scaffoldings of a false self can get a person a long ways in life: a good job, a beautiful spouse, a particular social circle, power, recognition, and more. But ultimately the false self leaves one with a life that is devastatingly empty - unfulfilling and full of despair (assuming we are honest and courageous enough to face the false self). A false self is incapable of intimacy, passion, and meaning because at the end of the day it is a fraudulent identity… it is something we have manufactured, and it can never have the integrity and vitality of a true identity no matter how much we invest in it. The false self is ugly, relationally detrimental, and ultimately meaningless – not to mention that it holds back any transformation of our true self. The truth is that in most cases other people can intuitively sense our posturing even if they can’t put their finger exactly on what it is. Besides, even if you are really good at maintaining your false self, you still know it is not the real you. – That is enough to make life empty on the inside. One day, if we are lucky, the façade will crack, the show will end, and it will all fall apart… and this is good news. That will be the beginning of life, not the end (even though it might feel like the end in the moment). This is where transformation begins. I am convinced that to the degree we are courageous enough to deal with and expose our false self for what it is and begin to live out of our true self… that is the degree we will find life.

So why don’t we just stop posturing? Truth be told, it’s really complicated. There are probably dozens of reasons why we are living out of a false self to begin with. Perhaps we have been deeply wounded, or we have experienced profound abandonment, or we went through a painful loss, or we were shamed, or we were not properly nurtured… all of these reasons (and others) add up to a situation which leads us to live in deep anxiety and fear (consciously or subconsciously) about what would happen if people truly knew who we really were in all of our frailty and smallness. Some of us are too panicked to even admit to ourselves who we really are (In other words we live out of false postures to keep ourselves in a state of denial). Others of us are deeply afraid of what God might think about the ugliness of our true self (never minding that God already knows). I have found that even people who appear to “let it all hang out” have this nagging fear. Some of us have so many false selves / false postures that we have totally lost sight of who our true self is. Like layers of an onion, every time we peel a layer of the false self back, there just seems to be another one underneath. This can be painful work to say the least. One thing is for sure… it doesn’t usually happen overnight.

To begin to live out of a true self requires an overwhelming act of grace… a deep sense of acceptance. Humans can offer an imperfect form of this to each other and that can be deeply powerful. This is why seeing a therapist or counselor can be so transformative. This deep acceptance necessary to deal with the true self is offered most perfectly in the forgiveness and love of God (which does not negate the fact that we may need to receive it through another person – such as a friend, therapist, pastor, etc.). If I’m honest, this love of God is what allows me to dismantle and discard my false postures and begin to lean into my true identity. It is the “ground” in which my true self can begin to grow and be transformed; it is the ground which allows for failure and forgiveness as well as the hope for change.

Thomas Merton, who thought and wrote extensively about the false self / true self issue says, “Every man has a vocation to be someone; but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.”

And then there is my favorite quote by Merton,

“Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of being that God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.”

Let’s work together to create a culture at Eucharist that is focused on the transformation of our true self. May we live in the grace of God so much that we learn to offer this same grace to each other so that we are transformed by this radical love that God has for us!

God and Fear

January 13, 2010

Our midweek series (Life-Shaping Forces) began with a session focused on FEAR this past week. The topic seemed incredibly relevant to everyone there. Who doesn’t face fear? We all have it in some shape or another. It was interesting seeing how we were similar and different from each other throughout the discussion.

The conversation about “authority and fear” was most interesting to me. In reflection since then I have come to feel compelled to emphasize a point that I think is nearly completely foreign to many parts of our culture at this point in history. The point is not a popular one: God is to be feared. Almost 50 times in the scriptures the people of God are referred to as those who “Fear the Lord.” It seems a cop-out to me to merely relegate this meaning to something like, “have some respect for the Lord.” I think there is an honesty to saying that biblically speaking “knee-knocking” and trembling is totally appropriate behavior for the people of God. Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “Isn’t that the exact opposite of what every church I know is trying to preach.”  (Minus the “fundy” churches represented by the crazies with the signs.) Interesting point… that is exactly my experience with the church too.

Ever since I was a child (growing up in the church), God has been emphasized as my “divine buddy.” - A sort of big Mister Rogers in the sky. A popular Christian speaker did a speaking tour across the US recently entitled, “The gods are not angry.” - I’m not even sure exactly what he was talking about (it was probably good considering his other work), but the title struck me as representative of what I find to be the case in a place like SF. We are perhaps fairly unique in the whole history of God-conscious humanity to think that God is not something to be feared. For many of us, our base-level assumption is that God is a rather harmless. Is he not just the cordially tolerant big guy upstairs?… or perhaps we even think of God as virtually a non-personal energy force-field. - Neither of these pictures of God seem too threatening unless you are REALLY bad (meaning a mass-murderer or a child molester or a proselytizer - all seen as nearly equally sinister behavioral traits).

Anyway, so I’m sort of overgeneralizing on purpose… but the point of what I’m saying is that nobody really trembles at the thought of God anymore. Hasn’t science marginalized God? Don’t we have genes to blame or childhood angst to accuse for our short-fallings? Can’t we explain morality as merely a roundabout evolutionary survival trait? Don’t we now know that enlightened people could never believe in the idea that Jesus was the unique revelation of God? (I would answer all of those questions in the negative by the way). I think that if we are going to be honest with our own scriptures and with a logical picture of a God who cares even a tiny shred about justice here on planet earth, then there might be some appropriate room for fear. I think we must, in fact, re-establish the idea that if there is a God who created the universe (which includes ourselves), and if that God has any semblance of character (which I gratefully believe God does), and if we will all be held accountable for our lives… then all of us are in big trouble (since we have often worked against God’s intentions). This is the base idea from which any “good news” that Christian scriptures might be trying to communicate must begin. - But it is strangely missing as an assumption to our current cultural setting.

What seems odd to me is that in our quasi-Christian, western culture we have blurred the issue a bit by assuming that God must just be tolerant of all of this bad human behavior (including our own) - like an apathetic grandpa who decides it takes to much energy to get out of his chair. We see God as essentially nice; but if nice, then necessarily not just. But this idea (God as essentially nice / tolerant) is one that really only makes sense to someone who is more often on the “oppressor” side of the ledger (which reflects the fact that most us who will read this are members of the most powerful, wealthy country in the world - we are largely on the good end of the stick.). If you are consistently the victim, you do not get apathetic about justice. You get pissed that the judge dismisses your case. You don’t say something like, “can’t we all just get along.” - All of us crave justice… especially when we are on the victim end of the stick.

What we must affirm again and again to our apathetic, oppressive culture is that if God is not just, God is not good. God’s justice is an expression of His goodness, not its exception. If what we want is a “nice” God who isn’t upset about our lack of moral performance, then to hell with the idea that God is good. A “nice” god is not a good god. What the Christian Scriptures say is that God is not nice; instead, God is declared to be good: simultaneously merciful and just. This is the story of the atonement - of Jesus life, death and resurrection. The message of the scriptures is not that “God is not someone to be feared.” It is instead that God’s fearsomeness is His goodness. We are only “ok” because part of God’s goodness is His deep loving mercy and willingness to, at great cost, absorb the consequences of darkness and evil into Himself.

Let’s just be honest. God is to be feared. Don’t kid yourself. There is nothing “safe” about God. Here is how C.S. Lewis described it in the Chronicles of Narnia - God being described as Aslan, the Lion:

In “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” the Beavers are describing the great lion, Aslan, to the children.  Mr. Beaver says,

“You’ll understand when you see him.”

“But shall we see him?” asked Susan.

“Why, Daughter of Eve, that’s what I brought you here for.  I’m to lead you where you shall meet him,” said Mr. Beaver.

“Is - is he a man?” asked Lucy.

“Aslan a man!” said Mr. Beaver sternly.  “Certainly not.  I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea.  Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts?  Aslan is a lion - the Lion, the great Lion.”

“Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he - quite safe?  I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you?  Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe.  But he’s good.  He’s the King I tell you.”

Eucharist Culture Highlight: Peacemaking

November 18, 2009

This past Sunday we spent a whole evening looking at “peace.” A lot of things were said, but I want to highlight a few very important ideas and develop them a bit further.

First, as we said on Sunday, the Christian vision of “peace” is so much more than cessation of violence. It is shaped by the Hebrew word, “Shalom” which means fullness, life, vitality, creation flourishing, reconciliation and more. If we are faithful to the biblical vision of peace we will never be satisfied with merely living in passivity or apathy. Shalom-peace cannot be achieved apart from actively dealing with a constellation of issues which work to disrupt God’s intended order. Issues like justice, health-care, disparity of wealth, respect for the “other,” ecological concern (because the earth and animals are involved in Shalom too!), forgiveness, reconciliation and more are all vital to the process of making peace.

Second, it might be helpful to distinguish two levels of peacemaking. The first level might be called intrapersonal peace (inside peace… coming from peace with God). This is where a person is able to be at peace with God within themselves rather than internally agitated, fearful, angry or restless. Paul, in the New Testament (Philippians 4:7), talks about having “a peace that surpasses understanding” - a calm, yet alive stillness that exists within regardless of the craziness brewing all around. This calm stillness is not to be mistaken for passivity. Actually it  exists side-by-side with the deepest passion imaginable. In fact, this stillness / settledness is essential to creating deeper passion because it brings more focus to the passion since a person is not being distracted away to other non-essential issues.

For me a practical illustration of this comes from my apartment. When I get my living area really clean it helps me focus on what needs to be done in my life. If my living area is a mess, it is distracting me every few minutes because there is always something nagging me for my attention that needs to be done. This is similar to what I mean by intrapersonal peace. Once you are able to get your own mind, desires, and life in order, you are able to bring piercing focus to things outside of your own life. By the way, the “order” I am referring to is not something we dream up or create… it is something we discover and submit to. God has a way that life was designed to work, an order… and our job is to conform our lives to it. Much of the un-shalom of this world can be traced back to us as humans prioritizing our lives wrongly. We love good things… but love them in the wrong order, to the wrong degree, and in the wrong way (this, by the way, is also known as idolatry). Loving God and placing God at the top of the “priority pyramid” allows us to bring the rest of life into order and focus. It is enormously freeing!

The question we must ask ourselves is this: How can we really be effective agents of Shalom in the world if we don’t know and experience Shalom within? This is one major reason why I believe religion has a massive role to play in the conversation about how to make the world a better place (along side peace organizations, the UN, humanitarian groups, etc.). It is short sighted to say, “don’t worry about the religion stuff… just get on with making peace in the world.” If we don’t deal with the Shalom deficit within, it will deal with us. Actually, I believe it is primarily this Shalom deficit within us that makes the conditions of non-Shalom around us in our world.

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