Having Faith in the Next Generation
Topic: Making Changes

Sixteen years ago, I met Jeannie Miller, founder of Linkup. This is an organization that only has a few people still using the name.  Yet the spirit of this rather short-lived activist organization lives on.  The spirit that was concerned about making changes in the faith community, but emphasizing the need to make changes in ourselves as the paramount concern.

The organization's leadership was willing to challenge survivors of abuse by clergy to not look to the Church with great expectations, though it challenged the Church to look at itself.  Today a small fragment of this group meets every week in Chicago, I learned reacquainted myself with some of them at SNAP.

It's such hard work to have faith in future generations and to trust the tedious process of change when making paradigm shifts.  That's what Jeannie told the national meeting of Linkup, however, back in 1992.  She said that we had to learn to trust the process--not the process of doing church, but the process of change that takes generations.  She even said we have to learn to enjoy the process--that's even harder for those of us who want to look beyond the standards that seem to satisfy most people.  Not because we believe we are better than others, but because we believe that we can all be better and more mature if we refuse to be satisfied with the status quo.

I've seen many people come and go in this work.  It seems to me that only those of us trust the process end up staying on. 

We believe in the next generation.  Or, at least,  we hope they will carry on in making progress.  And so we encourage the younger folks, empowering them and recruiting them in every way that we can.  As we dare to look into "the Promised Land," as Martin Luther King understood it.

 

 

Promised Land Isn't Necessarily "in the sweet by and by"

As a kid, one of the most sing-able hymns we sang was "I am Bound for the Promised Land."  My little voice could be heard sometimes above all of the adults.  Especially when we got to the part where people shouted "Hallelujah."

As a kid, I saw "the Promised Land" as being literally Heaven.  Not anymore.  I believe it is here and now.  We get there by moving forward or resisting the temptation to go backwards.  We can be in it one day and not the next; but with practice, we dwell in the Promised Land and create it in our homes more and more often. 

We only experience it when we are at peace.  Not because we live in a perfect world, but because we have a sense of peace in spite of the imperfect world.  That's a state of spiritual health that comes when we get in touch with the divine power that is available in each of us.  And through our relationships as we connect with other people when they are also truly in a state of peace. 

More on Liberation
Topic: spirituality

Without really digressing from the SNAP conference, I  want to continue in the line of thinking that Tom Doyle left with us.  About liberation.  Yet going to another organization that I found through Catherine Clark Kroeger and advocate and writer who is working hard to address the problems of domestic abuse in the Christian community.

Kroeger has been instrumental in establishing Peace and Safety in the Christian Home http://www.peaceandsafety.com/   The organization has a wonderful newsletter that I recently began receiving.  The title of the front page of article of  June/July 2008 issue is "Free Indeed."  It's Part 3 of a series, written by Joanna Barr.  Based on Exodus 7:14-10. 

Barr points out that Pharaoh's promises, interspersed with the 9 plagues in Egypt, illustrate well the cycle of abuse.  Because of the persistence and divine power exhibited by the plagues, the abuser was only able to be successful to an extent.  Yet each time there was resistance, he made promises of letting his victims go.  Only to abandon those promises as soon as there was relief from the pressure.

You may believe in the story literally, viewing God as one who uses violence to confront violence.  I saw it that way for many years.  Today I see the story as a metaphor with great meaning.  Either way it holds a message about where a loving God stands.  It's on the side of liberation. 

Psychologically, I do not have to plead with anyone to let me go.  If I am entrapped psychologically by anyone, I am the Pharaoh that is not letting myself be free of the one or the institution that is entrapping me.  Keeping me from being the person that I now understand God intends for me to be.  A person who has truly been liberated.

The Craziness of Automatic Respect

Automatically respecting someone for their credentials or title or office, according to Doyle, is "like accepting an unfaithful wife.  It's crazy to do that!"

The benefits of losing respect, by contrast, is serenity and the ability to communicate with really healthy people.  That's how I see it.

Losing respect for the familiar can be very scary, though.   We have to find healthy people to replace the ones  for whom we've lost respect.  That takes time and patience.  It takes faith to believe that you are going to find them, while you sit in the void that's created by loss of respect.

New Definition of Prayer
Topic: spirituality

You may not agree.  Or you may think that this is only partially true. 

Tom Doyle, however, suggests that prayer is sitting still and quiwetly until the negative goes away. 

However you see prayer, if you use that definition, it's an exercise we dare not neglect.

Learning to Embrace Many Dissenters in our World
Topic: Making Changes

In the free world, we like to think that we welcome new ideas and challenges.  To the extent that we do, there is a better chance of progress.  Not that all new ideas are good ideas--many are not.

Thinking people do not immediately throw out new ideas.  Neither are healthy people are not threatened by new ideas.  

Thinking people are also more willing to pay the price of being a dissenter.  Standing up to evil when it's obvious that evil exists. 

Not through jaded ideas that make us see everything that's different or odd as evil.  And not through seeing everything that's "normal" or ordinarily expected as good.  That would be black and white thinking. 

Thinking people act in good timing.  Taking time to examine new ideas, but not too much time.  Taking time to decide when being a dissenter is a good idea and when it is not.  And going through that process EVERY time a new idea is encountered.

It's work!!  Work worth doing.

Worshipping Other Images
Topic: spirituality

The depth of Thomas Doyle's address just continues to unfold as I meditate on what he said in a few moments in the final address at SNAP.  One expansion to my thinking about "worshipping graven images" came when he suggested that we fail to arrive at a place of liberation when we worship someone else's image of God rather than our own.

In man-made religions, that's exactly what happens.  We give our allegiance to others' images of God, we fail to develop our own ability to discern who God is on our own--something that I believe any mature person is capable of doing by filtering out what obviously doesn't contribute to spiritual health.  Obvious to those with common sense, anyway.

Advocates Must Sort Out Feelings to be Effective
Topic: Making Changes

Guilt, depression, and anger aren't just stuff for emotionally unstable persons.  Yet the "Christian" way of seeing these feelings often leads us to view them as bad.

Doyle reminded us at this year's SNAP conference that guilt, depression, and anger are a part of the journey of an advocate, too.  Feelings he's experienced many times as he's been a trail  blazer in the Catholic Church.

While the system may want us to see that being docile and obedient, not challenging the aristocracy, keeping the rules are all qualities to be regarded highly, people who transcend the system look at it differently. 

Transcendence allows us to sort out the mandates of the system and to examine our own rules that may be formed because of the system.  Or perhaps formed because of our own emotional instability.  Either way, the sorting out allows us to develop a healthy sense of guilt, to be temporarily depressed over things as we are sorting them out (without developing a clinical depression) and to get angry at a level that is appropriate to the situation at hand. 

When we bring the negative feelings into check, the impact of the changes that follow can be profound.  Not just the impact on others.  Mostly, the impact on ourselves.

Seeing our Failures as Gifts
Topic: music

Sometimes I have piano students who are really uptight about their errors.  I can be that way, when the errors are just noise--the errors that turn the word "piano" into "pain-o!" as I want to reach for my ears.

Yet a lot of errors I see as beautiful and try to monopolize on them.  When I make an error in public, I've become very skilled at turning many of them into gifts that enhance the music.  Right on the spot!  So I end up fooling my audience if I'm needing to impress more than to just clown around.  Even in clowning around, the errors can be fun.

The trick is to smooth over the errors so we turn them into blessings, even if they aren't what we intended to do.  Or maybe not the ideal way of making music.

Students who "beat themselves up" in the middle of playing a piece have to learn that a lot of errors aren't really errors at all--just variations from the way the writer intended for the piece to be played.  Theoretically, they are errors.  Musically, they may fit right into the chord or make a slightly different rhythm that doesn't effect the pleasant sound of the piece. 

When a student makes an error like that, I often point out the problem in retrospect.  I call it an error that can be turned into a beautiful mistake.  Much like a cook varies a recipe, by accident, and improves on it.  Or finds ways to learn from it. 

Sometimes the student discovers an even better way of playing the piece.  Or at least one that is more preferred to that student's ear than the way the writer wrote the piece to be played! 

That's when they are truly making music, not just playing it.

Same goes for life.  We have fun figuring out new ways of seeing things that may be unique, even as they change the music of our lives and smooth out the rough places.

Liberation from a Wounded Spirit
Since waking up from spiritual assault is painful, the cure for the wounded spirit is to find ways to think about the injury so that the pain is all but annihilated.  That means finding new ways to think about self, too.