Choosing and Chasing

When I first read this post by Bradley Moore, I couldn't help identifying with his middle school tale of self-reinvention (the eighth grade wasn't particularly kind to me), and I started thinking about the tension we live in between the lives that are given to us and our own ability to determine our selves.

It's a pretty live question for me how much possibility for self-determination really exists. I tend to think it's different for different people. You didn't get to choose all your circumstances, and some of those have an extremely powerful influence on the person you are and will continue to be. Even becoming fully aware of all the things that influence who we've become can be tough—rewriting ourselves in the midst of that can be even tougher.

But you have to try.

You have to fight for the possibility that you can grow, change, and struggle to become someone else. Sometimes you have to restructure some of the things in your life, enlist help from other people and God, and just dig into the struggle to become the person you discern God called you to be. Because while I don't think we have absolute power over our own self-determination, the minute we give in and just accept ourselves as accidents of fate, the moment we accept the way we are as the way we have to be, we get stuck. We stop growing. And the minute any living thing stops growing, it starts dying.

There’s a famous Lombardi quote from when he arrived to coach the Packers: "Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence." That's really the way it is: You have to be willing to chase some things that ultimately might be out of your grasp, because we humans are at our best when we're chasing something. But we don't have to chase anything, and there are infinite choices about what we're going to pursue.That's why intentionality, the practice of making distinct choices about who we want to become and what we want to do, is so important.

You don't get to make all the choices, but the ones you do get to make matter. They really, really, matter.

The Way of Mourning: A Corrective Alternative

There is so much to mourn in the world. Outbreaks of violence, the persistent ravages of poverty and injustice, all deserve grief on the way towards actions combatting them.We find it hard, of course, to keep up with the collective reports of the grievous state of humanity. There's too much to be born along, and we have neither the shoulders for the weight, or the skill in mourning to keep up. We've developed other skills instead. We deflect the grief with a variety of tactics, to various degrees of success.One road is to bypass the grief of the bad we see and experience today and to convert it immediately into fear for what could be tomorrow. This is the anxious way, one that looks past the present in exchange for fears—valid and unfounded—about what will come next.  Too much of this is recognized as an emotional disorder, which plagues some 3 percent of the population, but of course many, many people live on a spectrum of anxiety about the future.Another path for dealing with the grievous reports we hear is the path of cynicism. Pop cynicism responds to bad news with mockery. It seeks neither to persuade or to provoke action—cynicism is not an outlet to change anything, but rather a style of reacting to things in a way that deflects responsibility. Cynicism says "There is nothing to be done by folks like me—the powers that be will continue to mess things up." Which may be true, to some great degree, but the cynic's route not only experiences disempowerment, but it actually chooses powerlessness as though it were virtue. It scoffs. It deflects. But it neither acts nor mourns, inserting a buffer of wit between itself and every problem.In world with overwhelming evil, cynicism is a pretty attractive option. It's a way of getting by. It allows people to live in a messed up world without feeling the struggle, and without entailing themselves in the responsibilities of action which take and take, sometimes without meaningful feedback of progress.

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Grief is the sadness provoked by some negative event or state—whether personal losses or losses that we experienced empathically for others. Grief is something that comes to us, passively, whether we ask for it or not. It knocks on the door. But it can be deferred, which I think is a way of converting grief into anxiety. Or of course, it can just be sent away, deflected with cynicism.I suggest that an alternative to these ways lies in part in the practice of mourning. When we mourn, grief that we've received passively becomes something we actively experiences. We engage our grief, and express it. We lament and protest, shout, cry or weep. We actively feel, and do something with what we feel—maybe not in a way that definitely resolves the problem or loss at hand, but which converts some of that feeling, potential energy into doing movement in the world.I've been thinking more and more about mourning as a missing piece of our public discourse—there is much grief, to be sure, and too many occasions that bring about actual public mourning ceremonies. But the actual skill of mourning itself seems too distant from us as a people. Instead, we seem much more prone to defer and deflect the grief that comes our way by taking the paths of anxiety and cynicism. The story is of course more complicated and serves more nuance than I'm giving it here—fear, and the cynic's subversion of power both have a part to play in a healthy world I suppose, and a mix of them with the sort of mourning I'm thinking of is probably what we all need.  Nonetheless, it seems to me that the mix is off, and we need a corrective of more mourning, and less fearfulness and less cynicism.As counterintuitive as it may be, we might all be better off with some proper laments.

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(Some of my thinking about this was provoked by thinking through the sermon below.)

The Prophet's Word

I'm grateful for the annual day marked off to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Racial reconciliation and justice is something always bubbling just beneath my consciousness, and MLK day forces it to the surface. It forces me to reflect specifically on the man's legacy, but also on my own engagement with his cause.This year, I was glad to participate in our small town's March in memory of Dr. King. It was surreal and powerful, walking with my children, surrounded by a slice of our community.I also try to spend some time reading some of Dr. King's work, and this year I sat down with his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. It's an amazing piece of work, and its power to convict holds today. The challenging letter calls out the White church for their silence in the face of the struggle for civil rights, and every paragraph burns. The letter is inspiring, instructive, and stinging throughout, and if it's been a while since you've read it, it's worth sitting down with for a half hour. Word for word, it's one of the most important things the church produced in the last century.I also spent a little time trying to reflect poetically on what it means for me, living more than 50 years later, to try and pick up the echo of Dr. King's message. What came out was the little poem below, which I shared at the ceremony on Monday.There's much work to be done, my friends. May the Lord be with us.The Prophet's WordDreamer, Seer,Prophet, Preacher,Sent to us, the Nineveh next door,He willingly went,Walked,Marched,From you, with youTo us, at us,With just the word we needed,a word we could not hear.We could only see it,See its drama enacted,While it called out the violence within us.We could not hear the word,but we could see it,and be seen by it.We could not hear it, but the word would not depart.Its echo rumbles through the canyon still,While the unseen water rushes on below,like a mighty stream.

Ministry

Most people don’t feel good. Most people aren’t happy, and aren’t satisfied. For me, being a preacher starts with that gloomy fact, with that realization that most of the people I see walking around the world are terribly unhappy. And, it’s not without reason, either. A lot of people fight to keep depressing realities out of the forefront of their mind. Their families are crazy, and their friendships are shallow. Their jobs are unfulfilling, don’t provide what they really want financially, or are at risk of being taken away. Their life is slowly draining away, minute by minute, and it becomes increasingly obvious that they don’t really have much to show for it. And on top of that, most nights there isn’t even anything good on TV.I suppose in the back of my mind, a major part of what I’m doing in life is that simple—I'm trying to help people feel good. Sometimes that means ministry is about helping them get right with God, because when you’re out of line with God, it jacks up everything else. Sometimes it means helping people find something to do with themselves besides just turning the page on the calendar. Ministry means helping them see that there can be more to their life than chasing paychecks, boys, girls, and what passes for glory these days. Sometimes it means helping people pick up the pieces when they lose something like their job or their family. Sometimes it is full of the really hard work of helping people figure out what the next step is for them to take responsibility for their life, whether that means fixing or abandoning some old relationships or trying to figure out how they’re going to pay off the credit card. Lots of times ministry is about giving people a place where they feel like they belong.Sometimes, and maybe most of the time, ministry for me means just trying to help people believe that somebody else in the universe cares what happens to them. I guess I believe that if people think I care about them, it’ll help them believe that God cares about them. That seems to me like an important thing to do.I got into this business because I had a chance, early in life, to feel what it was like to help somebody get right, to help them untangle stuff in their mind just a little bit, and feel loved. I wanted to help everybody feel like that.  I suppose that’s what I’ll try to do again tomorrow.