Entitlement

Entitlement is a term used to describe a circumstance in which one has earned a right because of a way in which one has fulfilled a responsibility. For example, I am entitled to drive a car because I have earned a license, purchased a car, maintained it, and have shown a record of driving it safely. If I stop doing those things I will no longer be able to drive a car.

But the term entitlement has also come to mean a circumstance in which someone demands a right even though they have not fulfilled the necessary responsibilities. This phenomenon is common in teenagers but is, from my perspective, more and more common in the general populace.

One place we see this is in those persons who are happy to complain about the quality of government services but aren’t willing to pay the taxes to support those services. Some people are quick to complain about high taxes on gasoline and to complain about the poor quality of the roads on which they drive and fail to see the connection between those two. We have mostly agreed that there are certain services the government will provide as for the common defense of the nation. We all benefit from those services so we are all required to pay for them through our taxes.

Another agreement we have (as created by law) is that all are entitled to healthcare. If my youngest son and I are riding in the car together and suffer a major accident an observer will not be able to tell that I have health insurance and he does not based on the quality of care we each receive. We have collectively chosen to be sure that we do not live in a society in which those needing care are denied it because they are unable to pay.

The provision of universal healthcare is simplified in those nations with a single payer system. But problems like those in New Zealand have so alarmed Americans that healthcare debate in the last 20 years has almost excluded the single payer option. Instead we are keeping insurance companies in the system but tweaking the system so that everyone has to pay for the services they receive.

But the sense of entitlement in the nation is so strong that we are facing the high likelihood at this point that the Supreme Court will rule that the “individual mandate” is unconstitutional. The legislature cannot require that persons pay for services that it has mandated will be available to them unless it levies the cost as a tax, not as a fee paid to an insurance company.

If we are willing to deny health care to those who refuse to pay for it then we can keep the system from going bankrupt. But we collectively show signs that we will continue to care for the flightless birds in our midst. We will only have justice by maintaining a balance between rights and responsibilities. If we want a world in which everyone gets care we will have to figure out a way to pay for it.

Prone to the accident of grace

From an email from a client who was profoundly abused as a child:

You talked on Monday about "being accident prone" in terms of having grace come into our lives. I was trying to relate that concept to [my partner], but I realized I hadn't quite 'gotten' the import of your observation. I was trying to say that you meant that we need to create a circumstance in our lives where we are "more accident prone to manifesting a state of grace" motivated by love and mental health. Or something like that. Could you explain that in more detail? It's such a different perspective on being 'accident prone' that I found it quite intriguing.

It was in the context of enlightenment that I first heard the notion of being accident prone as an expression of grace. We can’t create our own enlightenment. Enlightenment is by definition something that happens to us. Nevertheless, there are things we can do to make it more likely that we will experience enlightenment. There are things we can do to make ourselves prone to the accident of enlightenment, or for that matter, to the accident of any sort of grace.

The question then is, “what can we do that makes us prone to the accident of grace?” Let me suggest that there are a series of steps that take us into and through a developmental process that opens us to grace.

1. There is a Power greater than I.

The first step is to recognize that much of what we experience is created by forces utterly beyond our control. This is readily and terrifyingly apparent from a very early age. We can do some things to alter our experience and even to create certain experiences but there are limits to what we can do.

2. I am a creation of this Power.

Indeed, everything is a creation of this Power. But I am a created being and thus one of the manifestations of this Power. I owe my very existence to the Will of the Power.

3. I am precious.

Because the Power that creates all things created me, I have been chosen into existence and thus am loved.

There are a few more steps in this sequence which leads to our awareness that we are actually not separate from this Power but, for the purposes of this question, this is far enough along the developmental line. The full apprehension that we are God’s beloved and that God causes good things to shower upon us at all times is the core of what it means to live in grace. But things can get in the way of that awareness.

Some don’t acknowledge a “power greater than themselves.” They tend to behave in ways that are sociopathic and stubbornly addicted. While you have struggled with addiction, it was not for this reason. You have never had any doubt that there was a power greater than yourself. You just knew that Power to be one that delighted in tormenting you. To the degree that this Power noticed you at all, it was to pin you to the mounting board and pull your wings off.

As for knowing you are a part of Creation, you have a deep spiritual awareness that includes this knowledge. Your difficulty is being able to know yourself as loved. Most of us have this awareness mediated to us through a relationship with parents who love us. For whatever reason, your parents were not able to extend love to you. In an attempt to make sense of the absence of love—which you intuitively knew was an aspect of your birthright—you decided that the reason you were not loved was because there was something very wrong with you. This is a fairly common choice for children who are abused.

You could have made a worse choice. Deciding that the source of power is either puny or punitive leads to sociopathy. If there is no God or God is evil then I can do whatever I want or I can ally with the source of evil. In either case the only choice that makes sense is to satisfy my immediate wishes with no regard for others.

That is not the choice you made. You decided that bad things happen because you are bad. That made you desperate to be good and it gave you a sense of futility. It seems that no matter how many caring things you do for others you can’t seem to be good enough to make up for being so bad.

In spite of all of the evidence that you are bad and that the Power that creates the universe has contempt for you, you have found the ability to love yourself. You have tamed your use of drugs to medicate yourself into oblivion; you have acted to provide for your own educational and physical needs; you have mightily resisted urges to harm yourself. You have acted toward yourself in love. You have thus brought yourself more and more into alignment with the true Will of the Power.

As you have brought your behavior into alignment with the Will of God for you by loving you, you have opened yourself up to a deeper and deeper awareness of the power of that love. When you met your partner you could have easily missed the opportunities for love that rest in that relationship. But by loving yourself you made yourself prone to the accident that is her love for you.

We become prone to the accident that is grace by treating all of Creation to the blessing that is our love for it. That blessing starts by loving ourselves.

Mirror my God to Me

The sermon Sunday referenced the hymn "Nearer My God to Thee" as the song the doomed passengers on the Titanic sang as the ship slid into icy waters. The version in our inclusive language hymnal departs from the original by changing the pronouns and thus the rhyme by prescribing, "Nearer my God to You." When we sang it as the Hymn after the Sermon, some insisted on singing the original words and I played with the narcissist reading, "Mirror my God to Me."

From a theistic perspective such a sentiment is heresy, even blasphemy. But from the perspective of extravagant welcome, it is really good theology. What might it be like to participate in a worshipping community in which we each took on the ministry of mirroring back to each other, not how we see each other, not how others see themselves or even how they want to be seen, but how God sees them? What if we reflected back to each other how God sees us, cares for us, loves us, welcomes us? That's the faith community I long for.

Complex Relationships

In its simplest form, a relationship is between two discrete entities as between two objects (the table is on the rug) or between two people (Sue and Frank are dating each other). There are also what we might call amorphous entities which can be complex collections of discrete entities. A community is such an entity.
Communities are made up of people. A person is a relatively discrete entity. I say "relatively" because we tend to think of a person as that entity contained within a specific skin bag but, in fact, we are each incredibly complex. Nevertheless, communities are more complex by a factor of how many people there are in the community.

In addition, communities also have relationships with other communities. Therefore, many of the characteristics of relationships between discrete entities are also true for relationships between amorphous entities. For example, just as some people have a fiduciary responsibility for the welfare of others (as a teacher for her students) so do some organizations have responsibility for the welfare of other organizations (as a bank for the investments of a corporation).

Nevertheless, relationships between amorphous entities are likely to appear simpler because they have to be able to condense down to clear terms the nature of the relationship. This is why it is so important for organizations to have a mission statement. Without it, the boundaries and agendas become too diverse and too fuzzy...too amorphous.

My vision is for a community in which all of the members are intentional about how they create themselves, their relationships with other individuals, and their role in the mission of the broader community.

Our Most Precious Commodity

Gordon Gekko: Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

I recently watched the two "Wall Street" movies. I had never seen the 1987 version with Charlie Sheen as Bud Fox and Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. In the 2010 Oliver Stone sequel Bud Fox makes a cameo appearance but Gordon Gekko is one of the central characters. He is a rapacious speculator who is only interested in the game of amassing as much money as possible. Though as he says often and easily, he is not interested in the money. Money is only the measure by which you know if you are winning the game.  But in the end, even Gekko recognizes that the $100 million that he stole from his daughter and only living relative is not as important as the relationship that he would like to have with her and her imminent family.

Our most precious commodity is the relationships we have. One might say that Gekko transformed from someone whose primary relationship was with money to someone who valued the art of the deal to someone who wanted relationships of love and trust. What has value is relationship and what has most value are the relationships we construct which have the greatest depth and complexity. The more robust are our relationships, the more precious they are.

All the People

I am a member of a Christian denomination called the United Church of Christ. We have a promotional advertisement that is being aired currently in St. Louis that is a 30 second spot that starts with a girl doing a finger play to the words, "Here is the church (fingers intertwined with the knuckles up), here is the steeple (index fingers pointing up), open the doors (thumbs move apart), and see all the people (hands invert to point the fingers upward)."

I remember learning this as a child and the spot has poignancy in part because of that memory and in part because it focuses on the phrase "all the people." As the visual images make plain, the thrust of the message is one of radical inclusivity...of extravagant welcome. "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."

As important and obvious as this message is, there is another message imbedded in it that is less obvious but even more important. What makes the church the Church, and what gives the Church vitality, is not the people, but the relationships between the people.

We can have beautiful buildings, we can have many members, we can have creative and effective programs, but unless we have vibrant relationships, we are not being a vital church.

My purpose in this blog series is to explore what it might mean to be a worshipping community that takes seriously the relationships we have. I hope to grow in my own capacity to describe the potential for intentional relationships and to discover others who wish to join me in this community.

Qualities of Relationships

Several years ago I made great use of a computer application called InfoCentral. I no longer use it as it hasn't been supported for years but it was a very powerful (though hard to learn) tool for managing information. At its simplest it had as its data a set of objects of different kinds which had relationships with the other objects. So an object might be a person and another object a place and the relationship would be that the person attended a meeting at that place at a given time. So the time, the place, the event, and the person were all objects in the application which were all held in relationship to each other.

What was especially powerful about this application was that the relationships themselves had qualities. For example, I could create an object which was my Thursday night therapy group and connect to it each of the members of the group. Each person had a relationship to the group which had the qualities of when they joined and when they left. It was possible to select a point in time and see who was in the group at that point.
 
You can see why it was complicated, but I hope you can also see how powerful it was. It allowed for entry of all sorts of data and then allow one to look at the data from far more points of view than one can easily do with a standard relational database.

We easily think of objects as having qualities. They may have color or weight or hardness or texture. We less often think of relationships as having qualities.

When we pay attention to the qualities of our relationships with others, and engage with them in a consideration of those qualities, we find that we can choose what we want the relationship to be like. We can consciously and collaboratively select the qualities we want and work together to create them. We can...but we seldom do so.