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.

Intentional Relationships

Two events today:

• Diane Rehm interviewed David Brooks about his new book, The Social Animal, in which he argues that our relationships are more important to us than we normally acknowledge and he stresses that our emotional connections are vital to our wellbeing. One of the things he noted was that decision-making face to face works better—more effective decisions are made in less time—than when the process is done online or by teleconference.
• An email exchange between members of my local congregation devolved into bitterness and anger when they each felt their concerns were not understood and appreciated by the other, even though they are working together on a project important to them both. The exchange finally evoked a truce called by our pastor. This is in the context of a congregation that has been quite intentional about how we build relationships and address and resolve conflict.

These events resonate with me because I have been giving quite a bit of thought recently about being intentional about nurturing a community in which the quality of the relationships we construct is an active object of consideration. We don’t normally look at our relationships unless they are in trouble. Thus we are not comfortable looking at them at all. Thus they grow almost by accident. “Almost” because we are secretly or even unconsciously very committed to our relationships. We need them to be as robust as possible.

So what would it be like to gather folks who are aware of their need for robust relationships into a community that has as a central purpose the development of relationships which have greater depth and durability?
I have some ideas about what such a community might look like. If you are interested, follow along. I will be blogging about my thoughts here over the next few weeks.

More about ‘complexity hierarchy and values hierarchy’

Because we are politically correct liberals we know that hierarchies are bad. Everyone is equal to everyone else and to put someone above someone else is bad. [From a philosophical perspective this is an example of a performative contradiction. The position contradicts itself. If all formulations which say that one item is better than another item are bad, then the formulation that states that all items are equal is better than all others, thus, itself being bad.]

The distinction to be made here is between hierarchies of valuing and hierarchies of complexity. An example of a valuing hierarchy is that the paler your skin the more value you have as a person. A recent program on Harlem pointed out that the Cotton Club only hired au lait blacks. Darker skinned persons weren’t acceptable. We find such hierarchies to be unacceptable.

Our vignette about Jack and Jesse and the juice glass is an example of a complexity hierarchy. [Just Conflict, page 90-91] Jack can think in three dimensions and so knows that the short squat glass holds more juice. Jesse only knows amount in two dimensions and so thinks the tall thin glass holds more. Jack’s way of judging amount is objectively superior to Jesse’s. But that doesn’t mean that Jack is better than Jesse. He is only more mature.

We are watching what is happening in Libya. We know that Kaddafi is on his way out. We are worried about what will follow. We are worried that the country will descend into tribal warfare.

There is a developmental sequence we all move through with regard to the circle of our care and concern. We are necessarily self-centered when we are young. Then we move to being more centered in our families, or our community, or our tribe. We may be ethnocentric, or species centric or even cosmos centric. A wider scope of concern is more complicated but more mature.

We are pleased to see that, at least in eastern Libya, the mood of those who oppose Kaddafi is to work together without regard for tribalism. They are committed to a unified and free Libya. Despite economic and educational deprivation, the revolutionaries are showing great maturity. Their way of constructing relationships is more mature, and thus more complex but effective, than is the way Kaddafi has been constructing relationships. We may have a judgment that Kaddafi is a bad person, but it is objectively true that his way of constructing society is less stable and just than a democracy would be.

Impact and Artifact, continued

Kathy wrote in response to the prior post:

I agree with the message.

I also know that in relationships of intimacy, it’s very difficult to sort through internally what is an artifact from what is a present impact….particularly when the other person has no interest or capacity to help examine the dynamics. 

An easier way for me to think about it is, only I can be responsible for my emotions.  I can’t be responsible for yours…..any more than I can be responsible for your thirst or heart beat.  But if I fully know and acknowledge mine objectively, and decide how I’ll act on them….it helps the relationship move over “bumps.”

Thank you for these comments, Kathy.  I am preparing for a class tomorrow morning about “how to repair a damaged relationship” and one of my topics is the distinction between impact and artifact.  Your comments help to focus my thinking.

I agree with much of what you say.  Specifically:

The line between impact and artifact is often fuzzy and is especially important in our most intimate relationships.  The line is much clearer when the relationship is one in which the issues can be clearly and honestly addressed.  When the other can’t or won’t address the issues with us, it becomes much more difficult to know what we are responsible for…and thus what we can do something about.

I also agree that it is a good default position that my sensations, emotions, thoughts, and wishes are all my own.  To the degree to which they derive from the choices of others, they are artifacts of those choices.  I am the one who can address them creatively.

Still, if I am looking at the choices I am making, there are some ways those choices are likely to impact others.  If I were to speak to you in a tone of voice that implied anger, and told you what a sorry excuse for a human being you are using terms that were demeaning and derogatory, I could reasonably expect that you would get hurt feelings. If I were to then brush off those feelings as just artifacts that are for you to address, I would be abandoning my responsibility for the harm I have done to our relationship.  I would be failing to be accountable.

If I were then to come to you and express clear remorse and commit to what I was going to do to be sure that I never treated you that way again, you might find that you could clean up the remaining artifacts successfully.  But if I were to repeat that behavior again and again you would likely begin to find that you couldn’t clean up the mess on your own.  You might decide to address me about how my behavior is impacting you.  Or you might just choose to have nothing to do with me.

It is easy to choose to have nothing to do with people when they are not important to us.  But some relationships have such history and are so connected to others with whom we want to maintain attachments that we can’t walk away from them.  We have to address them.

At this point my response to your response explodes into a much bigger essay about how we might act to create what we need when we are not confident that the other is committed to our welfare… or to their own.  Rather than going there let me just make one other point.

From my point of view in this hypothetical case as one who is chronically abusing you (which I certainly never wish to do but which is a perspective I know from my work with men who do), I can see that I am harming you by how you respond to me.  I may think you are over-reacting.  That what I said wasn’t that bad and you should know that I love you so why don’t you just get over it already.  Still, I can see that I am upsetting you.  Is that what I want?

Is what I am doing in my relationships having the impact I am looking for?  Do I even know what I am trying to create?  From the point of view of an actor, as one who is choosing actions, do I know my own motivation?  This is the central question.  Do I want to know how my behavior is impacting those around me?  Is it the effect I am looking for?  If not, am I interested in changing what I am doing?

Impact and Artifact: distinguishing responsibility

We had some freezing rain overnight. I went out this morning to toss some melting salt on the slick sidewalk and steps. On my way back over the path I had traveled I could see that the salt was already starting to work. Little holes had formed in the slush and ice where a piece of salt had fallen. The little hole was an artifact of the action I had taken in throwing out the salt in the first place.

Whenever we make a choice we have an impact. Even the choice to refrain from acting has an impact. If we are to be fully accountable for our choices we must acknowledge our responsibility for all of our choices and the impact of those choices on the world around us. Because of a wish to be accountable for the wellbeing of my neighbors as they traverse the sidewalk on the easement to my property, I choose to throw down melting salt.

There are limits to what I can do. I can throw salt. I can’t melt ice. The salt does that. The melting ice and snow is an artifact of the choice I made.

Also this morning I got an email from a client whose wife is very upset with him. She is frantic that he keeps doing things that she experiences as being inconsiderate in the extreme. He realizes that there are things he does that “trigger” her. But, as he also points out, she is very easily triggered and her reactions seem to be out of proportion to his misstep. He insists he is not fully responsible for the impact his choices have on her.

If we want to have deeply accountable relationships we have to be able to distinguish between what we are responsible for and what we are not responsible for. When I deny that I made a choice or insist that my choice didn’t have the impact that it did, I am then denying my accountability. At the same time, if I try to take responsibility for the artifacts of my choices—if I try to be responsible for the choices of another agent—then I am distorting reality and damaging accountability.

In the case of my client, he really is doing things that are inconsiderate and a violation of what his wife believes she has a right to expect in their marriage. His choices have an impact on her. The fact that she has been treated this way, not only earlier in this marriage but in a prior marriage and in her own childhood, exacerbates the intensity of her feelings. Some of the emotion that arises for her in the present is an artifact of choices others made or that he made some time ago.

For them to have a deeply accountable relationship they will both have to work on being more responsive to what is arising in the present. For his part, he will have to notice what he is doing that is triggering for her, decide if those are things he wants to continue doing, and let her know clearly what she can expect from him. For her part, she will have to look at the degree to which his current choices are impacting her and the degree to which they are bringing to the surface emotions that are artifacts of events from the past that she has not yet fully worked through. That he does what triggers her is his responsibility. That she is so overwhelmed when he does those things is her responsibility.

None of us likes to see our beloved upset. We are especially concerned when the source of the upset is our own behavior. We want to be careful to be acceptable to others and especially to those we love and those we want to have love us. Therefore we try to fix the feelings of our beloved by doing what they want and not doing what they don’t want.

This works well when we are addressing the impact of our behavior on the beloved. But it doesn’t work at all when we are trying to address the artifacts of this behavior. When we try to adapt our behavior to repair the damage done by past choices, even when those choices were our own, but especially when they were not, then we are trying to change something we cannot change. When we say to the other, “I will be responsible for your distress by being who you want me to be,” we will fail to be who they want us to be and we will relieve them of the responsibility to effect their own healing.

It is just this point that makes it so crucial that we become able to distinguish the impact from the artifact. We must be fully responsible for the choices we make and the impact of those choices on others. And we must invite others to be responsible for the artifacts by not trying to fix their feelings by abandoning our own integrity. Similarly we must address the impact that other’s choices have on us and address the artifacts we continue to carry in our own feelings.

We all project onto the behavior of others the meaning that behavior has for us. This meaning is an artifact of our past experience. This meaning may or may not reveal truths about the choices of the other.

My daughter mentioned to me at lunch last week that she had observed herself being distressed that her husband doesn’t look for ways to facilitate getting her day started. He is absorbed with what he has to do for himself and seems unaware of what is going on with her.

This came up when I was talking about what I do in the morning to help my wife, who teaches high school, to get her lunch and bags out to the car in the morning as she is racing to get to school on time. My daughter observed that she had learned from me that one of the things husbands do to show love to wives is to help them in the morning. When her husband didn’t do those things it meant he didn’t love her.

Once she allowed this meaning to come to conscious attention she could easily and quickly see that it was not accurate… that it was a distortion based on circumstances that, while similar in form, were very different in content. Had her husband decided to try to be more solicitous in the morning so she was more content, she may have never discovered the distortion and he may have become resentful.

In the case of my client, he is concerned that he not be expected to be responsible for the artifacts that have built up in his wife over a lifetime of being ill-considered. He doesn’t want to be expected to repair something he can’t fix. But in trying to not be to blame for something he didn’t cause, he is denying the impact of current choices. When he denies his responsibility, he makes himself unable to respond in ways that will genuinely create what he needs.

We must be fully responsible for the things we can change and not take on responsibility for the things we cannot change.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.