Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before–”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

 

Yesterday I dragged myself out of bed to join a few other friends for an early morning swim practice at the Eden Prairie Community Center.  I made it through the practice okay, and on my way back home I noticed a sign hanging on a light pole in the parking lot.  It proudly touted Eden Prairie as the #1 place to live in America in 2010 according to Money Magazine.

As I drove home, this sign got me thinking.  I live in the wealthiest country in the world, and Eden Prairie is supposedly the best place to live in this country.  That implies that Eden Prairie is the best place to live in the world.  Which means I live in the suburb next to the best place to live on the entire planet!  Now, obviously not everyone would think that Eden Prairie is the nicest place to live in the world, or even the nicest place in this country (different people would surely rank different places according to different standards), but those details are irrelevant to me.  What really matters is that Eden Prairie and other western Minneapolis suburbs are really, really nice places to live.

And yet while living in these really, really nice places, at some level I’m still unhappy, and I’m also aware of the unhappiness that plagues many of my peers.  How can we live in one of the nicest areas in the world, and still be so unhappy?

Louis C.K., one of the funnier but raunchier comedians out there, has a bit he’s done on Conan called Everything is Amazing, Nobody is Happy.  His point is that life has gotten much, much better, but as it has so also has our sense of entitlement increased.  Even though amazing things are happening and the most difficult things (like traveling across the country) have become easy, we are still deeply unhappy and find reasons to complain about everything.

As I pondered my own feelings of unhappiness and that of my peers (in spite of everything being amazing), I wondered, “what is it about humans that makes us nearly incapable of being happy?”  No matter the improvements in health, technology, ease of travel and generally just the quality of life, we remain unhappy.  This reality is particularly poignant for Americans, who’s lives have improved dramatically over the last 50 years, but who have also seen a correlative increase in the incidence of depression and anxiety.  ”People born after 1945 were ten times more likely to suffer from depression than people born 50 years earlier.” (Seligman, M. E. P. In J. Buie (1988) ‘Me’ decades generate depression: individualism erodes commitment to others. APA Monitor, 19, 18)

The post-WWII boom that created the suburbs and all the things that make Eden Prairie the “best place to live” are also the the things that make people profoundly unhappy.  Clearly, nice houses, new cars, safe societies, fancy airplanes, new appliances, and even good health can’t make a person happy. The things that are supposed to make our lives so much better cannot bring the results we want from them.

“It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it.” ~Aristotle

It’s not the satisfaction of our desires that makes us happy.   It’s not getting what we want that makes us happy.   I would suggest — without a whole lot of reflection, mind you — that the things that make us happy are simple: love and purpose. Happiness comes as we receive love and then put our energies towards loving others.  If we are loved and if we are striving to love others, we are generally happy, or at least content.  Whenever we think we don’t need love from others, we become isolated from others and eventually unhappy.  Or when we stop focusing on loving others, and turn our resources and efforts inward and self-serving, we likewise become unhappy.  Without love and without purpose, we are unhappy.

Which is why the western suburbs of Minneapolis are ironically really good places for people to become unhappy.  For the exact same reasons that Money Magazine named Eden Prairie the nicest places in the country to live, I suggest make it one of the best places to become unhappy.  It offers unparalleled opportunity to pursue the satisfaction of our desires outside of love or purpose.  It boasts affordable homes, cheap big box stores, good schools, and lots of other outdoor and entertainment amenities.  People live in beautiful homes and enjoy stimulating entertainment, which is to say they become isolated and self-centered. Eden Prairie, and other suburbs around it, offer a host of ways a person could satisfy his or her desires.  And it is precisely in the pursuit of these things that we become the most unhappy.

“Clearly, Pfuel, always ready for ironic irritation anyway, was especially upset that day that they had dared to inspect and criticize his camp without him.  From this one brief encounter with Pfuel, Prince Andrei, owing to his memories of Austerlitz, formed a clear notion of the man’s character for himself.  Pfuel was one of those hopelessly, permanently, painfully self-assured men as only Germans can be, and precisely because only Germans can be self-assured on the basis of an abstract idea — science, that is, an imaginary knowledge of the perfect truth.  A Frenchman is self-assured because he considers himself personally, in mind as well as body, irresistibly enchanting for men as well as women.  An Englishman is self-assured on the grounds that he is a citizen of the best organized state in the world, and therefore, as an Englishman, he always knows what he must do, and knows that everything he does as an Englishman is unquestionably good.  An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and others.  A Russian is self-assured precisely because he does not know anything and does not want to know anything, because he does not believe it possible to know anything fully.  A German is self-assured worst of all, and most firmly of all, and most disgustingly of all, because he imagines that he knows the truth, science, which he has invented himself, but which for him is the absolute truth.  Such, obviously, was Pfuel.  He had science — the theory of oblique movement, which he deduced from the history of the wars of Frederick the Great — and everything he came across in contemporary military history seemed to him senselessness, barbarism, grotesque clashes in which so many mistakes were made on both sides that these wars could not be called wars: they did not fit the theory and could not serve as material for science.

In 1806 Pfuel had been one of the architects of the plan of war that had ended with Jena and Auerstadt; but he did not see in the outcome of that war the least proof of the incorrectness of his theory.  On the contrary, to his mind the departures from his theory were the only cause of the whole failure, and he with gleeful irony all his own, used to say: ‘I said then that the whole thing would go to the devil.’  Pfuel was one of those theorists who so love their theory that they forget the purpose of the theory — its application in practice; in his love for theory, he hated everything practical and did not want to know about it.  He was even glad of failure, because failure, proceeding from departures from theory in practice, only proved to him the correctness of his theory.” pg. 639-640

 

When I was in Thailand, I saw idols.  They were outside bakeries and 7-11s.  They would be sitting on shelves behind the cash register at restaurants.  Cab drivers glued them to their dashboards and placed pieces of their lunch in front of them.  I even saw them outside of brothels when a group of us did a prayer walk through the Red Light district in Bangkok.  I watched as women offered food to these small statues surrounded by incense before entering for her their night’s work.  They asked for forgiveness and sought protection in these idols, and they may have even hoped for salvation.

I’ve also read about idols.  In the Old Testament, idolatry is such a common practice that at times Israel is said to have an altar to some god on every high hill.  And in the New Testament, idols are similarly present in every day life.  They show up in restaurants, and just by going out to eat, some Christians apparently were complicit with idolatry.

But it seems to me that in our western society, idols just aren’t a part of every day life.  Apart from seeing them in Thailand and reading about them in the Bible, I don’t really have much experience with idols.  They seem foreign and culturally irrelevant.  I’ve never experienced the temptation to offer a sacrifice to an idol, and I’ve never had the urge to put my trust in an idol’s ability to help me.  But lately, I’ve been reading a book by Gerald May that has cast the issue of idolatry in a whole new light.  He argues that addiction is a form of idolatry.  Addiction is a form of devotion to an object that parallels religious ritual. It is western society’s version of idolatry.  He writes:

Spiritually, addiction is a deep-seated form of idolatry. The objects of our addictions become our false gods. These are what we worship, what we attend to, where we give our time and energy, instead of love. Addiction, then, displaces and supplants God’s love as the source and object of our deepest true desire. It is, as one modern spiritual writer has called it, a “counterfeit of religious presence.

Addiction is a state of compulsion, obsession, or preoccupation that enslaves a person’s will and desire. Addiction sidetracks and eclipses the energy of our deepest, truest desire for love and goodness. We succumb because the energy of our desire becomes attached, nailed, to specific behaviors, objects, or people.

He then goes on to talk about addiction as being far more commonplace than we might initially think.  Addiction isn’t limited to just those with chemical dependencies.  It’s not just the alcoholic or the homeless drug addict who struggles with addiction.  Addiction is pervasive and pernicious.  It infects our daily routines and sabotages our ability to love God and love others.

He tells a story from his personal life of a bout with depression he experienced.  As a professional psychiatrist, he become depressed when none of his patients were getting healed.  Another psychiatrist comforted him with the good news that his depression was a sign that he cared deeply for his clients.  He said, “you are depressed because you care deeply about their well-being.”  Upon further self-reflection, however, he discovered that it wasn’t his love for his clients that was causing him to feel depressed.  It was his addiction to professional success, and the utter absence of any signs of it that caused his depression.  He was suffering from withdrawal not compassion for his clients.

He says many of us are addicted to professional success and other seemingly innocuous intentions as well.  We can be addicted to feeling loved, getting praise from others, the comforts of TV, being thin, sex, or power to name just a few.  Some of these addictions are obviously more serious than others, but if we are forced to go without them, we will become depressed, irritable, angry, manipulative and much more.  Our addictions become intertwined with our deepest desires and even our identity, and in this sense they do function like idols in our lives.  They replace God as our source of hope, desire and love with life-draining patterns of behavior.

And just like sin and idolatry can only be overcome by the grace of God, so also the addict can only experience real healing through an encounter with grace.  As I recognize my addictions and try to stop engaging in them, I also know there is no way we can rid ourselves of idols and addictions by effort alone.  We are set free from our idolatrous inclinations and our addictive appetites only as we experience the unconditional love of God.

I experience the love and grace of God in the pages of a good book, the warmth of a loving friend, the prayers of a fellow church member, the sacrificial service of my spouse, and in the practice of spiritual disciplines like sabbath and meditation.  They are the pathways of God’s grace in my life.  They are the means by which Gods grace brings healing to my addictions and sets me on the road to recovery.

And so far, I’ve been able to persist.  It’s been hard, but for the sake of the call we’ve endured.  We’ve persevered and pressed on despite difficulty.  But now I think things may be going too far.  Satan has taken over my iPhone:

(It did this after taking it to the Genius Bar and doing a software reset restoring system defaults. Before the software restore, it would go into my phone and call people listed in my favorites list.   They suggested the display is broken.)

For those of you who know how much I love Apple products, and in particular, my iPhone, you know how big a deal this is.  You know that ministry just might not be worth doing if the cost is losing my iPhone.

I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do.  I can receive calls, because when I answer my phone and put it to my ear the display is disabled.  But it’s really hard to place calls.  I’ll probably use Google voice to make calls for a while and replace my phone later.  Until then, I’ll daily be reminded of the cost of carrying my cross for Christ.

So, when an early twenty-first-century North American says, “What the church says may be OK for some people, but I think it is important to think for myself,” that person thinks that he or she is thinking for himself or herself.  No.  He is only espousing that self-centered, limited way of knowing that has been imposed upon him by his culture.  One could almost say that, because this is North America, because of the United States Constitution’s rendering of religion into a private matter, sealed off from everything important like economics, politics, and public matters, that person is not free to think anything more interesting than “I think it is important to think for myself.”  As Stanley Hauerwas has told us repeatedly, for a contemporary North American to say, “I think for myself,” is solid evidence of cultural formation, externally imposed social determination, since she did not think up the credo “I think for myself” all by herself. Pastor, pg. 211

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.  It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.

In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us.  But because our own resources inevitably fail us, we are all more or less subject to discouragement and to despair.

Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves.

But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.

Last Thursday night was the worst night of my life.  Mary was attending a small group, and I was home watching the kids by myself.  I got the two older kids to bed, and I was taking care of our youngest, Daniel, who is four months old.  He’s had bad eczema for the last couple of months, and we were told that it was an internal allergy, something that Mary was eating was being passed into her milk and irritating him.  So, I thought, while she is away I’ll just feed him some formula — give him a break from her milk.  I had fed him formula once or twice before more than a month previously.

He ate about 3 ounces of formula and fell asleep while feeding.  I woke him up to burp him, and after that he became extremely irritated.  I tried to feed him some more formula, but he resisted.  I tried to give him a pacifier but he wasn’t interested.  He got more and more fussy, and I noticed that his breathing started to get raspy.  He was sort of wheezing and coughing at the same time.  I wasn’t sure what was going on, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to go back to sleep.  So I left his dark bedroom and went into our kitchen.  As soon as we were in the light I realized his face was puffy, swollen, and splotchy red.  His breathing was sounding worse, and it was then that I first thought, “crap, my son is having an allergic reaction!”

Our older son has peanut allergies, so I recognized the splotchy redness as allergies.  I grabbed an individual packet of Benadryl and squirted some in his mouth.  I remember thinking, I need to get this in him now before his throat closes and I can’t get it in him any more.  He threw it up, and I gave him some more.  His breathing continued to get worse, and he was struggling to even cry at this point.  I decided to rush him to the ER.

Once we got there, he was starting to get better.  He was crying again, though it was faint at first.  As soon as they saw me enter the ER they sent me straight back (I was crying and he had throw up all over himself, so we looked awful).  They hooked up an O2 Stat machine to his toe to measure the oxygenation of his blood, and started blowing the pure oxygen over his face.  The O2 stats read something in the 6os, and they said it’s supposed to be above 97%.  His feet were dark purple by this point.  About 5-10 minutes later when he was finally crying pretty loud and seemed to be doing better they took this temperature.  It was 94.8.  They thought, that must be wrong so they took it again…still 94.8.  Then they used a different thermometer because they thought something must be wrong with that one, and it was still 94.8.

I was pretty emotional, and I was having a hard time communicating with the doctors what had happened.  I told them that I thought it was an allergic reaction, and I told them I had given him Benadryl.  I also told them that I had been feeding him formula.  The first doctor that came into the room checked him over and was asking me questions.  I couldn’t really answer them well because I was emotional.  After watching him for about 3 minutes she suggested that all the machines were wrong, and that he just had the hiccups!  Thankfully she wasn’t the ER doctor assigned to us, and she soon left.  The next doctor came in and he was better at listening to what happened.  He suggested that he was probably just choking on spit up and maybe some got in his lungs.  They did an X-ray and his lungs were fine.  He thought that he might have had an allergic reaction and offered to give him some prednisone, which we turned down because Mary had it once and reacted poorly.

Finally we left the ER about an hour later, and I was feeling a little confused.  I wasn’t sure if my son had almost just died and I had saved his life by giving him Benadryl or if he had just choked on spit up.  This is our third kid and I’ve seen our kids choke before so I didn’t think that was what had happened.

The next morning I took Daniel to children’s hospital for allergy tests.  We received the results last night, and we discovered that he has a highly elevated reaction to dairy, which is what formula comes from.  He also happens to be allergic to egg whites, peanuts and wheat.  It seems like our Thursday night scare mostly like was an allergic reaction to the dairy in the formula.

What I found frustrating was the way the ER doctors and other doctors we’ve talked to treated us.  It was particularly frustrating to have the first ER doctor suggest that all he had was the hiccups.  I’m sure it’s hard being a doctor.  I get that they see patients who are hypochondriacs and also see patients who are rude to them.  But making a comment about a child having hiccups is just rude.  In fact, it’s intentionally rude.  It’s a statement designed to insult far more than it is to enlighten.  And that got me thinking, why would she do that?

Why would she make that comment?  Why has our pediatrician been incredulous about our encounter from the beginning?  Why do we feel like we are being dismissed and put down by most doctors we talk too about this?  So what if he had only been choking.  I thought he was dying and I was scared.  Why not be sensitive to your patients?  Why do some doctors feel the need to make their patients feel stupid?

I think it’s because they are a lot like Pharisees.  They can be Pharisees just as much as religious leaders can be Pharisees, because a Pharisee is anyone who uses their knowledge and position of power to put another person down.  Religious Pharisees are dangerous because they use manipulative language about the soul and about our relationship with God in order to make themselves feel superior to others.  Doctors do something similar when they use their knowledge of medicine and their interactions with patients to feel superior. Practicing medicine is no longer about helping people, it’s a pathway for them to secure a sense of self — a self defined by their superiority over others.

Anyone who is an expert can do this.  Programers and anyone who works in I/T can do this when they are helping a friend with their computer.  Veteran mothers can do this when they interact with new moms.  Business leaders can do this whenever the topic of leadership comes up around their friends.  Whatever your expertise you can use it to promote your sense of power and superiority.  You too can be a Pharisee.

Right now, I’m just bitter that doctors can be Pharisees too.  They meet people in some of their most vulnerable moments, and they can use that to exploit them for their own personal gain.  I know I need to listen and learn from doctors, but I’m really struggling to trust them.  With my personal medical history, doctors have been wrong about what is going on in me far more than they’ve been right.  Maybe that’s why they can be jerks….maybe, like religious Pharisees, their arrogance is bourn out of their uncertainty.  They really aren’t sure what’s going on, but they don’t want anyone to know.  They want everyone to think they have things figured out because that’s their identity — they’re supposed to be medical know-it-alls and no one wants to hear a doctor say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.”

Either way, we begin a new chapter in our life.  We now know that Daniel has some major allergy issues, and we need to figure out how to care for him well.  We will need our doctors to help us.  I hope we can find some good ones who care about us as people and don’t use us as a means for defining themselves.

There’s a scale in our bathroom.  Every time I go in there to take a shower or do my business, I look at it and think, “I wonder what number would come back up at me if I were to stand on that thing.”  Over the last year, it has brought nothing but depressing results.  Beginning with the time that we went to weekly services last April, I’ve gained 20 lbs.  I don’t like getting heavier for a variety of reasons: have to buy new clothes, embarrassed to be in pictures, etc.  But more than anything else, my weight gain symbolizes something else, something deeper.  It reflects that I haven’t been healthy.  I haven’t keep up with exercising and I’ve chosen to deal with stress by overeating.

I have a number of rhythms I try and follow as defined in my Rule of Life to keep myself from getting to this point.  I set out goals for exercise, prayer, reading, spiritual direction, small group participation, giving, and much more.  I know that I have to follow this Rule of Life to stay healthy, because if I don’t my capacity to bear stress diminishes.  I become less adept at adroitly assuaging my anger.  I become more inclined to indulge.  And I end up lacking in the leadership skills that being a pastor and a dad requires.

So as I’ve looked down at the growing number on the scale, I’ve come to accept that I need to re-double my commitment to my Rule of Life.  For me that begins with swimming.  I’ve re-connected with the Masters Swimming team that I used to swim on.  We swim from 6-7am every morning Monday-Friday.  I hate getting up at 5:30am knowing that I’m going to get punished at practice, but I believe that it is essential for me being healthy.  Over the last two weeks I’ve swum 7 times.  I’m feeling pretty good about my start, and I hope to keep it going.  Right now, exercise is the part of my Rule of Life I need to be the most vigilant about keeping.

Do you have a Rule of Life or rhythms that you keep to stay healthy?  If not, here are some great resources for developing your own: http://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/resources/ruleoflife.asp

This is one of my all time favorite pictures.  It was taken a year or two ago up at my parents’ cabin.  Mercy was just 1 then, and she was cuddling with me while we were on a boat ride around the lake.  I try to relive this moment everyday.  I try to cuddle with her like this as often as I can.  My best chances are always in the morning, right after she’s woken up from her long night sleep.  She’s a little groggy and still half asleep, so she is much more content to just sit still in my lap.  Sometimes she curls up in a ball on my lap and other times she drapes her arms around my shoulders and rests her head on me.  I love it.  The stiller and the quieter she is the more I can just enjoy her.

That happened this morning, right after I finished meditating.  The form of meditation I practice is described by Thomas Keating as centering prayer.  During it I get as still and as quiet as I can and I just rest in God’s grace.  I let all self-justifying thoughts go as well as any visions of grandeur or even to-do lists.  I just sit still in the presence of God and know that there is absolutely nothing that I have to do to be accepted by Him.

Afterwards (usually 20-30 minutes of meditation), I move into a time of prayer.  I find it so easy to talk with God after this time of stillness and silence.  I find it so easy to know that he is listening.  It doesn’t really mater what I say — I feel so loved, accepted, and heard by Him and I can just share freely.

I imagine my meditation and Mercy cuddling with me have a lot in common.  When I meditate I let God’s arms of grace wrap themselves around me, and I believe God delights in me just being still before him the way I delight in Mercy just sitting still in my lap.  She isn’t showing me all her art work from Pre School.  She isn’t asking me to help her clean her room, play with her dolls or get her something from the kitchen.  She just wants to be with me.  She just wants to be held by me, and I love it.  There’s nothing I’d rather do.  I imagine God loves it when we just want to rest in His presence.  I imagine it’s like a child who climbs into his lap and just sits still in His loving, accepting arms.

Note: for those of you that find this post a bit too sentimental, see the previous post in which God is portrayed as an accountant.