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February 2 - February 3, 2022
What if I told you that I’m sexist?… This doesn’t mean that I intentionally hate women or that I desire to oppress them. It means that despite my best intentions, I perpetuate sexism every day of my life…. As a sexist, I have failed women. I have failed to speak out when I should have. I have failed to engage critically and extensively their pain and suffering in my writing. I have failed to transcend the rigidity of gender roles in my own life. I have failed to challenge those poisonous assumptions that women are “inferior” to men or to speak out loudly in the company of male philosophers who
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Also crucial to the deeply formed life is a deep commitment to listening to others even when it’s hard.
Reconciliation requires us to listen deeply to one another.
Like Jesus’s movement from Word to flesh, incarnational listening requires three movements of the heart.5 1. Leave your world. Let go of the familiar, take the risk, and step out (especially with regard to race and culture). 2. Enter into someone else’s world. Practice active, humble, and curious listening. 3. Allow yourself to be formed by others. Open up to their worldviews while holding on to yourself.
Reconciliation is hard and protracted work, yet by the grace of God and the courageous steps we take, we can begin to taste today what is waiting for us when the new creation is fully consummated.
sad truth about modern spirituality is that we often avoid feeling our own pain and in the process avoid feeling the pain of others. When this happens, it’s impossible to do the work of reconciliation.
This lack of prayer has marked the lives of the modern church as practicing, in the words of Parker Palmer, “functional atheism.”9
Prayer forges humility and opens us up to the love of God, out of which we work for healing.
Prayer forms us into people marked by the fruit of the Spirit; in prayer we invite God into the struggle of our lives.
Prayer can infuse us with, in the words of Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, a “prophetic imagination.”11
prayer was not a way to ignore the problem but rather a means of engaging the issues from a different place—a deeper place.
implicit racial prejudice infects all of us, but we need not passively acquiesce to it.
This short list of questions might help you identify any subconscious perspectives you have of others: Is there a particular people, ethnicity, or race that you don’t trust? Why? Is there any particular people, ethnicity, or race that you or your child cannot marry? Why? What types of people cause you to cross the street if you are walking alone? Why? What, if anything, happens inside you when you see interracial couples? Why? When was the last time you visited the residence of someone from a different culture or race, or invited the person to your residence? What type of person would you most
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a distinction between White people and Whiteness. The former speaks to human beings made in the image of God; the latter speaks to a destructive ideology that normalizes and absolutizes so-called White values, experiences, and history.
Truthfully, no one is born White. Whiteness—like race in general—is a human creation that was established to create a hierarchy of human value.
Whiteness is an absolute way of viewing and assigning value to the world through the racialized perspective of White normativity.
It’s a good question, but the distinction is massive. Whiteness has historically been a force of oppression (slavery, Jim Crow laws, discrimination, apartheid, and so on), rendering other people as inferior and even subhuman. Historically speaking, retaining Blackness or Brownness had been an act of survival and a heightening of dignity.
then, what does it mean to renounce Whiteness? For people identified as White or otherwise, it simply means acknowledging the lens.
reconciliation requires regular confession, repentance, and forgiveness.
we sin against God, and we sin against each other. We are all complicit.
Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf has said, “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”15
inside. I didn’t have the tools to access my anger or my sadness in a way that would bring me close to Rosie.
In Swiss psychologist Alice Miller’s provocative book The Body Never Lies, she named the tragic reality experienced by people who cut themselves off from their feelings and compensate this loss by appealing to the often sterile, unfeeling institution of the church: People who have been severed from their true feelings since early childhood will be dependent on institutions like the church and will let themselves be told what they are allowed to feel. In most cases it is very little indeed. But I cannot imagine that it will always be like this. Somewhere, sometime, there will be a rebellion,
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Many of our days are strategically and subconsciously constructed to avoid looking beneath the surface. We often belong to church communities that reinforce a lack of introspection. We use God to run from God, and we use God to run from ourselves. It’s so easy to do this.
The contemplative way is about listening deeply to God. The way of reconciliation entails listening deeply to each other. The way of interior examination is about deeply listening to ourselves.
For centuries, people have extolled the virtue of self-examination. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Saint Augustine wrote, “O God, let me know myself; let me know you.” Ice Cube said, “You better check yo self before you wreck yo self.”3 Like I said: for centuries.
John Calvin. He wrote, “The knowledge of God and that of ourselves are connected. Without knowledge of self, there is no knowledge of God. Without knowledge of God, there is no knowledge of self.”4
Calvin has in mind a knowledge of our creatureliness—of our condition of sin.
Sin is a principle of captivity to a power that permeates and contaminates our human reality. Sin is the word Christians use to name not simply our failed acts but also our inner and outer captivity. If we embrace a fuller understanding of the nature of sin, knowledge of self extends beyond our obvious acts of transgression or our insufficiency to save ourselves. It also extends to the limits and failure of living lives marked by wholeness. God in Christ takes on our sin that we may live forgiven, free, and whole. This wholeness extends to every aspect of life.
1. Examination before coming to the Lord’s Table.
There’s a fundamental split between the sacredness of the table and the flippancy by which they approach it. Paul warns that God’s judgment has come to this congregation because of their lack of examination.
2. Examination of faith.
“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you fail to meet the test!” (2 Corinthians 13:5).
3. Examination of our ways. Lamentations 3:40 says, “Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord!”
4. Examination of our work. In Galatians 6:3–5, Paul explains, “If anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load.”
the goal of self-examination is not navel-gazing. The goal of self-examination is freedom—freedom from destructive thought patterns, inner messages, and the ways we wrongly perceive things.
We often don’t look within simply because of our pace of life.
Limited reflection usually leads to dangerous reaction. When there’s no space to process our inner worlds, we find ourselves mindlessly and instinctually reacting to the world around us.
The compartmentalizing of our lives remains one of the most dangerous temptations for a follower of Jesus. Compartmentalization, in this context, refers to a kind of splitting of ourselves in which we offer some parts of our lives to God but deny the rest. The insidious practice of splitting refers to the subconscious habit of disconnecting aspects of ourselves.
But our refusal to embrace and integrate our parts is a recipe for greater personal, relational, and social pain.
David Benner, professor of psychology and spirituality, powerfully named this temptation we all have to deny particular “parts” of our lives. In his book The Gift of Being Yourself, he described the challenge: Genuinely transformational knowing of self always involves encountering and embracing previously unwelcomed parts of self. While we tend to think of ourselves as a single, unified self, what we call “I” is really a family of many part-selves. That in itself is not a particular problem. The problem lies in the fact that many of these part-selves are unknown to us. Even though they are
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The act of holding all our parts together before God requires that we grow in awareness of ourselves. It’s impossible to hold together what we don’t even know exists. The deeply formed life cannot flourish without a commitment to interior examination.
The real issue in this situation was not my anger at Rosie but my anxiety at the prospect of having to call my parents and cousin. This was the undercurrent at work in me. I was afraid that they would be disappointed with me. I was concerned that they would see me in a different light. I was anxious that I would ruin the holiday for them. This whole situation was not about Rosie at all; it was about me.
I listened intently and repeated back to her what I was hearing.
I share this story not to position me as husband of the year but as a way of highlighting how rare this kind of listening was for me. (Rosie can testify.) It’s easy to be a listening presence in moments of low anxiety. But in times of high anxiety, it’s another story. What was I doing? Very simply, this is the work of interior examination.
When I talk about trauma, I have in mind two sides of the same coin: getting what I didn’t deserve, and not getting what I did deserve.
Many families didn’t know how to create environments in which we felt safe and seen.
just because a person didn’t grow up with obvious dysfunction doesn’t mean there’s no underlying trauma.
Psychoanalyst and philosopher Robert Stolorow explained that developmental trauma occurs when “emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”2 In other words, the pain we experience through everyday life has a way of metastasizing, damaging the rest of our emotional worlds.
one of the major tasks of family-of-origin examination is the naming and rejection of certain scripts in favor of life-giving messages.
