Roger
Ray, pastor “Positive
Spirituality”
We
fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even
more to know the godlike in ourselves. Abraham Maslow
The famous
psychiatrist and writer, M. Scott Peck, used to say that if you need therapy
but you can’t afford it, pretend to be an alcoholic and go to A.A. meetings.
And he gave that advise only partially tongue in cheek because, the truth of it
is, that A.A. has done a masterful job of distilling some of the greatest
psychological truths that we have into nice, pithy, proverbs that even our
sometimes rather pickled addicts can remember.
When I was in my
doctoral program at Vanderbilt, a part of my training involved being the
chaplain to the drug and alcohol treatment program at the VA Hospital. Not all
of our patients were there by choice. For some, it was a choice between prison
or a treatment program and so we had more than a few fairly reluctant patients
on our floor.
It was a part of my
job to run the intake group every Monday afternoon. We put our new patients in
a group therapy session with some of our guys who had been around for a few
weeks to help them to plug into our recovery community. We had one old veteran,
Buddy, who had not said a work in any group meeting for the whole two months
that he had been there. He just slouched down in a chair, pulled his ball cap
down over his face, and snoozed until the whole ordeal was over.
But one day we had a
new young vet who was very sincerely sharing about how alcohol had ruined his
life. He told, maybe a little too much, about how he had been discharged from
the army, divorced, and then homeless. But when he said that he had gotten up
to the point of drinking 8 beers a day, Buddy suddenly sat up, pushed up his
baseball cap, and he exclaimed, “8 beers a day, shoot, I spill that much before
breakfast.”
Then Buddy slumped
back down, pulled down his ball cap and that was the last we ever heard from
him. Buddy was doing something that we see a lot in recovery groups. There is a
not-too-subtle competition to tell the biggest tales about how much you drank
and the wild behaviors it caused in all of its lurid, sexual, illegal, and car
crash details. Sometimes a meeting absolutely goes off the rails with everyone
trying to best the last person’s drunk story… all of which starts to sound like
they all kind of miss their drinking days rather than reveling in the joys of
being sober.
To counter this very
unproductive line of conversation, A.A. has a great proverb that says, “Don’t
tell us how sick you have been; tell us how healthy you want to be.”
Just that sentence,
dropped in a meeting, will steer the ship back in the right direction. Way too
much of medicine, psychology, and, I’ll argue, religion, is focused on illness
rather than on health, on neurosis rather than talent, and on sin rather than
on virtue.
We all know the name
of Abraham Maslow from his famous introduction of the pyramid of Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs.
It is a helpful model
that points out that, generally speaking, we cannot focus on social connections
or personal accomplishment and fulfillment until we have met basic survival and
safety needs. But his famous hierarchy of needs is not his most important
contribution to the field of psychology.
Abraham Maslow
recognized that most of psychology was focused on fixing what was wrong with
people rather than spending time and energy in encouraging what is right with
them. It seems like an obvious point but no one ever schedules an appointment
with a counselor to tell them that their marriage is going great, the kids are
all excelling in school, that they sleep like a baby at night, and they are
nearly exhausted from all of the great sex that they are having.
People come to
counseling because of the opposite of one or two or three of those things and
so we tend to talk about the problem and nearly forget about a person’s
strengths, talents, successes, which, inevitably is where they will find the
ability to be more healthy.
Todd Schaible, the
director of our Burrell Mental Health Center in Springfield, used to tell us in
board meetings about when he kept going to the hardware store for different
products and advice about how to kill the weeds in his lawn. After several
failures and frustrated trips to the hardware store, a sage old hand said to
him, “Son, you need to quit worry about killing weeds and focus on growing more
grass. Plant good seeds, water and fertilize them, and the weeds will go away on
their own.”
The field of medicine
could learn a lot of valuable lessons from this same bit of wisdom. We would
all be healthier if we focused on eating good foods, exercising, and avoiding
toxins than we will ever be by constantly taking pharmaceuticals to treat our
symptoms of ill health.
We need to quit
trying to kill the weeds and work harder on growing grass. We need to stop
obsessing about how sick we have been and focus on how healthy we want to be. Treatment can become its own reward. We have a
saying in the south in reference to our hypochondriac relatives. We will say,
“You know, Aunt Sally is enjoying ill health.”
People can start to
believe that their illnesses make them interesting. And why wouldn’t they, look
at how much attention they get from professionals for being sick! Look at how
many commercials are aimed at illness and dysfunction.
I know from my own
pastoral counseling practice that there are people who would come and see me
every week for the rest of their lives if I would allow them to. There are
people who nurture their psychological distress for the attention and sympathy
that it gets them.
In counseling, I try
my best to be sympathetic and encouraging, but I always try to remember that
the goal is health and I try to get people to strengthen what is going right in
their lives so that the business of growing grass will naturally crowd out all
of the weeds.
I am allowing myself
to realize the degree to which we have been guilty of this same malady in the
progressive religious movement. How easy would you find it to be to describe
your personal faith without using negative illustrations?
Perhaps it was
necessary, at some early point, to identify ourselves by talking about what we
are not. We do not believe in magic and superstition. We are not like churches
with creedal statements or assertions of truth about invisible things like
angels and demons, heaven and hell, souls and infallible religious texts.
We have decried the
irrational religious beliefs that inspire terrorism, that demean women, condemn
homosexuals, that provokes international wars, and diminishes the importance of
the environment. We have separated ourselves from the criminal institutions
that exploit the weak minded, taking their money while covering their own
sexual and financial crimes. We reject the neurotic guilt and sexual fear
generated by their silly religious assertions.
And like old veterans
sitting in a treatment center swapping stories about how crazy, malignant, and
deceptive our past church experiences have been, I think it is time for us to
stop obsessing about how sick we’ve been and start focusing seriously on
exactly how well we want to be.
Martin Luther King,
Jr. famously challenged churches to be the headlights of society and not the taillights.
But you know, most of the time we are engaged in protest… we protested the
invasion of Iraq, we have objected to oil pipelines, fracking, and coal burning
plants.
We have decried
police brutality and racial profiling. We have railed against anti-union
policies, and restrictive healthcare policies.
But folks, can’t we
be more than the loyal opposition? If
you look back in time, you can see that most religions actually began as
liberation movements. Zorastrianism began among Persian slaves seeking justice
in their oppression. The Buddha left behind a royal family and riches to
compassionately identify with the poor and teach others to do the same. Moses
was a liberator of slaves. Jesus went to the poor and outcast of Israel.
Muhammad sought to unite warring tribes and lived in poverty all of his life as
an example to his followers.
And what I hope you
will never get tired of hearing me repeat…. Buddha insisted that he was not a
god, though his followers tried to say that he was. Muhammad insisted that he
was not a god, though his disciples have in every meaningful way, divinized
him. I believe that the historical Jesus also insisted that he was not a god
but later generations heap up these divine titles on their deceased heroes to
make them seem to be more important. However, trying to push any human onto a
pedestal and throw roses at them effectively silences them. Confucius, Buddha,
Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, taught a way of life and institutional
religion tried to turn that life into a set of beliefs.
What we in the
progressive movement are trying to do is to recapture the relevance of the
message. A lot of people are discouraged by the loss of supernatural theism
because they have had that hammered into them for so long… how could they not
be disappointed to lose it?
Still, if you look
back in American history, there is a reason why we have so many hospitals with
religious names… don’t you know why there is a Jewish hospital, a Baptist, a
St. John’s, a Methodist, a Deacon’s, a Sisters of Mercy hospital in almost
every city? Because there was a time when religious people realized that the
poor needed healthcare.
Now what most of
those institutions became is a virtual dragon compared to the generous and
loving people who started them but there was a time when being a community of
faith meant that you didn’t just curse the darkness, you started lighting
candles.
The Civil Rights
movement was cradled in the Black churches of the south. America was ripe for a
violent race war in which everyone would have ended up being losers but by
commitment of peaceful, non-violent protest, a disciplined and well-organized
movement saved America from being burned to the ground and this happened in the
lifetime of most of us here.
So, sure, we’re against
war but everybody knows that. Now we need to be in favor of peace. We need to
work for peace, plan for peace, sacrifice for peace. We are against poverty but
we can’t make enough noise in the opinion section of the newspaper to end
poverty. We need to work on the complicated task of creating better jobs,
paying living wages, and closing the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
We despise racism,
and sexism, homophobia, gender bias, and unequal pay for women, but for God’s
sake doesn’t the church that speaks of community, and fellowship, and claims to
be full of brothers and sisters, don’t we know how to break down the walls
between blacks and whites, Latinos and Asians, between the straight and the
gay, the queer and transgender folks? Are we just against prejudice or are we
for love?
I was never a fan of
that old self-help book, Your Erroneous Zones, but there was one line in
it that I have held onto. The author begged readers to stop dwelling on their
dysfunctional families, their less than adequate parents, their experiences of
hardship and betrayal. He said, “So what
if you mother beat you, she’s not beating you now.”
I don’t want to
diminish anyone’s painful history, I don’t want to be dismissive of how abusive
religion can be and certainly has been in my own past. I just don’t want to
rent any space in my skull to those memories.
Don’t call me a
hypocrite the next time you see me pulling weeds but I’m just saying that I
think it is time, it is past time, for us to start focusing on growing more
grass and to let the weeds take care of themselves.
