“Sometimes Family is another ‘F’ Word”

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“Sometimes Family is another ‘F’ Word”      November 27, 2022      Dr. Roger Ray

Brown University Psychology and Counseling 

Types Of Dysfunctional Families

The following are some examples of patterns that frequently occur in dysfunctional families.

·       One or both parents have addictions or compulsions (e.g., drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, gambling, overworking, and/or overeating) that have strong influences on family members.

·       One or both parents use the threat or application of physical violence as the primary means of control. Children may have to witness violence, may be forced to participate in punishing siblings, or may live in fear of explosive outbursts.

·       One or both parents exploit the children and treat them as possessions whose primary purpose is to respond to the physical and/or emotional needs of adults (e.g., protecting a parent or cheering up one who is depressed).

·       One or both parents are unable to provide, or threaten to withdraw, financial or basic physical care for their children. Similarly, one or both parents fail to provide their children with adequate emotional support.

·       One or both parents exert a strong authoritarian control over the children. Often these families rigidly adhere to a particular belief (religious, political, financial, personal). Compliance with role expectations and with rules is expected without any flexibility.

 

I was one of about a thousand audience members crowded into a downtown auditorium in Louisville, KY 35 years ago, to hear the famous author and psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck. His book, The Road Less Traveled, has sold more than 7 million copies, which made everything else that he ever wrote an instant best seller. 

He was an amazingly influential author in spite of his pretty messed up personal life, and still, knowing as much as I do about his rather narcissitic self indulgence, I would still say that if you are only going to read one book before you die, you should read The Road Less Traveled. 

But I was clearly not the only fan in the room that day in the mid 1980’s as we all leaned forward to take in every word that he uttered. When it came time for the “Q and A” after his talk, one of the therapists in the room asked Peck to speak to the then new and instantly popular term, “Dysfunctional family.” 

 

Peck looked at the gathered assembly and asked for a show of hands of people who had grown up in a dysfunctional family, and I swear that I am not exaggerating when I tell you that you could literally feel a breeze in the room as a thousand people simultaneously raised their hands. And Peck observed, if the term refers to literally everyone, then it really is just a description of the human condition. 

 

As going to therapy became more popular and, frankly, something almost mandatory among the more educated, those of us in the family counseling field came up with a few helpful proverbs, one of which was, “Previous generations used to go to their priest to confess their sins, but this generation goes to their therapist to confess their parents’ sins.” 

 

Somewhere between denial of your family of origin’s deficits and a complete repudiation of any personal responsibility, placing all of the blame for anything that has ever gone wrong in your life on your parents, there is some sane balance. 

I received my education in pastoral counseling during my years in the southern Ivy League school, Vanderbilt University. The classism of the perspective from which I was taught counseling in that expensive school showed up quickly in my first clinical placement in a mental health office in Kentucky where I was given most of their court ordered cases of people who were often mentally challenged, violent, and substance abusing. 

Not the sort of people I had been trained to use reflective client-centered listening techniques on to help them rise above the guilt feelings their mother had burdened them with. I realized that some of what I had been told as absolutes may have worked for the sweet-smelling aristocracy, but it wasn’t true in the country roads of rural Kentucky. 

 

One of the things I had been told about self-actualization was that no one could ever fully accept themselves until they had entirely forgiven and accepted their parents. But that sort of truth is what lies behind the most insipid advice I have ever heard being given to people who really did have a family of origin that honestly deserved the title of dysfunctional, and I have heard it repeated a thousand times, “Well, your parents did the best that they could.” That, my friends, is absolutely not a universal truth. Lots of parents really sucked at being parents and what is more, they knew that they sucked at it when they failed to provide for and protect their children, and they especially knew it when they abused their children, physically, sexually, or psychologically.

 

As I mentioned in my last talk, my own parents were dysfunctional in some ways. They held onto a lot of their own hillbilly past with a lot of racial prejudices, and a fairly irrational fear of anything that they didn’t understand which included homosexuals, Jews, Catholics, and almost all foreigners. That gave me stuff to talk about in my weekly meeting with my counseling supervisor and it certainly gave me some junk to rise above.

 

But most of the families I saw in that mental health clinic in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and most of the people I have had to give a lot of my time and attention to after that first clinical placement, were dealing with things for which their parents should not be forgiven or granted acceptance. 

 

I realized that my attitudes about my own family were different from a lot of my peers in college who were often seriously home sick and who became absolutely giddy when it was time to go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. I usually went home for the holidays, as long as my parents were living, but it was often more a trip to be endured than it was something to look forward to. But for those who had been sexually molested, who had been seriously beaten, or who had been forced to work live slaves in their home, or who had been subjected to the violence and deprivations of poverty, especially when that poverty was caused by addiction or mental illness, the holidays were often nightmare scenarios.

 

I am bringing this up on the Sunday after Thanksgiving when many of you will have made that journey home which Garrison Keillor so accurately described as being “holiday guilt trips.” 

 

If you are one of the lucky ones for whom a holiday family reunion is all warm and fuzzy, that’s great and we’re all happy for you but this sermon is not for you. You should be aware that for most of the people around you, this holiday was not undiluted joy. A lot of people you know did not have a Normal Rockwell holiday and it may have been more like an episode of Breaking Bad.

 

I have known people who grew up in pretty normal homes with only mild degrees of neurotic issues who yet complained about their parents obsessively, and I have known people who really should have been taken from their family of origin and placed in a safer foster home who were so brainwashed into the insanity of their homelife that they insist upon heaping love and praise on people who should probably be in jail for the ways that they abused their children. 

 

To all of you, there are some things that I want to say clearly: 

You own your own story. As the famous author, Ann Lamont, once tweeted:

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.”

Parents who think of their children as being nothing more than extensions of themselves assume that they own their children’s lives, and they can reward them with love or punish them with rejection to demand their conformity. These parents have worked hard to prevent their children from ever having any sense of appropriate boundaries, the awareness that they own their own lives and can be different from their parents without feeling guilt. 

Another book that I have recommended to literally hundreds of women over the past 40 years is, My Mother, My Self, by the Freudian psychiatrist, the late Nancy Friday.

 

Though this book as proven to invaluable, to the point that no one seems to have written anything better to recommend to women who are struggling to find some healthy separation from their mothers in more than 2 generations, I don’t think that it is just for women.

 

One of the issues that Friday discusses at length is the whole issue of symbiosis in sick families. For those parents, family love only happens when their children are exactly like them. When they differ from them, in politics, religion, in who they love, or how they raise their children, this is experienced as rejection, or worse, literally, as hate. 

 

Even in very recent years, we have had church members who had escaped the mental prison of their parents’ religion, but even as adults with children of their own, they felt that they had to protect their parents from ever knowing that they no longer attended Catholic mass or an Assemblies of God charismatic church. And in this past decade when politics has been so vitriolic and divisive, if your Fox News watching family members found out that you had a Bernie Sanders sign in your front yard, or, as in my case, a dozen Bernie Sanders signs in my yard, on my fence, and in my kitchen window, asking the question, “What’s so wrong with socialism?” . . . well, that can make Thanksgiving . . . tense. 

 

Alcoholics, drug addicts, people with borderline personality disorders, and narcissists, all tend to create an alternative reality into which they try to force their family members and especially their children. But you don’t have to play along. You can be honest about your family. You can be open about the abuse you have experienced. You can tell your stories, you can even publish your stories if it seems important to you to do so. 

I have always tried to err on the side of being generous and understanding but you folks should know this:  you don’t have to lie or keep sordid secrets for anyone. 

 

This is not about revenge or retaliation, this is about establishing boundaries and taking charge of your own life. I encourage you not to harbor resentments or a fantasies of hurting them back. Trust me, it will be plenty painful for them when you start to establish and maintain appropriate boundaries. Your mother can not make you feel guilty unless you choose to let her make you feel guilt. You may have been trained for years to be manipulated by guilt but that can stop whenever you are ready for it to end. Your father cannot tell you what to think, how to dress, where to work, who to love, or how to vote and if you make that boundary perfectly clear, it will help him to be a more healthy father. 

 

We had a saying in family therapy, “No one goes crazy alone, they always have company.” You cannot change your mother, your father, your children, or any of your siblings or extended family. But you can change yourself and the more healthy you become, they more they have to interact with the healthy you, rather than the cowering victim they may have trained you to be, the more they have to get healthy just to be able to interact with you.

 

When we try to look at family systems, it is something like looking at the balls on a pool table. If one changes position; it necessarily changes the position of the other balls on the table. It is not moving, not changing, not growing, not taking ownership of your own life, that allows everyone to remain just as they are. We always tell the family members of alcoholics and drug addicts, that if you pretend to believe their lies, if you agree to enter into their universe of insanity, then you are enabling them to continue to be addicted. 

Parents know that they have to teach their babies how to walk, how to talk, how to eat, and to dress themselves, but too often they also assume that they also must teach them what to believe, what to think, and how to live. 

 

It is one thing to teach your kids how to balance their checkbook, the pitfalls of credit to avoid, and what to do to maintain their car. It is another to insist that their religion must be your religion, your political views must also be theirs, that they must somehow be a carbon copy of your values and preferences must be the same as you are.

As the famous sociologist from the early part of the last century, Margaret Mead, said so prophetically: Children must be taught how to think, not what to think. Your family cannot tell you what to believe, how to vote, who to love, or what to think and you have to see that you also cannot tell your children or grandchildren what to think, what religion they must be, or how they will form a loving family of their own. 

 

I know that for a whole lot of people, family really is just another “f” word. It was a source of pain, fear, guilt, and a longing for love that is never satisfied so that you end up accepting a kind of mind control as a substitute for love.

 

And even when you become aware of how you have been manipulated, conditioned, victimized, or controlled, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will ever be able to get the kind of love that you want from your family.

If I may reference M. Scott Peck once more, Peck insisted that it is our job to move the ball of evolution farther down the field. Your family of origin may have had issues that you just can’t fix. You can’t go back in time and relive that life with better choices and a more healthy experience. You can be honest about what you have experienced that has made you who you are today. 

 

You can try to improve the quality of your family relationships to the extent that the other members of your family are willing to evolve as well, recognizing that they may not be even remotely interested in changing at all. 

 

But what I think that we all owe to our own children and grandchildren, what we owe to society as a whole, is to take what we received in our family of origin and to improve on it. I worked hard not to pass on to my daughter the kind of irrational prejudices that were a part of my family inheritance, but I did try to pass along the positive traits of honesty, personal responsibility, compassion, and a serious work ethic. I didn’t want for her to have to get over the neurotic guilt and self-condemnation that was a part of my family’s religious beliefs, but I also had to hold my tongue as she explored spiritual options that I certainly would not have chosen for her.

 

I held my tongue when she was in a serious relationship with a wealthy Wall Street guy until she learned on her own that being rich doesn’t make you a good person. I could have saved her a couple of years but the right answer for me was to just tell her that I will love anyone that she chooses to love . . . while I hold out for more of a Gandhi than a Gordon Gekko. 

 

None of us will get it all right. I doubt that many people ever tried any harder to be a good father than I did and yet I know that I didn’t get it right and there are many things that I wish that I could have done better. Still, I know that I did my job, which was to do better than my parents did and now the ball is in her hands to see if she can improve upon her family of origin . . . which I feel certain that she will.

 

Thanksgiving is behind us now, I am wishing for you an even better, more loving or just a more healthy Christmas for you and your clan. 

“A Hard Look”: How the US Fails Its Children

“A Hard Look”: How the US Fails Its Children
David Ketchum
November 20, 2022

Watch the video HERE

I didn’t learn about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child until I was living in Cambodia, where it was an important framework for helping us address family violence, human trafficking, and community development. Maybe this isn’t too surprising, since the Convention is still young. It was adopted on this day (November 20) in 1989 by the UN General Assembly and became effective on September 2, 1990, after it was ratified by the required number of members. It is a very basic commitment to honoring and protecting the dignity and humanity of children, and 196 nations, including every member of the United Nations except one, has made that commitment. The one UN member that is still holding out, three decades later, is the USA. 

To our credit, the USA has ratified two Optional Protocols on restricting “Children in Armed Conflict” and the “Sale of Children.” But, as President Barack Obama described it in his 2008 campaign, our collective failure to ratify the Convention is “embarrassing.” Nevertheless, even embarrassment has been insufficient to muster the political will to address this issue, as no US president has even submitted the Convention to the US Senate for ratification. Today’s anniversary of the Convention’s initial adoption is a good opportunity for us to reflect a little on why we might be in this situation and what it means. 

In the United States, the arguments against ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child with which I’m most familiar usually boil down to parental or state sovereignty, or both. At the heart of the resistance is who gets to choose what is in “the best interest of the child.” Many detractors of the Convention insist that parents should get to make that decision. If there is evidence of abuse or neglect, they may make allowances for the state to intervene. Intervention beyond this is usually resisted, and the idea of a UN committee being empowered to determine international standards of care is seen as a threat to both national and parental sovereignty. This is despite the fact that Article 5 of the Convention explicitly names and protects - 

 “the responsibilities, rights and duties of parents or, where applicable, the members of the extended family or community as provided for by local custom, legal guardians or other persons legally responsible for the child, to provide, in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child, appropriate direction and guidance in the exercise by the child of the rights recognized in the present Convention.”

        The children’s version puts it more simply: “Governments should let families and communities guide their children so that, as they grow up, they learn to use their rights in the best way. The more children grow, the less guidance they will need.” These protections are one of the reasons that the ACLU has described popular opposition to the Convention as “based on incorrect assumptions”. But they also correctly and importantly point out that, underneath these false assumptions, we are avoiding “some hard truths about the exceptionally bad way we treat children in the United States” and the related hard work we need to do “to bring our laws and practices in line with human rights.” 

Doing that hard work is the priority, whether the USA ever ratifies the Convention or not. And while I personally support ratification, there continues to be discussion on what is the most practical way forward. I can understand those who say the objections will likely never be met, and that this means we should focus on more local and statewide movements and legislation for protecting children. Where we agree, and where we can work together, is on transforming our systems and cultures to actually protect the wellbeing and humanity of our children. This is where we can begin. 

The Congressional Research Service provided a report on the Convention in 2015 that continues to be helpful in understanding the issues, and their summary of objections based in parental authority is especially interesting. Rather than seeing value in protecting a child’s privacy, a provision intended to protect children from  government and corporate invasions of privacy, objecting parties wanted to ensure that parents “have the right to search their children’s rooms or be notified if a child is arrested or undergoes an abortion.” Instead of  supporting a child’s freedom of expression, objectors feared that the provision “could be interpreted to allow children to speak their minds at all times”, in opposition to parental authority.  Similarly, they objected to a child’s right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion because they feared it “might give children the right to object to their parents’ religious beliefs or training.”

        Objectors resist a child’s access to information and education because they do not want children to access materials “they find objectionable.” A similar reasoning leads to rejection of freedom of association, to restrict a child’s “right to associate with people that his or her parents do not approve of”. Finally, Article 19(1)’s declaration that “no child should be subjected to physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation,” at school or by a parent or legal guardian” was rejected because parents could maintain their right to use corporal punishment. 

I can’t help but reflect on these ideas through the lens of my own experiences of authoritarian cultures. Whether consciously sought or not, this focus on parental rights to control and coerce their children also connects with the ability of leaders to maintain their own power. It is a self-perpetuating cycle, reinforcing cultural assumptions that also reinforces the status quo. While authoritarian tendencies exist across the religious and political spectrums, I have only personally experienced it in a conservative context. However, I oppose authoritarianism in any form, whether it is from the right or the left. And I can remember several key moments in my own spiritual journey when I had to recognize, resist, and heal from such an abuse of authority. For all our sakes, I’ll only share only two examples today, both from experiences I had in the early 2000s. 

First, one of the notoriously difficult passages in the Christian scriptures comes from 1 Timothy 2:11-15 (NRSVUE) –

“A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.”

Most preachers and exegetes I heard comment on this passage went out of their way to either interpret it in a creative way or dismiss it as a corruption of earlier and more egalitarian teachings. So I was surprised when I began encountering preachers who increasingly leaned into and even celebrated an explicitly misogynistic interpretation. I remember clearly hearing a prominent preacher explain that the greatest temptation for women was to usurp the role of men and their headship. Men were divinely appointed to lead and dominate women, and women would need to be content with caring for and dominating children, under the umbrella of the man’s authority. Usurping a man’s place meant doing anything independently, from earning an income to teaching a man. This was literally an argument along the lines of “women belong in the kitchen.” Moreover, everything needed to be under the authority of a girl’s father, a woman’s husband, and/or their male pastor. You couldn’t act without a man’s permission, which could be revoked at any time. 

        And yet, this control was presented as a benevolent gift. All of this was “for her own good.” Remember that this entire argument was framed within the context that usurping a man’s authority was the greatest temptation and sin for a woman. The best deterrent against such rebellion, this preacher argued, was to have children. Motherhood would give them a meaningful life while keeping them busy and tired, reducing their likelihood of falling into sin. On another occasion, I was incredulous as I sat and listened to a robust debate between church members about the age a boy became too old to be taught by a woman, since women should only teach other women and children, lest they “assume authority over a man.” In conversations and sermons of this sort, I never heard any awareness of the vulnerability of this kind of relationship to domestic violence. And I never heard any discussion of the rights and wellbeing of either women or children. The goal was to maintain the power of male leaders (in the home and in the church), taught with the assumption that maintaining patriarchal power would doubtless protect women and children. 

     My second example was even more shocking to me. I had gone to listen to a prominent leader of the Missouri Baptist Convention, who was going to be a guest preacher at a nearby church event. I was used to some version of the talks about male headship and the authority of men, but my childhood church had still generally accepted the goodness of human life and the innocence of babies. I was confronted with my own  naïveté when I heard this leader describe how babies were selfish from the start, and that their cries were proof of their inherent, total depravity. He lamented that babies don’t think at all about the needs of their parents and will cry incessantly until they get what they want. This, he said, was evidence of their sinfulness. It followed, in his thinking, that parents had a responsibility to punish and control their children: to keep them from indulging their sinful impulses, to convince them of their sinfulness, and to warn them that their sinfulness deserved eternal punishment. I was already a parent by this time, and I couldn’t fathom viewing my child as this kind of enemy, intent on thwarting my wellbeing and deserving my threats and coercion to bend them to my will. But the pattern was becoming clear. There was no awareness of the vulnerability of this kind of relationship to authoritarian and even abusive parenting. And there was no awareness of the rights and wellbeing of children. The goal was to maintain the power of male leaders (in the home and in the church), with the assumption that maintaining men’s power would doubtless protect women and children. 

     It was not my experience, and I am not aware of research that demonstrates, that people who hold conservative religious and political views are more likely to abuse or neglect children. However, my experience is that cultures that uphold authoritarian parenting and leadership (whether left or right) create an atmosphere that helps empower and shield abusers. (This is in contrast with permissive parenting styles, which tend toward neglect.) Psychological research is helping us better understand how this works. For example, a 2015 study on authoritarian parenting “found that almost 50 percent of children were at risk for anxiety, and 10 percent for depression and somatization, with these rates persisting over time.” And Dr. Grant Brenner summarized the results of a 2020 study demonstrating that:

“All other factors equal, when parents violate psychological boundaries in an attempt to control the inner world of their children, they are setting them up to be vulnerable to abusive future relationships.”

The particular mechanisms for achieving this are familiar to many of us:

“Psychological control of others means gaslighting, making others feel ashamed of their own valid feelings and thoughts, using guilt and blame to turn others against themselves and manipulate them, and even sadistically and exploitatively ‘messing with their heads’ for parents high on dark personality traits.”

        These mechanisms also happen to complement the objections to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that we discussed earlier. And it aligns with my own experience of rigid, authoritarian religious communities. I personally was trained by my extended religious community and culture to feel ashamed of my basic human inclinations and needs (especially related to gender and sexuality), experience guilt that blossomed into self-loathing, and become vulnerable to manipulation, all while I was a child. The lack of protection and resources meant that I spent years doing intensive healing work to grow into my own well-being. We are still repeating tragic versions of this experience in the lives of so many children. And the justification for sacrificing the wellbeing of our children is often that emphasis on maintaining parental and religious authority, grounded in a fear of losing power to socialize children through psychological control. If I could give a message to those who treated me this way, or who treat other children like this, it is simply this: it didn’t work. You hurt me instead. All your insistence on loving and protecting me, of having my best interests in mind, didn’t change the reality of that harm. 

        And it is not only psychological control and harm. We can also ask: what are the broader, structural results of our failure to protect children? What kind of world have we created? In the United States, as Farzad and Ochoa Familiy Law has pointed out:  

• “At least one in seven children suffer child abuse (Article 19).
• Approximately 4.3 million children do not have any health insurance (Article 24).
• Nearly 1.5 million children experience homelessness (Article 27).
• About 10,000 children are forced into the commercial sex trade (Article 34). …
• U.S. Customs and Border Patrol have over 15,500 unaccompanied children detained in overcrowded facilities (Article 22).
• Children as young as 12 can labor limitless hours in agriculture work (Article 32).
• Approximately 80% of the over 200,000 child brides between 2000 and 2015 were married to an adult (Article 34).
• Juvenile detention centers and prisons house around 60,000 minors on any given day (Article 40).”

      In September, Human Rights Watch released a report card grading each US state on four representative issues protecting children and their rights, based on the Convention: “child marriage, corporal punishment, child labor, and juvenile justice.” The highest overall grade was a C, achieved by just four states. 26 states received D’s, and the remaining 20 received F’s. Missouri ranked #32, earning an F. As Human Rights Watch observed, “The US is the only UN member country that has not ratified the international treaty on children’s rights. Most people might think this isn’t such a big deal because the US is good to children. But it turns out we aren’t and our state laws don’t help.”

These problems demonstrate the actual dangers that our children are facing across the United States. We have a good idea what policies would make a difference, and we can support them as much and as often as we can. But this is another area where an important part of our work is in transforming our cultures, because our cultural assumptions are standing in the way of our children’s wellbeing. Our collective hesitation to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child can help us understand just how important this cultural transformation is making real progress as a society. And we can all be engaged in meaningful work, personally and in our communities, to help make this happen. 

For many of us adults, we can do the internal work. Even if you did not get directly wounded, most of us did not escape being socialized into these cultural assumptions. This is especially important for anyone who works with children, including parents, caregivers, teachers, social works, and, increasingly, law enforcement officials. A good foundation for the kind of shift we need is described by Pam Leo as “connection parenting” – “parenting through connection instead of coercion, through love instead of fear.” She points out that authoritarian parenting “is based on the child’s fear of losing the parent’s love,” while permissive parenting “is based on the parent’s fear of losing the child’s love.” They are both reactive, and neither consistently support healthy relationships or child development. In particular, coercion is a quick fix that may get short-term results but undermines long-term wellbeing. Shifting to connection is a long-term commitment, because a healthy relationship takes time. But it is precisely this commitment that we need to collectively make, if we want to open up a way to actually protecting children and their capacity to thrive. As Leo put it, “Let’s raise children who won’t have to recover from their childhood.”

“Even Where We Mean to Mend Her”: Transforming Culture in an Age of Catastrophic Climate Change

“Even Where We Mean to Mend Her”: Transforming Culture in an Age of Catastrophic Climate Change by David Ketchum November 13, 2022 Watch the video HERE

        It’s been another hectic week, in the world and in our community, from midterm elections and ballot measures to natural disasters to climate change summits to continued war in Ukraine and so much more. The world remains both more wonderful and more terrible than most of us can possibly imagine. And amid all the headlines this week, I’ve been thinking about “Binsey Poplars," a poem that is nearly 150 years old.
   In 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated a row of trees and grieved that they had been cut down. His grief expanded from those trees to the hubris of humanity, elegantly and painfully describing how quickly we alter the living world of which we are a part – often to its (and our own) devastation: 

 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
    Of a fresh and following folded rank
            Not spared, not one
            That dandled a sandalled
            Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

 O if we but knew what we do
           When we delve or hew—
    Hack and rack the growing green!
            Since country is so tender
    To touch, her being so slender,
    That, like this sleek and seeing ball
    But a prick will make no eye at all,
            Where we, even where we mean
            To mend her we end her,
            When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
    Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
            Strokes of havoc unselve
            The sweet especial scene,
            Rural scene, a rural scene,
            Sweet especial rural scene. 

Within these short verses is the haunting thought that no one could have cut down those trees if they knew and loved them like Hopkins did. Or, if the trees had to be removed, no one could have done it without a great deal of care and with the sorrow of losing a friend. And you certainly couldn’t fell the trees without a keen sense of humility. Their growth is counted slowly, in years and decades, while their death is over in seconds and minutes, needing only ten or twelve “strokes of havoc.” Once done, it is done for a long time; there is no quick remedy if you make a mistake. And once done, that beautiful chance to know and love them is gone. “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.” So care must be taken, and will be taken, if you know what it is you are doing and know the love that binds all of us living things together. If you have ever watched a tree, dancing in the wind, you might know the feeling. 

Most haunting to me was that insight that “even where we mean / To mend her we end her, / When we hew or delve”. This isn’t a comment on human nature; there is nothing inherent in humanity that makes us automatically destructive to the earth to which we belong. But it is possible for humans to create cultures and systems that operate with such hubris that “even where we mean / To mend [the earth] we end her”. This is, tragically, where we find ourselves.

Even as we reflect together today, global leaders are gathered for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt. It’s the 27th of these gatherings, which Oxfam calls “crucial opportunities to show commitment and progress towards climate justice”. There is important work to be done, but also the reality that the dominating systems, currently driven by economic considerations that value short-term profit over everything. We cannot consume our way toward a sustainable, regenerative, equitable future. We’ve known this for years. As Oxfam put it last week, 

  “Every year since the historic Paris Agreement we have hoped for concrete global action on climate. And each year, while world leaders claim to be taking action (or, during the Trump years, proudly reject climate action), we are forced to confront the fact that we are still far away from meeting emissions reduction and finance goals laid out in 2015. And that even the goals set out are far below what is needed to protect humanity from dangerous climate change. / This year, in the face of the realization that countries’ current combined climate plans will increase global emissions by over 10 percent by 2030, real leadership that is more than platitudes can feel far away.” 

 

The words return to us: “even where we mean / To mend her we end her”. 

        Hopkins understood this because of similar dynamics wreaked devastation in his own time. The nineteenth century was on fire with a relentless pursuit of capital and industry, with seemingly little care for the impacts on the wellbeing of people or the earth. Hopkins’ world and concerns were different than our concerns today, but they rhyme. In both eras, the problems threatened catastrophe, with grief and helplessness in their wakes. Hopkins put this into words in “God’s Grandeur,” where the earth, and with it, our spirits, were trampled under the heavy boots of extraction and exploitation: 

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; 
 And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

         It can be bewildering to look honestly at such a world and ask: How can we effectively resist the exploitation of each other and the earth? What could possibly slow this destruction, let alone heal it? What could possibly slow the exuberant embrace of violence – direct, structural, and cultural - as a solution, let alone transform it? The crush of society (and our own broken hearts) would easily have us coalesce into the lifeless monotony of selfishness and apathy, asking us to look the other way, to let things be, to mind our own business on the way to an eventual and meaningless death. These questions are some of the reasons why I find voices like Hopkins’ remain meaningful and empowering. 

        I was introduced to Hopkins’ poetry as a freshman in college, and they quickly found a place in my heart. I had the habit of climbing trees, especially the Osage Oranges lining our neighborhood or the young sycamores lining a creek: sometimes to make a splash (when the water was deep enough), usually to feel the gentle sway (as the branches opened their long fingers to catch the wind), and, when the night was friendly, to be that much closer to the stars and moon. If I had a chance in the daylight, I’d carry a book with me, reading while hidden away in the leaves. Most of the places where these friendly trees grew were bulldozed long ago, making room developments abundant in concrete. Grieving for felled trees was already a familiar feeling. 

I say I was quickly at home with Hopkins’ poetry, but there was a bit of a rough start. The first time I read his poems, I felt off balance. Poetry had previously been overwhelmingly presented to me in rhymed couplets, and often with platitudinous meanings. So I stumbled over Hopkins’ sprung rhythm and unfamiliar images, but I kept coming back until I felt as familiar with the forms as I did with the meanings. Because reading one of his poems was like making a friend, the kind of friend that I could stay up with late into night, exploring all the wonder and beauty and terror of the world. Hopkins’ world and language were deeply religious, to be sure, but so was I, and he gave me words and images that helped me feel hope that there might be a place for someone like me in this wild and variegated world. 

For example, Hopkins wrote a poem called “Pied Beauty.” (Before you get too disappointed, pied is an adjective that means the object has two or more colors. This can apply to pies, however, so please feel at liberty to imagine the fierce, purple-blue of baked blueberries against a flaky, golden crust.) “Pied Beauty” is an ode to the feast of colors and designs that surround us on every side, if we pause to notice: 

  “Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.” 

All the things we rush by, that become so commonplace that we fail to notice them, become an opportunity to experience joy. The key was in my willingness to be present with them. This attention to detail, opening the door to gratitude and joy, was a theme in my young adult life, and I had a bookshelf and a backpack to prove it. Hopkins reminded me that resistance and change can be joyful. In fact, the joy cannot be contained. The divine beauty is to be found precisely in “All things counter, original, spare, strange: / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)”. Being counter in the economy of joy is not negative or hostile; it is a celebration. ‘Counter’ in this case means the opposite of that mindless crush – trading death for life, apathy for courage, selfishness for joy. It is a delight that reveals the staggering beauty, intricacy, and diversity of life. Nature is not mono- anything. Hopkins’ praise is a litany of sky and earth; cow and trout; chestnuts and bird’s wings. Being counter is a reflection not of hostility, but of reconciliation – of recognizing the beauty and worth of people, animals, plants, and minerals, and of seeing in this recognition our own hope for peace. 

Hopkins could see both of these contrasting worlds and hold them together. If we return to “God’s Grandeur,” we find that those lines that describe the trampling of the earth are sandwiched between a celebration of the irrepressible greatness and beauty of the world on the one hand and the divine hope that “nature is never spent” on the other: 

  “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

“And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” 

You don’t need to be religious, let alone Christian, to feel and appreciate the shift in the language. There is a movement from wonder (with grandeur flashing “like shining from shook foil”), to loss (trodden and seared, bleared, and smeared), and then to renewal (“the dearest freshness deep down things”). That is a movement for us today, to acknowledge honestly the seriousness of the ecological damage humans have inflicted, while learning from regenerative capacities of the earth to transform our cultures and support our common healing. The scarcity and alienation, born of exploitation, is not inevitable. And as the product of our own cultural assumptions and actions, its transformation is within our influence. As Wendell Berry wrote,  

“We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled. 

“We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.” 

“Recover” is a well-chosen word here, reminding us that other times and cultures have preserved this sense of gratitude, care, and contentment in relation to one another and the earth. More recently, Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote that: 

 “The shortage is due not to how much material wealth there actually is, but to the way in which it is exchanged or circulated. The market system artificially creates scarcity by blocking the flow between the source and the consumer. Grain may rot in the warehouse while hungry people starve because they cannot pay for it. The result is famine for some and diseases of excess for others. The very earth that sustains us is being destroyed to fuel injustice. … And yet, while creating an alternative to destructive economic structures is imperative, it is not enough. It is not just changes in policies that we need, but also changes to the heart. Scarcity and plenty are as much qualities of the mind and spirit as they are of the economy. Gratitude plants the seed for abundance. ... It celebrates cultures of regenerative reciprocity, where wealth is understood to be having enough to share and riches are counted in mutually beneficial relationships. … Gratitude for all the earth has given us lends us courage to turn and face the Windigo that stalks us, to refuse to participate in an economy that destroys the beloved earth to line the pockets of the greedy, to demand an economy that is aligned with life, not stacked against it.” (Braiding Sweetgrass)

I don’t read Gerard Manley Hopkins as often as I did twenty years ago. But, for lovers of trees and books, I still have my old paperback copy of his poems, a Wordsworth Poetry Library edition which has accompanied me on many hikes and up many trees. His voice is part of me and continues to be a reminder of the type of relationship we can and need to have with this incredible earth. Returning to those well-loved poplars, we can reflect on how different and healthy our approach to development, industry, agriculture, entertainment, and our daily lives could be, if we cared for the earth like Hopkins cared for those trees. We couldn’t brazenly destroy the planet, provoke a mass extinction event, or accelerate climate change. We couldn’t do all this at the expense of the most vulnerable humans and ecosystems on earth. We would do everything with a great deal of care and, when development did require some level of destruction, we would proceed with the sorrow of losing a friend and with a keen sense of humility. 

        Destruction is quick work, while life and ecological health is counted slowly, in decades and even centuries. There is little room for error, for “strokes of havoc.” Our scientists have told us this for decades, urging us to take seriously our belonging to the planet, to care for ourselves by caring for her. But there has been a gap; the dominant cultures brush all of this aside to continue to “Hack and rack the growing green” to accumulate wealth and power. So we must continually turn to voices and cultures that show this other way, that remind us that care must be taken, and will be taken, if we know what it is we are doing and know the intricate web that binds all living things together. (If you have ever watched a tree, dancing in the wind, you might know the feeling.) And joyful insights like these - birthed by the wisdom of our elders, the wonder of our children, the keen ears of our poets and eyes of our painters, the songs of our singers, the hands of our gardeners – will gather to a greatness, shine out like shook foil, and make a healthier, happier planet and people possible again.  

“True Friendship (only exists among good people)

“True Friendship (only exists among good people)  Nov. 6, 2022

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Cicero, a Roman orator in the 1^st century BCE, on friendship:

But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle - friendship can only exist between good men. I do not, however, press this too closely, like the philosophers who push their definitions to a superfluous accuracy. They have truth on their side, perhaps, but it is of no practical advantage. Those, I mean, who say that no one but the "wise" is "good." Granted, by all means. But the "wisdom" they mean is one to which no mortal ever yet attained. We must concern ourselves with the facts of everyday life as we find it - not imaginary and ideal perfections. . . 

We mean then by the "good" those whose actions and lives leave no question as to their honor, purity, equity, and liberality; who are free from greed, lust, and violence; and who have the courage of their convictions. The men I have just named may serve as examples. Such men as these being generally accounted "good," let us agree to call them so, on the ground that to the best of human ability they follow nature as the most perfect guide to a good life. . .

Now friendship may be thus defined: a complete accord on all subjects human and divine, joined with mutual good will and affection. And with the exception of wisdom, I am inclined to think nothing better than this has been given to man by the immortal gods. 

 

I have recently returned from a three week-long trip to Asia. It was a long-delayed journey that had been postponed until I could be away long enough to justify the amount to time that it takes to get there and back. I thought that I had timed the trip well but the one thing that I had not factored in was the monsoon season in Thailand. 

We have all heard of monsoons but if you have never been in one, it is difficult to describe. The rain was coming in from Vietnam which was experiencing a hurricane and so, I’ll allow Forest Gump to description southeast Asian rain.

One day it started raining, and it didn't quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin' rain, and big ol' fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night.

I had a good trip. I saw a lot and I learned a lot but what I saw more than anything else was the inside of my hotel room where I watched the Asian news in English where they talked incessantly about the rain and the flooding right where I happened to be. I didn’t have a computer, a book, or access to any programs in English other than the Asian news, so I had a lot of time to think.

 

Now that I am in this transition from my more than 40 year long career as a parish pastor, through this period of being part time and evolving towards being a fully retired minister, I spend a lot of time thinking about my life in the church. As with many other professions, there were high points and low spots. There were successes and accolades that I did not deserve, and there were heart-breaks and disappointments, most which, I also am convinced, that I did not deserve. 

 

Captured by torrential rain and flooded streets in a small apartment in Phuket, I can say that I was haunted by ghosts . . . the memories of friendships that had failed . . . relationships with people I had once thought would last a lifetime, that were closer than blood kin, and more vital than even parents or siblings, but which, almost always with an element of shock and disbelief, came to an end. 

 

I don’t say this to get sympathy because I know that everyone who has managed to live beyond middle school has experienced the broken heart of losing a close friend. But, I am speaking about friendship from my own perspective and, in my life as a minister, friendship has taken on some unique twists and turns. Also, all that time I had alone during the monsoon in Asia, it was my ghosts that haunted me, not yours. I just hope that my story has familiar touchstones for you.

 

My reflections included a lot of time going back to the decision I made when I was 21 years old, to go to seminary rather than law school. Back then I had a lot explanations that had to do with God’s call, and the greater good, but I realize now that I primarily did it because I wanted to be loved.  

 

I have always believed that I had one of the less miserable childhoods of almost anyone I have known. I wasn’t molested and while my parents were not afraid of using corporal punishment, it wasn’t frequent and typically wasn’t much. But, it is true that in the 1940’s my parents had two children, that they meant to have, were happy to have, and, they were convinced, were all that they would have.

 

In the 1950’s, they had two more sons which they distinctly and obviously did not mean to have and that they did not want. I was the second of those two mishaps. Still, unlike so many of the people who have scheduled appointments to come talk to me through the years, my home was stable. There was no fighting, there were no loud arguments, no talk of divorce, there was no drinking or substance abuse, and we wore clean clothes, ate three meals a day, we were driven to school, and we were taken to the doctor when we were sick. And most of the people who have had reason to come talk to me about their family of origin could not say about their family what I just said about mine. 

 

What was missing from my family home, at least from my end of the birth order, was any sign of affection, of approval, acceptance, or even anything that might have passed for either love or joy. It wasn’t a dysfunctional family. In fact, it was a family that was really really good at functioning. We had our assigned duties, and the house and lawn were kept with a kind of military precision. 

 

The saving grace for me in that sterile environment was the fact that my family went to church. My mother was the church secretary, so I walked to church every day after school, and we were there for every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night service they ever dreamed of having. Being in church at least 6 days a week was not just my career, it was also my childhood.

 

Church had a lot more dimensions to it than my home did. The organist was an alcoholic, the choir director was a teacher with a taste for adolescent boys. There was the deacon who owned the dive-in theater that showed X-rated films, visible from just the right part of state highway 31. There was, for a time, the governor of Kentucky, and a few less honorable politicians, a few well known criminals, and no small amount of philandering. 

I wasn’t aware of all of that when I was young but with each new revelation, church continued to be more interesting to me than almost anything else in my life.

 

Church was where we talked about important things. It was where we read books, we even, to a certain degree, experienced the arts, and it was in church that I heard the war in Vietnam condemned. It was in church that I heard a demand for the integration of our public schools, for decent working conditions and pay in our local factories, and even an absolute rejection of capital punishment. 

 

Our pastor, Brother Duncan was a powerful, tall, lean, white-haired preacher, and as a child it seemed to me spoke with confidence as if God was whispering in his ear every time he stepped into the pulpit. As it turned out, it wasn’t always God that he was in conversation with. When he didn’t get satisfaction from the managers of the local sewing factory, he also called in his brother, who was a labor union organizer. And in that little town, they succeeded in unionizing the largest employer in the region. A nearly impossible though courageous accomplishment.

 

But that was southern Kentucky in the 1960’s, so the church fired Brother Duncan, and he got revenge by promptly dying of a heart attack; but not before he had planted a seed in my heart. The church, the town, my own parents had turned on him, but I knew something that they didn’t know . . . I knew that Brother Duncan was right. I didn’t know how to be loved, but I had a role model in how to be a prophet. 

 

The church was always more of a family to me than my family was. They could be messy and cruel but there was love there, and honest debate, and when, at a very young age, I became a preacher, I was certainly challenged and criticized but I was also nurtured, encouraged, and loved and those were things I had never felt at home. 

 

I was only 23 years old when I started writing opinion pieces for local newspaper, taking on a corrupt city government that was protecting bootlegging, prostitution, and drug sales in the black neighborhood of Russellville, KY. I put them out of business by getting that rural community to vote in legal liquor sales which closed down the bootleggers and their related illegal industries, increased the tax base which increased the size of the police force, and though I didn’t get fired, that started my long history of getting death threats and suffering humiliating attacks in the press. But I was probably the only 23-year-old preacher who got police protection every Sunday morning . . . which is not relevant to this story. 

 

I had experienced an intensity of friendship in my college campus ministry. There were endless conversations, warm hugs, there was compassion, empathy, and opportunity to serve, to make mistakes, and to grow and mature. It was easy to fall in love and to get married too young in that environment, as many of us did, because that was a context in which we had found meaning and purpose for life, even if we had little appreciation for how brief that whole college experience would be. 

 

In graduate school, I became aware of how I had been shaped by the emotional vacuum of my home. How I longed to turn my congregation into more than a mere faith community. I wanted it to be a loving family. I wanted friendships that became fraternal, life-long, loving, and joyful. 

 

Cicero said more than 2000 years ago that real friendship was impossible except among truly good people, and as soon as he said that he began to back pedal, acknowledging that you couldn’t expect good people to be perfect people. He never really cleared it up but what he meant was something like “good-ish” people. 

 

What I became aware of, over and over again, is that everyone is broken. There is hardly a person who is old enough to leave the backyard and who kept walking until the clothesline was no longer in sight, who didn’t have a few exposed nerves. 

 

It is a lot easier for church members to make friendships and keep them because they don’t know all or even much about what each other really believes, whereas the minister is always holding the talking stick. My ex-wife liked to say, “You have no unpublished thoughts.” Some of my professors at Vanderbilt would occasionally say, “Now, you can’t say this in your churches, but….” And I would start to take notes furiously because whatever I was not supposed to revel from the pulpit was going to be my next sermon. 

 

I think that the academics in schools like Vanderbilt assume that church folk really are more like sheep than they are thinking people. They assumed that church people couldn’t stand too much truth. I wanted to end the centuries of teaching successive generations myths that did not serve their real lives. I wanted to expose the lies and reveal the naked truth.

 

However, that impulse was in direct conflict with what I wanted the most: I wanted my congregation’s love and friendship more than a drowning victim wanted to breathe, but I never made it easy for them to do. It took me getting fired at the age of 50 to realize that you can get a congregation’s respect without getting their love and that virtually no church will love any minister who is not, first and foremost, a moderate who holds no strong opinions about anything of importance. 

 

You add to the controversy that comes with trying to be a prophetic preacher, the secrets you learn when you are a parish pastor. I almost never had a church member who managed to stay in a friendship with me when I had been called into their most embarrassing life moments…. Sometimes I had to go break up domestic disputes.

 

I wrestled a pistol out of my best friend’s hand when I walked into a drunken family fight. She had shot at her out of control husband, and missed him, thankfully, but the bullet had gone through the wall into the nursery and had literally pierced the blanket in the crib covering their sleeping baby. We had been so close, but as happened hundreds of times after that, when you bail someone out of jail, or have someone arrested, when you know about the affairs, the crimes, the addictions, well, most people don’t have what it takes to face their shadows and still be friends with the people who have seen them in their worst moments.

Real friendship can only take place among good people . . . not perfect people, but good-ish people . . . people who have the character to be known for both their good attributes and their brokenness, and to still love the people who have seen both sides of who they are. 

 

These are the ghosts that visited me when the streets of Phuket were three feet deep in flood waters, and I had a few days of isolation to remember where all of the scars on my heart had come from. And I still feel grief about every friendship that ended that might have been saved if we had been smart enough, disciplined enough, good enough to rise above the pain of conflict or humiliation. 

 

 

I have already talked to long to give the friendship of Jesus and Judas the time and energy it deserves so I am going to distill it down to a nutshell: Judas was not a real person. Judas is a literary invention, what we call an interlocular. Judas isn’t one person, but Mark invented him as a literary representative of a lot of people, it is no accident that “Judas” sounds like “Judah.” Mark distilled all of the betrayal, all of the falsehood, all of the pain and broken relationships that led up to the crucifixion of Jesus and put it into one character in a brilliantly described passion narrative. If it makes you mad to hear me say that Judas wasn’t a real person so matter-of-factly, write to me ask me to prove it and maybe I will do that in April around Easter.

 

We don’t have a lot of historical evidence to go on but my best account of the actual death of Jesus of Nazareth is that we was crucified by the Roman government along with other Jewish trouble makers, under a charge of insurrection following a riot he started in the Temple’s outer court. 

This probably happened during the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot, in the fall. But, so far as we know, the first gospel writer, Mark, takes tremendous liberties with history to give us a passion narrative that, in spite of his bad grammar, gives us one of the most brilliant narratives in all of literature.

 

Mark is, on one level, trying to answer one of the first and biggest problems with the Christian story: if Jesus was God’s chosen one, how did he get killed? And the answer couldn’t be simply that the powerful Roman government plucked him out of a band of rioters and executed him. Mark tells the story of the death of Jesus as an archetypal narrative of betrayal . . . symbolically, at least, a betrayal by everyone; his family, his closest disciples, and all of his Judean people, but Mark pulls it down into a few characters . . . a governor, a high priest, his friend Peter, but mostly, it was interlocular, the symbolic character of Judas.

 

Judas was portrayed as the most trusted friend. Judas carried the money bag, he was the one trusted with their resources. He is said to have always been seated next to Jesus. In fact, he was the kind of friend who could walk up to Jesus in a crowd and just greet him with a kiss. It was that person, that beloved friend, who could bring about the death of God’s very own son. 

 

William Shakespeare is obviously borrowing from Mark’s passion narrative in the way that he describes the death of Julius Caesar. We know from history that Caesar was stabbed by a group of Roman senators who were, in part, organized by Marcus Brutus, but Shakespeare makes it very personal. 

He describes Caesar being surrounded by his assassins and one by one they stab him, and Caesar turns to see with each blow who is holding the dagger. Finally, he is stabbed by Brutus, and Shakespeare says that Caesar looked at his friend and said, “Et tu, Brute? Then die Caesar.” Suggesting that the mighty Roman dictator could not survive the betrayal of his close friend. 

 

Medically speaking, someone is likely to die from being stabbed more than 20 times, but that is an irrelevant biological observation because when you have been betrayed by a friend, when your heart is broken by the loss of a close friendship, it feels like you have been stabbed in the heart. 

 

Cicero was critical of the sophists of his day who warned people to avoid making close friends. They seemed to suggest that you should be “friendly” with people who can benefit you in some way, but avoid actually loving someone because they will inevitably hurt you. 

 

Love is dangerous that way and Cicero didn’t disagree, but in spite of the risk, you should still allow yourself to love a good person, if only we could figure out who really is good . . . or at least, good-ish. I’m a fairly clever boy with more than a little training in psychology, and I have been wrong a hundred times more often than I have been right. Admittedly, the unique nature of my work, and undoubtably, the way that I have done it, makes it hard to be a good friend to me, but still, love is worth the risk. 

 

If you don’t want to be a sophist in the way that Cicero describes them, you can’t just use people and discard them when they are no longer useful or when the friendship asks a bit too much of you, but I bet that both Freud and Nostradamus had less than a 500 batting average when it came to picking the people who were actually good enough to be a trustworthy friend.

 

I’ve taken thirty minutes of your time to get to this point. Friendships can be and most often are, dangerous or at least disappointing, the worst one’s can kill you and at best, most of them will disappoint you, and yet they are still worth the risk and possibly even necessary to life and they are necessary to the success of families, companies, churches, armies, and nations but no one can consistently tell in advance who has the character to hold up their end of the bargain. 

 

Still, there is this one important thing that you can do. You can be good enough to be worthy of friendship yourself. You can choose to never stab a friend in the back, to never betray them with a kiss. You can choose to never abandon a friend in their darkest hour. And I would like to add even this . . . do not assume that friendships are in endless supply. Do not lose a friend through neglect, absence, forgetfulness, or by taking them for granted. 

 

My very own “ides of March” actually took place in July of 2007 when I was fired from my church position in a coup that was, largely organized by false friends. I withdrew, hard. For a time, I cut myself off from everyone. I remember even saying to my daughter that I hoped that I would never be dumb enough to ever trust another person. 

 

Slowly, I recovered enough to try again but, admittedly, not without a lot of caution and no small amount of sophistry. I gave almost all of my energy to starting our progressive church and rarely had a minute for anyone who wasn’t a part of that project. I starved a lot of friendships through neglect while being so focused on our church. Only in the past year, as I have begun to step back from full-time ministry, have I made space to just be a friend to some people who couldn’t care less what I do in my professional life. 

 

I have even been able to resume some vital relationships with people I was once close to but who I simply didn’t bother to be in contact with for 15 years. It started by just playing a game of racquetball and in a very few weeks we were both kicking ourselves for having let so many years pass without contact. We have become again what we were to one another years ago, one another’s closest confidants and most trusted friends. 

 

There have been so many times in those 15 years when I felt so isolated, so all alone in the world, when I didn’t need to. Not all the ghosts of my past haunt me. Some of them, given a little time and effort, have turned out to be saints. 

 

People now, in this messed up time in history, have fewer friends, less contact with family, and we have more addiction, depression and suicide. I don’t have all of the answers for a world that seems to be falling apart but I have one answer that I know makes a big difference . . . be a friend, treasure your friends, invest time and energy in your friendships. 

 

 

 

Give up your anger, set your resentments aside, stop fantasizing about revenge, and focus on being a good person who is worthy of trust and friendship, and you can be a part of the healing of the world. 

 

Some of you will have to start by just trying to be good-ish, but, please, do your best.