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by David C. Downing
Books & CultureJanuary 1, 1997
Those who associate “possession” with the gullible old days before the rise of modern science should consult Thomas B. Allen’s Possession: The True Story of an Exorcism, a detailed and disturbing account of the actual case in 1949 upon which the novel and film The Exorcist were based.
Allen, who identifies himself as an agnostic, has located more than a dozen eyewitnesses who will attest to paranormal phenomena involving a 14-year-old boy whose aunt had introduced him to a Ouija board. Family members, neighbors, priests, and therapists claim to have seen objects floating in midair, a heavy chest of drawers sliding across the room, its drawers opening and closing at random, and welts spontaneously appearing on the boy’s body, which formed letters and numbers. Most chilling perhaps is the testimony of the Jesuit priest who says that the boy, from a nominal Lutheran home, answered one of his queries in perfect Church Latin: “O sacerdos Christi, tu sci me esse diabolum. Cui me derogas?” (O priest of Christ, You know I am the devil. Why do you bother me?)
Of course, the Puritans’ understanding of the symptoms they observed was inextricably linked to their supernaturalist world-view. Later commentators would dismiss not only their claims to have witnessed paranormal events, but also their credulity in believing such things were possible. The tragedy of Salem was not that the Puritans believed in the demonic, but rather that they equated demon possession with bewitchment. That is, they went beyond any scriptural precedent in assuming that the symptoms they observed were caused by human agents of Satan in their midst.
After centuries of commentary on Salem that often descended into caricature, Chadwick Hansen published a landmark study in 1969 called Witchcraft at Salem. Hansen exploded a good many popular myths, showing that accusations of witchcraft were rare in Puritan New England as compared to Europe, where thousands were executed as witches in the early modern era. Hansen also demonstrated that the Boston clergy discouraged rather than encouraged the public excitement over witchcraft, and that folk magic and witchcraft were indeed widespread in both old and New England at the time.
In dealing with the afflicted children themselves, Hansen records the severity of their symptoms, asserting that the children were not frauds but rather hysterics. He refers the reader to classic studies on hysteria, such as those by nineteenth-century French clinicians Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) and Pierre Janet (1859-1947).
Indeed, it was Charcot who pioneered the idea that religious ecstasies and demonic possessions were hysterical in nature. At his Paris clinic in the 1870s, Charcot gave public lectures, bringing his patients on stage to demonstrate a variety of neurological disorders. His demonstrations, as well as the 120 case studies of Janet, record most of the symptoms associated with possession: seizures and contortions, paralysis, anesthesia, restrictions of the senses, hallucinations, and altered personalities.
Nineteenth-century French physicians were fascinated by seemingly paranormal abilities of their hysteric patients, such as the ability to move about, read, and write in the dark, and even an apparent ability to see into the future (for which the doctors coined the word “clairvoyance”). British physicians, on the other hand, with their strong tradition of Scottish empiricism and common-sense philosophy, would admit only to their patients’ remarkably improved abilities in penmanship, playing the piano, or parsing Greek sentences.
In Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations, Mark S. Micale surveys theories of this malady, ranging from the ancients’ conjectures about “wandering wombs” (hysterion means “womb”) to recent feminist readings of the disease. Especially intriguing is Micale’s discussion of the relations between psychology and religion in nineteenth-century France. For example, when asked late in his life about purported healings at the Roman Catholic shrine near Lourdes, Charcot–generally considered a scientific naturalist–wrote that many of those who journeyed there were undeniably hysterics, but that some of the healings there were “well-authenticated” and that he sometimes sent his own patients there. He added that physicians should not neglect “the great resources of the faith cure,” ending with Hamlet’s famous observation that “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Pierre Janet was even more explicit in his conviction that psychology was not a replacement for metaphysics. While publishing detailed case studies of hysteria, he maintained a lively interest in religious philosophy, even in spiritism and the occult. Janet was particularly intrigued by a patient of his named Madeleine, who had mystical visions and bleeding spots on her hands and feet resembling the stigmata of Christ. Janet always expressed a great deal of respect for her and saw no contradiction in having his treatments of her supplemented by regular meetings with her spiritual adviser.
The term hysteria became a household word, not because of Charcot or Janet, but because of their famous contemporary, Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. Freud, a student of Charcot’s and a bitter rival of Janet, was an outspoken atheist who would not have countenanced their accommodations to a religious point of view. His early work, Studies in Hysteria (1895), offers a number of case studies, including that of “Anna O.,” whose complex and baffling symptoms were generally hysterical in nature. It was Anna herself who coined the phrase “the talking cure,” finding that her symptoms were eased when she was able to verbalize her fears, fantasies, and traumatic early experiences. From Anna and early patients like her, Freud developed the rudiments of psychoanalysis, including his theories of sexual trauma in childhood, repression, and the symbolic manifestations of the unconscious in dreams and fantasies. One scholar, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, has summed up Freudian psychoanalysis as “the child of the hysterical woman.”
For the first half of this century, it seemed that the issue was pretty much settled, since the notion of hysteria gave a name, a cause, and a cure to the symptoms under discussion here. But for reasons no one quite understands, cases of hysteria such as those described by Charcot, Janet, and Freud began to wane in Europe and America and pretty much disappeared by 1920. Even more significantly, the prestige of Freudian psychology has steadily declined as his theories have been increasingly discounted, his methods labeled unscientific, and even his personal integrity and character called into question. Donald Spence and Frederick Crews have offered devastating critiques of the psychoanalytic project, and Elizabeth Loftus and others have questioned whether there is even such a thing as repression, a displacement of hurtful memories from the conscious mind to some mysterious realm called the “unconscious.”
As contemporary American and European psychiatry has moved away from classical psychoanalytic models, the term hysteria has been abandoned, replaced in diagnostic manuals with classifications such as “dissociative disorder–conversion type,” “psychogenic pain disorder,” “histrionic personality type,” or “borderline personality disorder.” (At least one student of psychology, T. Craig Isaacs, in a 1986 dissertation, argued that the symptoms of spirit possession do not correlate satisfactorily with any of the classifications used in diagnostic manuals in the United States. In other countries, clinicians use the term “possession disorder,” a label avoided in this country because of its metaphysical nuances.)
Just as hysteria suddenly and mysteriously disappeared early in this century, so near the century’s end the reported incidence of “multiple personality disorder” (MPD) has skyrocketed. In 1980, the diagnostic manual for mental health professionals (DSM III) recognized mpd as a condition involving two or more distinct, fully integrated personalities, with the dominant personality at a given time determining behavior. This classification has become increasingly problematic, and in 1994 the revised diagnostic manual replaced mpd with the rubric “dissociative identity disorder.”
David Spiegel, who chaired the committee that made the changes, explained that this is a real disorder, but that it involves “a failure of integration of various aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness. The problem is not having more than one personality; it is having less than one personality.”
According to Ian Hacking’s excellent new study, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, there were fewer than a dozen cases of this reputed syndrome before the publication of the novelized case study Sybil in 1975. Since then there have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new patients, virtually all in America. Hacking describes the typical mpd patient as a woman in her midthirties who has been in some form of counseling for an average of seven years before being diagnosed with mpd. She is nearly always an excellent hypnotic subject and, on average, feels that she has 16 “alters” besides her host personality. The usual explanation for the condition is childhood trauma, most often sexual abuse.
Hacking notes that while advocates of MPD make up a popular, grassroots movement, they are by no means monolithic. One prominent practitioner, Ralph Allison, uses Theosophy as the metaphysical baseline for his understanding of MPD, and confesses that sometimes in therapy he has to “exorcise an intruding spirit.” There is also a feminist strain, which focuses on abused female children in a patriarchal society; there is a religious strain, which argues for a Satanic underground that tortures and even murders thousands of infants every year; and there are even MPD therapists who specialize in past-life regressions and in memories of alien abductions.
Obviously, therapies that evoke these kinds of memories are going to provoke a reaction, especially when adults accuse family members retrospectively of childhood sexual abuse. In 1992 the False Memory Syndrome Foundation was established as a support group for families targeted by such allegations. As their name suggests, members of this organization argue that false memories of abuse are created under hypnosis, and that uncritical therapists confuse fantasy with recollection.
These arguments receive powerful support in Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters’s Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria. Ofshe and Watters begin unequivocally: “We believe there is now sufficient evidence–within the therapists’ own accounts of their techniques-to show that a significant cadre of poorly trained, overzealous, or ideologically-driven psychotherapists have pursued a series of pseudoscientific notions that have ultimately damaged the patients who have come to them for help.” In their discussions of MPD therapy sessions, Ofshe and Watters recount symptoms by now familiar: patients who feel invaded by an alien presence; who rapidly change voices and personalities; who may get down on all fours and bark like animals; who may have welts appear on their bodies when visualizing abusive scenes; and who may injure or even try to kill themselves. But Ofshe and Watters argue that very few clients come in with these symptoms, that it is the therapy sessions themselves that create these symptoms. In their analysis, the symptoms of mpd are induced by uncritical use of hypnosis and by the patients’ own chronic abuse of self-hypnosis.
This leaves us at something of an impasse. Here we have a collection of symptoms that have been observed since ancient times (though the more florid physical manifestations are relatively uncommon now). This condition was demonized in the early modern era, psychoanalyzed in the beginning of our century, and would now seem to be increasingly politicized. Terms such as possession, hysteria, or multiple personality all have their drawbacks, yet this dissociative disorder is very much with us as we approach a new century.
For contemporary Christians, the key issue is one of rightly gauging the boundaries between the theological, the sociological, and the psychological. In cases like these, it may be hazardous to ignore the reality of what we cannot see. But it may be equally damaging to assume that merely owning a Bible equips one as a mental health therapist.
The apostle Paul promised that some would be given the gift of discerning spirits. In our era, I believe such a gift is to be cultivated by broad acquaintance with mental health theories and practices, as well as a solid grounding in biblical principles. In an oft-quoted remark, C. S. Lewis commented that “there are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
- More fromby David C. Downing
by John Wilson, Managing Editor
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As we progress through our sophomore year of publication, we are learning more about our readers. Last month I heard from a couple who were among our charter subscribers. “We’ve hardly had a chance to read the last several issues,” they said. That didn’t sound good. I wondered what was coming next. Their daughter, it turns out, who recently completed her first year of college, has discovered B&C. “As soon as she spots an issue, she just I it. We never see it again.” So they were getting another subscription–for themselves.
Many of you who read B&C regularly are equally passionate about it. You’ve told us so, in letters and conversations that have been enormously encouraging. That’s the good news. Along with this wonderful feedback, however, has come a less happy fact. We are learning that you who choose to subscribe are a rare breed. About 15,000 of you have signed up, and that’s a terrific start for a thought publication. But to become viable for the long term, we need to move much closer to the 25,000 mark.
We are convinced that those additional subscribers are out there waiting to discover B&C. Almost every week we hear from new readers who, despite our best efforts to publicize the magazine, had never known of its existence until just now, when a friend or colleague put a copy in their hands. We need to reach more of those potential readers. But we simply cannot afford to send avalanches of direct mail to the usual lists. We find B&C readers in small pockets–too small to bother with in conventional marketing terms. That’s expensive.
And that’s where you come in. It takes time to build a publication like B&C. It takes help from many sources. We have carefully used major foundation monies and CTi investment to build our current circulation. CTi will continue to invest, and we are seeking additional foundation support. But to maintain momentum, we need your help. We need people who share our vision to invest with us.
We are therefore asking you to make a New Year’s resolution to add your support by becoming a B&C Sustaining Subscriber. We are seeking three levels of support: Friend ($100), Sponsor ($250), and Patron ($500). As a Sustaining Subscriber, you will be acknowledged by name in the pages of the magazine (unless you request otherwise); $24.95 of your money will go toward renewing your subscription, and the remainder will be your tax-deductible donation that will be used to firm up B&C’s financial base and help us find those additional subscribers who just don’t know what they’re missing. Simply fill out the form below and mail it to us.
Part of my job is to read several magazines every day. Mostly these are the old-fashioned kind–you can hold them in your hands and flip the pages. Lately, though, I’ve also explored the online variety. They take some getting used to–I can digest half of a conventional magazine in the time it takes just to move from one article to another online–and so far only one site has drawn me back for repeated visits: the online magazine Salon ( http://www.salon1999.com ). I’m drawn there by the same qualities that keep me reading the New Yorker, Lingua Franca, and such: sharp reporting, lively opinions, funny writers with a strong personal voice. (Also, alas, as with its conventional counterparts, you’ll find in Salon a measure of the foolish, the perverse, and the relentlessly hip.) To B&C readers who want to check out Salon, I particularly recommend Anne Lamott’s online diary. Lamott is a writer (look for John Spalding’s review of her book Bird by Bird in a forthcoming issue of B&C), a single mother, and a stubborn Christian in that modern-day Babylon known as San Francisco.
If you are a browser in the ether, you may already have accessed B&C via Christianity Online, the area of America Online where all of CTi’s magazines are featured. Now we’re also on the World Wide Web ( http://www.christianity.net/bc ). At our Web site you’ll find a sample piece from the current issue of B&C as well as the full text of the previous issue. (Here AOL users enjoy a distinct advantage: they can access the full text of the current issue via Christianity Online.)
The greatest boon of the Net, of course, is e-mail, for which I give thanks every day. Many of you have written us ( bcedit@aol.com ). We’d like to hear from more of you. After all, what is a magazine if not a virtual community?
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
- More fromby John Wilson, Managing Editor
by Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen
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Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of PhilosophyBy Jostien GaarderTranslated by Paulette MollerFarrar, Straus and Giroux405 pp.; $19, hardcover;Berkley, $6.99, paper
Jostein Gaarder is a high-school philosophy teacher in Norway whom I first encountered via an interview on National Public Radio in the fall of 1995. That philosophy is regularly taught in the Norwegian high-school curriculum was the first surprise from the interview. The second was that Sophie’s World, Gaarder’s history of Western philosophy embedded in a science fiction–like novel, was already in its ninth English printing and slated for translation into French, Russian, Korean, Portuguese, and various other languages. Gaarder himself seemed rather bemused by the attention his first book was receiving, and by the fact that (in his words) he was being “shipped around the world like a package” as a result. (Since then, two more books by Gaarder have appeared in English translation.)
After reading Sophie’s World, I could understand the unusual enthusiasm the book has generated. I happen to teach a required course in the history of psychology to undergraduate majors in that discipline. Since many psychology majors are neither by training nor inclination attuned to the history of philosophy that makes up the bulk of the course, anything that can reduce their anxiety and capture their attention between textbook chapters and primary source readings is to be welcomed. In my experience, a well-chosen novel can often do the trick: B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two has been a mainstay of my history course for years, and Sophie’s World now bids fair to become another.
Sophie Amundsen is a 14-year-old high-school student who comes home one day to find two envelopes addressed to her, each containing a single question: “Who are you?” and “Where does the world come from?” This marks the beginning of a correspondence course in philosophy, unilaterally initiated by an eccentric but enthusiastic middle-aged, free-lance scholar named Alberto Knox.
He deftly avoids meeting Sophie for the first few weeks, preferring to drop unpredictable installments of the course on her doorstep, in her mailbox, or to send them by canine courier in the form of his golden Labrador, Hermes. Sophie is intrigued–both by the mystery of her teacher’s identity and by the continuing questions he poses, each of which she mulls over for a while before a sheaf of notes arrives introducing her to the philosopher of the day, beginning with the pre-Socratics and ending with Marx, Darwin, Freud, and some contemporary theoretical physics. Sophie, who is a precocious example of Piaget’s formal-operational stage of development, is soon hooked by Alberto’s breezy and vivid pedagogy and the story of Western philosophy that unfolds.
Knox eventually reveals his identity to Sophie–first via a videotaped lecture from the Acropolis in Athens, which he magically recreates in its original reality, then in a secret early-morning rendezvous in a medieval church, where he dons a monk’s robe to expound on Augustine and Aquinas.
At this point, the narrative takes on a note of urgency: Alberto has deduced that he and Sophie are fictitious beings engaged in a battle of wills with their literary creator, a Norwegian army major on a NATO assignment in Lebanon. Said major has his own reasons for poking his nose periodically into the story with mysterious postcards and other more dramatic messages to his own teenage daughter, Hilde, all of which (to her bewilderment) he has been sending care of Sophie.
As Alberto’s lectures move to the Renaissance and beyond, Sophie learns about the philosophy of the eighteenth-century Anglican bishop George Berkeley and its significance for their situation. Berkeley, you may recall, shared with his fellow empiricists (such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume) the conviction that sensory data is the main source of human knowledge, and that whatever mental processes we have cannot produce reliable truth unless such sensory input is furnished–thus denying earlier doctrines of innate ideas from the classical and Cartesian philosophical traditions. But as a devout Christian, Berkeley also wanted to challenge the creeping deism and mechanistic materialism that his fellow empiricists had absorbed from Isaac Newton and other luminaries of the scientific revolution. Thus, while he agreed that humans learn about reality through a combination of sensory input and the laws of association, he asserted that the reality we learn about is not brute “matter in motion” but a purely immaterial reality that exists because we perceive it–and, more significantly, because God perceives our perceptions into existence as a stable, lawful reality, interrupted by occasional miracles. In Berkeley’s words, “God is intimately present in our consciousness, causing to exist for us the profusion of ideas and perceptions that we are constantly subject to.” Humans are thus surrounded not by a universe of material objects, but by the mind of God–hence Berkeley’s famous aphorism, esse est percipi (to be perceived is to be).
The question then becomes: Do the beings who have been perceived into existence have any degree of freedom to depart from the author’s script and write their own? And do there exist any intermediate beings (angels, perhaps) who can help them in this endeavor? As Alberto and Sophie survey the Enlightenment, the Romantic period, and the existentialist philosophers, they arrive at possible answers to this question, and prepare–with the help of an unknown sympathizer–to put them into action on the eve of the summer solstice, during Sophie’s fifteenth birthday celebration.
Sophie’s World, although dense and lengthy, is an entertaining brain-teaser of a novel. Paulette Moller’s translation will not win any prizes for colloquial elegance, but it is straightforward and accessible. That the book covers only Western philosophy should hardly be taken as a criticism–it’s long enough as it is, and no author can be all things to all people in one book. Moreover, it is obvious that Gaarder is anxious to display his raised feminist consciousness: that he chooses a reflective adolescent girl as the philosopher’s pupil is significant, allowing him to make apologetic qualifiers about the misogyny of thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas, and to praise others–like John Stuart Mill and Simone de Beauvoir–for taking gender seriously as a category of analysis.
I found this particular tactic somewhat strained, however, because the actual adult women in the novel–the mothers of Sophie and Hilde–are painted as rather bewildered and beleaguered people who do their best to keep families together in the face of fatherly absence, and who fail to understand the intellectual journey their daughters have embarked upon. (Sophie’s mother can only invoke drugs, sex, and incipient mental illness as explanations for her daughter’s suddenly acquired philosophical passion.) The fathers–and father surrogates, like Knox–are portrayed as the intellectual rescuers of daughters from the dreary domesticity and dead-end jobs that have become the lot of their mothers, even though the latter are the only stable, day-to-day presence in the lives of their children. The result is less a critical reflection on the history of gender relations than a suggestion that certain unusual women–those who think like and identify with the agenda of powerful men (and are young and attractive to boot)–may be graciously assimilated into the philosophical old-boy network. This “add women and stir” form of feminism is admittedly better than leaving women functionally invisible, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.
Finally, except for Gaarder’s treatment of the late classical, medieval, and Renaissance periods, there is little sense of the importance of theology to the history of philosophy, and vice versa. (Interestingly, Gaarder’s NPR interviewer faulted him on this very point.) Gaarder is deliberately evasive about his own world-view; as a historian, he wants to portray each intellectual period so vividly that Sophie will be caught up completely in each as it is presented. In this he succeeds admirably: like students in a personality theory course who are convinced Freudians the week Freud is taught and become Rogerians two weeks later, Sophie thinks like a Platonist in the early part of the course, like an empiricist in the middle, and like an existentialist toward the end.
The novel does make clear that, like his fellow Scandinavian Kierkegaard, Gaarder has little use for the state-church kind of piety-cum-civil religion that Sophie has been exposed to in school, but it is less than clear what he would put in its place–except, perhaps, an expanded philosophy curriculum. The one hint he gives us comes in the form of a crucifix, lost by Hilde, which turns up both in Sophie’s dream and in the latter’s bed when she awakes, and which appears to confirm that Sophie’s world–and her actions and aspiritions–are more than mere ephemera in the mind of a Norwegian army major who aspires to a literary career. But here I may be reading too much of my theistic agenda into the novel’s complex plot: other readers will have to judge this for themselves.
-Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of philosophy at Eastern College. With Anne Carr, she edited Religion, Feminism, and the Family, just published by Westminster John Knox.
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
- More fromby Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen
by Michael G. Maudlin
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There are benefits to being married to a psychologist. Sometimes, when I least expect it, my wife comes home from work, ignores the fact that I haven’t done any of the dozen things I had promised I would do, puts her arms around me, and tells me that I am a wonderful husband.
I simply smile and receive this grace. It means she has just assessed the damage to a marriage in which the husband is truly awful, and she is feeling grateful that all she has to put up with is me.
But then there are the days when no matter what spousal virtues I have demonstrated, I find myself a marked man. The conversation starts innocently enough. “You know, it’s a man’s world. They control everything.” I have learned not to play Bill Buckley to her Gloria Steinem. “Why do you say that, honey?” Her glare says, Don’t give me that crap. You are part of the conspiracy and you know it. I try to look empathetic, but it is no use. I am the enemy.
Nine times out of ten, what prompts Karen’s fury is a divorce case. The husband is hiding assets, and his wife has no clue as to what they actually own. Or he has cheated on his wife and now wants half her pension. Or the wife wants to fight for a just settlement but is afraid her husband will beat her or even kill her. Or she simply doesn’t know how she will raise three children and meet expenses while her husband gets to live out the dreams of a second adolescence.
Karen has heard it all. She can walk her client through the stages of grief, help her deal with feelings of guilt, fear, and failure, and formulate a life plan. Still, Karen seethes with frustration at her relative impotence. She is on the wife’s side, but everyone else, it seems, is on the husband’s: the lawyers, the judge, the government, and, tragically, often the church. This is a reality, a widely acknowledged but little-discussed fact of life 30 years after the feminist revolution. And it makes women, like my wife, mad.
That anger runs deep. In its first weekend, The First Wives Club grossed $18.9 million; it topped $100 million for the year. The film made the covers of Time and People. An American nerve had been touched. What audiences have responded to is a story of revenge told as a comedy. The sweetness and thrill come from seeing the tables turned. And the wrinkle is that the bad guys here are not terrorists or drug runners or serial killers. No, the bad guys are the guys–men. And it is amazing how much pleasure the audience gets from watching them get their just deserts.
How bad are they? Morty’s sins are the most common. After years of toiling with Brenda (Bette Midler) to build his appliance-store chain, he takes all the equity, grudgingly gives Brenda a paltry alimony (which he rarely pays), and moves into a downtown penthouse with a beautiful though classless twentysomething twinkie. That’s bad.
Producer Bill leaves fortysomething movie star Elise (Goldie Hawn), his mentor and ticket into the ‘biz, for Showgirls star Elizabeth Berkley–and then demands half of Elise’s assets and a hefty alimony. That’s worse.
Advertising exec Aaron is separated from Annie (Diane Keaton) so he can deal with his “commitment issues” in therapy. He invites Annie for dinner, takes her up to his hotel room, where they make love (he claims later that she manipulated him into doing it), and then tells her he wants a divorce; in walks their therapist–who, as it turns out, is having an affair with Aaron. That’s worst.
In Gender and Grace, psychologist Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen puts forth the intriguing theory that men and women experienced the Fall differently. She speculates that men’s sinful propensity is to objectify people and treat them as means to an end. Women, on the other hand, have a propensity to give away too much responsibility for the sake of relationship. If she were writing the book today, she would say, “For instance, in The First Wives Club . . .” The men, as noted, have treated their wives as the means to getting established in the world and then traded them in for newer models. The wives, on the other hand, let it happen.
We first see them as cheerful, independent, intelligent friends in college. Fast-forward 20 years and you’ve fallen a long way, baby. They have lost touch with each other. Annie has become so codependent she is no longer capable of uttering a declarative sentence. Brenda has been reduced to enlarging herself through overeating and becoming a nag. Elise turns into a lush and a cosmetic-surgery junkie.
Redemption comes through sisterhood and a decision to fight back. The men, as it turns out, are almost pitifully easy targets (mostly because they expect no resistance from their formerly passive wives). And here is where the audience moves beyond chuckling at the jokes to full-blooded cathartic release. What woman wouldn’t enjoy the fantasy of seeing the husband who has betrayed her begging, as Aaron does with Annie after she buys out his business partners, that she not let him go because he can’t start over again at his age? Her response–“I know just how you feel”–carries the same force as Dirty Harry’s bullets.
My wife was once surprised by the candid and unguarded comment of a pastor: “Women who go through divorce often become so much more alive, more interesting than they were before.” Karen and I have noticed this uncomfortable phenomenon–uncomfortable because it complicates the otherwise simple formula “Divorce is bad.” This dynamic is clearly at work in First Wives. By the end, the three Muskatettes are each self-confident, fit, and healthy. They have shed their neuroses and taken control of their destinies. One could even say they glow. In fact, it is hard to imagine that their husbands (even those three) would have divorced them if they had displayed such dynamism while still married.
But the movie isn’t really antidivorce in the first place; that’s not the point. We witness these women being tossed carelessly aside, but we never hear that marriage should be for a lifetime. We watch them receive psychological punches in the gut, but we never hear questioned the husband’s right to leave. The moral force of this movie is directed solely to the how of these divorces: that the husbands were mean and insensitive and kept too many of the marbles.
Sociologists have amply documented that women suffer more than their fair share in a divorce. Their standard of living goes down; men’s goes up. Men remarry sooner. Yet secular feminist groups are not on the march against divorce. They want equity, not longevity.
Why? I believe it is because women who go through divorce often end up closer to the ideal feminist vision. Divorce is the machine that produces self-reliant women–women who are not dependent on men. Van Leeuwen’s theory helps to explain this metamorphosis. In divorce, women experience a harsh correction to their propensity to give away or deny too much of themselves. As Diane Keaton’s character screams to her husband: “I’m sorry. Sorry I worked and slaved all those years to give you everything you ever wanted or needed!” Is marriage really supposed to sound like martyrdom?
While the movie is not antidivorce, it is not prodivorce either. The opening scene, and the event that initially brings the three women back together, is the news that their friend Cynthia, their rich, society friend who had given everything to her husband, jumped from her penthouse apartment after he left her for a younger woman. The pain of divorce is a cultural fact.
The church has begun to mobilize in its fight against divorce–with community covenants among pastors to guarantee premarital counseling, lobbying to change no-fault divorce laws, and proactive efforts to save marriages–but First Wives reveals another step we need to take: promoting models of marriage that allow women to thrive and grow without having to divorce.
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
- More fromby Michael G. Maudlin
by Ethan Casey
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Books discussed in this essay
–Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! (Soho Press, 224 pp.; $20, 1995; Vintage, $11, paper, 1996)
–Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 339 pp.; $35, 1995)
–Herbert Gold, Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp.; $12, paper, 1992 [first published 1991])
–Blair Niles, Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa’s Eldest Daughter (1926; o.p.)
–North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads (South End Press, 256 pp.; $35, hardcover, $15, paper, 1995)
Public events give place names new overtones that can seem to override previous, private meanings. For my first 27 years, for example, Waco was merely the town my grandfather came from. Now the name evokes an unhappy recent history, and I’m tacitly asked to take a side. So too with Haiti. I have spent time in that unhappy country, respect particular Haitian people for particular reasons, know the country’s language and vivid smells and sounds. The now pervasive presumption that politics should trump my own experience both baffles and angers me; I’m not on anybody’s side, thank you very much.
The meaning of “Haiti” has become a battleground. Some months ago a friend sent me a flier for a new book from South End Press. Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads was, I was told, “a succinct history and up-to-date analysis of the tragic betrayal of Haitian democracy” that explained “why attempts to ‘restore democracy’ in Haiti seem doomed to failure. In part,” claimed the flier,
the reasons lie in Haiti’s centuries-old “semi-feudal” class structure overlaid by the agro-export economy established during the U.S. occupation. Much blame, however, rests squarely on the shoulders of the United States. The U.S. response to the coup–the inhumane refugee policy, a leaky embargo, ineffectual weak-kneed diplomacy, and a sustained cia campaign to paint [then-President Jean-Bertrand] Aristide as demagogic and mentally unstable–lays bare the United States’ contempt for democratic and legal processes.
Such effort expended, I mused with some disgust, to demonstrate what seems so obvious as to be irrelevant. The leftist publisher’s blinkered paradigm blinds it to difficult truths: that “democracy” (however defined) is not the be-all and end-all, nor is “the United States” a monolith. (No state is a monolith; only totalitarians say otherwise.) Furthermore, Aristide is demagogic and mentally unstable, even if the CIA does say so.
The American Left did more harm than good with its preemptive invasion of the moral high ground in the debate over Haiti. (The journalist Amy Wilentz, for starters, deserves much credit for having “discovered” Aristide,1 but her own compromised role as his leading apologist remains too little criticized. Her writings during and since the crisis show her striving, and inevitably failing, at once to retain her chair as dean of American retailers of Aristideism and to regain the journalist’s authority as independent observer that she should not have squandered.)2 Indeed, this self-congratulatory stance recalls Norman Mailer’s words (to V. S. Naipaul) on posturing leftists back in 1969: “They just want to make a statement and stand around being right. ‘I know what is wrong, I’m noble.’ This I don’t buy.”
On the other side of the debate, the claimed meanings of Haiti enforced in the service of what the North American imperial state defined itself as doing–“restoring democracy”–were classically Orwellian, and the salvation of our national soul will begin the moment we admit this. “Our success in Haiti to date shows what the international community, with American leadership, can achieve in helping countries in their struggle to build democracy,” said Bill Clinton, with a straight face, just after the invasion. As Orwell himself might have put it, two and two make five.
The fiasco’s tellingly unremarked background music was the moaning and chain-rattling of the apparently never-to-be-exorcised ghosts of Vietnam. Sen. John McCain asked if U.S. troops in Haiti could be kept safe from “a bomb in a cafe.” Sen. Nancy Kassebaum noted that “people remember Somalia”–a polite way of saying what it was people really remembered but still preferred to forget. “The lesson of Vietnam is that you don’t commit troops until the country is committed to the mission,” opined David Broder from his desk in Washington, D.C.; “the” lesson, indeed. Above all we kept hearing about “boat people,” most Americans evidently having quite forgotten that term’s origin. (Even more chilling was the constant talk of “refugee flows,” as though human beings were some kind of liquid substance.)3
“People’s interest in Haiti,” a publishing professional informed me all too rightly in January 1995, “has peaked.” The prevailing American attitude seemed quickly to have become that of Pilate: Well, that’s taken care of. On to Bosnia and beyond. The secular media for their part have not known what to make of the awkward fact that Aristide came to politics from the priesthood, so they ignore it. But Aristide the priest, called to speak the truth, secularized himself (and set the stage for the ensuing tragedy) by seeking power. If recent Haitian history demonstrates anything, it is the moral poverty of a purely political response to oppression. Which way to something better?
My own journey home to a place beyond politics began when I found the courage to consider Haiti a personal matter. I am entitled to do this because I first went there at age 16 in 1982, when very few of my fellow Wisconsinites even knew the place existed. More fundamentally, I am entitled, even bound, to take personally the sufferings of Haitians because, like them, I am a human being.
My father, an Episcopal priest now in the Diocese of Colorado, began taking teams of medical people and others to Haiti in 1980. He took me along in 1982 and again in 1983, when I stayed for six weeks. The Wisconsin program became less attuned to his priorities, so one day in the mideighties, at the Episcopal cathedral in Port-au-Prince, he and his associate Ed Morgan met the priest with whom they still work. “We sat at the table outside the gift shop,” my father tells me in a letter, “and I asked if it was possible to begin some programs with him that would maintain the church connection as well as the medical and he said, ‘Sure.’ I’ll never forget our first trip from L_____ one day to ‘scout’ out T_____. All day, 7 of us in a 4 or 5 person, small jeep, over all the rivers and through all the mudholes, with our medical gear sliding off the top of the jeep and sliding all the way down the mountain . . . and our retrieving it . . . and when we got back to L_____ that night, I talked the day over with Ed.”
“We just can’t do it,” the two Americans told the Haitian. “It’s too far and too difficult. We’d never get our people and stuff there.”
“If Jesus wants us to go, we’ll go,” replied the Haitian priest. “And besides, I’ve already bought the land [for the church].”
Since then my father has pursued his work with a doggedness I now know comes only from a hard-won serenity. “The taking of medicine to Haiti is incidental to our going there,” he said recently in a sermon, and now I am prepared to understand what he means. But for a long time I wondered: What good does any of it really do? The liberal impulse always requires rectification. Not a damn bit of good, I think my father would reply. And more good than you can possibly imagine.
“Our reality looks forever different after we have experienced somebody else’s,” writes Jim Wallis in The Soul of Politics, “especially if it required that we cross over the lines that divide us.” The Episcopalians who accompany my father to Haiti are the best of their breed: husky, milk-fed white Americans who go beyond meaning well. I have known women who had voted for every Republican since Dewey uncomplainingly sleeping in tents and hiking four miles to staff a clinic to bring not only a measly modicum of medical attention but also concretely expressed compassion to people of a distinctly different skin color and cultural background, living at the end of indescribable “roads” in a country whose very name evokes only horror to most Americans.
I have learned wisdom from such women and, even more, from Haitians–because wisdom emerges from suffering, and they have suffered more than I have. On the last night of my last visit, the month Bill Clinton became President of the United States, I found myself holding hands with three small children, one of them my father’s adorable godson. The children were ubiquitous and, as always, came seeking hugs, recognition, balloons. “Ba-m blad! Ba-m blad!” they cried: Give me a balloon!
“Mwin rinmin ti moun yo ampil,” I said in Creole to my new friend, a young man who had attempted the sea journey to Florida once already and planned to try again. (As I write this, I don’t know if he is still alive.)
“And they love you too,” he replied. “Jesus say, ‘Let the little kids to come to me.’ “
“I don’t want to leave,” I said that night to my father.
“Well,” he said, “it’s time to move on to the next thing.”
Haiti poses a challenge to writers: How to respond? The first task of all writing is to define terms, in this case “Haiti” and “democracy” and “restore.” It is not a simple or straightforward task. To get at truth and–even more difficult–to communicate it, we need to look at our world out of the corner of our eye. All real writing is samizdat; the rest is filler and propaganda. The recent book I consider to have handled Haiti best, for instance,
is Herbert Gold’s loving memoir, Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti. There ain’t much politics in Gold’s book. What the world needs, now more urgently than ever, is for each of us to have the audacity to take history personally.
Alas, Haiti’s most emphatically is a political history. Its revolution of 1791-1804 is a perpetually crucial touchstone: If fundamental social change could be (or could have been) made to succeed in such a place, what might that forebode for us all? Haiti fascinates Americans, more than we realize, because it connects all too directly to the story of slavery and race and injustice in our own country.
Haiti and the United States and the New World in general all were founded on the same seductive lie: that it is possible to begin anew. By now we should know better. The great Southern writers, from Thomas Jefferson (who trembled for his country when he reflected that God is just) to Zora Neale Hurston (who wrote a book on voodoo) to the author of Absalom, Absalom! (in which Haiti figures significantly) knew truths to which many of us today are only beginning to awaken. The painful truth we should learn from Haiti, and Detroit in 1967, and Los Angeles in 1992, and the double murder trial that finally ended October 3, 1995, is that we are all southerners now. The journey forward of our race (the human race) leads nowhere but back to our tragic past. But there is good news: All we need do to claim the amnesty we don’t deserve is acknowledge that we are involved and responsible.
Two women writers with Haitian roots explore the meanings of Haiti in new books. The stories in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! are so good and true they are painful to read. Whether set on a doomed boat bound for Florida, in a village where a young father chooses a defiant suicide over the obligations he cannot meet, or in New York where an immigrant mother and her American daughter never quite succeed in understanding each other, they always stress the personal over the political, irony over ideology. Danticat is a hugely talented as well as disciplined young writer; one’s hope for her fast-developing career is that she will continue to rise above the vulgarities of the culture of hyphenation. Danticat understands that the circle between the past and what is yet to come is unbroken. If her personal voice sometimes seems just a bit precious, put it down to youth (she was born in 1969); she has a long road ahead. As she herself reflects,
The sky in all its glory had been there for eons even before she came into the world, and there it would stay with its crashing stars and moody clouds. The sand and its caresses, the conch and its melody would be there forever as well. All that would change would be the faces of the people who would see and touch those things, faces like hers, which was already not as it had been a few years before and which would mature and change in the years to come.
Speaking to herself in the collective voice of her forebears, Danticat writes:
Sometimes, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case. You have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years. And over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried “Krik?” and we have answered “Krak!” and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us.
What Joan Dayan’s rambling, unfocused, self-absorbed monograph lacks in clarity it almost atones for with not infrequent flashes of keen insight. One does wonder by what criteria Haiti, History, and the Gods was edited; but turgid though it is, it is in places superb. It even may be said that the book’s opacity mimics the immense complexity of its topic. “Yet in highlighting complexities and ambiguities that have been obscured in writings about Haiti, about France, and even about the United States,” Dayan says, “I hope to set the stage for what might be called literary fieldwork.” In this she may have succeeded, albeit at a high cost.
Yet all the brighter shines the occasional nugget. One such is the very first sentence: “Haiti tempts impassioned representation, as well as proprietary impulses.” Yes, the reader sighs, it’s true. The New World “kept Haiti as its silenced but crucial interlocutor, and to a large extent its ancestor spirit.” Yes, yes. “Those who came to Saint-Domingue in the last years of the eighteenth century came to a country where definitions were defied as they were made and categories were mixed up as more rigorous labels were invented.” Yes–not unlike the last years of the twentieth century? And this on the inner life of Haiti, its spiritual imagination, is deeply revealing: “For the Haitian who serves the spirits [the loa of the voodoo pantheon] there is no ‘beyond’ in the Christian sense,” writes Dayan, “no redemptive surcease of sorrow, but rather an uncertain realm of obligation, or broken but obstinate communion between the living and the dead.”
Not all the books that might enlighten us are new ones. Graham Greene’s 1966 novel The Comedians remains exquisitely timely. And a decade or so ago at a library sale in my hometown I found Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa’s Eldest Daughter, published in 1926. “The workers sing in the fields, and against the black tide of their recurrent lives the spectacular crises stand out,” author Blair Niles had written. “Peasants have sung and toiled in Haiti, danced and sung and drummed, sorrowed and wailed, while the great figures have moved passionately through their parts.” Of one Haitian, Niles wrote: “His candidate for the Presidency had lost. And then he’d had, of course, to take to the ‘bush.’ In order to save his life he’d gone up into the hills. It was always wise to give a new President time to settle down into office and to forget just who had taken up arms to elect his rival.” Is Aristide, and are the events of the last few years, really all that distinctive?
If we listen carefully, we can hear history unfolding well before it hits the headlines, and the echoes remain audible long after the battles have been fought and forgotten. Our fate is to return whence we came, perhaps (so we must hope) just a little wiser.
My own education began in November 1990, in a mountain village on Haiti’s southern peninsula. My teacher was an elderly Episcopal priest, a wiry man given to gallic hand gestures and shrugs and sporting a goatee that made him resemble Ho Chi Minh. An election was to take place in less than a month: the country’s first genuinely democratic election ever. Almost idly, I asked the priest which candidate he thought would win. Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official, was a name one heard often.
“Aristide will win,” he said without hesitation. He lifted a finger. “If he lives.”
I had not heard the name before. I asked which candidate he preferred.
“I prefer the candidate who will be the best for the country.”
Well, which one was that?
“God will choose the right one. No man can become a leader unless God wants it.”
I rejoined: Had God chosen Hitler?
“Oui,” he retorted. “Bon-Dieu a choisi Hitler, mais Hitler a trompe Bon-Dieu.” God chose Hitler, but Hitler betrayed God.
The priest wanted, he told me, a government “that will allow you and me to continue doing our work here.”
Did Bazin stand a chance?
“Between you and me, no. Aristide is too popular.”
A few days later, at a restaurant in Petionville, I asked the priest’s wife what the government-I used the French etat-was doing for the people of the village where we had been.
“L'(tat, c’est mon mari ( L_____,” she replied and laughed. In L_____, my husband is the state.
It was a perfectly Haitian reply: ambiguous, ironic-and true.
-Ethan Casey is a journalist based in Bangkok. He writes for The Globe and Mail of Toronto, among other publications.
1. Note Wilentz’s eerily prophetic treatment of her acquaintance with Aristide, well before he was at all known outside Haiti, in The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (Simon & Schuster, 1989).
2. See, for example, her call in the Nation of August 22, 1994, for a continuation, at that very late date, of the brutal economic embargo.
3. The political game playing continues. In September of 1996, Republicans on the House International Relations Committee charged the Clinton administration with covering up the murder of two critics of Aristide in August of this year. (Aristide stepped down as president in 1996, but the new president, Rene Preval, is widely regarded as a puppet of Aristide.) U.S. Ambassador William Swing conceded that members of the Haitian presidential guard were implicated in the murders, but said that those responsible had been fired. Michael Killian of the Chicago Tribune (Sept. 28, 1996) reported that the State Department and the Pentagon have sent 46 security experts to Haiti “to help protect Preval from rogue elements within his own presidential guard. State Department security agents have never been used before to protect a foreign head of state in his own country, according to the American Foreign Service Association.”
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and DrugsBy William J. Bennett, John J. Dilulio, and John P. WaltersSimon & Schuster271 pp.; $24
Though he hasn’t yet turned 40, John J. DiIulio, Jr., is one of the nation’s leading experts in the field of criminal justice. Professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Public Management, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, DiIulio carries an impressive list of academic credentials, including a number of scholarly publications. He is also a widely quoted public intellectual whose essays appear regularly in the Weekly Standard, The New Republic, National Review, and other leading journals of opinion.
DiIulio was one of the first to sound the warning about the now widely acknowledged increase in juvenile crime. In particular, he has drawn attention to the young criminals–mostly male–whom he calls “super-predators,” characterized by violent impulsiveness and a chilling lack of empathy or remorse. Because he writes and speaks about crime without employing fashionable evasions, DiIulio has been harshly criticized by some of his scholarly peers, but he does not belong in anybody’s political pigeonhole. As James Traub observed in a New Yorker profile (Nov. 4, 1996),
Besides being a tenured Ivy League professor, he is a Democrat who has sharply, and publicly, attacked the Contract with America and the new welfare law. He may be the only academic in the country who could say, as he did in a speech earlier this year, “It is no more true that most welfare recipients are lazy, undeserving people than it is true that most prisoners are mere first-time nonviolent criminals.”
Lately DiIulio has been working with a coalition of black ministers who believe that churches, given adequate funds, are the best hope–maybe the only hope–for neglected and abused kids in the inner city. Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center met with DiIulio in Philadelphia to talk about that ongoing work and about DiIulio’s new book, Body Count, coauthored with William Bennett and John P. Walters.
You have said America is sitting on a ticking demographic crime bomb. Can you explain that to us?
In 1994 there were 2.7 million arrests of persons under age 18, up from 1.7 million in 1991; 150,000 of those arrests of juveniles were for violent crimes. Juveniles are now responsible for ever-larger shares of both property and violent crime. If you look at the estimates by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, they will tell you that by the year 2010 we’ll have about 4,500,000 more boys, males under the age of 18, in the population than we had in 1990. Even if the increase isn’t that big, even if fertility rates nationally trend downward as some people suggest they well might, almost everyone believes that there is going to be an increase in the number of at-risk juvenile males: kids who are basically unsupervised, not in homes where they are given the most rudimentary education.
A good proxy for what’s going to happen down the road is rates of child abuse and neglect. We know that, all other things being equal, child maltreatment will increase the chances of delinquency by about 40 percent. That sheer demographic effect is going to have an impact. Lots of other things could happen to mitigate the situation: law enforcement changes, social-policy changes–all sorts of other things can make a difference; it’s a multi-variant world. But ultimately, I think, the news is not very good.
Is this what you mean when you write about the coming of the “super-predators”?
Among the increasing population of children who are growing up without adequate supervision and care, there is a small fraction of kids who are simply surrounded by deviant, delinquent criminal adults, in fatherless, godless, and jobless settings. That kind of criminogenic environment is the breeding ground for the kids who have been referred to as the super-predators. They are remorseless, radically present-oriented, and radically self-regarding; they lack empathic impulses; they kill or maim or get involved in other forms of serious crime without much consideration of future penalties or risks to themselves or others. The stigma of arrest means nothing to them.
The important thing about the super-predators concept is that it’s at one end of the juvenile crime continuum. At the other end is the old concept of delinquent youth, stealing hubcaps or going for a joyride. Most of the kids who are committing crimes are not at either of these ends. But if only one-tenth of 1 percent of the kids who are out there committing crimes are at the super-predator extreme, that’s very bad news, because those kids exercise an influence that is completely out of proportion to their numbers. The most radically impulsive and violent kids tend to be the ones who are leading the more than 200,000 kids who are organized into gangs in this country today.
The super-predators are the kids who will commit and instigate the most serious crimes, but they are also among the most needy kids. Every super-predator I’ve come up close and personal to is a kid who has suffered unrelenting abuse and neglect. They are desperately in need of spiritual and material help.
Are you encouraged at all, as a counter to this pessimistic forecast, by the recent drop of crime in New York?
I am encouraged by it. I’m encouraged by the fact that New York has had such success. I attribute that largely, but not solely, to the improvements that have been made in policing in New York City. If you look at the data that have been reported (they are essentially the fbi’s uniform crime reports), fully a third of the decrease in reported crimes in America over the past several years is concentrated in New York. So if you throw New York out of the mix, we haven’t had a national decrease in crime. It’s been stable, and some categories have been increasing. New York is the national story as well as the northeastern U.S. story.
I’m not quite as thrilled as a lot of people for at least two reasons, however. One is that reported crimes are not all crimes. We measure all crimes through the National Crime Victimization Survey. To make a long story short, the National Crime Victimization Survey showed that in 1995 there had been a drop in violent crimes nationally, from 10.9 to 9.9 million criminal victimizations, which is real and true and good news. The bad news, however, comes in two parts. Number one, the way in which crimes are counted and measured is different from the way it was done only a few years ago. So, for example, until May of 1995, the same survey instrument had never counted as many as 7 million violent crimes in a single year. So as far as anyone knew, as of May 1995, Americans had never suffered as many as 7 million violent crimes in a single year. Now we’re cheering the fact that we’ve decreased under this new way of measuring victimizations from 10.9 to 9.9 million. We ought to cheer, because I think crime is nationally in that direction, but again, that’s more crimes than we knew we had before.
Second, if you compare crime rates today with those in the 1950s or ’60s, you’ll find that we are living with rates of violent criminal victimization that are four and five times what they were as little as three or four decades ago. I want to cheer the decrease in New York, but we ought not define criminality down, we ought not be happy that New York City may only have a thousand or so murders this year, when in the 1940s with a population as large and with paramedics who weren’t as fast, we had 44 gunshot murders in a typical year.
Let me bring this around to a new book you’ve written with Bill Bennett and John Walters (Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs),wherein you all suggest that the principal reason for the increase in violent crime is “moral poverty.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
Let me take the first word, briefly, because it’s often a source of confusion. When we talk about moral poverty, we’re thinking about morality as something that doesn’t inhere in the individual, but that is learned. So by moral poverty we mean growing up in the absence of parents, coaches, teachers, clergy, and other adults who teach you right from wrong, who nurture you, who show you unconditional love, or something that is close to it, and give you loving discipline as well. More and more kids in this country, not just poor kids or inner-city kids, but kids across the board, are growing up with some degree of moral poverty.
So you don’t have to be in an urban neighborhood to grow up in moral poverty?
Absolutely not. In fact, over half of kids in this country, by some estimates, will reach the age of 18 without having experienced consistent adult supervision and guidance. You can be at Princeton University and have grown up in moral poverty and have problems as a result of it. You could be on the streets of Camden. It knows no race, creed, color, or zip code.
You suggest in Body Count that the religious dimension of moral poverty is the most important of all. Why do you say that?
For two reasons. First, we’re concerned not just about crime and not just about criminals, but about the spiritual condition of the people who are doing the crime. If you told us that there is a gun-control program or strategy that could take every high-tech gun off the streets of North Philadelphia, we would run, not walk, to get that program implemented. We would also, at the end of the day, remain very concerned about the spiritual condition of kids who would use high-tech guns if they could get them. When everything is said and done, we believe that, as Christians, we should feel convicted by the fact that we are dealing with this problem of moral poverty and so-called super-predators. Our response can’t be simply to lock these kids up, even though that’s something we must do in far too many cases. We’re concerned about the child behind the crime.
Second, we talk about religion because, as much effective monitoring as you can do through juvenile justice, as much effective mentoring as you can do through programs like Big Brothers and Big Sisters, there are many, many kids in the most abject moral poverty who will not be reached by these programs. And here the church needs to step in. These are the kids who are the biggest street-level crime problem. They are the most abused, neglected, and underserved. In the inner-city communities where this problem is most acute, the churches have a moral obligation–and many of them are already doing this–to open their doors to these kids.
How is the involvement of the church in these issues viewed by your colleagues in the social science community?
I’m laughing a bit because over the past ten years, first I thought there was nothing less popular in academic and intellectual circles than a pro-family intellectual. Then I concluded, no, it was a pro-incarceration intellectual, but now I nominate pro-religion intellectuals. Not because of out-and-out disregard or dislike of religious institutions, so much as the knee-jerk suspicion among a lot of elite academics, in particular, that if you believe in God you have some form of mental illness, and you need to be treated rather than encouraged.
We believe that, purely as a good social scientist, you need to look at the efficacy of religious commitment, attachment to religious institutions, and so on, as a factor in explaining variants in juvenile crime rates. You simply cannot explain variants in juvenile crime rates without some reference to the religion variable, or the so-called faith factor. It just keeps coming up. As hard as some people have tried to bury it, suppress it, sweep it under the rug, there is more and more research evidence, and there will be more and more scientific research evidence, to suggest that kids who have some attachment to religious institutions do better in terms of staying off drugs, staying out of crime, than other kids who are the same in all other ways we can know, but lack that attachment. We think the spiritual dimension here is real and important. The at-risk kids, like all kids, need adults in their lives who are there because they see in the child not just another statistic or body but a spiritual being who needs to be saved, saved from the horrors of the streets and saved spiritually.
We also think there is a very practical dimension. There may be a church in your neighborhood, as there are in some of the most depressed areas of Philadelphia, for example, where kids can go and get literacy training, and get drug treatment that addresses the whole person–not just credentialed therapy, but a whole-person treatment: what’s going on in the home, what’s going on in school, what’s troubling you, what’s driving this, why did you do it, how can we help you; we’re here for you, we love you even when the world hates you. That kind of care makes a positive difference. So our position is, if you want to view religion purely in a secular light, do so. If you want to talk about measuring the performance of competing ways of dealing with substance abuse, that’s fine, too. Just give the churches a chance to compete, and give the faith factor its due in explaining the variants in crime rates.
Now you do say something a bit controversial when you say that government officials should enable churches to do more. Is this possible, given the church-state issues?
I have to be clear that in answering this I am speaking for myself, not for my coauthors in Body Count. America has somewhere in the vicinity of 23,000 black churches, many of them in inner-city areas where the problems are worst, and they are doing all kinds of good things. I say, let the government fund programs that are targeted to serve kids who have these attributes, with the aim of reducing their frequency of drug use and their recidivism rates, and so on. Don’t specify process criteria–how many Ph.D.’s you need to have, and what the treatment modalities need to be–just specify the performance criteria and let the churches compete for those funds, like anyone else. Don’t regulate them to death. Don’t make it impossible for them to get local zoning waivers. Don’t bar them from competition for federal dollars.
I’m hoping to be a part of building a systematic inventory of evaluative research on the churches, and I believe that the black churches are already outperforming many of the secular alternatives in terms of primary and secondary prevention programs. Beyond that, I would simply point out that in many places, a fairly substantial fraction of the social-services dollar is going to religious institutions today. Catholic Charities, for example, gets about 62 percent of its funds through various government entities. Now, as a good Catholic, I will maintain for the sake of the organization that there is no proselytizing going on. It’s like Jiffy Lube, only it happens to have a religious orientation. But if we really believe that, I don’t think we understand the nature of the Catholic church’s mission here on earth, or what Christians are about. I want to do it up front, not through the back door; I want people to know that when we do literacy training, that literacy training is going to occur using the Bible, as it has occurred for generations and generations, and very effectively. I want people to be aware of that up front. I want people not to be afraid of it or scared by it. My own take on the constitutional questions differs radically from what I consider to be the myth of the separation of church and state, but I’ll fall silent on that.
That’s why your guiding principle is, “Build churches, not jails.”
That’s right. We will probably build scores more maximum-, medium-, and especially minimum-security prisons, including ones for juveniles, over the next 15 years. This will happen regardless of whether the demographic crime bomb goes off or not. The laws have been passed, the kids are in the pipeline, the crimes are being committed. So the prisons are going to be built. But I truly believe, not simply as a matter of religious faith, but as a matter of empirical observation, that if we could build 10 or 15 churches with youth-outreach ministries like we have at the Deliverance Evangelist Church in Philadelphia, we could make a real difference.
When you say “if we could build churches,” who is the “we”?
I’m part of an effort that is forming a nonprofit organization to raise private funds to identify the churches in major metropolitan areas in America that are actually doing this now–not talking about it, but doing it-who need help in getting the dollars and the personnel and the logistical support. So when I say “build churches,” in some cases I mean literally the bricks and mortar of building a facility, which in some cases is the only decent physical dwelling in the entire neighborhood, with open doors and with staffing and with space and activities going on for the kids of the community.
They need help in money. We could fit in every at-risk kid in Philadelphia who doesn’t have parental or home support. We could do it in this city. We don’t have to have a major juvenile crime problem in the city of Philadelphia, we don’t have to have kids who are growing up without any decent adult care. If we empower the churches, we can change that.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the coalition you put together on this?
I’ve been working over the past ten months or so with a group of inner-city ministers here in Philadelphia and in Boston. The Boston coalition is headed by Reverend Eugene Rivers, a self-described Christian black nationalist, who has been at it for the better part of a decade in the Four Corners neighborhood of Boston. In Boston, they’ve been working around a ten-point plan which basically runs the gamut from being ombudsman for juvenile probationers to one-on-one drug treatment, to literacy training, to Boston Freedom Summer, where they give kids the opportunity to be together in a structured, disciplined, but loving environment. Walking among the poor: that’s what they’re doing. It’s really as simple as that.
The difficulty that I’ve discovered is, as Reverend Rivers likes to say, there are lots and lots of churches with lots and lots of resources, both public and private resources, that haven’t lived their faith commitment on the streets. They haven’t gotten the money to where it is needed and haven’t gotten the help to where it is needed. That’s not an indictment of all the churches, it’s merely to say there’s an awful lot that needs to be done here, and it’s going to take some kind of radical action to get it done.
So you are trying to build a network in something like 35 cities?
We have a goal. We talk about job one being to refine the ten-point plan; job two, shoring up the Boston operation and making it truly citywide; job three, taking that and replicating it here in Philadelphia, a much bigger, tougher, more crime-ridden city; and all the while beginning to develop a network of people all across the country in our 20 biggest cities, with the goal of a thousand churches by the year 2006 that are doing some or all of the key ten points of this holistic youth-outreach ministry. It’s a coalition not only among the various black Protestant inner-city churches, but also involving the Catholic church. It is an alliance that transcends a lot of the usual theological, ideological, and denominational divides. I’ve met and talked to everyone from Ralph Reed to Ron Sider. Again, the problem defines the solution here. I think we’ve gotten a tremendous amount of support from lots of people. So far, mostly rhetorical support, but I hope soon financial support, and best of all, hands and feet in the neighborhoods and the communities, which is really ultimately what we need
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
- More fromMichael Cromartie
by George Marsden
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Scholars do not operate in a vacuum, but within the frameworks of their communities, traditions, commitments, and beliefs. Their scholarship, even when specialized, develops within a larger picture of reality. So we must ask: What is in that larger picture? Is there a place for God? If so, does God’s presence make any difference to the rest of the picture? Does that presence change the relative proportions of the picture as a whole?
A picture of reality in which there is a being great enough to produce and to oversee the universe is, after all, quite different from one in which things operate sheerly through impersonal forces. If we affirm a reality that includes a being of immense intelligence, power, and concern for us, every other fact or belief will have some relationship to that being. At the least, the presence of that being should alter our view of the relative significance of the other aspects of reality that we deal with in our scholarship.
The doctrine of divine creation has the widest implications for scholarship in Christian and other monotheistic traditions, but Christians should ask as well whether more specifically Christian theological beliefs might also have implications for their scholarship. The Christian faith that Jesus Christ is God, the second person of the Trinity, who was incarnated as truly human, is central to Christian tradition. If such an astonishing belief is deeply imbedded in the web of beliefs that forms our thoughts, what implications ought it to have for our academic work?
One implication, which is not unique to Christianity but is accentuated by faith in Christ as God incarnate, is that the supernatural and the natural realms are not closed off to each other. Christians who affirm that Jesus was not only human but also fully divine must presuppose that the transcendent God, the wholly Other, the Creator of heaven and earth, can appear and be known in our ordinary history.
Most of modern thought, by contrast, assumes something like “Lessing’s ditch”: that one cannot get from the contingent truths of history to the timeless metaphysical truths of religion. Acceptance of the Incarnation, however, seems to presuppose that we can know about the transcendent through ordinary contingent means, such as the testimony of others and evidences drawn from our own experience.
The Christian experience of faith involves in some way knowing God through an encounter with the historical person Jesus Christ. The starting point for Christian thought, then, entails an implicit rejection of the rule (perhaps derived from more abstract conceptions of the deity in classical Greek thought) that we cannot bridge the gap between empirical truths and wider metaphysical realities. Religious truths are not first of all “necessary truths,” like the truths of mathematics, but rather, according to Christianity, revealed to us in encounters with the divine person within our history.
Christians who believe in the Incarnation are then working within a framework of a universe that is open to spiritual phenomena that go beyond those that people of all faiths or of no formal faith can agree on. While Christians may be as skeptical as anyone about any particular claim of a miracle, a revelation, or spiritual phenomenon, they would not rule it out on the modern premise that such things do not happen. In short, they are working in a spiritually open, rather than closed, universe.
At the same time, in academic and many other settings, Christians may engage in what could be called “methodological secularization.” For a particular task, such as landing an airplane, this is the stance that we hope our fellow citizens will take. No matter how open the pilot may be to spiritual realities, we hope that he will rely on the radar and not just the Holy Spirit when trying to get to O’Hare.
The same applies in many academic activities, especially the more technical ones. Yet the implication of such methodological secularization is different from that of the “methodological atheism” that is more often the academic rule. Methodological secularization means only that for limited ad hoc purposes we will focus on natural phenomena accessible to all, while not denying their spiritual dimensions as created and ordered by God or forgetting that there is much more to the picture. The pilot who follows the radar and the instrument panel may even sense those tasks differently if she believes she is ultimately dependent on God and that she has spiritual responsibility to her passengers. In academic work, such openness may have real impact on our theories, particularly in eliminating those that claim the universally accessible natural phenomena are all there is.
For Christians in the natural sciences, this incarnationally based viewpoint should invite a consciousness of the wider context of the more real and more permanent spiritual dimensions of reality within which empirical inquiry takes place. This awareness might have an impact on how one regards the significance of one’s work, even if, technically considered, that work might look much like the work of a nontheist. When scientists have occasion to articulate their understandings of the wider contexts–philosophical, historical, or practical–this wider consciousness may have explicit implications as well.
Since Christ the Word is co-creator according to Christian doctrine, scientists with a strongly incarnational view of nature may be sensitive to spiritual dimensions in all of reality. Practically speaking, such views might affect how one applies scientific or technological inquiry to issues such as ecology, medicine, or engineering. For some pure researchers, simply the doxological implications of an incarnational world-view may be sufficient. They might resonate with the sensibilities of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
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 . . .
Such sensibilities might not change one’s research methods or conclusions. Nevertheless, they might have an impact both on the quality of one’s work and on one’s agenda in studying God’s creation in the first place. Surely there would be huge implications when such scientists relate their subjects to the larger issues of life. At the least, it would counter the impression, created by some scientific popularizers, that because natural science is essentially materialistic, materialism therefore provides the best account of reality.
The incarnational motif also has implications for the arts, humanities, and social sciences. It suggests, for instance, that we may see God working in the ordinary, if only we have the eyes to see. Poets, artists, and musicians may be most open to giving expression to such dimensions of reality, but they are there for all to see.
For the Christian, the Incarnation is not an abstraction; it is central to the revelation of the character of God. As Jonathan Edwards emphasizes, God is not only a righteous judge, but is also infinitely loving. God is not only revealing the beauty of his love in creation, but he displays the highest love and hence the highest beauty in Christ’s dying for us, the infinitely good God incarnate dying on behalf of those who despise him. Although we are creatures capable of great love, we in fact build our universes around love to our selves. God’s display of his sacrificial love to us in Christ relativizes our self-righteousness. United with Christ, we are to love even those whom we would naturally despise.
This revelation of the character of God in Christ should thus change our sensibilities toward other humans. In the Incarnation, Christ emptied himself and became poor for our sake. He identified with the poor and the ordinary. Christ went so far as to instruct us that when we see the poor and the destitute we see him. How we act toward them is an indicator of how we love him. Christ’s incarnation honors what the world has not usually honored.
We run into a central irony in attempting to isolate the implication of Christian commitments for our scholarship. The sensibilities of Christians toward the poor and the weak have been dulled by the very success of the assimilation of these same sensibilities by the wider Western culture and, lately, world culture.
Sometime in the last four centuries, many Westerners began attacking hierarchies and emphasizing the essential equality of all humans. Often such ideas had direct religious roots, as in early Quakerism or in the pietism and other forms of “religion of the heart” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In other instances, the religious roots, although substantial, might be less apparent. Some prevalent modern political sentiments grew out of the convenantal idea that divine law stood above rulers as well as ruled and evolved into talk of “the rights of men” and eventually “the rights of women.”
At least by the time of the French Revolution, the flowerings of such sensibilities were often separated from their Christian roots. In fact, whatever spirit of Christianity they embodied was often being opposed by institutional Christianity. So, while in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries many Christian expressions of such sensibilities have persisted, they have been overshadowed by their non-Christian or anti-Christian counterparts. Marxism’s concern for the poor is the most obvious example.
Eventually the rootlessness of such humanitarianism caught up with Marxism. One of the great tasks of Christian scholarship is to recover some dimensions of Christian teaching that have been alienated from their theological roots. This task is particularly urgent in an era when secular morality is adrift and traditional Christianity itself is too often beholden to the politics of self-interest and simplistic solutions.
-George Marsden is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. This essay is excerpted from his book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, just published by Oxfor University Press.
George Marsden has just published a new book, with the wonderful title The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. Why “outrageous”? Well, the average secularized academic regards the Apostles’ Creed as an affront to reason. It’s bad enough that people should believe this stuff in the privacy of their own homes; to propose that such antiquated notions should inform one’s scholarship is truly outrageous.
But the challenge is not only to the naturalistic mindset that dominates the university. Christians must be able to answer the question “What difference does your faith make in the way you see and understand the world?” And that question isn’t exclusively for scholars; all believers need to wrestle with it.
In the section that follows, four writers respond to the challenge of thinking incarnationally. They take as given that the God of the universe was incarnated as truly human, and that as human beings, body and soul, we are created in the divine image. Marsden shows how those core beliefs should provide a framework for Christian scholarship. Frederica Mathewes-Green reports on one of the hottest trends in academic publishing: the discovery that we have bodies. David Downing investigates the phenomenon of spirit possession, from the Salem witch trials to the current fascination with multiple personality disorder. And Richard Mouw considers what we might learn from the confessions of a sex addict who has found grace.
“It seems unfair, even embarrassing,” Mathewes-Green writes, “that our noble, pure, bright spirits are tangled up with clumsy flesh.” But that is where we are, and that is where Jesus meets us: “Take, eat; this is my body.” Outrageous.
Special Section: Thinking Incarnationally
Tangled Up with Clumsy Flesh
-JW
Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
- More fromby George Marsden
Pastors
Eugene H. Peterson
Leadership BooksJanuary 1, 1997
The vocational reformation of our own time is a rediscovery of the pastoral work of the cure of souls.
—Eugene H. Peterson
Areformation may be in process in the way pastors do their work. It may turn out to be as significant as the theological reformation of the sixteenth century. I hope so. The signs are accumulating.
The Reformers recovered the biblical doctrine of justification by faith. The gospel proclamation, fresh and personal and direct, through the centuries had become an immense, lumbering Rube Goldberg mechanism: elaborately contrived ecclesiastical gears, pulleys, and levers rumbled and creaked importantly, but ended up doing something completely trivial. The Reformers recovered the personal passion and clarity so evident in Scripture. This rediscovery of firsthand involvement resulted in freshness and vigor.
The vocational reformation of our own time (if it turns out to be that) is a rediscovery of the pastoral work of the cure of souls. The phrase sounds antique. It is antique. But it is not obsolete. It catches up and coordinates, better than any other expression I am aware of, the unending warfare against sin and sorrow and the diligent cultivation of grace and faith to which the best pastors have consecrated themselves in every generation. The odd sound of the phrase may even work to advantage by calling attention to how remote present-day pastoral routines have become.
I am not the only pastor who has discovered this old identity. More and more pastors are embracing this way of pastoral work and are finding themselves authenticated by it. There are not a lot of us. We are by no means a majority, not even a high-profile minority. But one by one, pastors are rejecting the job description that has been handed to them and are taking on this new one or, as it turns out, the old one that has been in use for most of the Christian centuries.
It is not sheer fantasy to think there may come a time when the number reaches critical mass and thus effects a genuine vocational reformation among pastors. Even if it doesn’t, it seems to me the single most significant and creative thing happening in pastoral ministry today.
What Do We Do?
There’s a distinction between what pastors do on Sundays and what we do between Sundays. What we do on Sundays has not really changed through the centuries: proclaiming the gospel, teaching Scripture, celebrating the sacraments, offering prayers. But the work between Sundays has changed radically, and it has not been a development but a defection.
Until about a century ago, what pastors did between Sundays was a piece of what they did on Sundays. The context changed: instead of being with an assembled congregation, the pastor was with one other person or with small gatherings of persons, or alone in study and prayer. The manner changed: instead of proclamation, there was conversation. But the work was the same: discovering the meaning of Scripture, developing a life of prayer, guiding growth into maturity.
This is the pastoral work that is historically termed the cure of souls. The primary sense of cura in Latin is “care,” with undertone of “cure.” The soul is the essence of the human personality. The cure of souls, then, is the Scripture-directed, prayer-shaped care that is devoted to persons singly or in groups, in settings both sacred and profane. It is a determination to work at the center, to concentrate on the essential.
The between-Sundays work of American pastors in this century, though, is running a church. I first heard the phrase “run a church” only a few days before my ordination. After thirty years, I can still remember the unpleasant impression it made.
I was traveling with a pastor I respected very much. I was full of zest and vision, anticipating pastoral life. My inner conviction of call to the pastorate was about to be confirmed by others. What God wanted me to do, what I wanted to do, and what others wanted me to do were about to converge. From fairly extensive reading about pastor and priest predecessors, I was impressed that everyday pastoral life was primarily concerned with developing a life of prayer among the people. Leading worship, preaching the gospel, and teaching Scripture on Sundays would develop in the next six days into representing the life of Christ in the human traffic of the everyday.
With my mind full of these thoughts, my pastor friend and I stopped at a service station for gasoline. My friend, a gregarious person, bantered with the attendant. Something in the exchange provoked a question.
“What do you do?”
“I run a church.”
No answer could have surprised me more. I knew, of course, that pastoral life included institutional responsibilities, but it never occurred to me that I would be defined by those responsibilities. But the moment I became ordained, I found that indeed I was defined both by the pastors and executives over me and by the parishioners around me. The first job description given me omitted prayer entirely.
Behind my back, while my pastoral identity was being formed by Gregory and Bernard, Luther and Calvin, Richard Baxter of Kidder-Minster and Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, George Herbert and Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman and Alexander Whyte, Phillips Brooks and George MacDonald, the work of the pastor had been almost completely secularized (except for Sundays). I didn’t like it and decided, after an interval of confused disorientation, that being a physician of souls took priority over running a church, and that I would be guided in my pastoral vocation by wise predecessors rather than contemporaries. Luckily, I have found allies along the way and a readiness among my parishioners to work with me in changing my pastoral job description.
Curing Souls vs. Running a Church
It should be clear that the cure of souls is not a specialized form of ministry (analogous, for instance, to hospital chaplain or pastoral counselor) but is the essential pastoral work. It is not a narrowing of pastoral work to its devotional aspects, but it is a way of life that uses weekday tasks, encounters, and situations as the raw material for teaching prayer, developing faith, and preparing for a good death.
Curing souls is a term that filters out what is introduced by a secularizing culture. It is also a term that identifies us with our ancestors and colleagues in ministry, lay and clerical, who were and are convinced that a life of prayer is the connective tissue between holy day proclamation and weekday discipleship.
A caveat: I contrast the cure of souls with the task of running a church, but I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not contemptuous of running a church, nor do I dismiss its importance. I run a church myself; I have for over twenty years. I try to do it well.
But I do it in the same spirit that I, along with my wife, run our house. There are many essential things that we routinely do, often (though not always) with joy. But running a house is not what we do. What we do is build a home, develop in marriage, raise children, practice hospitality, pursue lives of work and play. It is reducing pastoral work to institutional duties that I object to, not the duties themselves, which I gladly share with others in the church.
It will hardly do, of course, to stubbornly defy the expectations of people and eccentrically go about pastoral work like a seventeenth-century curate, even if the eccentric curate is far more sane than the current clergy. The recovery of this essential between-Sundays work of the pastor must be worked out in tension with the secularized expectations of this age: there must be negotiation, discussion, experimentation, confrontation, adaptation. Pastors who devote themselves to the guidance of souls must do it among people who expect them to run a church. In a determined and kindly tension with those who thoughtlessly presume to write job descriptions for us, we can, I am convinced, recover our proper work.
Pastors, though, who decide to reclaim the vast territory of the soul as their preeminent responsibility will not do it by going away for job retraining. We must work it out on the job, for it is not only ourselves but our people whom we are desecularizing. The task of vocational recovery is as endless as theological reformation. Details vary with pastor and parish, but there are three areas of contrast between running a church and the cure of souls that all of us experience: initiative, language, and problems.
Initiative
In running the church, I seize the initiative. I take charge. I assume responsibility for motivation and recruitment, for showing the way, for getting things started. If I don’t, things drift. I am aware of the tendency to apathy, the human susceptibility to indolence, and I use my leadership position to counter it.
By contrast, the cure of souls is a cultivated awareness that God has already seized the initiative. The traditional doctrine defining this truth is prevenience: God everywhere and always seizing the initiative. He gets things going. He had and continues to have the first word. Prevenience is the conviction that God had been working diligently, redemptively, and strategically before I appeared on the scene, before I was aware there was something here for me to do.
The cure of souls is not indifferent to the realities of human lethargy, naïve about congregational recalcitrance, or inattentive to neurotic cussedness. But there is a disciplined, determined conviction that everything (and I mean, precisely, everything) we do is a response to God’s first work, his initiating act. We learn to be attentive to the divine action already in process so that the previously unheard word of God is heard, the previously unattended act of God is noticed.
Running-the-church questions are: What do we do? How can we get things going again?
Cure-of-souls questions are: What has God been doing here? What traces of grace can I discern in this life? What history of love can I read in this group? What has God set in motion that I can get in on?
We misunderstand and distort reality when we take ourselves as the starting point and our present situation as the basic datum. Instead of confronting the bogged-down human condition and taking charge of changing it with no time wasted, we look at divine prevenience and discern how we can get in on it at the right time, in the right way.
The cure of souls takes time to read the minutes of the previous meeting, a meeting more likely than not at which I wasn’t present. When I engage in conversation, meet with a committee, or visit a home, I am coming in on something that has already been in process for a long time. God has been and is the central reality in that process. The biblical conviction is that God is “long beforehand with my soul.” God has already taken the initiative. Like one who walks in late to a meeting, I am entering a complex situation in which God has already said decisive words and acted in decisive ways. My work is not necessarily to announce that but to discover what he is doing and live appropriately with it.
Language
In running the church I use language that is descriptive and motivational. I want people to be informed so there are no misunderstandings. And I want people to be motivated so things get done. But in the cure of souls, I am far more interested in who people are and who they are becoming in Christ than I am in what they know or what they are doing. In this, I soon find that neither descriptive nor motivational language helps very much.
Descriptive language is language about—it names what is there. It orients us in reality. It makes it possible for us to find our way in and out of intricate labyrinths. Our schools specialize in teaching us this language. Motivational language is language for—it uses words to get things done. Commands are issued, promises made, requests proffered. Such words get people to do things they won’t do on their own initiative. The advertising industry is our most skillful practitioner of this language art.
Indispensable as these uses of language are, there is another language more essential to our humanity and far more basic to the life of faith. It is personal language. It uses words to express oneself, to converse, to be in relationship. This is language to and with. Love is offered and received, ideas are developed, feelings are articulated, silences are honored. This is the language we speak spontaneously as children, as lovers, as poets—and when we pray. It is also conspicuously absent when we are running a church—there is so much to say and do that there is no time left to be and no occasion, therefore, for the language of being there.
The cure of souls is a decision to work at the heart of things, where we are most ourselves and where our relationships in faith and intimacy are developed. The primary language must be, therefore, to and with, the personal language of love and prayer. The pastoral vocation does not take place primarily in a school where subjects are taught, nor in a barracks where assault forces are briefed for attacks on evil, but in a family—the place where love is learned, where birth takes place, where intimacy is deepened. The pastoral task is to use the language appropriate in this most basic aspect of our humanity—not language that describes, not language that motivates, but spontaneous language: cries and exclamation, confessions and appreciations, words the heart speaks.
We have, of course, much to teach and much to get done, but our primary task is to be. The primary language of the cure of souls, therefore, is conversation and prayer. Being a pastor means learning to use language in which personal uniqueness is enhanced and individual sanctity is recognized and respected. It is a language that is unhurried, unforced, unexcited—the leisurely language of friends and lovers, which is also the language of prayer.
Problems
In running a church I solve problems. Wherever two or three are gathered together, problems develop. Egos are bruised, procedures get snarled, arrangements become confused, plans go awry. Temperaments clash. There are polity problems, marriage problems, work problems, child problems, committee problems, and emotional problems. Someone has to interpret, explain, work out new plans, develop better procedures, organize, and administer. Most pastors like to do this. I know I do. It is satisfying to help make the rough places smooth.
The difficulty is that problems arrive in such a constant flow that problem solving becomes full-time work. Because it is useful and the pastor ordinarily does it well, we fail to see that the pastoral vocation has been subverted. Gabriel Marcel wrote that life is not so much a problem to be solved as a mystery to be explored. That is certainly the biblical stance: life is not something we manage to hammer together and keep in repair by our wits; it is an unfathomable gift. We are immersed in mysteries: incredible love, confounding evil, the Creation, the Cross, grace, God.
The secularized mind is terrorized by mysteries. Thus it makes lists, labels people, assigns roles, and solves problems. But a solved life is a reduced life. These tightly buttoned-up people never take great faith risks or make convincing love talk. They deny or ignore the mysteries and diminish human existence to what can be managed, controlled, and fixed. We live among a cult of experts who explain and solve. The vast technological apparatus around us gives the impression that there is a tool for everything if we can only afford it. Pastors cast in the role of spiritual technologists are hard put to keep that role from absorbing everything else, since there are so many things that need to be and can, in fact, be fixed.
But “there are things,” wrote Mariann Moore, “that are important beyond all this fiddle.” The old-time guide of souls asserts the priority of the “beyond” over “this fiddle.” Who is available for this work other than pastors? A few poets, perhaps; and children, always. But children are not good guides, and most of our poets have lost interest in God. That leaves pastors as guides through the mysteries. Century after century we live with our conscience, our passions, our neighbors, and our God. Any narrower view of our relationships does not match our real humanity.
If pastors become accomplices in treating every child as a problem to be figured out, every spouse as a problem to be dealt with, every clash of wills in choir or committee as a problem to be adjudicated, we abdicate our most important work, which is directing worship in the traffic, discovering the presence of the Cross in the paradoxes and chaos between Sundays, calling attention to the “splendor in the ordinary,” and, most of all, teaching a life of prayer to our friends and companions in the pilgrimage.
Copyright © 1997
- More fromEugene H. Peterson
Pastors
Richard C. Halverson
Leadership BooksJanuary 1, 1997
The greatest baggage a pastor carries to a new ministry assignment is ready-made programs.
—Richard C. Halverson
After my first pastorate, 1944-1947, in Coalinga, California, I never intended to pastor again; I didn’t think I was good enough material. So I worked with small groups as an associate minister for eight years and then joined International Christian Leadership for three years. After the Lord led me to Fourth Presbyterian Church, I realized I didn’t have a ready-made ministry program. In fact, I was so out of touch I didn’t even know what programs other churches were using or what programs were available.
Now, after twenty-one years at Fourth, I look back on that “problem” as one of the greatest assets I took to the church.
The greatest baggage a pastor carries to a new ministry assignment is ready-made programs. He is programmed to think he should try out this program as soon as he’s finished trying out that program. He’s buried in an avalanche of “how-to’s.” He continually compares program ideas with his colleagues. Consequently, ministries never become indigenous.
To make a ministry indigenous requires a more inductive approach.
Keep Things Simple
In those early days at Fourth, God taught me two things: First, treat the Sunday morning congregation the same way you’d treat a small group of people meeting in your living room. Second, fully implement the commandment Christ gave: “Love one another as I have loved you, and you will demonstrate to the world that you are my disciples.”
I was captured by a simple little statement in Mark: Jesus chose twelve and ordained them to be with him. Suddenly the word with became a big word, one of the biggest in the New Testament, because implicit within it is koinonia prayer and support. That word convinced me to have a ministry of being with people. I didn’t worry about what I was going to do with them; I didn’t need an agenda. Jesus began a movement that would be universal and that would last forever, and yet he spent most of his time with twelve people.
I’m not saying the most effective church structure is one composed of small groups; I’m saying that the right attitude about and approach to ministry is more effective than a lot of canned expertise.
For example, I have a regular Wednesday breakfast with some lay leaders. I learned long ago that if I came to the breakfast burning with a message I had prepared in my study, it would invariably fall like a lead balloon. Afterward the guys would say, “Halverson, it just wasn’t the same this morning.” It took me time to understand there is a chemistry about each group that generates its own agenda. I believe it comes from the Holy Spirit in our midst. That doesn’t mean I should neglect preparation, but it does mean that I have to prepare with a high degree of awareness and execute with a high degree of sensitivity. Even when a congregation or group is silent, something is still transmitted to the speaker.
Avoid the Canned Approach
We had a Gordon-Conwell student who recently interned at Fourth Presbyterian. I advised him, “John, you have learned many things at Gordon-Conwell, and before that you gained some valuable experience working with the Navigators. As you go to your first pastorate, you’ll be tempted to bring to that new situation all of the ideas, plans, and programs that you picked up in your training, and you won’t be patient enough to discover what is already there. Take the time to become part of what is there, and then these things you have learned will find proper adaptation and application; they’ll become indigenous to that situation. You can grow a dandelion in just a few hours, but it takes seven years to raise an orchid.”
I have real problems with the humanistic assumption that we can find the “right way” or the “best way” to do everything, and that if we find it, we’ll get the desired results. When I went to Fourth Presbyterian in 1956, I had come out of eleven years of small-group ministry. I thought I was a small-group expert. I wasn’t, but that’s the way we operate in this culture; when you’ve done something a few years you become an expert.
The man who led me to Christ was my first pastor, and he taught me how to handle ideas. He taught me to treat ideas like good seeds and showed me how to plant them in the soil of a heart or mind and let them grow. I have a bias against “canned” or ready-made, mass-distributed church programming. My style is to plant a seed, water it, and watch it grow.
We begin every worship service with a little greeting that reminds the people of the importance of their contribution to what is about to happen. The greeting is: “There is something to be captured in this moment that we can never give or receive at any other time or in any other situation. Let’s be alive to what Christ wants us to do here and now.”
I began to visualize myself standing in the pulpit on Sunday morning and talking to a group of people who have been literally inundated all week long with words. Now I want them to listen to my words. I suppose that’s what originally challenged me years ago to treat my congregation like a small group of people in my living room. When you invite a few people to your home for an evening, you don’t line them up in rows and lecture them unless you’re an absolute bore. Although the task of host or small-group leader may require you to focus the thinking or the discussion of the group, the objective is to get them involved in the process, to get them to participate.
On Sunday mornings, I try different things. One time I’ll say, “Here’s what Jesus said … now do you hear that? Do you hear it?”
If the congregation just sits there, I’ll persist, “Do we hear it?” I’ll begin to get a response. “What did he say?” I’ll wait until somebody says it out loud from the congregation. I don’t see any point in throwing words out at people if they are not listening and responding to them.
Identify Your Core Philosophy
I see the ideal organizational structure for a church in a model of concentric circles. I don’t like to diagram church organization on a vertical plane.
The scriptural model might start with John, who was called “the beloved.” At the Last Supper, he laid his head on Jesus’ chest; somehow, the intimate relationship John had with Jesus, the first circle, so to speak, was not a problem to the others. In the second circle were Peter, James, and John; Jesus took them to the Mount of Transfiguration and to the Garden of Gethsemane. Somehow Peter, James, and John had a relationship with Jesus that was not enjoyed by the nine but was accepted by them, even though the disciples were a normal group of human beings and prone to peer-group jealousy.
The core group around Jesus was the twelve; then there were the 70 around the twelve, and the 120 around the 70, and out beyond that the 500. The church should be the same.
This is how I approach pastoral care. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12:25, “That the members should have the same care for one another” (NKJV). A true Christian community is not something you organize. Now, I’m not saying you should never have a specific program, but the more spontaneous the caring is, the better it is. My mind keeps coming back to the Sunday morning service, which I believe is the pastor’s greatest opportunity for real caring.
For years the back page of our bulletin has been called “The Family Altar” and is devoted to congregational needs: the sick, the shut-ins, the students, and four or five “Families of the Week.” During our service we have a period of time called the “Praise and Prayers of the People.” This is followed by a period of silence in which we urge our people to pray for one another. Then we ask them to touch someone near them. I personally step down from the pulpit and walk into the congregation and touch various people. Other pastors do the same. Then we pray for the people on the back page. These simple gestures encourage an environment of caring.
Model Supportive Relationships
We encourage small groups, but we don’t try to organize them. It’s common for people to come to me and say, “We’d like to start a small group. Will you meet with us?” I usually do, and in the first session I show them how to study the Bible inductively and encourage them to make the group experience more that just a straight Bible study. Every small group has the potential to become a support church.
Within our church, this dynamic is modeled for our small groups by the steering committee of the small groups. I meet as often as I can with all of our steering committees. The other pastors do the same. We try to model supportive relationships. Sometimes we fail, but that’s good for us.
Twenty-one years ago we started with the “flock system,” whereby each lay leader was responsible for a certain number of members. That responsibility was clearly defined. For example, they were to meet with each member at least once a year, maintain contact at least twice a year, and so forth. It never worked. One reason was the nature of community life in metropolitan Washington. Some of the members said, “We don’t like to be thought of as sheep.” That was the final blow that killed the flock idea. More seriously, the sense of regimentation didn’t seem to set very well.
So we tried other programs. We have tried fellowship committees and other forms of congregational care. Right now we have a Ministry of Concern office. We were fortunate to secure the services of Pat Brown, a lovely woman from South Carolina with a beautiful southern accent. She obviously likes people and cares for them, and they in turn immediately respond to her. She creatively handles all kinds of situations.
For example, if a family is being evicted, they call her. If somebody can’t pay a hospital bill, she acts as a liaison with the deacon board. She’s developed what she calls a “Going Forth” ministry. This is a group of people who make themselves available to help others wherever she sends them. She has also organized what she calls “Family Connection,” an event-centered ministry of fellowship that encourages entire families to do things together. For example, Family Connection will be going to this month’s home game of the Redskins. During the summer they attended an outdoor concert at Wolftrap, and soon they will be chartering a train to spend a day together at Harper’s Ferry.
This kind of fellowship brings together young and old, married and single. Pat’s office tries to be especially sensitive to the need of singles who want contact with married couples, and to young people who want contact with older persons.
The point is that in all of these things we are less than perfect, but we are going to come back tomorrow and try harder.
Read the Culture
When I first came to Fourth, I did a lot of conventional visitation nearly every afternoon in the week. Little by little I discovered that suburban culture doesn’t allow for effective pastoral calls.
In the first place, it’s almost impossible to find the family together. Second, the suburban housewife tends to be very busy, and she usually doesn’t see any particular value in sitting down with the pastor and visiting for thirty minutes. Third, when children are present, a pastoral call can be looked upon as a family intrusion. I’ve had the experience of calling on families where they tried to accommodate me with one eye while watching television with the other.
In place of home visitation, we have assigned each of our pastors the responsibility of a certain number of members to contact by phone four times a year. That kind of contact has been very satisfying to me. I’ll take a couple of hours on a regular basis, sit at the phone, call a family and say, “Hi, this is Dick Halverson. I’m just calling to find out if you have any special needs I ought to be praying about today.”
We recently revived a term used a great deal when I was in seminary: care of souls. I hadn’t heard that term for years. Dr. Bonnell, who was in the vanguard of pastoral counseling, taught a course by that name which was required for seniors. His objective was to make us as sensitive as possible to the needs of the believer and to the many different means we could use to meet those needs. However, the emphasis was always on the person’s needs, not on the method to meet those needs.
Learn to Listen
When I began my ministry, I had taken a required course in counseling at Princeton and had read the one or two books available on this subject. I really wasn’t well prepared to face the problems that came my way. So I had to learn counseling by listening to people. Let’s face it, there is no substitute for being with people and trying to understand them and empathize with their needs.
For example, I was counseling a church member who was a closet homosexual. In our sessions I could sense he was getting close to admitting his problem. Instinctively I knew that if there was anything in my facial expression, anything at all that would indicate shock or change in attitude when he admitted his problem, I’d lose him. I so well remember how I prepared myself for the moment he shared who he was.
I made a few major mistakes in counseling, mostly when I failed to spiritually prepare for my task or allowed outside pressure and personal frustrations to desensitize me to the situation.
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but early in my ministry at Fourth, a couple—she was Japanese, he was Jewish—came to me for help. Their marriage was in terrible shape; I spent hours with them. It seemed at some point in every session the young man would rise and start pacing back and forth. Then he would start talking, getting louder and louder until he worked up into a frenzy.
One Sunday morning right after church they asked to see me, and as soon as he was in my office he began his little act, thoroughly embarrassing and intimidating his wife. He ended his performance by saying, “You know, if it weren’t for my wife, I’d take my life.” By then I was fed up with him, and in anger I said, “Well, you sure aren’t much use to her now.”
Monday morning I found he had attempted to take his life. I went to the hospital and the first thing he said was, “Mr. Halverson, you told me to do it.”
I had failed him—both of them, because I stopped listening and allowed myself to become insensitive to the real problem. Even to this day I rarely give what might be considered direct advice.
Handle Criticism Firmly
The plant-and-watch-it-grow philosophy doesn’t preclude conflict. Recently, a family whose fifteen-year-old boy was in trouble with the law made some critical comments about me. His father called me by phone, leveling me about my personal failures and the failure of our church. It wasn’t all true, but there was enough truth in it to make it hurt.
Even more devastating was a letter I received from one of our former elders who is now separated from his wife—two pages of very nasty notes about the church’s failure.
I had to face conflict head-on. In the case of the former elder, I called him as quickly as I could after receiving the letter. He didn’t want to talk, but I persevered. I let him say everything on the telephone he had already said in the letter. Then I apologized: “I’m sorry. I’ll accept this criticism for myself personally, and I’ll apologize for the church.” Since then, I’ve been talking to him by phone on a regular basis, and we are going to get together in two weeks.
In the case of the father and son, I went first to our director of youth ministry. The night after I talked to the father, the director went to their home and spent a couple of hours talking with them.
I prefer to handle criticism quickly, directly, and sensitively. But the emotional trauma that conflict creates deep in my soul is not as quickly handled. There’s a story about a frog that fell into a pothole. Regardless of what his frog friends tried to do, they couldn’t help him out of his dilemma. Finally, in desperation they left him to his destiny. The next day they found him bouncing around town as lively as ever. So one frog went up to him and said, “What happened? We thought you couldn’t get out of that hole.” He replied, “I couldn’t, but a truck came along and I had to.”
I don’t know any other answer to jumping out of the pothole of conflict despair than “you just have to.” Many times I would love to run away, ignore the situation, or try to justify it, but Christ has given us very specific instructions in Matthew 5:24. If you know you have offended a brother, you must go to him; if he has offended you, you must go to him. We have to do it!
The ancient image of the pastor being the shepherd with the long crook on one arm and a cuddly little lamb in the other is only one perspective. The other is the shepherd who must look disease right in the eye and come up with a cure or a recommendation for a cure no matter how painful it might be. Cancer can’t be treated with a skin salve.
Evaluate the Right Thing
The word success troubles me. The implication pervading the Christian church equates bigness with success, and I think that’s absolutely wrong. Most criteria for success have their roots in materialism: congregation size, budget size, building size. These aren’t bad in themselves, but they are not criteria for success.
I’m very concerned about people who pastor small churches, for there is an unspoken assumption in our culture that if one is really doing a good job he’ll eventually become pastor of a large church.
Size is not the criterion for success.
Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship recently told me he had hired someone to travel the country and evaluate their ministry. I asked Chuck what criteria he used in the evaluation. Not one item on his list was statistical. Every one had to do with values: What was the spiritual climate of a group of Christian brothers in a prison? Were they studying the Bible? Did they have the spirit of reaching out to others? These are some of the criteria for successful ministry.
Be Free to Fail
I’m always amazed by the grace of God. Paul Tournier, the Swiss physician, points out that some parents are extremely authoritarian and others are extremely permissive, but most parents are somewhere in the middle. Then he says that regardless of the parental style, if one’s children turn out all right, it’s by the grace of God. I like that—a grace that allows me to fail.
I think one of the greatest freedoms any pastor has is the freedom to fail. Again and again, in my private life and in my public ministry, I’ve had the pressures build until I think I can’t stand it any more. When I stop long enough to take a spiritual inventory, I discover that I’ve failed many times in the past, and it’s likely that I will fail again. How liberating!
This past Tuesday morning I awakened about four o’clock after some kind of dream about which I couldn’t remember a thing except that I had failed. I tried to go back to sleep, but I couldn’t relax. I felt like my skin was crawling right off my body. I finally slipped out of bed onto my knees and began to pray. As I talked to my Father, I again eventually realized that my failure does not constitute God’s failure. It was so liberating to say, “Lord, when I fail, I know your grace will be there to cover the bases.”
Obviously, we can’t presume on God’s grace or use his goodness as an excuse for negligence, but likewise, we don’t need to fear failure. Failure is a part of the forging process. Failure is God’s way of consuming the dross so the gold may remain.
Copyright © 1997
- More fromRichard C. Halverson
- Richard C. Halverson
Pastors
Randy Alcorn
Leadership BooksJanuary 1, 1997
Counseling is like the proverbial camel that sticks its nose into the tent and, once allowed that liberty, follows with its shoulders and forelegs, pushing till there’s room for nothing else.
—Randy Alcorn
What’s it like to be a counselor?”
The question often comes my way, usually from young men and women interested in a counseling ministry. They often ask with a sort of awe, convinced that counseling is the most fulfilling of all vocations, that counselors are the most fortunate of mortals.
Though counseling has been a central part of my pastoral ministry for seven years, I never know quite how to answer their question.
From a distance, counseling has a pretty face—it seems mysterious, stimulating, and challenging. Up close you see the pock marks. Because counseling is difficult, draining, and sometimes frustrating, it’s easy to lose the sense of wonder about it.
Pastor, Not Psychologist
I’m not a psychologist. I’m a pastor called to minister God’s Word. Nevertheless, for some years I’ve borne the title “Pastor of Counseling and Family Ministries.” I’ve worn two hats, the pastor’s and the counselor’s, which is a real juggling act, and I’ve discovered I’m not always a good juggler.
I had always considered counseling as just one phase of the pastoral ministry. Now I know how easily it can overshadow not only your ministry but your entire life. It’s like the proverbial camel that sticks its nose into the tent and, once allowed that liberty, follows with its shoulders and forelegs, pushing till there’s room for nothing else.
In my case, the counseling mantle fell to me by accident. There were originally two of us on the church staff, and we split the responsibilities down the middle. Counseling was one of my responsibilities and I welcomed it. I always had a sense of satisfaction in helping another human being (and hearing them tell me what a help I’d been).
People’s needs were ever-present, and I seemed reasonably successful in dealing with them. Within a year and a half counseling became my primary, almost exclusive domain. It was another two years before I realized the mistake that was. Along the way, I’ve learned some lessons.
Counseling can’t be taught. Professors can teach you about counseling. But they can’t teach you counseling per se. They can’t prepare you for the physical, emotional, and spiritual drain that comes with a counseling ministry. At least, they didn’t prepare me.
Counseling is an art. But it is unlike the physical arts that allow the artist to escape from people to maximize creative potential. Often the counselor performs his art under duress, in the crucible of human pain and conflict. A surgeon of the soul, he cannot dismiss himself from the operating room to read up on the latest surgical technique.
Only in actual practice can the counselor develop the skills and perspectives so essential in addressing the specific needs of human beings. Until then, you can’t appreciate the fact that counseling’s effects, both good and bad, are felt not only in the life of the counselee but in the life of the counselor as well.
The better you do the more you get. In the seven years since we started the church, we have grown from forty families to over 1,000 people.
I’m thankful, of course. To a preacher, such growth is gratifying. For the counseling pastor, however, it can be a nightmare. When one person walks in the door, twenty personal needs come along, needs that someone must help meet. There may be others qualified to counsel, but it never seems like enough. The shepherd’s heart of the counselor gets panicky when numerical growth outstrips resources. Soon “super-counselor” tries to do it all, and that means a lot of unfinished dinners, changed plans, interrupted days off, and exhausting days on.
I started as a pastor of people but soon became a pastor of problems. The more experienced I became at counseling, the more the difficult counseling situations came my way. Initially, counseling successes gave me satisfaction. But my sense of satisfaction in being used of God quickly diminished. That is partly because the more your reputation spreads, the more demands are placed upon you—”He helped me. I’m sure he can help you too. Besides, he doesn’t charge $60 an hour.” In my case, the quality of my counseling decreased as its quantity increased. I was doing less and less good for others, and none at all for myself.
Counseling can change your personality. As I became more and more involved in counseling, I underwent what one friend described as a personality change. Once outgoing and always available, I found myself holding back, inviting fewer people over, introducing myself less frequently. It was only later I realized what had happened. It was a matter of self-defense—the survival instinct in its rawest form. Many pastors overburdened by counseling know exactly what I mean.
The problem? Each new person I met was a potential counseling appointment. It might be him, or it might be his suicidal cousin, his lesbian sister, or his neighbors involved in a messy divorce. But one way or another his presence meant more responsibility for me—an already overburdened pastor trying to avoid additional responsibilities. My unconscious defense mechanism was to avoid the problems by avoiding the people (though it never seemed to work).
Once my work day was done (pastors will chuckle at that thought), people became intrusions. When the phone rang in the evening at home, my stomach literally ached. (I shared this with another pastor and he was shocked—he thought he was the only one whose phone rang in his stomach.) Like Pavlov’s dog, I was conditioned to associate the ring with a negative experience.
The doorbell had a similar effect. Sometimes, when we would have preferred to stay home, we packed up the family and left for the evening, just to ensure we wouldn’t be interrupted. (The fear of interruption is sometimes as bad as the interruptions themselves.)
When I came into the church office I hoped that for once the junk mail would outnumber the pink slips. (These messages from my secretary had the same symbolic effect as phone calls and ringing doorbells.)
Church retreats and banquets were really tough. I longed to relax and have informal fellowship. What better place than a social gathering? Invariably, however, the people we sat next to grabbed the opportunity to talk to me about their problems. My wife was left out completely. During one retreat I barely saw her—I was doing marriage counseling the whole weekend. Believe me, I resented it.
Living With the Guilt
You may be thinking, What a terrible attitude for a pastor. I felt that way for a while and suffered from the guilt. Ironically, though people’s problems burdened me and robbed me of strength and sleep, I felt I was becoming callous, insensitive, uncaring. To a counselor, such things are the ultimate shame and cause for alarm—as frightening as a surgeon helplessly watching arthritis creep into his hands.
I felt more than psychological pain, though. I began to experience the physical symptoms of stress. I was always tired. I could honestly not remember the last time I wasn’t tired. And I was constantly fighting colds. Sore throats would often last for months—one year the same cold and sore throat lasted from August to February.
Of course, I didn’t let sickness interfere with my work! When I was so sick that even I could justify staying home, I couldn’t rest. This was my only chance to get things done around the house, to do some writing, and get caught up on paperwork and phone calls. I refused to listen to the message my body was sending me.
Here I was—less than ten years in the ministry, and contemplating whether I had hit mid-life crisis fifteen years early! I began to wonder if the longevity of pastors was comparable to that of professional football players. If the press had interviewed me, I would have said I was waiting till the end of the season before deciding whether or not to retire. If I made it to thirty-five, they’d be calling me “the old man”—and they’d be right!
The one thing worse than the guilt and fatigue was the price my family was paying. I thought I was a loyal family man. I was even occasionally criticized for leaving meetings at 10:00 p.m. out of courtesy for my wife. I “put in my time” with the family, as any good family man should, but I gave them second best. By the time my energies were poured out at the office, I often arrived home about 6:30 for a late dinner. Typically, I struggled to stay awake at the dinner table. I would have traded anything for a half hour nap on the recliner. But I knew I should spend time with my girls before they went to bed. So I did. It took every ounce of energy I had to wrestle with them on the living room floor. The delight of reading them “Harry the Dirty Dog” and their favorite Bible stories was gone. Even “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish” became a chore. I had once been a very good listener (aren’t all counselors?). Now my girls had to repeat themselves and raise their voices to get my attention.
For a period of three years or so, I experienced most of the symptoms described in the books on burnout. I felt lonely, depressed, physically and emotionally exhausted. My morale was low, and I was sensitive to criticism (a disastrous condition in the ministry). I was defensive and resented the fact (or was it only my imagination?) that the ministries of other staff members were often publicly applauded, but mine was not.
A barrier slowly grew between me and the others on the church staff. Though we loved each other and had unusual rapport, our busy schedules hindered communication. It bothered me to emerge between counseling appointments only long enough to overhear important staff discussions I wanted to be in on. I felt increasingly “in the dark.” Of course, the root of the problem was not theirs, but my own overspecialization and consequent lack of availability of time.
Perhaps the best indicator of how deeply I was hurting is the way I reacted when people complimented and encouraged my teaching and preaching. Sometimes, it actually bothered me. Why? Because those things were such a small part of my ministry (maybe 20 percent), and compared to the counseling, it seemed to me an easy part (“the grass is always greener …”).
Those were dark days; I was prideful on the one hand, yet felt tremendously inadequate on the other. I had a classic case of job saturation, an inability to leave my work behind me. The problem is common to all the helping professions, especially the ministry, but I didn’t know that—I felt terribly alone. And when I tried to share my dilemma with others, between the pain and frustration I never seemed to communicate well. I ended up feeling more alone and misunderstood than ever and determined not to open up again.
I felt trapped—the victim of circumstances. I tried everything I could think of to resolve my overextension problem, but I could not say no to people who were hurting. I still cared deeply for them and was often moved to tears at their emotional and spiritual problems. At the same time, I didn’t realize how severe my own problems were becoming. The challenge “Physician, heal thyself” was for me “Counselor, counsel thyself.” Finally, I did.
Perspective Rediscovery
For me, the key to physical, emotional, and spiritual healing was getting some extended time off. My church granted me a two-month sabbatical for my six years of service. It was a good investment.
I spent a week alone, meditating and writing. Then I spent nine days at the Oregon coast with my family. It was the time of our lives. We played, bicycled, ate out, picnicked, and consumed a lot of ice cream. It was the first time in years that I was not constantly aware of my ministry responsibilities. I ran on the beach, walked out on a 500-foot jetty, and sang to the Lord as I was drenched by the mist of waves beating against the rocks. I had no idea how much I needed those times, both alone and with my family.
After I’d been away for a few weeks, and knowing I still had plenty of time left, my head began to clear. I was able to see myself and my ministry in perspective, something that had time and time again proven impossible when I was in the thick of things. Often I had identified the problems, but despite my most sincere and diligent efforts, the obstacles to a fulfilling ministry had persisted. At last they seemed to, if not disappear, shrink to a manageable size. I did three further things that began to revitalize my ministry.
1. I recognized I was a sheep first, a shepherd second. My biggest mistake was forgetting that my primary calling is to be a sheep in need of guidance, affection, protection, provision, and peaceful rest in the presence of my Creator. I relearned the lesson through prayer and study.
During the time away I read two helpful books: Tim Hansel’s When I Relax I Feel Guilty, and Don Baker and Emery Nester’s Depression, in which Pastor Baker recounts his personal struggles and trauma in the midst of a highly successful ministry.
I also studied Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38-42, and mulled over the implications of their different approaches to life and ministry. Martha was first a worker, only secondly a worshiper. This is what I had become—a worker, pure and simple.
As a counselor I had learned a forbidden art—how to keep giving out when my reservoir was dry. Like Martha of Bethany, I excelled at doing rather than being, at labor instead of love. I was a servant but not a saint, a do-er not a pray-er, a giver who had forgotten how to receive. And, ironically, since I had stopped receiving, I had little of quality left to give.
2. I attempted to delegate more. You’ve probably wondered why I didn’t delegate in the first place in order to get the job done without killing myself. I did, to a degree. In fact, I taught a nine-month counseling course to sixty committed and capable laymen in our church. I delegated many counseling situations to these people, and it was a terrific investment in every way. But there was one problem I hadn’t bargained for. Still seeing myself as super-counselor, I delegated to laymen those that were less serious and less complex. This reserved for myself, of course, the really hard cases.
The problem was that these really challenging cases (extreme depression, deep sexual problems, major marital crises, etc.) were abundant. And many of them couldn’t afford to see a Christian psychologist. I was really in a mess. I had managed, by delegating, to avoid all the mild problems, while I filled every hour with the severe ones! I had become a specialist. I was a pastor in psychologist’s clothing, who sometimes wasn’t doing a good job as either. Not only that, but I couldn’t find time to follow up on the lay counselors I had sent people to. I seemed further behind than ever.
I began to miss all those “easy” cases—you know, the dear people who really want to grow in Christ and simply need some good biblical input, a time of prayer, a practical assignment, and an encouraging pat on the back now and then. These are the people who praise you for working wonders in their lives, when all you’ve done is listened and shared a little Scripture! They were the kind of folks who convinced me I was gifted in counseling in the first place. Now I saw them only on Sundays. I was surprised to find how much I missed their spiritual contribution to my life.
Delegation didn’t really pay off until I got hold of my schedule. I had often tried to change my schedule before, but never with lasting success. Perhaps what made the difference this time was my degree of desperation. I forced myself to start saying no not only sometimes but much of the time. I realized that merely because something would be good to do didn’t mean it was the best thing to do. In fact, if I wasn’t careful, I could spend the rest of my life doing good things without ever doing the best.
I no longer felt I was saying no, but yes, when I delegated counseling to qualified laypeople and professional Christian counselors. And as the fog cleared, I realized I had no right to resent people for their “demands” on my time. After all, my schedule was my responsibility, not theirs.
3. I diversified my ministry. I undertook new ministries that brought me closer to thriving, growing people who not only receive from me, but give to me. I counseled less, and by my request the church provided financial aid to those who needed professional help. (Back when I was super-counselor, I never put funds for this in the counseling budget—after all, wasn’t I paid for this?).
Moving into some other areas of ministry did wonders. My relationship with the other staff members is better than ever. I feel part of the team once more. And I love to meet new people again. The phone can still be a problem, but I’m getting more calls for spiritual guidance—many are asking advice in working with a friend instead of sending the friend to me. Not every call is a crisis, and that makes the real crises much easier to deal with. For the first time in years, I feel like I’m a pastor first, a counselor second.
Nothing has magically fallen together. I still experience pressure, and occasionally it gets the best of me. Still, the change is significant and noticeable. I am studying and teaching more, and finding time for some of the people with the “little problems.” I’m also learning to approach life less like Martha and more like Mary. My family has seen a tremendous difference, and now, life at home is more than leftovers. It’s a feast again, and I thank God for it. Now I feel I can look forward to many more rewarding years of ministry.
Copyright © 1997
- More fromRandy Alcorn
- Randy Alcorn