So it looks as though my posts this summer are circumambulating (!) around the topic of faith change/worldview change and healing, and by circumambulating I mean winding, touching in and moving out from different angles of a core.

Wednesday I made a couple of points about self interest. Today I want to say more on the second one–the idea that I think it’s okay when we can’t meet others’ self interests. There are exceptions to this rule for sure, like when kids need to be fed, or neighbors need us turning our music down, or bosses need us showing up for work on time. I’m not peddling hedonism. The okayness I’m wanting to explore is something other than that. It’s about respect, actually, of the deepest kind, because I think it respects self at the same time as other people.

I want to lean back into talk of Christianity here. I certainly can’t speak for the whole thing, but I can for my experiences with a few subsets of it, mostly Protestant, mostly evangelical, and the challenges the structures in these places create for okayness with not meeting others’ self interests. Leaders’ self interests, specifically.

As I’ve observed it, there’s a combination in these places, a mixing of three things, that makes for a lot of pressure. I’m thinking here of pressure particularly by leaders, on leaders, which for the purposes of this conversation include anyone at all who volunteers or gets paid to do things at church. The combination is a) a belief in hell (defined as eternal, unrelievable torment) and the responsibility of Christians to help deliver people from that fate, b) a societal culture of busyness, where fewer and fewer people can sanely participate in church leadership in addition to everything else they’re trying to do, and c) a decline of interest in religion at all (partly because of ‘b’, but for other reasons as well), and the feeling like fewer and fewer promising-leader-types are pursuing or sticking with leadership in religious places.

Add these up and mix them around and I think what you have looks a lot like fear. Which makes a ton of sense. If we have a mission to accomplish, a terribly important one with eternal consequences, and the people who are best equipped to lead us are not interested or available to do so, a very real, very genuine crisis ensues. Maybe not unlike the feeling I had as a child when I lost my mom in the abyssal chaos of a large department store. By the time I found her again (or she found me), I wasn’t about to lose sight of her legs one more time.

Which corresponds with some of the pressure leaders feel to stay leaders. To maintain or increase church involvement and commitment to the mission. Fellow leaders don’t want to bear the increasing load of responsibility that declining church involvement represents, so the motivation to “keep those legs in view”–to keep our “mothers” and “fathers” operating as such–is high. When a “mother” or “father” hits a crisis, or enters a season of spiritual darkness, or needs time for whatever reason to step back, to make a change, maybe for good, they can get christened bad guys. Deserters. Traitors. Or simply huge disappointments. I felt some of all of these things in my moves away from church, and prior to that, toward others making similar moves. I got back what I gave, I guess.

But here’s what I think now: It’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay to be disappointed. And it’s okay to be stumped about how an important mission will ever get accomplished. But it’s also okay to be the one on the other side of those things, the one causing them (or at least thought to be). There is no inherent equals sign between shocking or disappointing or angering people and doing something wrong. In fact, and as history has demonstrated so many times, evoking such responses could very well mean you’re doing and being exactly what you need to do and be. Christianity orbits around such a story.

It takes courage to walk our paths authentically, courage to be who we are, owning and pursuing our convictions and the questions others may not want us asking, let alone finding anwers to. It takes courage to stick with our paths, too, long enough to see what they’re leading us *toward*, rather than only away from, and particularly when there are highways (thoroughfares of paths alligned) anywhere nearby. Highways are magnets, I tell you, if for nothing else than pulling out our insecurities.

But, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think authentic lives are ultimately the best tonic for everyone. I think they’re the best tonic for the people afraid their mission won’t get accomplished, and for the people who don’t think that mission is the one they want to live, and for the people who don’t give a rip right now about mission at all. Authentic lives honor everyone, I think, and maybe I’ll write another post or more exploring why I think that is. For now though, go read Christy. Her post is why I got this one out of my draft folder and am actually posting it. Her authenticity frees me to be that much more…me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 9:47 am and is filed under Healing, Psychology, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.