Can't help but admire a woman who will ask these kinds of questions publicly and in writing for the entire world of faith to read. Takes more faith and guts than most of us will ever have. Gotta read this!!
Cindy is a the loving mom of many that she raised with her husband who co-pastored a Fundamentalist church. She chronicles her journey out of the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement through honest and moving posts at Baptist Taliban and Beyond.
Somehow the different
varieties of ducks don't want to admit that they all pass the “duck
test” and even fly together all too often. I was told that the
Southern Baptists were
deeply offended because I classified them with homeschooling's
“Biblical Patriarchy” in a workshop
a few years ago, even though they invite this “fringe”
to share
their platforms, even as keynote
speakers. We're just not supposed to notice, and we're
not supposed to say anything when we do. ;) But I digress...
Several elements of Rachel's new post
jumped out at me for a whole host of reasons.
From her post entitled The
Scandal of the Evangelical Heart
It’s strange to think that doubt has been a part of my life for more than ten years now.
But the questions that have weighed most heavily on me these past ten years have been questions not of the mind but of the heart, questions of conscience and empathy. It was not the so-called “scandal of the evangelical mind” that rocked my faith; it was the scandal of the evangelical heart.
Perhaps in reaction to the “scandal of the evangelical mind,” evangelicalism of late has developed a general distrust of emotion when it comes to theology.
It’s a decision I make every day, and it’s a decision that’s made my faith journey a heck of a lot more hazardous and a heck of a lot more fun. It means that grinning monster, doubt, is likely to stick around for a while, for I know now that closing my eyes won’t make him go away. It means each day is a risk, a gamble, an adventure in vulnerability and trust, as I figure out what it means to follow Jesus as me, Rachel Grace—the girl who cried for Zarmina, the girl who inherited her mama’s bleeding heart and her daddy’s stubborn grace, the girl who digs in her heels, the girl who makes mistakes, the girl who is intent on breaking up patriarchy, the girl who thought to raise her hand in Sunday school at age five and ask why God would drown innocent animals in Noah’s flood, the girl who could be wrong.
Befriending Doubt and Fear
I recently kissed my own “grinning
monster” and was prompted to pull out an old book to revisit a
wonderful story. In the Friels' seminal book about the secrets of
Adult
Children of dysfunction, there's a story about a girl who makes a
brave and daring journey over a mountain to see her grandmother, soon
hounded by two different monsters on the way. When she comes to a
fork in the path through the woods, each terrible, loud monster
beckons her to take their path. For reasons she can't explain, she
obeys her hunch, following one path (and one monster) instead of the
other. Half of the mountain soon begins so shake and fall away, and
she realized that if she'd made choice to follow that other path, she
would not have survived. Her monster approaches her and suddenly
looks kind and compassionate to her through his wise and loving eyes.
The girl suddenly jumps up and kisses him on the nose. The monster
then tells her that his name is “Fear.” He explains that
avoiding something important that he's trying to communicate is like
following that other monster whose name is “Destruction.”
“If...you learn to make friends with me,
then you will have Wisdom...No matter how attractive, nothing good
ever comes from destruction.” (pp
191-3)
But
there were other elements of Rachel's post that tugged at my heart –
or rather pierced it. After the event that brought Kiss Your
Monster On the Nose to my mind recently, I thought about how the
rules that I was taught at a very young age about who I was and what
was expected of me had so adversely affected my basic emotions. When
Rachel mentioned that little girl that she once was, I couldn't help
but to think about the similar things I have been meditating upon.
What fills our hearts and how can we change them? One of the
foundational principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and what a
Christian will identify as spiritual warfare maintains that emotions
follow thought. When we believe fallacious rules about life, we will
experience disappointment. By having realistic beliefs about how
life works, who we are, and how we should be, our emotions will be
better balanced (read
more here). We won't ride through life like we're on a wild
roller coaster ride
of drama.
Rachel's
post explores how some of the harsh ideas that we hear in Evangelical
preaching and the hard ideas of the gospel must be equally balanced
with the ministry of grace and the concerns of the heart. She
echoed Walter
Martin's statement that we must have good fruit in both our lives
lived and in our doctrine, but we Christians often get fixated on
doctrine to the exclusion of everything else.
Though my following
example concerns a personal issue, I hope that it will illustrate the
process of at least one way that we can go back into our memories to
stand along side that five year old we once were as we raise our hand
to ask the hardest of questions. And for those who respond to those little ones today, I hope to share some insight into the tremendous power you hold to nurture and shape the children in your care.
As a gadfly and dissident who also
asks such questions, I know that they are not always welcomed. The
strength from the mouths of babes can provoke surprisingly harsh
responses from adults who are too afraid to admit that they don't
always have the answers. I also learned to be so grateful for the
rare, wise mentor who had learned to kiss their monster on the nose,
for they actually celebrated those questions, understanding them as
necessary step in the development of the Berean. God doesn't call us
to commit intellectual suicide, but we must also be honest when we
cannot comprehend something or accept it. We must learn that doubt
is a function of discernment, a tool we must develop so
that we can learn to use it to clarify belief.
The
Thought Seeds of the Heart's Scandal
As a post-Great Depression child, my
grandfather desired to instill in me the habit and benefit of saving
money, and he inspired me to collect pennies. In an annual tradition
that continued through the rest of my childhood, in his visit just
before Labor Day, we would take the pennies to the local amusement
park and I would “reward myself” for my diligence by paying for
my own tickets. But what became a cause for celebration of the love
I shared with my grandfather also became a foundational lesson of
maladaptive thinking that I would struggle with for decades.
While learning the new, important ritual of counting
and wrapping pennies on a late summer afternoon, a little girl my own
age came by for a short visit. I joyfully told her how excited I was
about this process and of my promised reward. That evening, when it
came time to collect the pennies I'd saved all year for the grand event, I couldn't find
them anywhere. Everyone was angry. I learned what I would now call pure
panic, and it had a frantic quality. I learned helplessness,
confusion, and sadness that day, and I recall them well. I was
reprimanded verbally, lectured about the diligence of saving again,
and about how to be careful with things, especially money. I
learned how it felt to be bathed in shame. I don't even recall if we
went to the amusement park or not. But I remember the events that
followed.
The Thought Seeds of Shame
I assume that within a day or so, the
mother of the neighbor who had visited me that day that I'd counted
my pennies and placed them neatly in the red paper rolls called my
mother. She'd found her daughter with rolls of pennies, and the
child confessed that she'd stolen them from me. You might think that
I experienced vindication. No. What followed revealed the
rules my mother believed about the world, what Chris Thurman wrote
about in his book, The
Lies We Believe. My mother believed that when you exhibit
good behavior, you will always encounter good circumstances. The
flip side of this belief is also true to my mother, so bad
circumstances can be assumed to result from bad behavior. These are
different corollaries of the fallacious idea that “Life is fair,
no exceptions.” It also revealed something about my mother's
level of personal worth and likely how she was esteemed by her own
parents. It revealed her own heart, so she
poured the contents of it into mine, emptying that which she
thought was best to give to me: her shame.
I was lectured and painfully shamed
verbally, and I would wear those wounds and still bear those scars in
my heart. It was explained to me that people don't do bad things
unless they are provoked, and the only conclusion that could be
believed was that I had “provoked” this other child to jealousy
by my actions. I was charged with the moral crimes of pride and
bragging. My mother defended the other child, and upon me, she
bestowed the blame that belonged to her for her offense. I was
punished for lying about what I had done, and more so when I
protested and claimed innocence. The confusion was so great, and I
felt what I would now call terror, worse than anything I believe I've
experienced since, because of the intensity of the embarrassment and
other emotions my mother expressed. I vividly remember feeling emotions that I would now describe in my adult language as a fear of impending annihilation. I thought of these events in school when I learned that respiratory patients in distress often express feelings of "impending doom."
The
next time I visited that neighbor's home, the girl who'd stolen from
me whipped out more rolls of pennies and laughed, taunting me that
she'd managed to hide a portion of them from her mother. I didn't know what to do, so I went home to tell my mother, and I have no memory of what happened to the rest of the pennies. Rather than understanding these new events as some evidence of
perhaps the greed and jealousy resulting from the other child's
immaturity, my mother interpreted them as proof that I was quite
corrupt, on so many levels.
I was again punished and shamed harshly
to the point that I felt like I would disintegrate and wished that I
would. This, folks, is my first dynamic memory of speaking with
people and using words in conversations. I learned that I was damned
and evil, regardless of what I did, and speaking the truth on my own
behalf resulted in even greater punishment. I leaned that I was
responsible for other people's behavior, without question, and in any
given situation, I was the probable cause of a bad outcome. I
learned that questions and self-advocacy were verboten, and
though the truth was always demanded of me, I learned that there were
times when speaking the truth resulted in an even greater punishment
and shame. I learned that I had to please people, too, and I learned
that this was usually a futile pursuit. And I didn't realize it at
the time, but I would live to learn that bad, fallacious ideas had
hard consequences. I learned how to be self-deprecating.
The sad thing of it is that my nature
is honestly generous, and I would have shared those pennies with that
neighbor if she'd asked for them.
Healing
When I started to peel the many layers
of emotions away with a therapist I'd sought for treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as an adult, I realized that these early
lessons touched every part of my life in pervasive and harmful ways.
These malignant beliefs had actually limited my ability to cope well
with the trauma that followed, the trauma for which I sought
counseling. I healed through a process of identifying the negative,
false beliefs that undergirded the feelings that made havoc of my
life. At the core of many other traumas and beliefs, I traced most
of them back to these first lessons of spoken and unspoken lies.
Those malicious seed-ideas sprouted into much emotional pain and
anxiety that I carried through most of my adult life. Reflecting on this today, I cannot help but consider the lessons we teach young children when we engage their questions in religious settings and the impact that this can have on how those children will approach God, faith and religious life in their adulthood.
My therapist, my witness and ally,
walked with me through the heartache as we chased down every one of
the beliefs that I'd developed through this experience. A part of me
had so internalized these horrible beliefs so deeply into my heart
that I never really fully let myself experience the pain of them.
I'd never learned to master them, and I'd run from them through
behaviors and distraction, though they remained in my heart as vivid,
real memories, as though they were ongoing. My therapist sat with me
as I went through the process of chasing down every monster,
desensitizing to each one until I could kiss each of them on the
nose.
So often she would remind me that I was
no longer four, and we imagined what I would do if I could intervene
in those memories as an adult. We used imagery to face down the fear
in those situations. I gave to myself the gifts of honor and trust
that my mother didn't have to give me (because no one had given them
to her when she desperately needed them). I went back into those
memories, declared the truth, and acted on my own behalf to stand
beside that frantic, helpless, confused, ashamed little girl to
declare her deliverance. And then I rescued her by moving out of
those memories and delivering my child heart from the bondage of the
past. The principle and technique works because there is a part of
the mind that doesn't distinguish between reality and fantasy, and by
injecting true beliefs into the revisited memories, you can actually
free the mind from the compulsive bondage that accompanies these
types of “flashbulb” trauma “associated” memories.
This process became a new and creative
way by which I stirred up the gift of God within the deepest recesses of my own scandalous heart. And I found that in that
process of revisiting that memory, I called upon Jesus to stand with
me, too, setting at liberty that bruised child. He just appeared
there to me, standing beside my mother and me in my mind's eye,
bringing healing and compassion to the both of us. From that image
flowed my own compassion for my mother which became profound empathy
and forgiveness.
Lessons and Challenges of Scandal
Many people flock to high demand
religion like patriarchy because it boldly promises to provide people
with help to transcend pain and difficulty. For many, it
provides a means of power which they use to ward off their own ill
feelings. We all feel the limitations of our humanity and should
then have reason to better understand our dependency on God's
precious grace. But some of us go through the motions, spouting
doctrine while forgetting matters of the heart. Christians who lack
the abundance of God's love and trust in Him pour their own lack into the very people who look to them for
direction, hope, and comfort. They can only share with others that
which they have in the abundance of their hearts themselves. Many
only share shame, fear, and condemnation, all in Jesus' name. In
their purity of doctrine, their hearts wax cold and icy, and they
lose their First Love if they ever indeed possessed Him.
The scandal of the evangelical mind
creates the scandal of the evangelical heart. (Mark
Noll says that the scandal is that there is no evangelical mind
anymore, perhaps why our hearts can end up suffering lack. Or we allow our hearts to meditate on the wrong things.) Action and emotions follow thought, and
as
we think in our heart, so we are.
What is it that we have in
abundance, and what is the treasure of our heart? Who can know it?
The challenges that follow require bold
and radical realism, painstaking honesty, and faith. We have to be
about the hard work of chasing down those monsters to make them our
friends, God's gifts to us. Often, we have to call upon God Himself
to enter the deepest, darkest places in our hearts to ransom us from
the past. We only need bid Him to take us there. This, my friends, is where real spiritual warfare takes
place. If we cannot manage to do it alone, we can enlist allies to
walk with us.
And another challenge remains still.
When we are faced with the scandals of our own hearts, and when fear
and discomfort greet us, what will we do? Will we yield honestly to the God who is greater than our hearts, or will we
resist Him all the more?
Will we require those around us to bear
the discomfort that we don't want to feel by deflecting it through
shame and blame onto others? Will we even give it to little ones to
carry? Will they languish in shame for decades thereafter? What
will you say to the five year old budding Berean Rachels in your
Sunday School class when they ask the hard questions? Will you make
them a receptacle for your own shame for having no pat answer to give
them? Or will your heart be full of love for them, seeing
discernment growing as their hearts learn how to think? What will
you model for them? I hope that through your own actions that you
teach them just how to go about kissing their monster on the nose.
Bravo, Rachel. Bravo.
I dedicate this post to my best friend's daughter who at the age of four literally stood up, put her hand on her hip, and announced that there could never have possibly been a worldwide flood. I love you, Cherise!
May we always be ready to rise to the challenge to foster such discernment. For moms of the Rachels, Cherises, and Cindys of the world, I highly recommend reading Cynthia Tobias' book, You Cant Make Me, but I Can be Persuaded.
And for those like us, I love Tobias' Redefining the Strong Willed Woman: How to Effectively Use Your Strong Will for God.
