Pardon is only one half of the initial work of reconciliation.
The below is an outline of a word of instruction I gave sometime in the months after news broke of Bill Hybels’ sexual misconduct.
Where does this topical teaching, submitted under full subjection to you, come from?
a response to some mishandling of sexual misconduct I’ve heard about in the church,
inspired by my reading of Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion, and
a realization of what has worked in my own battle against my own sin (especially against my wife).
The starting point: The sin Jesus directly addressed via the Cross was our sin against God and did not include our sin against one another. This is never stated explicitly directly in Scripture, but consider:
A set-aside half-hour or so every day for pure leisure (no work or duty, even social duty, so probably solo). And the eventide for resting and relating!
glade noun : 1 : an open space surrounded by woods
I looked this one up because I love words for landforms and vegetation and encountered this one in MacDonald’s Phantastes. It is often confused these days with glen, which is a steep creek canyon-drop.
clotheshorse noun : 1 : a frame on which to hang clothes 2 : a conspicuously dressy person
I looked this one up because having decided last year that at the beginning of this year I would spend 75% or 80% of my apparel budget, I have slowly allowed myself to become consumed with systematizing it all and finding the perfect options and shopping ethically (i.e., sustainably, locally, etc.). I am convicted by Jesus’ words on the subject. And I am mildly surprised to find out that a clotheshorse is a slightly derogatory term for someone who obviously concerned with wearing fashionable clothing. I’m not so much that, but I am allowing my mind to be consumed by clothes right now.
It appears that middle-class U.S. friendships are not generally expected to bear the weight of deep and diffuse obligations to care. More like pleasure crafts than lift rafts, they are not built to brave the really rough waters—and [dementia is] rough, corrosive, bitter waters indeed. Dementia seems to act as a very powerful solvent on many kinds of social ties. I doubt that many friendships survive its onset.
There is no doubt that it can be difficult to be with someone you know who has forgotten who you are and, indeed, who they are. At times it takes a leap of faith to remember them as the person that you know. But no matter what, your friends remain your friends, don’t they? The ease with which people with dementia can be unfriended raises a dark question: What is it that we actually love in those we claim to love?
Time is not money. It is the gift of God. Live in the moment and assign value to the present. Be with people.
Visit the sick, especially demented folks.
Dementia sucks.
Hospitality among strangers is an important concept to bring to bear on all relationships, especially those with demented folks.
We are all contingent, embodied people.
Hanging out and friendship can change the world.
God remembers us in the present even when we forget who we are.
[edit June 9, 2023] Our windows into the conscious experience of folks suffering from dementia are quite foggy, so we can’t assume to know what they’re thinking and feeling. Even if someone’s dementia is so far progressed that they can’t even talk or move, their inner life might still be quite rich. And even if they’re expressively tetchy, they might be hating that on the inside and unable to express as much. Don’t assume. Always with interact with tenderness and patience and love. One of the main things they need is plenty of good company.
God still speaks today as he spoke to our forefathers in days gone by, before there were either spiritual directors or methods of direction. The spiritual life was then a matter of immediate communication with God.…All they knew was that each moment brought its appointed task, faithfully to be accomplished. This was enough for the spiritually minded of those days. All their attention was focused on the present, minute by minute, like the hand of a clock that marks the minutes of each hour covering the distance along which it has to travel. Constantly prompted by divine impulsion, they found themselves imperceptibly turns toward the next task that God had ready for them at each hour of the day.
— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, as quoted by John Swinton in Dementia (256)
This excerpt floored me because it sounds just like how Carla does things. And it strikes me as right. It’s how I want to walk through life.
One of the things that can serve as a guideline to discerning God’s leading: Do I...
After reading page 169 of Swinton’s Dementia, it strikes me again that all the different parts of creation are like different organs and cells and organelles in God’s body. We are literally the body of Christ, the body of God. In Him indeed we live and move and have our being. How indeed can the eye say to the foot, “I don’t need you”?
God acts in the big stories in history—those of the Exodus, the Cross, and redemption. But God also acts in and through the smaller stories of human life. If we take time to listen and to reflect, we can discover God’s practices of revealing and acting in the strangest of places.
Once again I gravitate toward the moral performance side of this beautiful Psalm about looking only to God for strength and salvation and love. It’s a good precept, but why not journal about the God-as-source part?
There is a tired → grumpy → tired → etc. loop that I need to write more about and recognize. Here’s a quick take: If I am tired, then I find I don’t have the energy for some tasks. But my default setting is do-do-do, so then I get grumpy about not accomplishing things, especially if I feel like I have no right to be tired. But trying to think my way out of these things with a tired mind makes me grumpier and more tired.
I obviously overreact to the novel stimuli in my house right now coming from Crystal—basically just a different manner of speaking and reacting in speech to the stimuli around her. She is a twelve-year-old who hasn’t grown up in my house. Of course she will be different. Inwardly, I’m fine about it all, but when I talk with Carla about it, it comes out agitated, overwrought, and angry. I’m really not as agitated as it comes across. It’s just new.
It would add to my happiness to do and request what I want more often—and tenderly—from Sullivan, Crystal, and Éa. It would also add to my happiness for them to comply more readily and without repeated prompting. My evenings seem to be me chasing them around and fretting about what they and I are not doing.
At a very basic level, well-being within Christianity is not gauged in the presence or absence of illness or distress. Religious beliefs and practice may well have therapeutic benefits, but that is not their primary function or intention. Nor is the efficacy of a “spiritual intervention” theologically determined according to criteria such as reduce anxiety, better coping, or a reduction in depression, important as these things may be at a certain level. Theologically speaking, well-being has nothing to do with the* absence or reduction of anything. It has to do with the presence of something: the presence of God-in-relationship. Well-being, peace, health—what Scripture describes as shalom*—has to do with the presence of a specific God in particular places who engages in personal relationships with unique individuals for formative purposes. Rather than alleviating anxiety and fear, the present of such a God often brings on dissonance and psychological disequilibrium, but always for the purpose of the person’s greater well-being understood in redemptive and relational terms.
“More than anything else I am thankful to Jesus for being patient with me and for remembering me when I have forgotten whose I am” (John Swinton, Dementia, x).
“I don’t know if it’s a success, but I do know it’s good.”
— myself, quoted despite the gaucheness of doing so instead of just journaled because it seems a multi-purpose saying: I said it originally to Aaron about his running club, but I could say it equally about our church