Author / Michael
What Was This Like For You?
What was this like for you? I ask this question all the time.
I ask this to lift up what’s been said in the presence of a person, to hear it, and to notice it. This question is one way I process my process when I spend time with people.
It’s come up in how I think about ending meetings where someone has said things they wouldn’t generally say. It’s my way of spending a few minutes before a class, group, session ends to review and re-see what’s happened. I find myself asking, “What was this like for you?”
There are other versions of this question. There are a few reasons why I ask this, reasons underneath my comments above. It’s important for me to walk away knowing how this conversation, this meeting, or this moment was from your perspective. It’s important for me to change and adapt so the next one can be more hospitable.
A Great Reminder
Spirit Island
Making decisions when you’re under assault is a bad idea, especially if the decisions have anything to do with what’s assaulting you. To decide, you need the wind and wisdom of all your feelings, not just the ones pressing into you when you’re hurt or in trouble or when your personhood is called into question.
Decisions aren’t what you need. You need safety. You need repose. You need a harbor that you can attach yourself to in order to remain attached to the self that is you.
What you need to visit your spirit island. I learned this name when I was in Minneapolis for a conference. I was walking across a long, wide bridge, occasionally reading the descriptions of what I was seeing. I was struck by a brief description of a Lakota island, “Spirit Island,” and I knew that this place would be with me for a while.
Spirit Island was made of rock, was a nesting location for birds and a spiritually significant place for native people. One description I read said that it had no soil. It was removed in the 1960s when St. Anthony Lock and Dam were built.
I’m twirling around the notion of spirit island and how we all have one. It is the place where you sense your roots deepening. The spirit island is the place where you are at home, even when nothing around you brings peace or helps your heart reside. That spirit island is the home of your soul when your surroundings are chaotic, untrustworthy, or dangerous.
It’s, at least, in the inner chambers of your soul, where God speaks in definitive ways. Go in and find that island. Sit there. Wait there. Listen there.
Something You Said
When I left you, I thought to myself that patient rooms are the best classrooms.
Better than graduate seminars and intensives. Better than syllabi with supplemental reading lists so long they make your eyes hurt.
The simple wisdom coming from the lives of pained people is exquisite, expensive truth that I get for showing up as a chaplain. I didn’t have to pay tuition or get reimbursed for my travel. I didn’t have to buy a book or copy an article. I, simply, answered a page.
You told me something I’ve heard in different ways by other people. You said, my words not yours, that our conceptions of God are ours, that they are personal, and that they can be taken only so far. You used the image of the stars and suggested that we ought to be humble as humans because we “perhaps just stumbled upon the ability to think.”
You said that our ways of understanding God should be humbled by such things. And I’m considering the depth of your words. We ought to be humbled by such things.
Seeing the Shadow(s)
Me and Dawn were discussing Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. I should hurry to say that this is not a regular topic between us. As a general rule, I’m very quiet about psychological theory at home. I don’t want to threaten my home with my scattered ramblings, especially when it comes to Jung, someone who I’m slowly learning from, whose analytical psychology is in the deep as far as I’m concerned. Plus, it’s not exactly fun to see.
Nonetheless, the topic came up. Dawn asked me about something from my day and I told her a story. The story–and I am modifying a bit–was about a person that I met that day. Now, I’ve met this person before. That day the person came to me in the form of a woman. So I’ll say that I met this woman, and every time she has shown up in the past, I react. She usually comes as a prideful person, as a person who is really good at being self-congratulatory, and to some degree, dismissive of others. When I see her coming, I sense my own nerves shuffling.
Me and Dawn were talking about this and I said that I don’t like this person. I never have. When I first met her in my first ministry role and when I’ve seen her a few times every year, coming and going into my life. As I get along though, I’m learning that this person has something to teach me, something to show me. I’ve said this to friends as well. That person is going to keep finding me–in the church, in some class, in a group I’m supervising, or in a relationship I’m in–because she has something to show me. Jung suggests that she has something to show me about me.
Jung would say that this person is really offering me a view into my unconscious. Now, without giving an adequate class in Jung (something I’m not qualified to do anyhow), the unconscious in Jungian theory is a barely discernible reservoir of materials that aren’t in your immediate consciousness. You aren’t aware of the unconscious (the collective unconscious), but it’s there. It’s instructing and moving you in ways that you don’t realize because it is, by definition, out of your awareness. Its role is to balance what’s happening in your awareness.
The unconscious comes to you and usually in unbidden ways: dreams and images and things you say that you didn’t know you’re thinking until you say them. These are the bridges over which the unconscious travels to get to us. Another bridge is through people, particularly the people who grate us, provoke us in ways we don’t usually move, take us out of character, if you will. Those folks are carrying some message about us to us. The more we meet them, the more we meet (something about) ourselves.
The self-reflective piece is the endeavor to listen well, to attend to them and to the self. You pay attention and you learn more. You keep meeting that person, that shadow side of the self, and you’ll find out something that’s worth knowing. Jung says that what we meet is not only about us. The unconscious is the property of all time and all creation, if you will. What comes from the unconscious comes from earlier generations of humanity.
Jung wouldn’t say that they come from God, but having been the son of a preacher, he probably would approximate such things in his medical way. He was a doctor who was chiefly influenced by the Spirit, albeit a psychological interpretation of the Spirit as a subjective experience in itself if I get him. That said, Jung thought that our gifts from the unconscious weren’t only for personal consumption but common good.
That means that our learning and your self-reflection aren’t only for you. It benefits me and us and others. So your seeing the shadow and being curious about it; my seeing myself and being interested in what’s really here; these are ways that we can ultimately be good to and for each other. The more we know about ourselves, the better and more whole we can be in relationship.
Being Liberated from Traumas
I’m reading a great book by Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score, a thick but approachable exploration into how the brain and body respond to traumas and how we can address such things. Bessel says many things that catch my eyes. And though this quote doesn’t leak the full and meaty words and stories I remember from all my psychology courses about the brain, here’s a quote for you that feels significant these days:
Don’t Pay Attention to Him
I practice paying attention. I’m the one trying to convince people to be in the room, to give the person asking for it your attention.
But I wonder if all the attention the country has paid to our current president is an error in attentiveness. I wonder if the best way to respond to him, his needs, and his appetites for viewers–however you define those appetites–is to turn away.
All the attention people have given to one person has turned the executive branch into a reflection of the singular individual sitting in the Oval. All the work of our democracy has contracted into constant rambling about one person, the very person seeking to get us to talk about him. Could this be our turning him into an effective person, one who gets exactly what he’s wanted?
We’re not focusing on being citizens, or real political next steps, or peace or war. We’re looking at images of him. Watching mistakes from his management. Listening to stories about him. Rehearsing tweets from him. This seems to be a very effective way of getting us to do what he suggested he would: name him, underline him, esteem him. In one way or another, are we doing just that?
Perhaps we should demand that people not pay attention to him. It’s hard. It may be impossible for the sheer entertainment that has become our nation’s political leadership. It’s a digital toy store to see what mess or step or descriptions will show up today and different or consistent they’ll be from the last one hundred days. But is that the purpose for which these leaders were chosen? To become the people we discuss or to institute things or, at least, do things.
Oh, the journalists should work hard. And we should appreciate and consume their best efforts. But we also should expect and demand and move our government toward being a more perfect union that that. And when we cannot do that, we should expect people to do something approaching representation and governance.
I think that starts with looking at more than one person. I think that starts with attending to all the people whose stories go unreported and unmentioned because the oxygen of our critical discourse leans in one direction. I wonder if the poorest part of all this current frenzy is all the stories and words we’ve lost or dismissed or ignored in order to re-present the president’s latest.
Long Loving Looks
The other week I was at the ACPE ‘s national conference. Among the many highlights were seeing my previous training supervisor, Peter Strening, one of the best people I know, hearing and meeting Parker Palmer and Carrie Newcomer, and experiencing Greg Ellison.
Dr. Ellison’s time with us was a critical, illuminating display. Among the many things we did during his discussion of the non-profit he created with his colleagues in connection, Fearless Dialogues, was what he called the long loving look. It takes him to explain it. I haven’t found Dr. Ellison’s explanation of this part of his presentation, but I have found this important summary of the context for the brother-scholar’s book. It’s as good because it contextualizes what I experienced in this professor’s time with us at the conference. Attend to what he says, please.
What he offers is a summary of his first book that also names and underlines the particular part of his presentation. If I find more on the loving look, I’ll post it at another time. Of course, you can also bring Dr. Ellison and his crew to your church, school, or business for a quality, hard and heartfelt discussion about something that matters.
Laugh as Often as Possible
A wonderful meal with a cast of pastoral educators the other week made me think of this. I’m grateful for the wisdom within Dr. Angelou because she hits all the notes here.
Personal Vocational Values
Yulee Lee, our pastor to children and youth at New Community in Logan Square, led us through an exercise during our staff meeting last week. She guided us in a discussion about personal vocational values.
Our staff is in the midst of forming as a team for this current ministry season. Having added our newest leader a few months ago, we are thinking about developing a team or group culture as pastors at the Logan Square church. This is an area where we’ve experienced a fair amount of change over the almost 11 years I’ve been at the church. Because the group has been different over those years, it feels like a new moment. It certainly is a new group of us since January.
Our emphasis has me thinking through how personal values meets the work of a group. It seems that a person is always bringing himself or herself to a group. The question is usually one of degree. How much am I in this room? How much of me is known by this group? Who am I to this circle? What have I shared and what have I withheld? These are some of the questions during group process. I’m grateful that our congregation’s pastors are engaging with some of them.
Illumination from The Inward Journey
Michael Washington 