Category / Relationships

by Michael

When You’re Stressed

Stress has a way of uncovering your faults, stripping you of your character costumes, and revealing who is left.

When taken into your body (and by that I mean all of you), stress is received as a signal to your system(s) to fly, flight, or freeze.

Another way of screening stress is by calling it your way of coming down to your basic self, your raw self, and who you are.

You’re surely more than any one decision, but you are definitely who you are when you’re raw. Angry, pissed, disappointed. How you interpret stress, how you take that stressful event in and live from it, will look differently from the next person. But you are in that response.

Take a look at your stresses. Take a look at your responses. Notice who you were in them. Notice who you still are.

Is that the person you want to be when the next stress comes? Is who you are consistent with who you thought you were?

Accept who you see. Love that person. And decide if you want to change.

by Michael

Clinical Skill

A friend called me and I answered the phone, “What did I do?” She laughed and then asked me what my goals were for the year.

Having thought little about the calendar year, it took a minute. I live on a few calendars. My school calendar, my oldest son’s school’s calendar, my work calendar, and in an implicit way, the liturgical calendar.

Each project in my world has a calendar. In some ways, I’m modifying goals regularly based upon what happens in each mini-world.

So we joked a few minutes while I got myself together to answer her question. She and a few folks had listened to each other’s goals the day prior and she wanted to hear mine. She wanted to do me the favor of hearing my goals. Emmanuel Lartey, a pastoral theologian, wrote in In Living Color, that “Listening is a core skill in any form of caring.”

We traded goals and that was it. The thing is, when trading goals and expectations and hopes, I was–and she was–giving each other permission to participate. Trading was a step. Her asking me in a few months some version of “how are you doing with this one?” is another step.

It was a gift to me, having her ask the question, probe gently, and listen. I actually said to her, “This is what I do. I show up and ask people a question in order to hear them. How are you taking my role?”

I learned in that conversation that more people do what I do. More people are capable of coming alongside another person in order to listen, to care. I also learned that friends can take different roles playfully and that we can all do more or less than what we’ve done in the past.

That’s actually one of the learnings behind my goals, learning that I’m not, merely, what I have been and what I have done. My friends…always strengthening my and their clinical skill.

by Michael

That Comment at Dinner about Manhood

The other day at dinner, we were all at the table, and you said something about “Trump.” I corrected you, told you to insert a “Mr.” and you did. Then, you went on with your story.

Since then, I’ve had a couple moments reflecting upon that parental intervention. I’ve questioned my response like I often do with you. Was it right? Where was I coming from? Was my approach authentic to the best parts of my upbringing, the parts that I want to pass on to you and to your brother?

And I’m thinking over the goods and bads of that insertion. That Mr. comes with problems. I didn’t go into the problems then, though they were on the borders of my thinking. I’m your father and a part of my role is to regularly be as close to my best thoughts as I can be because you and your brother come up with all kinds of things I want to affirm, correct, question, laugh at, or otherwise capture. It takes energy to be present. It takes energy to be a good father. I want to be both with you and number two. So the Mister.

In some ways, we’ve already discussed portions of the problematic insertion. In some ways, explaining myself at the time would have gotten us off the important point you were making and pulled us away from the more pressing matter of what you wanted to say. But this is why I blog, to post up little indications of increasingly critical and vulnerable discourse so that you and your brother will have trails of thinking where I’ve said my piece, made my peace.

There are issues with my suggestion about the current person sitting in the Oval, the broad white structure made by a lot of beautiful black hands and recently inhabited by a beautiful black family, the family there when we traveled to DC as a family so we could trek through the Museum while our president was Barack Obama.

First, everyone is worthy of being treated like a person. In my quick move to tell you how to put a handle on a last name, I was foundationally trying to say that you should treat “Trump” the way you’d treat anyone who was an adult and that isn’t by saying there name.

Second, this is an admittedly cultural application. You know people, some of them are your friends, who call people by names without handles, but that’s not the family you are being raised in, is it? Black people have conventionally raised each other to be honorable and that honor is expressed by an enduring respect for elders. That respect is easily translatable to others who aren’t old but who are older than you.

Third, you cannot restrict yourself to the limited experiences of people who use language irresponsibly. For better and worse, I am your father. You and your brother have inherited the godparental influence of Auntie Pat who on too many long rides corrected me and Uncle Mark and who wouldn’t let us get away with poor speech. I am passing that on. Of course, she has told you some of these stories herself. Both me and your dear mother are communicators in our own ways. There are certain phrases you must use, certain ones I’d strongly encourage you not to use.

Fourth, adults are adults. When you become an adult–and I plan to tell you precisely when that occurs!–those who are older are elders. As I said, adults and elders generally must be treated as, among other things, containers of deep wisdom. This comes out of your African heritage. It isn’t constricted only to blackness but it is certainly in your blackness. Your lineage includes honor for the elders.

I was coming out of these points of view. However, and now we turn toward the paradoxical and toward the ways I’m encouraging you to second-guess me and toward ways I’ve second-guessed myself on this comment at the table, some people are not worth your Mr. Some people–and I’d include this person in the Oval–are not worth your respect.

There are males who are only men by virtue of their maleness, who do everything to diminish your view of them because of how they conduct themselves in the world, and those males are not worthy of your respect. They may well be worth your acknowledgement of them as human beings, but they are unworthy of your respect. The men in your life, me among them, are aiming to teach you in how to discern which qualities make a man respectable. For now–and at the table–I was intervening, showing you this current example of a man who is unworthy.

You know because of how you are being raised by your dear mother, by me, and by our extended family (the plural collective that I’m collapsing in the singular term) that your respect is hard-won. Your respect is an indication of what it took for you to develop an idea of personhood broadly and manhood in (this) particular.

You have seen and loved and been by and loved by good men. For quick instance, your uncles are good men. All of them. For another instance, I am a good man. We are teaching you to respect yourself and how that respect is immediately and intricately related to respect for others. Since it’s hard-won, you ought not give away easily.

Giving your honor to a person means that you are extending to him or her some part of you that they ought to be able to accept, take in, and appreciate. People ought to be able to receive you, receive the pearls that come from you to use a biblical allusion. The man is the Oval, the current president of the country, is not one of those people. Again, this is complicated so I need to tell you more about why I’m offering a well-situated exception to the rule.

The current president, as you have told me, has been unkind to many people. This was a part of your heartbreak when he was elected. You remember how excited you and your peers were to vote in school, how surprised and perplexed you were when the man who said “those bad things about Mexicans and women” won. He has called for the harm of individuals and families. He has repeatedly told lies. He has admitted to participating in sexual assaults against women. He has deceived. He has consistently misapplied sacred texts, a devious consequence when a person is not a part of a sacred community. He has made decisions based upon people he knows and not taken the wide grace of counsel beyond his own comforts. He has encouraged violence and engendered, insofar as is possible for his talent, a national culture of division. He has been a successful businessmen in the United States of America without any real historically visible integration of spirituality which says more of the same. These may be true about other political misters but it has been documented by others in this president’s case and it has been experienced by you in your own life.

The current president will not always be the president. We will have others. So govern yourself accordingly. You can respect his personhood without extending to him what he would not extend to you. You can respect his personhood without accepting the type of masculinity that he models.

I wish I could tell you to use me as a guide. In some ways, you necessarily use me as a guide and measure of manhood. That is a delightful, bruising, high burden for me. But I’m imperfect as I often tell you. What I’m happy to do is point to the very contours from which you will judge me and judge others. Use these mentionings to hold me to the accountability of your best notions of respect. And use them to judge others too. They’re good enough for that, these cultivated ramblings.

by Michael

Park Swings

I heard Nina Li Coomes, a poet from Japan and Chicago, and her poem–which I got to by her essay in my inbox through the On Being newsletter–made me think of you. It made me think of your brother, too, but the thought of you came first.

Her poem was written to her unborn daughter and for a moment the title of the poem, spoken at a Chicago slam which Nina won, felt implausible to me, felt foreign to me because of my deep experience with you boys, felt distant to me because your mother used to say all the time how she thought I’d soften if I ever had a daughter and how she wanted to see that softening.

Presumably I’ve spent a lot of time hardening. Well, I should be honest that it’s not a presumption. I have hardened. I could insert the things I’ve said in a dozen ways before to explain that calcifying of my heart, that drying of my spirit, and provide departure points that begin with you, extend with your brother, and deepen in the country of loss that I live in while being a father whose own father exists in memories, in pictures, in videos, in the mouths of loved ones, in the twinkle of my mother’s eyes.

But I have softened and I thought of that softening today. I thought of it last night as I melted over the pain joy blanketing me in the quietness of a wonderful day to be a father. I softened all over again as I thought about why going to McDonald’s is so hard for me, why white and brown vans send my heart into its own swirls, why passing by parks and playing in parks with you and your brother the way we did yesterday is a trip full of complicated pleasures. These softenings remind me of the days when I held my father’s steep, chiseled hands, when he took me and my brother to eat, to play, to run, to be free. Thinking of them let me think of the hardening.

Nina’s words brought back my scholar and peer’s words while we were swinging on the swings, your brother commanding me to push and him watching you and you doing the same, smiling just the way you did when you were your brother’s age when we played in our park across from the Obama home, and me pushing you both by using the back stretch that ends of a sanchin kata that you haven’t learned yet, one you’ll do better than me. I was being a good dad and it was a way to spend the day with you and with my good dad on his birthday.

Nina’s poem had a line. You know lines because you possess many of them, keep your own like a poet awaiting his debut, inching up to the stage at Busboys, breathing lines at Louder, testing phrases at the Hyde Park Blvd bus stop, whispering them while you review a kata just before a promotion. Her line made me think of your line, which made me remember a moment that you discussed with me and your mother late one evening, after bedtime came and went.

You were distressed and that distress etched something in me that made me want to shield you. We talked it through. You and your mother had talked it through before. I heard some of it and stayed out of it. I waited until I was brought in so that you could do your thing with mommy. Then, we three discussed it. And we kept at it. I hardened in the moment because I’m used to hardening. I’m not bad at hardening. I would soften later. We would keep speaking over themes like the one you raised that night. We would edge toward the swing, lift ourselves in it, and eventually press ourselves into the blue.

Second grade would be a long grade for you (and me), longer than the others so far. It would be the grade where I heard difficulties emerge for you that were never difficulties before. It would be the grade that would show me the poverty and richness of my fathering skills. It would be the grade when me and your mother worked through how to become even better at something we do well.

It would be the grade that would deepen my longing for my own father, when I would write for him and offer my words to the sky for him to read the way I pushed my sons on swings during the holiday when their father felt free with them and, surrounded by friends over poorly coordinated leisure that worked out fine, despite his little fears that felt less strong.

You and your brother will keep swinging. The smiles in your faces tell me that. I’ll be one of the ones behind you, pushing, pausing, pressing you to extend yourselves, kick your legs, and dig into the movements of freedom. And we’ll all be engaging in that extending and kicking and digging. We’ll all be freer for it. One swing at a time. One smile at a time.

You and your brother can fight about who will write the poem. I have my thoughts about who will win.

by Michael

Telling Others What You Hear

I started graduate school last fall in a program that prepares scholars to teach in pastoral care, pastoral counseling, and pastoral psychotherapy. I’m not in the clinical track, though it’s set up in order to deepen students’ clinical skills. I knew when I started school that I was also continuing in my work as a supervisor in ACPE. I knew I was meeting committee (in November of 2017) and again (in November of 2018). I knew of some of the feedback throughout my supervisory education process and that it’d be with me still when I started school. I knew because of these specific “events” that I’d re-enter individual therapy.

My committee in November gave me 2 recommendations that I wanted to take into therapy. I was also in the midst of an important departure from ending 16 years of congregational ministry, which meant a significant role loss; that was something I wanted to use therapy to reflect upon. I would add individual therapy to my list of venues of growth.

I started in January, and it felt familiar to me, and good. Don’t worry. I will not expose my experiences in therapy on this blog! But I will say one specific thing. Consider sharing what you get from your venues of growth with people who will help you grow, heal, deepen, and live.

If you keep what you learn to yourself or if you keep it within that venue, it won’t go far. It won’t spread. And it will be limited in how it reemerges in your ears. You won’t see it or hear it in the words and faces of others. In other words, you’ll forget about it. You’ll lose touch with it. You’ll restrict your possibilities to use what you get.

I’m using therapy as a venue of growth, but I’m adding it to supervisory education, spiritual direction, collegial conversation, and so on. Your venue may not be therapy for your venue to be therapeutic.

I used to tell people during pastoral care conversations at church that they should consider what to share with small group members or relatives. Those were the people who would come alongside my conversation partners, who would help them live toward what they discovered in worship, in prayer, and in spiritual conversations.

If you could do it all yourself, then the counsel would fall flat. But you can’t do it all by yourself. You never could. So when your pastor tells you something meaningful, share that with your cousin who texts you a million times a week. She can bring it up, ask you how it’s going using what your pastor said. You get the idea?

I started. I occasionally tell very close people what happens in my therapy. It’s a way of sharing my experience. It’s a way for me to keep using, speaking about, and practicing self-discovery on the way toward living. If it wasn’t helpful, I wouldn’t be in therapy. And if it is helpful, I need to keep it going. Sharing what I hear with others, helps me keep it going. What will help you keep your growth going?

by Michael

Go Ahead and Be Biased

Forget about objectivity. It’s a fallacy and a send-off. There is no such thing as being general. There isn’t a general individual on this planet. Why would you try to be?

Rather than trying to be what you cannot be, general, consider a more natural option: being biased. When you’re biased, you lean in a direction. You turn and set yourself. You head to a place.

Be slanted in a direction. Go somewhere that’s different, that’s unique to you, and that sets boundaries that are consistent with who you are with your different, unique, and special self.

You’re already biased, even if you don’t want to be. You’re interested in things and disinterested in other things. You wake dreaming about this and not that. You pray about some matters and ignore others. All of that means that you are facing a direction.

It’s absolutely true that you should question your biases, unearth the stories of your prejudices, and interrogate your acts of ignoring what is good. This is not a post about that kind of criticality. This post is a post about you being who you are and not some poor made up version of someone else. You were made to be you.

Go ahead and be biased. The worst that can happen is that find out that in the process of being you actually lived.

by Michael

You Are Anything But Alone

The thing I remember about those first days, the thing I mostly remember at this moment, is the nights and how long they felt. Not that first night because I was in the airport taking a very late flight when my aunt called me about my Pops death. That first night, I nearly dropped into the bed after negotiating our first flight with Bryce. Carrying things takes a toll on the body, and even holding the news of my father’s death, sleep took me in for those next hours like an attentive lover.

I sensed something, some knowing, less than a week prior. I had a burst of conviction to see him. I knew I would travel the week of Christmas. I wanted to see him though. I felt like I had to. I had been driving down to Arkansas, at least, monthly since his stroke. The last visit was literally a last-minute decision. I got a car, drove the 10 hours, and was pressing a button on the door of a specialty hospital after winding through Google’s crazy directions which took me through unlit roads from the interstate in very dark country.

I won’t write about that moment. But I will say that six days later when he died, that dark night driving came back to me. It’s the dark, lengthy nights that sit with me when I first get into the memories of my father’s death, the bitterness of it, and when I start to get back to the other recollections of his life.

The nights where I lay in the bed crying and wondering why the world wasn’t doing the same thing, wondering how anybody could sleep after the death of my father. The nights where I had no soul company, where I couldn’t relate to anyone, and where my reality was so unique, so different from my four brothers or from my mother. The night where I knew there were people near me but where I felt so far away.

My father’s death was an entrance for me into a qualitatively different depth, one I would gladly give back if I could. It was the one grim event in my adulthood that has framed the rest. His death brought a reference point for all my subsequent dark nights. There is more to say. There will be more to say, and there will be nothing to say, many moments when there is absolutely nothing to say.

I will be with you in the darkness. I will be with you from a distance and I’ll be with you occasionally up close. You, like me, won’t be alone. You’ll be cloaked with others even when you’ll feel that particular separation that will lodge somewhere in you far down. You are anything but alone.

by Michael

Fully Recognizing What is Here

The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us. Our deaths inside a system of racism existed before we were born. The legacy of black bodies as property and subsequently three-fifths human continues to pollute the white imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but also grasp it. In the words of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, “The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.” And, as my friend the critic and poet Fred Moten has written: “I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world and I want to be in that.” This other world, that world, would presumably be one where black living matters. But we can’t get there without fully recognizing what is here.

From Claudia Rankine’s “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” in The Fire This Time

by Michael

Consequences

Your decisions and non-decisions will follow you into the future for the next dozen years if not longer. That’s what occurred to me as I read a story about a leader who died.

His life of service was full before a particular set of choices that turned the view of his constituency, the views of his peers, and likely his view of himself. I don’t think everything you are sits or falls on one choice or one non-choice. A person is more than his action, especially in an instance. And yet, a person is a person, and people can change perspectives for a number of reasons.

One event, one comment, one fight, one attempt at repair, one email. One gesture can turn the world between you and another person in any direction. What’s the direction you want for yourself? Perhaps what you choose can promote that direction. There are consequences to your decisions.

Your choices carry power. Imagine them greeting you in your future, claiming you and calling for you to claim them. Make decisions out of grace, so that grace carries consequences into tomorrow.

by Michael

For Belonging from O’Donohue

I read this earlier in the year to a group of people I have spent years loving:

May you listen to your longing to be free.

May the frames of your belonging be generous enough for your dreams.

May you arise each day with a voice of blessing whispering in your heart.

May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.

May the sanctuary of your soul never become haunted.

May you know the eternal longing that lives at the heart of time.

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.

May you never place walls between the light and yourself.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

“For Belonging” from John O’Donohue’s To Bless the Space Between Us