The Little Friar

Seneca's Medea is a story that's been running through my mind the past few days.  In it, Medea murders her own children in order to inflict the maximum amount of pain on Jason, her husband, that she can -- despite the fact that killing them also deprives her of their love, something that, itself, is redemptive in the ways she needs, moreso than the pain she wants to inflict on Jason.  Punishment accomplished, she feels her dignity and self-respect restored. Medea's story is all too familiar.  Few betrayed spouses murder their children to hurt their betrayer, but many certainly aim to inflict pain, and these efforts often have heavy collateral damages.  Even when self-restraint prevents the enactment of anger's wishes, ill-will seethes, just hoping for some bad outcome for the wrongdoer and his new family.  And so often that ill-will sneaks out after all, in litigation, in subtle deflection of children's affections, or maybe only in an unwillingness to ...

My friend Angela asked that I write a bit about what Christians might have to say to the issue of suicide.  I'm going to go about this in two ways:  First, I want to lay out a bit of the theology behind what we Christians have had to say historically.  Then, I want to tell the story of how I as a pastor handled a suicide's funeral, in an effort to chart a course for a conversation about how Christians might think about suicide into the future. First, the history. Let's be honest here:  Suicide is confusing for Christians.  Although historically, Christians have thought that Scripture is clear in its disapproval, the few instances of suicide in Scripture make this case far less clear. Must we necessarily believe that those who have taken their own life in order to end suffering are somehow damned to eternal torment?  Not if you give Scripture a clear reading. Of the seven or so suicides reported in Scripture, most familiar are Saul, Samson, and Ju...

We don't think about self-deception much in our culture. But the Bible does.  For example: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.  Who can understand it?  (Jeremiah 17.9) The pride of your heart has deceived you, you who live in the clefts of the rocks and make your home on the heights, you who say to yourself, "Who can bring me down to the ground?" (Obadiah 1.3) If anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.  (Galatians 6.3). In the past warnings regarding self-deception were common.  Now, though, we talk about being "authentic" and "true to ourselves" in a way that insists there's not really a way we might be deceiving ourselves. And it's odd.  Because the research -- not to mention the simple daily experience -- would tell us how very inauthentic that is. And we Christians seem to be among the worst at this. Christians worry about a great many vices but we rarely warn against self-...

One of the theological problems I've noticed lately is how we Christians handle mental illness.  In particular, though, I want to focus on depression .  It should really go without saying that the ministry of the Church is given to extending welcome and kindness.  But, sadly, that seems so little to happen.  So a pastoral word before I say what I really want to say. I've seen some terrible, horrible, awful, no good, rotten, very bad stuff on mental illness by Christians -- and most recently around the suicide of Robin Williams publicly.  But it's some of the stuff I've seen privately, around someone very vulnerable and close to my ministry that most bothers me.  So bear with me here.  Heaping guilt onto someone who's suffering is like tying a millstone around the neck of the vulnerable.  And, trust me, that's not something Jesus likes.  Think Matthew 18.6-9 here.  Where's our Christian compassion? Yes, we Christians have a bad track reco...

Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence  is a first-rate expose of the overwhelming contemporary scientific evidence about the destructive effects of media violence on our children.  We may want to deny it, but Grossman and DeGaetano bear witness.  But they also provide us with tools -- real life and workable tools! -- to change all the violent media diets that have been changing our kids for the past two generations.  And no one is more qualified than Grossman to lay out those effects.  His On Killing  and On Combat  are meticulously researched classics.  So when I ordered this book I was expecting much of the same.  But I was blown away!   Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill  provides  indisputable, scientifically demonstrable facts that media violence is psychologically, emotionally and even  physiologically  doing damage to our children.  Every parent must read ...

Some years ago, as a pastor, I was called upon to give Ann a Christian burial.   I'd gotten to know her only months before.  So I needed to talk to friends and family, to get a picture of her life.  Ann, you see, had committed suicide.   This is Ann's story, and what she taught me.  Ann's father deserted her when she was 3.  Her mother filled his void with a number of temporary replacements.  But they always saw Ann as "under foot".  She was discarded.  Passed around family members, shuffled from town to town, school to school.  She made acquaintances.  No friends.  Not enough stability.  So at 17, she created her own stability.  She latched onto the first man who'd give her attention.  She married young, and poorly.  He abandoned her eventually, with four kids, no job, no home, no money.  Her dreams withered.  She survived as best she could.  Bad jobs, followed by worse ones.  Abusive bo...

There's an ancient philosophical adage that says, "Know Yourself". Joseph Hallinan's Kidding Ourselves:  The Hidden Power of Self-Deception explores all the ways in which that's so difficult.   What Hallinan advances seems, at first, to be counter-intuitive:  Far from being a defeating defect, self-deception has its benefits.  It even gives us the optimistic edge over dreary realists.  So there's a great deal of power, according to Hallinan, in not  knowing ourselves.  The power, according to the book, is found in our sense of control.  Our health, success and even survival depend on maintaining that sense of control in our lives -- and bolstering the hope that comes from that powerful sense of control.  Hallinan goes on to develop his thesis will a review of study after study.  Written in an accessible prose, Kidding Ourselves  wants to say, riding the pop psychology wave of science -- as if science has all the right answers -- tha...

Sigmund Freud once wrote that the only feeling that doesn't lie is  anxiety .  This is a hard thing for us to hear, because few feelings terrify us more than anxiety.  Anxiety disrupts our carefully constructed and managed zones of comfort and serves to remind is that there's a world beyond the edges of our noses.  In other words, anxiety is the way way we're affected by the reality we can't change, the things that just won't go away.   That's why it's so hard to repress anxiety.  Sure, we medicate it, attempt to hide it.  But it's still there.  We can pretend it's not there.  That's one of the luxuries of modern life.   If we don't like seeing tragedy, just change the channel.  If we don't like hearing about all the deaths in the world, there's XM Radio.  If you don't like all that talk you hear in church about sin, repentance and following Jesus, you can always stay home and watch Joel Osteen and feel much better about y...

A friend of mine responded, a few days ago, to a quote about letting go of ego with a very Freudian statement:  "Embrace your Id".  I retorted that Freud and I don't have much in common, because I'm Christian.  Talking about Freud -- among Christians  -- can be a dangerous thing.  We have such opinions and biases about Freud.  And Darwin.  And we've usually read neither.  I discovered this after teaching a course on "Psychological Theory and Christian Faith".  When we came to read Freud, I'd chosen not only his Future of an Illusion , but also his Introductory Lessons on Psychoanalysis . As I tried pointing out to students, our culture is thoroughly Freudian.  We can't help it.   By the time you are an adult you've already internalized a ton of Freud's theory.  The unconscious.  Dreams.  Repression.  Defense mechanisms.  Fixations.  Analyzing people.  Neuroses.  The Id, Superego, and Ego. ...

I lost a friendship last week.   Self-esteem -- or something like it -- killed that friendship.  Now, I spend a lot  of time in ministry reaching out to my sisters who suffer psychologically because they think they're not "enough".  Lots of women suffer from poor self-esteem.  And that grieves my heart.  I think it's a genuine spiritual  problem that there's so much psychological  dysfunction.  But let me quickly add, that's not  the kind of self-esteem that killed my friendship.  The kind of self-esteem I'm talking about -- the kind that has the power to destroy friendships -- is the violent  self-esteem that gets touted as healthy in our culture.  The kinds of self-esteem I'm talking about are those that create a  rush of pride or envy or resentment, depending on how we work them out.  None of those are particularly healthy, perhaps especially the pride.   Most of us create, build up, and maintai...

Over past weeks, I've been thinking a great deal about evil -- how it's perpetrated in our daily relationships, specifically.  How is it that we come to be some violent to one another?  And why does this violence take a myriad of forms (from outright abuse to more subtle passive-aggressive pot-shots)? In the process of these reflections, I've come to notice how prevalent the language of evil  is in our dealing with the violence.  And how we often couch that language in religious terms.  So what I want to offer here is a two-fold reflection. (1) I want to explore why the myth of "pure evil" just won't work and how the reality of evil's source is even more violent than we often recognize.  And (2) what all this talk about "evil" says, theologically.  To the Myth of Pure Evil, then.  When we think of evil , we tend to use a schema with three parts.  These are: 1.  Evil is intentional harm. 2.  The perpetrators of the harm are sadistic;...

Kendra and I celebrated our Christian marriage yesterday.  It is but the first celebration of daily celebrations hereafter, but I want to offer some reflections of lessons I've learnt along the way to that celebration yesterday.  Christian marriage not only creates a new family -- it unites already existing ones.  Sometimes those families come with burdens that push up against the very boundaries of being Christian  in ways we -- or at least I  -- never appreciated until the past few weeks.  First, I must say I'm a Christian.  That confession shapes and molds -- is shaped and molded by -- a number of practices, not just intellectual affirmations.  Among those practices is the practice of reconciliation .  "God was in Christ, reconciling  the world to himself" (2 Corithians 5.17).  The practice of reconciliation is extending the graceful forgiveness, respect of an for the Other, kindness and humility toward those who despise and abus...

I was talking this morning with a friend about Jesus' second Greatest Commandment ("Love your neighbor as yourself").  Particularly, a friend asked a question about it in relation to self-esteem.  Generally, her interpretation of what Jesus said rings widely true in the Church these says:  You  have to love yourself  first , and  then , once you love yourself, you can love your neighbor.  In this formulation, self-love functions as a prerequisite for the love of others.  And you often hear it described as a two-stage process: Stage One:  Love yourself Stage Two:  Love others In one sense, I agree with this.  It's hard to really love others if you've got a catastrophically bad self-esteem.  In those cases what looks like love might actually be, underneath, a fearful, servile dependency.  So in that sense, I get it. But, I don't think this is what Jesus is saying.  I don't think Jesus has this very recent, Western psych...