Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theology. Show all posts

Why Am I Still Sick? Mental Illness, Faith, and the Love of God

Rumor has it, I'm going to start preaching again. My brain functions a lot better than it used to. But it still functions slowly. So to give myself plenty of time, I have been looking ahead to the scriptures that are coming up in the lectionary.

[In the Episcopal Church, among others, we preachers don't pick and choose our favorite bits of the Bible. We get confronted by and have to deal with what is assigned.]

That's how I came across Matthew 9:18-26, one of the texts for early June. Jesus is on his way to heal a young girl when a woman with an issue of blood reaches out surreptitiously to touch him. He feels the power go out of him and turns to confront her. Then he says:

Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.

Ah, here it comes -- the faith question of every person with a chronic or fatal illness, every person who prays and has people praying for us.

Don't I have faith? Don't I have enough faith to get my healing?

Many years ago in one of my darkest times, I met a young woman. She was part of a mission group who had come from Mexico to Costa Rica. On behalf of a local church, she and others would be going door to door, sharing their witness.

She asked me what I was doing in Costa Rica. So I told her that I had depression and was writing a book about it.

Without missing a beat, she answered, If you give your life to Jesus, he will heal you, and you won't have depression anymore.

She described her life in her teens, a life of indulgence, as she put it. She was a smoker. But then she gave her life to Jesus and he turned her around. He took away her addiction to cigarettes

Oh, honey.

She and I had met at the church that was sponsoring the mission. The worship service had gone long. I was tired. And I didn't have enough Spanish to get into it with her.

So I didn't tell her that 

  • I fell in love with Jesus when I was eight and was baptized
  • I took Jesus as my Lord and Savior when I was eighteen at college
  • I gave my life to Jesus when I entered seminary at twenty-five
  • I vowed to . . . pattern my life in accordance with the teachings of Christ, so that I may be a wholesome example to my people when I was ordained a priest at twenty-nine
  • I . . . well, you get the idea.

The thing is, I have a brain that works differently, and sometimes not very well. Living a life in Christ has not protected me from the symptoms of bipolar disorder, nor even from feeling suicidal at its worst.

Bipolar disorder has been around for millennia. People had it before the coming of Christ. And people have had it since. Faith in Jesus really has nothing to do with it.

I am glad that Jesus took away her addiction to cigarettes. I am glad that Jesus healed the woman with an issue of blood, that he freed the Gerasene man who had been possessed, that he raised Lazarus from the dead.

But he hasn't healed me. At least, he hasn't taken away my bipolar.

Why not?

No, don't answer that question. I don't want an explanation. I especially don't want God to explain to me how He -- and I use that pronoun on purpose -- how He is using my suffering to some greater end. To help you, I suppose.

I don't want a God who manipulates people who are suffering, moves us around on some chessboard as part of His grand design.

For God's sake, don't tell me to have faith.

What a cruel notion that if you just believe hard enough you will be healed.

The first preaching I will do after an absence of a few years will be for a man who was one of the most faith-filled people I know. He died after waiting for years for a lung transplant, while people around the world prayed for him. As people have prayed for me.

Why am I still sick? I think that's the wrong question to address to God. I think that question posits the existence of the kind of God that we want, a God who will answer our questions and give us certainty and make us feel good.

A God that exists only in our desires and our imaginations.

Whoa! Did the preacher say that God doesn't exist? No, the preacher said that the God that does exist is not small enough to fit inside the box of our desires.

Who is the God who does exist? I am a very smart person. Nevertheless, that question is beyond my bandwidth. I have my own desires about God. But I no longer expect that God will satisfy them.

However, reading all those stories of healings year after year, over forty years of preaching on them, there is something that I have noticed. In almost every one of them, part of the healing is a return to community.

The woman who had had an issue of blood for fifteen years (endometriosis?) would have been unclean on that account. Nobody would have touched her. For fifteen years. Now she could take a neighbor's hand.

The Gerasene man who was possessed (schizophrenia?) lived in chains outside the city of Gerasa. When he was restored to his right mind, Jesus sent him home.

Lazarus -- dead and in the tomb. Jesus returned him to his sisters.

And me with my bipolar -- that is the kind of healing I have experienced. When I was newly disabled and not leaving my second floor condo except to go to the doctor, I joined NAMI -- National Alliance on Mental Illness. I went a Peer to Peer class, where people with mental illness teach other people with mental illness how to navigate our lives.

I discovered people who didn't care whether I had faith or not. They didn't need for me to be healed to confirm their own faith. They expected I wouldn't be. And they loved me. They invited me in. They were my new community.

Romans 8 -- that's what I believe. When I don't believe in God -- I really don't believe in the God who withholds healing based on my puny wounded capacity for faith -- I do believe this:

I am sure that neither death, nor life, [nor feeling suicidal], nor angels, nor principalities, [nor health insurance companies], nor height, nor depth, [nor the personal hell of side effects], nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I am not healed. But I am loved.

That's a kind of healing. And it is enough.


photo by Nevit Dilman, used under the creative commons license.

"I Don't Believe in God Anymore. Just Don't Trust the Guy"

Job 42 - A sermon

Fourteen years ago, I wrote an essay titled, I don't believe in God anymore. It was a response to my grief about my mental illness, the loss of my self-image, my sense of confidence as a person who could rely on the state of my own mind.

I wasn't suicidal at the time. But I was acutely aware that chances are I would be again in the future, because I have a remitting, recurring condition. It appears, it gets better, it flairs again. And suicidal ideation is one of its symptoms, a particularly cruel symptom.

I felt betrayed. Betrayed by God.

I mean, I had given my life, my energy, my health to serving God. And all of those things had been taken away from me. Me!

Okay, I know that bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen even to saints. But, damn!

It wasn't about mental illness so much as it was about grief, grief for the loss of what I thought I knew about myself, what I thought I could count on, my brain, most of all.

And I thought I could count on God, too. So, I wrote, I don't believe in God anymore. Just don't trust the guy like I used to.

Job had a different response to his grief. He never said, I don't believe in God anymore. He continued to challenge God to be the God he thought he knew. But there are ways that the book resounds powerfully for me.

What is God Doing on World Bipolar Day?

It was not that this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. John 9:3, Revised Standard Version.

Or as The Message puts it: You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no cause and effect here. Look instead for what God can do.

There's the text for World Bipolar Day.


In the Gospel, Jesus heals a man born blind. Presumably what God can do is made manifest by that healing. So, okay, Jesus, what about me?

What about me? How many people, with how many disabilities, wonder what God is doing, especially those of us surrounded by others who wonder, Who sinned, this one or the parents?

Can People With Mental Illness Become Saints?

 The day approaches - the start of Lent Madness.

What, any reasonable person might ask, is that?

Take March Madness. Mash this bracket-style competition with a list of saints, some well-known, some utterly obscure, chosen by Scott Gunn and Tim Schenk, the two members of the Supreme Executive Committee who answer to nobody. Despite years of campaigning, they still will not include Fred Rogers. But I digress...

Every weekday through Lent the reader is presented with two saints and asked to vote. Anybody with an internet connection can vote - only once - they will know. The saint with the greater number of votes advances to the next round.

Sanity, the Serenity Prayer, and the Way of Love


Last week I just couldn't. Well, my laptop was dying. And then my printer wouldn't install. But all that within the context of everything that well, you know... So last week there was no new post.

This week, I still can't, not really. I can't find any new research that intrigues me. I can't bear the thought of yet another rant. I am determined not to spread any more pain.

But there's pain out there. There's pain in here. And this blog is about the things I can change. So this I will do.

I have a spiritual discipline that I am using to walk through these days. I am a Christian, and this is a Christian discipline, or series of ancient practices - though my guess is that nonChristians can find something of value here. I will do my best to do some translation.

It's called the Way of Love.

To Write Love - Hope for Depression, Addiction, Self-Harm, and Suicide

There is power in a story. You tell me your story. You are seen, heard, affirmed. I tell you my story. You know that I am for real. We are not alone.

To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) harnesses the power of story to offer hope to people struggling with depression, addiction, self-harm, and suicide.

The organization itself began with a story, a young woman who was suicidal but could not be admitted into a treatment program because she was also addicted and they couldn't bear the liability of her detox.

Yes, if you think you're done after you tell your suicidal friend or family member to get help, read that sentence again. Trying to get treatment can be enough of a nightmare to push us over the edge.

But that was just the beginning. A group of friends took it upon themselves to create a safe place and treatment program for this young woman for the five days it took to detox. The treatment program was admittedly unorthodox. She stayed with friends. In rotating teams they supported her, kept her safe. They also took her to concerts, Starbucks, and church. They prayed. They smoked cigarettes. They were her hospital.

Mostly, they listened.

Social Distancing and Sabbath


Pandemic

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.


How to Stay Sane

Shock, rage, fear, despair, depression, hopelessness, apathy, or even how about - drinking the kool-aid, surrender. Do we have a better choice?

Robin Chance, behavioral specialist and therapist, did a little therapy for the nation three years ago with her article, How to stay sane if Trump is driving you insane: Advice from a therapist. She offered a better choice.

Two questions: (1) How do we integrate this crisis into our understanding of the world? and (2) what do we do now? Now that the crisis of three years ago is our new normal, it seems time to revisit her words.

God and Suicide

Eight years ago I wrote "I don't believe in God anymore." It was the title of a book chapter, a book reflecting on suicide from a Christian perspective, though probably not the Christian perspective that you think about when I say that. More like what goes through the mind of a Christian who is suicidal and is bringing what is left of her theology to the experience and desperately trying to tell the truth about it. The truth. Not what we want the truth to be. Just the truth. It wasn't exactly a suicide note, though it might have been taken that way if that's the way it turned out.

It didn't turn out that way. I recovered. "I don't believe in God anymore" anticipated that I would recover, but that wouldn't make the problem go away. Relapse was statistically probable. I might be in that darkest of places again. This chapter dealt with the problem of suffering. Oh, how tidily that phrase expresses the chaos of a believer's brain when looking into the abyss. But I wouldn't let the tidy answers stand, and I still won't. While I am not so bitter anymore about this remitting, recurring condition of mine, as far as God goes, well, I just don't know as much about God as I used to.

Here is a piece of that chapter:

Although my own soul is a dry desert, I have deep wells from which to draw. While I do not believe in God, so I cannot say the creed, I cannot set my heart on the One who has broken it, I still believe in the communion of saints. As a Christian, I have a big family, across space and time. For now, I ask the rest of my family to do my believing for me.

The lament psalms persist in worship, and worship is how I persist. I listen to Gospel music. I sing along with those whose music it is. I do not have their faith. But I cannot dispute their testimony, what God has done for them, and the power they find in God to get through. I believe in them. I believe in the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir.


Those whose ancestors survived the Middle Passage, survived slavery, survived Jim Crow, survived the Klan, who still survive today, I don't know how they survive. But they assure me, and I listen to them tell me over and over:


             Everything He said in His word,

               He will do it for you.
               Every prophecy he gave, every promise He made,
               He will do it for you.

Eight years later, I am in remission, not depressed, not even a shadow for the last six months. An eternity! I have challenges. I manage my condition every single day. And my life is good. I work toward a publication date of September 2020. There will be something that comes out of that old hellhole, a book, a different book that offers help and hope to others who have been misdiagnosed and inappropriately treated as I was. And I am very proud of it, Prozac Monologues, the book.


I am not saying it was worth the price. I am not saying that my God issues have been resolved, that some promise was kept, and it's all okay because there was a happy ending. You can say that if you want. But it's a slippery slope, hanging your faith on the happy ending.


David Conroy wrote, Suicide is not chosen. It happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with pain. There is some truth for you. I have been blessed by enormous resources, and they have kept me alive through enormous pain. One of those resources is an unshakable experience of the communion of saints, those who have been there for me across the centuries, from Jeremiah to John of the Cross to the friend who said my prayers for me when I confessed I couldn't pray anymore to the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir.

I went to church on Sunday with a CD by The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. It reminded me of that chapter. And I thought it was time to say thanks. They carried me through.





photo of candle by anonymous, used under Creative Commons license

Spirituality, Mental Illness, and the Wellness Paradigm

Spirituality has a troubled place in the psychiatrist's office. A recent PsychiatricTimes.com article explores the complex reasons. The discomfort starts in "the traditional psychoanalytic view of religion being almost a culturally sanctioned form of neurosis" and continues through the modern diagnostic schema, "it is not uncommon to have delusions with religious or spiritual elements." While the DSM, the manual that guides diagnosis of psychiatric ailments takes care not to label as delusional any thought that is part of the cultural framework of the patient, this fig leaf seems to beg the question - is the patient's culture built on delusion?

Neurotic or delusional - which would you rather?

Honor the physician

The issue is made thornier by the recent development in Christianity that pits faith against science. And I cannot stress enough - this is a recent (also North American) development. Alas, what was once a minority voice within American Christianity has gained political and cultural power and, in this country at least, threatens to drown out the traditional Jewish and Christian view, as expressed in the Book of Ecclesiasticus:

Honor the physician with the honor due him, according to your need of him, for the Lord created him; for healing comes from the Most High, and he will receive a gift from the king. The skill of the physician lifts up his head, and in the presence of great men he is admired. The Lord created medicines from the earth, and a sensible man will not despise them.

Again alas, not a lot of sensible around these days. I don't even want to give you the link to the page that headlines, Psychiatry is a vicious enemy of Christianity and the Bible. In bold type, no less. One can hardly blame doctors for suspecting those who make them choose between religion and the gifts that God gave them.

Now there are plenty of psychiatrists who recognize this choice to be nonsense, among them one of the psychiatrists interviewed in the article above. While president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, Paul Summergrad "convened a gathering of clergy, other faith leaders, patients, and patient advocates with a group of distinguished psychiatric leaders. [Their] first goal... was to establish a dialogue and recognize common goals. [Their] work group developed a guide for faith-based leaders, which can be found and downloaded... from the APA website. "

A Guide for Faith-based Leaders

This guide has good stuff in it, and I commend it to faith leaders. But there is something about it that bugs me. It bugs me in most stuff that I have read written by people who approach spirituality from a scientific point of view. It is found in their description of wellness.

Wellness means overall well-being. For people with mental health and substance use conditions, wellness is not simply the absence of disease, illness, or stress, but the presence of purpose in life, active involvement in satisfying work and play, joyful. relationships, a healthy body and living environment, and happiness. It incorporates the mental, emotional, physical, occupational, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of a person's life. Each aspect of wellness can affect overall quality of life.

There is a graphic that demonstrates each of these aspects as separate items, presumably of equal weight, with Wellness at the center.

Well, what's wrong with that? I am just not sure that spirituality can be turned into an item among others. I am a priest. Spirituality is my life. But I can't figure out how to use it to promote my wellness. God uses me. I have no idea how to use God. And frankly, I suspect those who do.

Wellness vs. Wholeness

What would that graphic look like if theologians created it? For one, at least for this one, Wellness would not hold central position. Wholeness would. Not exactly the same thing. Wholeness is how to describe spiritual health. It is a translation of the Hebrew shalom or Arabic salaam. It means the kind of peace that comes from completeness and includes the completeness or justice of the community. It does not depend on financial, environmental, nor physical health. How one addresses either presence or lack of financial, environmental, and physical health is a measure of spiritual health.


Doctors are about the business of maximizing wellness. That is their job and, from a spiritual perspective, their calling. That's fine, and this wellness paradigm is fine. Except for the spirituality part. Spirituality is a different paradigm.

Well, I have only stated my starting point here. Perhaps this sounds like nonsense to you? Spirituality is peddled today as something to make you feel good. Okay, let me put it out there. Feeling good, as a life goal, is the goal of a spiritual peanut.

This blogpost will just have to become a book. I would like your help. What are the questions you would like to explore about spirituality and mental illness? Like, can you be whole and mentally ill? Does prayer really work, and how? Does it make a difference what you believe? Add a comment. Thanks.

cartoon from @lectrr

photo of St. Luke (patron of doctors) window by author

Christina the Astonishing!

Basil the Great vs. Christina the Astonishing – Lent Madness begins.

Saints and Lent – is Prozac Monologues straying from its mission, reflections and research on the mind, the brain, mental illness and society?  Hardly.  First, note the Madness in Lent Madness.  Then wait ‘til you see the saints.

Lent Madness

The forty days before Easter are traditionally a time to focus on one’s spiritual growth.  But there is a looniness built in from the start.  Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday – count them – 46 days.  Oh yeah, Sundays don’t count.  Does that mean I can smoke and eat chocolate on Sunday?  Opinions vary.

And once you are debating whether you can smoke on Sunday (does it depend on what you’re smoking?), you have already leaned in the direction of madness.  Leaning, leaning…

Suicide Is Not a Choice

I peered over this very overpass on the Eisenhower Expressway. Years ago, there was no the fence along the top, just a rail. It was pie that brought me there. Yes, pie. It was Thanksgiving night, and the holiday was ending without pie.

Of course, it wasn't a reason to commit suicide. Of course, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Don't treat me like an idiot with your clever lines.

No, pie brought me there, but that was not why I would jump. Pie was a match, a tiny little three letter match. My problem was a brain filled with gasoline. And one tiny match, that I should have been able to snuff with my fingers, threatened to ignite it and send me over the edge. The shame of being powerless over one tiny match poured on more gasoline.

The Power of Apology

First, a nod to our excrutiatingly polite neighbors to the north, on the Power of Apology from Scott Stratton:



Next, inspired by Scott and in honor of Magna Carta Day - a rerun of last year's Entitled to an Apology?

Perhaps because a central feature of both hypomania and depression is irritability, and because a characteristic of the "bipolar temperament" is a certain tendency toward an attitude of entitlement, interpersonal disputes tend to be common in this patient population. -- Ellen Frank, Treating Bipolar Disorder

Untangling Redemption

Kelly Flanagan is a psychotherapist who blogs.  I think that is brave of him.  Most mental health professionals keeps a decidedly low profile online.  Boundaries, you know.

Flanagan not only blogs -- he puts it right out there.

[I have been sick as a dog this week, and will share him with you, instead of churning out my own stuff.  Thanks, Kelly, for doing the heavy lifting.]

Flanagan's blog is called Untangled, and his theme is redemption: Tell a redemptive story with your life.  Now.

Immediately, he is asking for trouble in this bizarre world where meanness has become the measure of ones Christianity, and all those Christian words are distorted to stand for the opposite of what they intend.

In this Orwellian world, (where entitlement means something to which you are not entitled) Redemption means that you have paid whatever price somebody else has decided you ought to pay in mental gymnastics and conformity to their way of life.

Ring The Bells That Still Can Ring

Liturgical Christians, Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians keep a season called Advent, four weeks before Christmas.  It is a difficult practice, because it calls us to be thoughtful.  Thoughtful?!  You mean making a list and checking it twice?  No.  Advent is a time to acknowledge the truth that we hide from, behind our shopping lists and party schedules, the truth of emptiness and brokenness, in ourselves and in the world.  We are surrounded by Ho Ho Ho.  Advent says Hmm.

Advent says, Yes we will rejoice, because the baby, The Baby is born.  And yet.  And yet...

This has been a hard week.  Our defenses against the darkness have been found wanting.  And yet.  And yet...



Those Who Have Eyes, Let Them See

Yes, I said I was on sabbatical.  But I do have to write.  Like, I do have to breathe.  My facebook page this morning, somebody posted an Ernest Hemingway quote, There is nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.  I have learned there is more than one way to bleed.  Teresa of Avila's stigmata, by the way, were interior.  Mine (writing) seems better than other alternatives.

So yes, I am on sabbatical.  That means I don't have to post.  I might anyway.  Oh well.

NAMI National Convention 2012

It started with Shepherd.  He stood straight tall.  Life has taken a lot out of him, including a lot of teeth.  But he stood straight tall.  I remember him as a black man, with piercing light blue eyes.  I know that's possible, a black man with blue eyes.  Maybe it isn't true in this case.  My brain really isn't that dependable anymore.  But the piercing part is the most important.  I am so glad I wasn't afraid to look in his eyes.

Entitled to an Apology?

Perhaps because a central feature of both hypomania and depression is irritability, and because a characteristic of the "bipolar temperament" is a certain tendency toward an attitude of entitlement, interpersonal disputes tend to be common in this patient population. -- Ellen Frank, Treating Bipolar Disorder

Frank goes on to explain how this attitude of entitlement plays out in the clinical setting.  Unlike the usually self-effacing patient with Major Depressive Disorder, grateful for any scrap of attention, people with bipolar get irritated at imagined slights, such as when the therapist cancels an appointment, or is late.  Sometimes, the only way the therapist can maintain the therapeutic relationship is to go ahead and apologize for these imagined slights.

Yup, stick that fork in the 220 volt socket again.

God, Tebow and the Problem of Suffering

You know, they could be right.  Maybe God is responsible for Tim Tebow's astounding success.

First, the one take away from this article:  It's not magic-thinking.  It is pattern-seeking, hard-wired into our brains, one of the things our brains are built to do.

I Am A Professional -- Do Not Try This At Home

A whole world of football fans are suddenly theologians, explaining the ways of God.  And how silly for me to caution non-professionals from this endeavor.  Everybody with a frontal cortex is a theologian.  Our brains are built to ask Why?  Everybody with an anterior cingulate cortex looks for patterns that make sense of the events of the world.  That is what the anterior cingulate cortex does.

How is this for a pattern -- A new quarterback about whose talents many have doubts delivers a win.  Somebody sticks a microphone in his face.  He gives glory to God.  Next week, he wins again.  Again he gives glory to God.  Again he wins.  Again he gives glory to God...

And what is with that 316 yards thing?

If this were a baseball player on a streak, it would be the same socks he wears each game.  It's the God-thing that makes people twitchy.  More than that.  If it were basketball, he'd be crossing himself at the free-throw line, and nobody would miss a beat.  But it's the politics of the God-thing that have raised the stakes.

Suddenly people who should know better are doing bad theology.  And people who do know better let their chains get jerked.  I don't except myself here.  Twice a day I write something snarky on Facebook, and have to delete before I post.  (It's a thing I have about public discourse on Facebook.  I try to save my snarkiness for my blog.)

At Prozac Monologues my readers can expect more than snarkiness.  I have to bend the topic a bit.  So here we go.

God Improves Athletic Performance

Really, I'm serious.

Well, in a particular way.  Anybody else have a hometown team whose weekly police report is longer than its injury report?  And the results -- Hawkeyes went where this year?  The Earwax Bowl?

These days a little clean living gives an incredible advantage in the world of collegiate and professional sports.

Now this is not about Tim Tebow.  I don't know anything about his private life.  I do know a lot of athletes flame out on dissolute living, leaving behind only fumes of what had been promising careers.

I also know that some people find their way back.

The Twelve Steps

  • We admitted we were powerless over [our addiction] - that our lives had become unmanageable.
  • We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
  • We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.

There are more steps.  These are a start, the part that matters to a mental health blog.

However and why ever they do it, and how seriously they need to work on it, a lot of athletes and a lot of the rest of us could improve our lives by acknowledging a Higher Power.  It's a bottom line sanity issue.  People who think they are the center of the universe have their own DSM code.  It's 301.81.  But they aren't in therapy.  Those closest to them are.

No, you don't have to be a Christian, religious, not even spiritual but not religious to work the Steps.  I heard somebody used gravity for his Higher Power.  Like I said -- I am not the center of the universe is a bottom line sanity issue.

Tim Tebow's Higher Power

Again, I know nothing about the man's private life, and less than nothing about his heart.  But to the extent that his publicly professed Christianity conforms to orthodox Christianity, and by that I mean not making it up as we go along, I do believe the claim that his athletic prowess comes from God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth who delights in creation and said of it, It is good.  We have something in common here, Tim Tebow and me.  We each believe that God delights in us.  Well, I am willing to be a little less specific about the details.


If nothing else, think of this also as a comparative claim.  If he thought it was all about him, he would be at greater risk to flame out, and thereby not be able to complete as many passes as he does manage to complete.

Of course, there has to be somebody to catch those passes.  Writing now as a one-time Bronco fan, I wish I heard him say more about his receivers and his left guard.  He might make a better spokesperson for the Lord if it didn't seem like his personal miracle.

Alert: Rocky Shoals Of God-Talk Ahead

So far, I have been in the realm of orthodox theology, not making it up as I go along.

Everybody is a theologian.  The advantage of professional status is that you recognize the potential shipwreck before you get there.


Oops.  Too late.

A status update from a Facebook friend Sunday night: This is what happens when God is in charge!

Pastor Wayne Hanson, Summit Church, Castle Rock Colorado said, It's not luck.  Luck isn't winning 6 games in a row.  It's favor, God's favor... God has blessed his hard work.

So... how about 19 games in a row?  Was that luck?  What happens if the Broncos make it through this weekend and next, and Tim Tebow comes up against Aaron Rodgers, who also happens to be a stand-up kinda guy?  Not to mention one hell of a quarterback.  Will that be about God's favor?

The Problem of Suffering

I think what really drives people nuts, including a lot of Christians of the orthodox/not making it up as we go along variety, is this:

While God was blessing Tim Tebow's hard work on Sunday afternoon, 720 children around the world died of hunger.  270 people committed suicide.  Two of them, by the way, were veterans of the United States Armed Forces.

That was before overtime.  Good thing overtime was short, huh?

So on Monday morning, nearly 1000 mothers were asking, If God could help Tim complete that pass, couldn't he have paid some attention to my child?  Billions still listen for their answer.

This is not a question to be answered blithely.  We have to put football, even America to the side.

See, we have been here before, trying to find the pattern.  That is what our brains do, search for patterns, notice anomalies, then respond to new information.

There is one pattern we really, really want to find, that good is rewarded and evil is punished.  For the LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is doomed.

That's from Psalms.  And to some extent, we do find evidence to confirm the claim.  Usually people who treat their spouses right have happy marriages.  Or at least happier than their marriages would be if they were out running around at night, coming home drunk and violent.

This pattern gives us a way to arrange our own behavior to get outcomes we desire, which is a good thing, and the evolutionary purpose of the development of this capacity.

This is from Psalms, too: I have been young and now I am old, but never have I seen the righteous forsaken, or their children begging for bread.

720 mothers whose children died of hunger while the Broncos pulled out that squeaker against the Steelers would beg to differ.  All you have to do is turn the channel to CNN to find that pattern disrupted.

The Bible Knows Better

Well, if you actually read the whole Book, and read it several times, over different times in your life, so you have a wider experience that helps you catch things you missed the first time round, you discover that the Bible says some other things about the ways of the righteous and the ways of the wicked.  Read Jeremiah.  Read Job.  Read the rest of the Book of Psalms.  Go do relief work in Haiti or Sudan and read them again.

The Bible records how a whole community of faith over centuries has struggled with this issue.  Sometimes the Psalm begins, O LORD, my God, my Savior, by day and night I cry to you.  And at the end, it still says, Darkness is my only companion.

The Psalms of Lament speak the truth of people who do love the LORD, who are faithful.  From Jeremiah thrown down a well to Paul shipwrecked on Malta to Mother Teresa struggling her whole life with severe depression a couple millennia later, faith does not turn out to be bankable.  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Maybe the Psalms can give voice to your own experience.

Creativity and the Absurd

The ancient Israelites were sure of the pattern, that they held God's favor.  They lived in the Promised Land, after all.  Then something else happened, off pattern.  A new super power came on the scene, destroyed their temple and threw them into exile.  By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion... How can we sing the Lord's song upon an alien soil?

When faced with the unpredicted, the absurd, the anterior cingulate cortex shifts into high gear.  Its job is to modulate emotional response, to manage the panic.  It does so by reasserting sense.

Sense can be found in two ways.

The first is to revert to the familiar.  When the brain is overwhelmed by stress, it becomes more efficient.  It shuts down brain-derived neurotrophic factor, stops learning and concentrates on what it already knows, or what it is habituated to trust.  It was the forces of evil (gays, the First Amendment...)  We are being tested, we have to believe harder...  People confronted by the absurd sometimes cling to habit, reject the unfamiliar (immigrants, head scarves).  After 9/11 there was a spike in sales of mashed potatoes and mac and cheese.  That is the anterior cingulate cortex at work, modulating emotional response.

The second way is to ramp up the pattern seeking by noticing connections that had been overlooked.

The second way is the way of creativity.  For the Israelites, the Babylonian Exile resulted in an explosion of creativity, poetry, philosophy, history, new forms of worship, the legal code, and the development of a religion that was larger than their prior notions of land=success=God's favor.  They came up with a religion that could handle exile, handle loss.  It could travel and face the future.

Their brains found new patterns.  They recognized a kinship and developed compassion, even obligation toward others who were immigrants or poor or who had lost.

America At A Spiritual Crossroads

I was approached once to be a supply preacher at a Unitarian Universalist Church during an interim.  I realized I had no idea how to do that, how to preach, if not the Gospel.  So perhaps it is inevitable that I fail my nonChristian readers at this point.

But I will do my best.

The 20th century witnessed horrors when people responded to their suffering by pulling away, by blaming others and cutting off connections, dividing nations into smaller and smaller subgroups to despise.  The brain that does that eventually goes senile.

A lot of us have lost a lot since the start of the 21st century.  And the rules have been rewritten, so we can expect more of the same.  This would be a good time to seek deeper than the theological optimism that cheered us when there was still a frontier and we could always walk away from our failures.  This is not the time to place our hopes for spiritual vindication on the thin reed of an untried and immature quarterback and Christian.  Give the kid a break.  And, by the way, give the people who are rooting for him a break, as well.  They are having a hard time, too.

The good news is that there are other patterns to be found.

The brain that remains open to new experiences, that searches for common ground, grows, creates, delights, has fun!  Ditto the nation.  Ditto the world.

Imagine that.  We are hard-wired for compassion.  And for fun.

Go Cheeseheads!

photo of Tin Tebow from tempecarnivore.blogspot.com/2011/12/hate-time-tebow-here-are-10-sports.html
Hawkeye and AA logos in public domain
Creation of Adam by Michelangelo,  1510 in public domain
The Shipwreck by Claude Joseph Vernet, 1772, in public domain
photo of Haiti earthquake victim by Lohan  Abassi, used under the Creative Commons Attribution License  
photo of UA 175 striking World Trade Center in public domain

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