Читать книгу Embracing Weakness - Shannon K. Evans - Страница 8

Chapter One

Where We Go Wrong

I sighed happily, closed the book in my lap, and gazed out the window. It was the perfect kind of day for a transcontinental flight. Cerulean sky and cirrus clouds affirmed my confidence that this was the path my life was always meant to take. I gave my husband a gentle elbow to the ribs and we exchanged grins. There had been a few tears at the airport between our families and us, but I was so excited I barely tasted the salt of them. Missionaries, I thought to myself. After two years of training, we finally got to wear the title. After a quarter-century search for meaningful adventure, my life was finally about to begin.

Sodas on airplanes always taste a little better than they do on the ground, and my small cup of Sprite was no exception. Sipping the bubbles, I picked up my book again and studied the cover. A middle-aged charismatic American missionary in Mozambique was pictured surrounded by African street kids. The fiery wife and mother of two was everything I dreamed of becoming. Her autobiography told of her work in the slums of Mozambique, where she had seen illnesses healed, the dead raised to life, and the traumatized hearts of orphans set free to love and worship God.

I couldn’t envision a more desirable way to spend a life, and having traveled to Third World countries for short-term mission trips several times before, I wasn’t intimidated by the sacrifices it would cost. We were being sent to Indonesia — not Mozambique — through the missions arm of our nondenominational church, but still I read my own hopes in black-and-white print somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

My life was going to matter. I was going to be fearless, and I would see miracles. Yes, of course, if God willed it and all of that, but why wouldn’t he? Looking around down here on earth, there didn’t exactly seem to be a surplus of people willing to do the brave things that I was doing. I wouldn’t say God needed me, but I wouldn’t deny he was lucky to have me.

I reclined my seat back the eighth of an inch it was designed to go, happy determination in my heart. This was going to be a wild ride.

To be human is to carry around the companionship of an internal ache. Some of us have become so adept at ignoring this, that we deny it’s present at all. But I would argue that most of us are willing to own up to the presence of a gnawing pain within. Dorothy Day famously dubbed it “the long loneliness,” but it goes by other names, too: fear, shame, disappointment, disillusionment, weakness. Such deeply rooted motivators generally manifest in one of two ways: either they woo us into spells of depression, or they repel us so much that we spend our lives trying to run from them.

Differences in our personalities or temperaments aside, almost all human beings want to be seen as powerful and effective, not weak and needy.

I, for one, am a runner. I seek to avoid my own weakness by trying to stay one step ahead of it, and at times it almost appears to be working, times that I can be steady as a rock. But inevitably a relationship will implode or a circumstance will break me, and then I have no choice but to confront my demons head-on. Or at least I imagine myself to be doing so, with a congratulatory pat on the back for my keen self-awareness and teachable spirit. Then, just as predictably, once the dust settles, I return to my numbed state of being. It’s downright cyclical.

But I know another manifestation — depression — too, and intimately. My husband, Eric, has been blessed with an artistic temperament, and I say that with utmost respect, because his high levels of consciousness and empathy have deeply shaped me. Yet such sensitivity comes with a price; he feels darkness and fragility often and acutely, and is more inclined than I to experience bouts of depression. He absorbs the ache; I run from it. But I’ve found one thing to be true to both experiences: no matter what your knee-jerk reaction is to your own poverty, none of us feels at ease welcoming it. Differences in our personalities or temperaments aside, almost all human beings want to be seen as powerful and effective, not weak and needy.

Admitting our lack to one another does not come naturally. Indeed, it’s quite contrary to the self-preservation instinct that kicks in to keep us out of harm’s way. Don’t be vulnerable, our brains warn us. Don’t let anyone in. You’ll get hurt. It feels far safer to be seen as competent and esteemed. After all, if everyone really knew how small and disappointing you felt, how could they still respect you? How could you achieve your goals? How could you ever hope to matter in the world if your weaknesses were made known?

But it’s not just our minds that send out flashing danger signals when it comes to getting honest about our own insides; it’s our society, too: “Boys don’t cry.” “Never let them see you sweat.” “Fake it ’til you make it.”

Our fears are not exactly unsubstantiated. Looking at history, it was the powerful who “conquered” the land we now call the United States, and the powerful continue to be disproportionately rewarded here. The rich are exposed to boundless opportunity, while the poor are stuck in the riptides of poverty. Studies show that attractive people are paid as much as 13 percent more than their average-looking peers.¹ Respect is instinctively given to families whose marriages are intact and whose children are the school “all-stars,” even with no idea of what goes on behind their closed doors. They are the Joneses, and we are determined to keep up. Between our protective subconscious and our cultural messages, it’s amazing that we ever open up to anyone at all, and confessing our own deepest ache to a confidant is certainly not something we do every day. Even meeting with a professional therapist, as beneficial as it may be, can potentially become a way to avoid vulnerable, organic relationships if we are not careful.

This lack of authentic connection creates a void inside the human person. Instinctively, we try to fill this space with other things. For most of us, it doesn’t take much introspection to acknowledge our tendency to consume as compensation for weakness or loneliness. Whether food, drink, shopping, Netflix, recreational drugs, or something else entirely, we each have respective addictions that we are happy to let fill the role of honest relational intimacy in our lives. But the further we run down the rabbit hole, the harder it becomes to see clearly, until one day we are brutally woken up to all that we’ve lost in the spending.

The internal gnawing we feel of needing connection, so familiar to the human experience, has the potential to bring us together; vulnerability births intimacy, after all, if we’re willing to go there. Such unity could be the very reason the Creator knit our bones and sinews into such an emotionally weighty reality. Unfortunately, statistics show that more of us feel greater isolation than ever before. In a 2016 interview with Fortune Magazine,² the director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, John Cacioppo, said numerous studies confirm that Americans are only getting lonelier. This was corroborated by the 2018 findings of a nationwide survey administered by health insurer Cigna. Out of twenty thousand individuals surveyed, nearly half reported that they sometimes or always felt alone. What’s more, 43 percent reported sometimes or always feeling that their relationships are not meaningful. These numbers are of epidemic proportions.

Statistics like these tell us the unity of connection isn’t happening, but Scripture tells us that it could. The Book of Genesis describes man and woman as being made in God’s own image, bearing the imprint of the Lord’s likeness. If the most powerful encounter a human being can experience is with the Living God, would we not be fools to discount the potency of touching the imago Dei that stands right in front of us when we take off the masks and let one another in?

The weakness of the human condition is a gift given to us so that we may truly encounter God in what Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the other.”³ Despite how it sounds, the “other” is not a gruesome alien from outer space; it’s simply a human being outside of oneself. But to take it one step further, let’s say the other is specifically a human being who appears different from yourself in some way, for that distinction is often critical when it comes to our level of discomfort.

Young children need little prompting to handle this well; they are refreshingly inclined to make friends with those who are different. It’s common for young parents to comment on the way their small child “doesn’t see” skin color or other physical differences, often with the mystified pride of having created a rare inclusive individual. But far from being the exception, this is a universal quality of all children at a certain developmental stage.⁴ Granted, perhaps your daughter is a particularly empathetic person, but the point here is that we have much to learn from all of our toddlers. Sadly, we seem to lose the ability to look past differences as we age. We become wary of those who have not shared our particular life experiences — yet another reason Jesus urged us to change our hearts to become like a little child (cf. Mt 18:3). We must return to the humble, welcoming state of childhood to enter the kingdom of God.

We must return to the humble, welcoming state of childhood to enter the kingdom of God.

Without a paradigm-altering confrontation with our own weakness, it is virtually impossible to feel true connection with the other on a significant level. If we are not in touch with our own smallness, our own sense of having fallen short of our hopes and ideals, we will never be able to authentically touch someone else’s vulnerability — the only place of true encounter. Instead, we will resort to power plays and intimidation games, and I’m not just talking about in the office or marketplace.

We put up walls around our hearts even against those we hold most dear. As we age, our relationships with our own parents can be the most difficult ones to maneuver. Often the same could be said of our adult siblings. Truly intimate friendships are rarer in adulthood than in childhood, as we become more comfortable operating out of self-sufficiency and grow less willing to express our emotional need for others. Marriage is, but for the grace of God, the most impossible relationship that we could ever have imagined. Parenthood is a breeding ground for control issues and fear. Estrangement of the heart is not relegated to disgruntled co-workers or the immigrant neighbor you feel too uncomfortable to really get to know. This instinct for self-preservation affects even the closest relationships in our lives.

We seek to operate from a place of power, because this makes us feel more protected from potential injury. We seek to control a relationship, whether through dominance or passive-aggression, because in this way we feel less likely to play the fool. But choosing these paths restrains us from the fullness of life that God desires for us. That fullness includes relationships that mine the depths of love, self-sacrifice that conforms us more to the image of our Savior, and inner change in all the ways we cannot see that we need.

For Christians who actively strive to live out their faith in the world, this human tendency to deny their own brokenness and grasp for power is subtler — and yet more dangerous — than they would like to believe. Instead of embodying a unitive humility, too many of us Christians instead spend a lot of time and volume on having all of the answers that others may or may not feel are important.

It is all too easy to jump into ministries of evangelism or service with the unconscious motivation of feeling strong and useful.

The painful truth is that our own weakness makes us uncomfortable, and the quickest way to ease that discomfort is to position ourselves in a place of power. If we’re honest with ourselves, we may be forced to admit that our efforts to help are not really about authentic encounter with one another as much as they are about how good it feels to be the one with the ability to offer solutions, whether material or theoretical. It is all too easy to jump into ministries of evangelism or service with the unconscious motivation of feeling strong and useful. Just as things like alcohol or shopping can be agents to numb the pain of our weakness, so too can ministry. In fact, it is perhaps the most perilous “fix” for a Christian, because it looks so good and altruistic that it’s easy to fool ourselves into believing we are in it for the right reasons.

Perhaps this seems harmless enough, as far as vices go. But when the curtain is pulled back, we see that ministry from a pedestal benefits no one: Not only does it diminish the dignity of those being served, but it chips away at our own humanity as well. When we are not in touch with the poverty of our own human condition, the work of ministry can fool us into thinking we have “arrived” and hence keep us from the wholeness that God desires for us. We continue to numb the places inside us where the Holy Spirit wants to come, and we deny ourselves the chance to see what riches the needy and marginalized have to offer.

This truth is not relegated to the works of mercy alone, but applies to our efforts of evangelism, too. Can we be honest about the pressure that comes with the word evangelism for a moment? Too many of us feel that, in order to be worthy of the title “evangelist,” we must be on the victorious side of a struggle. The result is that we feel either smugly superior or categorically disqualified. The pressure is so intense that many well-meaning Christians refuse to evangelize at all, which is a shame.⁵

The power of the Gospel is not that we no longer suffer or struggle, but that we no longer do so alone.

We need to seek a true understanding of what it means to evangelize, and that requires we come to a truer understanding of ourselves as evangelizers. Pope Francis has said, “Evangelization does not consist in proselytizing, but … in humbly drawing near to those who feel distant from God and the Church, those who are fearful or indifferent, and saying to them: ‘The Lord, with great respect and love, is also calling you to be a part of his people’ (Evangelii Gaudium, 113).”⁶ Evangelism is finding Christ already present in the world, and inviting the other into the loving belonging of the inclusive family of God.

If my testimony of the gospel revolves around a plotline of, “I used to struggle with this, but God gave me the victory and now I’m free/healed/saved/fill in the blank,” I have immediately distanced myself from the listener of my testimony by implying that I have arrived in a place where they are not. No doubt we do find freedom, healing, and salvation in Christ — and want that for others, too — but the reality continues to be that we ourselves are also in process. The power of the gospel is not that we no longer suffer or struggle, but that we no longer do so alone.

The Second Person of the Trinity stepped in to recorded history to relate intimately with humankind, so that in his willingness to share our lived experience he might gain our trust. This has to be the pattern of our efforts at evangelization and of any ministry we undertake. Can another person really trust us if we are not willing to bare our own weaknesses while prying into theirs? Are we, in our efforts of evangelization, asking something of the other that we ourselves are not ready to extend first?

Of course, many of us do not recognize that our hearts are in this place when we’re trying to minister or evangelize. We certainly don’t want them to be. But if we’re willing to look closely, most of us have an “us and them” mentality, whether conscious or not.⁷ This is marked by a discomfort with, avoidance of, or desire to change anyone who is not a part of the particular culture in which we are most comfortable. By “culture,” I mean not only one’s place of origin, but also things less often associated with the term, such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexuality, and religious affiliation or lack thereof.

As a nondenominational church-planting missionary in Indonesia, I had the best of intentions and a deep concern for the people around me, as did all the folks I knew who held similar roles. But in my nearly four years of training and serving, it was consistently communicated to me that my ultimate responsibility to every person I met was to try to lead them to a conversion experience with Christ. Such a worldview may seem harmless and even good, depending on your particular spirituality, but a closer look reveals the necessity of a line drawn in the sand. This mentality leads to the inadvertent creation of a “club,” where one is either in or out.

In my experience, the approach seemed to be that cultivating deep friendships with non-Christians was valuable only if the individual seemed likely to convert. Sharing in their sufferings (and being vulnerable with them about my own) was lauded but, at the end of the day, not the ultimate goal, and thus not critically important.

In the stream of Christianity in which my husband and I belonged, the idea of relational evangelism was looked down upon. “You don’t have to earn the right to share the gospel,” a leader once told us. “Jesus already did that for you.” Which — translated into its most honest but abrasive form — means you have the right to push your beliefs upon strangers without taking time to know them as human beings.

It could be argued that this is a tragic consequence of the “once saved, always saved” theology that undergirds many Protestant beliefs. Indeed, my world was turned upside down the day a gentle Anglican priest friend introduced the idea of salvation being a journey we are all walking on rather than a line in the sand that we have either crossed or not, and I came to find that my soul deeply resonated with the Catholic teaching of a continual salvation. But the truth is we Catholics have our own dragons to slay that don’t look much different than those of our evangelical brothers and sisters.

We know the Incarnation mysteriously unites all of humankind to God and one another, but so often the lines of Christianity feel like they do nothing but divide us.

Evangelicals focus on leading people to make a singular, eternal, life-altering decision. We Catholics don’t have the same focus in our evangelizing efforts, but the same outcome-based mentality still plagues us, and we tend to operate within the same “us and them” paradigm. Aside from our efforts to spread the gospel, this also plays itself out in our ministry. We, along with many of our Protestant counterparts, undertake the works of mercy to meet people’s physical needs, but the work is only temporary. We make no long-term emotional investment, which means there’s very little at stake for us when we perform these works. We want our hearts to be conformed to Christ, but we also want the service project done on time so that we can keep our dinner date. It’s important to ask ourselves honestly: How often do I perform acts of service to check them off a list, or because my faith says I have to, or because I like the pious feeling I get when I perform them?⁸

Regardless of where we fall on the theological spectrum, in the depths of our spirits we know our faith is meant to be more than a one-time prayer that will save a sinner’s soul, and more than meeting people’s physical needs without fully engaging their hearts. This might be why so many Christians are frustrated and disillusioned with the Faith. We know the Incarnation mysteriously unites all of humankind to God and one another, but so often the lines of Christianity feel like they do nothing but divide us.

At the same time, we are each waging our own internal war against the weaknesses of our human condition, but we’re too proud or too ashamed to admit them to anyone else — or, sometimes, even to ourselves. These two problems seem unrelated, but perhaps they couldn’t be more intricately tied. Perhaps the very thing that is meant to unite us to the world around us has actually distanced us from it — and we don’t know how to come back.

I walked the narrow alley back to our house, sandals shuffling dust underfoot, arms loaded with canvas bags filled with eggs and bread, oil and bananas. “Mau pulang?” The elderly woman a few doors down inquired with the polite warmth of a culture that prides itself on manners. “Are you going home now?”

I smiled, responded in the affirmative, and stopped to make small talk, reminding myself to be thankful for the spontaneous opportunity to practice my fledgling language skills. We had been in the kampung for eight months, and our Javanese neighbors were beginning to get used to the glowing white couple and our odd ways. Whether they were as happy to have us there as they seemed or the politeness of their culture had an iron will, we couldn’t tell: The best we could do was hope for the former. This particular neighbor had struck me as the kampung gossip, and I always wondered what foreign words she used for me when her tongue ran away with her. Was there an Indonesian word for snob? Surely so, but I didn’t yet know it. Perhaps if I did I would have kept an ear out.

When we moved into our little house in the kampung, we were thrilled to participate in the close-knit community life of a low-income Javanese neighborhood. At first, people came out of the woodwork to help move in the furniture we had bought in town or to bring us a hot meal. Eric and I had learned to adjust to life without hot water or a Western-style toilet or shower. Ignoring the cicaks (lizards) that constantly roamed our walls thanks to the permanently opened windows became second nature. I’m an animal lover, and geckos pose no threat. It was all going well, yet as the weeks ticked by, relationships had begun to lag. The language barrier was a problem, of course, but those things are overcome every day. This was something more.

The pressure to evangelize every person I met, the mission of converting hearts and minds, the lack of room for any true depth of mutuality in relationship, all felt like a suffocating weight I couldn’t bear. Any effort to get to know someone was haunted by the underlying mandate that I fix what was broken in their lives. There was no room for brokenness of my own; I could quietly take that back to the people in my own corner.

Consumption was an opiate, an escape from the reality of my desert-dry heart.

I soon observed that my response was, little by little, to close myself off from everyone. My subconscious couldn’t hold the tension between my failure to perform my job and the nagging feeling that the job itself was asking something of me that I didn’t like. So, I withdrew. Day by day I pulled further inward, holing up in my tiny house to cook unnecessarily intricate recipes and watch movies rented almost daily from the local video store. Consumption was an opiate, an escape from the reality of my desert-dry heart, an escape from the disappointment within that felt too raw to touch. Where were those dreams of worshiping street kids and redeemed orphans now? They felt like the hopeless naiveté of a girl from long ago.

I willed my mind to return to the neighbor’s chatter. Today was Idul Adha, she was informing me. I racked my brain and vaguely remembered: ah, yes, the feast of sacrifice. I had been taught about the Muslim holiday honoring Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son to the Lord, and the mercy of Allah to provide a ram in his stead. A feast of mercy, I thought to myself, I could get on board with that. I told her I would put away the groceries and return to walk to the mosque with her.

As we navigated our way through the alleys that made up our beloved neighborhood, a familiar heaviness weighed on my heart. This holy day was the perfect segue through which to present the gospel message: The parallels between the stories of Isaac and Jesus Christ are blatant and poignant, and anyone remotely interested in religion of any form would be keen to discuss it. It was an underhand soft pitch and all I had to do was swing.

But I kept silent.

We turned onto the only road in the kampung wide enough to fit a car, and I did a double take. There was a flash of red out of the corner of my eye, and was it what I thought? I squinted, then sucked in my breath as we stepped closer. Flowing, gushing, running through the open drains that lined the streets of our neighborhood was an unmistakable stream of siren-red blood. Blood mixed with water, in fact, as though it had come flowing straight from Christ’s pierced side. I felt him there, suddenly, a heavy presence; I felt him nearer than he’d been in a long, long time.

We walked further and joined the mass of neighbors gathered for the annual animal sacrifice. Goats and cows dotted the landscape, some alive and some no longer. Men and women grinned proudly to show me what they had brought to offer. Boys and girls ran amok, happily weaving in and out of hanging carcasses. To me, it was a bloodbath. To them, it was a feast of mercy.

I could only bring myself to stay for a little while before walking the path home alone. A knot made its way up my throat as I closed my front door. Falling to my knees, I began to sob without even being sure why. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world had already come, and they either didn’t know or didn’t believe: My years of missionary training told me that was why I wept. If they died today, they would be headed for the fires of hell: My ultraconservative faith formation told me that was why I wept. But neither felt true; neither felt sufficient to explain the aching in my heart, the grief that I knew was from Christ but for which I had no language. It wasn’t until years later that I would put my finger on what I felt that day. I cried heaving tears on cool tile not because my neighbors didn’t know Jesus the way I did. I cried because I didn’t know them like he did.

1. Daniel Hamermesh, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

2. Laura Entis, “Chronic Loneliness Is a Modern-Day Epidemic,” Fortune, June 22, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/.

3. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, reprint edition 2005, originally published 1972).

4. Marguerite A. Wright, “Appendix: Stages of Racial Awareness,” in I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Bi-Racial Children in a Race-Conscious World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).

5. Barna Group, “Sharing Faith Is Increasingly Optional to Christians,” Research Releases in Faith & Christianity, May 15, 2018, https://www.barna.com/research/sharing-faith-increasingly-optional-christians/.

6. Homily at Mass in Quito’s Bicentennial Park during visit to Ecuador, July 7, 2015.

7. For an example, see Russell Heimlich, “Threat of Secularism to Evangelical Christians,” Pew Research Center, FactTank, July 12, 2011, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2011/07/12/threat-of-secularism-to-evangelical-christians/. While this research looks specifically at evangelical Christians, I think it is fair to say that many of the findings are broadly applicable to all of us.

8. For my Protestant friends who are reading, I feel the need to clarify a grave misconception. We Catholics do not believe we are saved by these works alone, but that true faith always goes hand in hand with action, as it says in James 2. A properly catechized Catholic understands this important distinction.