In chapter 2 of Richard Rohrs Hope Against Darkness he touches on the concept of victimhood as it relates to us in the postmodern world of today. I feel like he makes some very valid points concerning church and spirituality and what the purpose is of both.
He writes that "spirituality in its best sense is about what you do with your pain." Rohr believes that we do not know what to do with our pain. We have moved away from the image of God as the taker of our pain. He writes "When a people no longer knows that God is, God is good, God can be trusted and God is on your side, we frankly have a very serious problem." Now I like that sentence and I like both what it says right out front but I also like its deeper meaning. When I read it my first thought is that the reason people feel this way isn't Gods fault. It is the churchs fault for all of their failings. What I find most interesting is that as I read further into CH 2 I begin to understand that I am doing just what Rohr is talking about as it relates to Victimhood.
I am taking the percieved slights that I have experienced at church and using that to give me a reason to move away from God. It isn't that God has failed me or really that the church has failed me. But, being an institution that so often has man at its core as opposed to God it really has no choice but to be inconsistant and to fail. Failure is the single thing that man does well. God is consistent, God is there, God does love us. I think the problem begins when we put our faith in the church and not in God. When we put our faith in the rules of each particular denomination as opposed to focusing on what God and by extension Jesus, or the other way around , wants from us.
Back to Rohr and Victimhood before I get to far afield and become entranced by the sound of my own voice. Rohr notes that in todays world people are using being a victim to gain some sort of moral high ground. Often to achieve sypathy from others one only has to claim that so and so's great-grandmother did something to hurt their great-grandmother and then the cycle of recriminations begins. I think he again is making a very valid point here.
He writes "Playing the victim is an effective way of getting moral high ground without doing any moral development whatsoever. You don't have to grow up, you don't have to let go, you don't have to forgive, you don't have to surrender----all the things that great religion deemed necessary. Now you just have accuse somebody else of being worse then are, or of being a member of a race or group that is worse then yours, and that makes you feel like you're good, moral, or superior."
I see this everyday. Not only in my own life as it relates to how I think about church or politics or the world in general but also all around us. Today I read a blog that was condemming Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll and his use of language when he preaches. Now I am not a fan of Mark Driscoll and I have commented on him in the past. But what I find most interesting is that what this blogger is using as the beginning point for his attack on Driscoll is that his wife was listening to the radio and a sermon of Driscolls came on and he used some words that were objectionable to both the blogger and his wife and both were concerned that their young children were subjected to these terms. I think that is a reasonable concern and that is something that most parents are concerned about. But the blogger takes the position of being a victim of Driscolls language and now he must stand up and fight against this great evil.
I think that if Jesus were to play the victim card we would have never been saved. We must forgive and if we continually play the victim card then we will never reach the point of being able to forgive. There is much more in the chapter but to me the inherited victimhood passage really stood out to me. It spoke to me about the need to move beyond my being a victim and to be able to forgive those who have hurt me.
Rohr closes the chapter with this " the cross calls all of us to a mystery of transformation. On the cross none of us is in charge, none of us is in control, none of us can possibly understand, just like Jesus himself. On the cross someone else is in control. Someone else is in charge. Someone else understands. Someone else is obviously a much more patient lover then we are."
That is something to think about.
Friday, June 26, 2009
CH 2 Beyond Victimhood
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Rohr presents new ideas that I’ve never heard expressed in quite these ways before, but at the same time, even when reading them for the first time, most of the concepts immediately struck me as profoundly true, on several different levels. It’s like he’s hit on truths that have been there all along, that I’ve been operating under even though I didn’t realize it. In fact it resonates on so many levels that I’ve had a hard time even knowing where to start talking about them, which is part of why my comment is coming so late.
Along with you, I was struck by the statement that spirituality in its best sense is about what you do with your pain, that by default we usually end up transmitting it to others, blaming outside forces, looking for a devil that we can blame for everything being so screwed up.
I see this in the area of politics, where I’ve felt for a while now that extremes on the right and left have more in common than they’d ever admit – and that thing in common is that same anger, the same inability to see anything at all from the other side’s perspective. Once you start demonizing the other side, they’re pretty much forced into reacting in the same way and then you’re both stuck in a shout-fest. Unless you can adopt that third-way Rohr suggests.
That whole idea of holding your pain until it can transform you – in part I see that as sort of ‘forgiving’ the situation that created it, of letting go of the need to blame anyone or anything, of realizing that’s just the way life is sometimes – it seems so obvious, I can’t help asking why weren’t we taught this all along? After all, Christian doctrine does have a heavy emphasis on forgiveness, and I’d posit that, at least in my own evangelical tradition, I did inherit a healthy emphasis on forgiveness, it was just an incomplete version. It pretty much focuses solely on immediate interpersonal relationships – forgiving an individual who’s wronged you or irritated you or whatever. It was all about people getting along smoothly with each other. But I’ve never heard anyone dig down to that base level of the pain we all feel, the stuff we walk around with on a daily basis – loneliness, alienation, frustration, disappointment, the stuff that’s less about playing nice with each other than it is trying to make sense of and comprehend your place in the universe.
In that sense the teaching I inherited fell short. For while holding a grudge against a friend or coworker was seen as a problem, it was perfectly acceptable to channel your anger toward secular humanists or pro-choicers or liberals who wanted to tax and spend, or society at large for not understanding our spiritual values, or whoever was the villain of the day, those godless people who were trying to ruin our country. Not that everyone did, of course; I knew church members who seemed to exude love and grace toward everyone. But there were also people who, while they could lavish enormous love and care on their immediate church family, still carried around an enormous amount of angst and resentment. But since it was channeled in all the ‘right’ places (the evil things that God is supposed to hate, so it must be our duty to do it too), it was never addressed. Or at least I never heard it addressed. And I guess I find that a great tragedy, that we could bring people so close to transformation yet still leave them mired in their inner muck; that the gospel we preached wasn’t strong enough or complete enough to overcome that core darkness.
And that only begins to touch on the stuff I got out of this chapter, but I am clogging up the comments page and I’ve got work to do. Maybe more later….
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