Swords and Dishes

Ever been embarrassed in public by a family member?  I will never forget the day someone in my family asked my cousins how to teach me to dress properly.  I’m sure I turned bright red with embarrassment.  I couldn’t have been more than 6 or 8 years old, but that incident stuck in my memory.  

Family gatherings can be like that.  “Can you tell so and so how they should behave?” can sound like an innocent comment but is really an attempt to shame the other person in public.  How embarrassing it is to hear that.  It is also very common.

Which is why the Mary and Martha story is so relatable.  It sounds like a typical argument between two sisters.  I imagine that Martha was the first-born child, used to acting in a parental role, taking charge and making sure everything got done just right.  And Mary was the youngest child who got spoiled by doting parents and was not good at the practical aspects of day-to-day living.

It came to a head when Jesus showed up for a visit. Martha was determined to show good hospitality.  That was a core value of her faith.  Stories going back as far as Abraham and Sarah taught about the importance of hospitality.  Without hospitality, being a wanderer in the wilderness could easily lead to starvation and even death.  But Martha was also focused on herself and her tasks.  She mentioned herself several times, “My sister, me, and me.”  The only thing she wanted Jesus to do was join her side and use his authority to correct her sister’s inappropriate behavior.  And she claimed Jesus was being uncaring, hoping to get him to take her side.  This is classic manipulation and triangulation.  Trying to get a third party to do the communication that she would not have with her sister.  Some psychologists would go even further and describe this as bullying behavior.

It's subtle bullying that leaves the target feeling shamed and embarrassed and uncertain how to react.  Mary never said a word in her defense, she might have been as shocked and ashamed as I was at my family gathering.  Words like these can leave us speechless!

We have no idea of why Mary did what she did leading up to Martha’s comments.  Was she rebelling against Martha’s expectations, deliberately sitting down with the men, and daring Martha to complain?  Was she putting Jesus on the spot by acting like an equal to the disciples?  Or was she just mesmerized by what he was saying, forgetting what she should be doing and dropping everything to sit and listen? 

Even today, the Marys and Marthas of the world can experience deep shame around housekeeping and expectations.  If you watched the CBC show “Back in Time for Dinner”, you may remember the mother saying that the 1950’s with its expectations of domestic perfection made it the worst decade for women.  And there is still a lot of shaming around housework.  This week I read, “How to Keep House While Drowning” by KC Davis.  She is a psychologist and a mother of two; the youngest was born during Covid lockdowns.  She struggled with post partum depression with her first, so wanted to prevent that by having a friend help with cleaning, other moms with babysitting swaps and so on.  All that fell apart when Covid struck.  And when she shared how she was doing, she was told that she was lazy because she didn’t get the dishes and laundry done every day.  There was no sympathy for living with depression or mental illness.  So, she wrote a book about housekeeping and talked about the outer messages that fed her inner bully. It lives in our heads and can be louder than real people because it doesn’t stop. It can trigger depression, anxiety, and shame.  That inner bully which sounds a lot like Martha, can leave us vulnerable to mental illness. 

And lest we think this is a problem that only women face, there’s a wonderful book called “Becoming the Kind Father” by Calvin Sandborn.  He also writes about the inner bully who shames men for showing emotion, vulnerability, gentleness, or any number of things our society has decided men shouldn’t be.   That toxic idea is probably what led to the sword attack we heard about in Athabasca this week.  Both Sandborn, Davis and others like Brene Brown write about how destructive the inner bully is. 

Comments like “Tell my son he shouldn’t cry”, or as in today’s scripture, “tell my sister she should be helping me in the kitchen” feed the inner bully until it destroys souls, families, and marriages.

Jesus says to all of us, “You are anxious about many things.   But it’s time to quiet the inner bully and love yourself and your family instead of feeding shame and blame.

We are called as Christians to convert our inner bully to an inner Christ.  A gentle, loving voice that changes shame and blame words into love and support.  It takes time, but it is possible.  We do that when we admit that we are not perfect, that we feel overwhelmed at times by all we feel pressured to be and do.  Martha was called to be hospitable, but not to the point that she forgot the love she had for Mary.  Her sister was called to learn from Jesus, but not to the point that she neglected her sister.  Both were called to listen to Jesus’ message to love each other, pray for each other and not to lose track of their relationship with him.  We too are called to listen to Jesus’ message of love and compassion.  It’s why we say a prayer of confession and hear words of comfort and assurance on Sundays, to calm our inner bullies. When we replace those inner bullies with Christ’s peaceful, loving words and vision, we can heal ourselves and our world.  May it be so for us all.

Over, Under

 When I was a kid, the ultimate test of friendship was the teeter totter on the playground.  Unlike a swing that one person could power all by themselves, a teetertotter needed cooperation to make it work.  If you picked the right partner.

Too big and you would end up suspended up in the air, looking a little silly, and not able to pull your weight in the game of up and down.  Too small and you would end up on the ground and the other person would be the one looking silly. Then there were the extra long teetertotters that could accommodate more than one rider.  We didn’t know we were learning physics or even math in trying to end up with balanced sides.  And wasn’t it wonderful to have a kind teen or adult that would be at one end who could bring us up and down single-handedly?  Teamwork, co-operation, equality and trust were all required.  I remember feeling sad when I got to be too big for my dad to single-handedly lift me on the teetertotter, but by then he was introducing me to the mysteries of catching a ball in a big leather glove.

Teetertotters are often how we view our relationships with others.  Are we on top?  Are we higher than everyone else?  Who has got the power? Anti-bullying educators talk a lot about power and how there are a lot of people striving to have power over other people.  And there are a lot of people who are in situations where they feel like they have no power and feel bullied and depressed.  We know of children who die by suicide because the only power they feel they have left is the power to take their own lives.  Anorexia can be an attempt to find power and talking to addicts and alcoholics I hear the same kind of language, “no one is going to tell me what to do!”  There was a story this week of a Calgary Heart Surgeon who is retiring and has filed a complaint against Alberta Health Services. Why the complaint and why only once retirement is happening? Well, she is the only female heart surgeon in Alberta, and has faced microaggressions, gender bias and outright discrimination throughout her career simply because of her sexuality.  No wonder other female doctors are avoiding becoming heart surgeons!

It's easy to blame toxic masculinity for the competition over power that some say has been with us since the overthrow of mother goddess worship in ancient Europe.  Jean M. Auel, author of the Clan of the Cave Bear series, hypothesized that once men realized that they had something to do with the babies being born by women of the tribes, they became possessive and controlling over who had access to the women.  But I think it’s even more universal than that.  Women can be just as invested in the battle for power, and the worst bullies I had as a child were the girls who made some pretty cruel comments, or even worse, jumped off the bottom of the teetertotter when I was up high in the air.  I came crashing down, bruising my ego and my trust as well as my tailbone.

Toxic lust for power can be seen everywhere we look.  It’s at the heart of the invasion of Ukraine and the January 6 insurrection at the White House, and the Ottawa Convoy where protestors made noise and garbage for over three weeks.  It’s at the heart of the current run for party leadership of the United Conservatives in Alberta.  It’s at the heart of family violence, abusive relationships, racism and homophobia.  It is even at the heart of how we talk about the homeless in our community in Athabasca.

We want power over because we want to feel safe, to feel in control, to feel competent or important.  And we have historically done whatever we could to feel that power.  We put people like my great-grandmother in Bedlam under horrific conditions or locked them in chains in a graveyard to deal with their chaotic mental illness.  Is there a better, more humane way in which to address this toxic culture we live in?

Some folks have traditionally thought all that was needed would be to give power to the powerless, to give guns to victims or karate lessons to scrawny children.  Give a radioactive spider bite to a weak teenager, or a magic wand to a boy forced to live in a closet under the stairs.  From Spiderman to Karate Kid, the theory has been to give power to victims and that will fix society.  However, studies of bullying in classrooms show that when a bully and a victim are separated without any other interventions, the bully quickly finds another victim, but surprisingly the victim will often find another kid to become a bully!  Or the victim becomes a bully themselves, taking a turn on the teetertotter.

Jesus sidestepped the power over-power under teetertotter completely and frequently.  It’s seen very clearly in his approach to the Gerasene. He didn’t respond by bullying, putting more chains on the man, or responding like a victim, reacting with fear.  He connected with engagement and respect.  With questions to learn more.  And with authority and confidence.  But not with intimidating, controlling, blaming or shaming.  And he rid the man of the power that was bullying him, driving him to drastic behaviors. 

When people say that the world does not change, they are wrong.  I drove around Athabasca looking for a teetertotter in a playground and couldn’t find a single one at WHIPS, LTIS or the riverfront.  The world changes.  We can change too.  We may not send demons out of people as dramatically as Jesus did.  But we can face our own inner demons, the urges that demand we grab power over, or even the fears of being dominated by others power, and claim our identity as children of God who called to be freed from the tyranny of our own bullying and victim urges.  We can become sensitive to power dynamics at the root of sexism, toxic masculinity, racism and homophobia.  We can be healed and healer, committed to balancing the teetertotter of power with everyone we meet.  We do this with God’s grace and love; knowing that healing is real, change is possible and new life in Christ will make the world a better place for all!

Pointing to Love

 My in-laws have a sturdy little sundial on the deck made out of black wrought iron.  It’s supposed to tell the time by the way the shadow falls. But it doesn’t work unless it is pointing North.  Last summer when I was staying there, I decided to rearrange the deck chairs and the sundial got shifted around.  Since it no longer pointed north, it no longer told the time.

Some days I feel like a sundial that is not pointed in the right direction.  Maybe something unexpected happens, I sprain my ankle, there’s bad news on the radio, a friend’s house burns down, or a photo of a flag with a swastika is spotted in Boyle.  Instead of feeling like a calm grown-up Christian, I feel like a grumpy grouch that doesn’t know how to love her neighbor, especially one with a penchant for flags that are so horrific.

Enter the scriptures.  Jesus has a penchant for fixating not on the north pole, like a sun dial, but on Love.  Love is the true north that Jesus constantly points to.  Jesus is no sundial, but more like a compass that swings to point to the right direction.  Unlike humans and sundials, Jesus is unwavering in his commitment to be loving.  And not just any kind of loving, but one that is willing to take risks that seem irrational and dangerous.

This is no cheap or over-sentimentalized card or poem, this is a robust, muscular love.  In our society, we use love to describe anything from our enjoyment of flowers and chocolate to our sense of profound deep astonishment when we look into the eyes of a newborn baby.  Talk about sentimentalization!

Sentimentalization is not love.  We think that love is just sweet emotions or gentleness.  But real love leads to action and change.  I heard the story recently of a church who had a new person join it for worship.  One Sunday morning the newcomer had a panic attack because someone wore a red shirt.  It triggered memories of a trauma experience she had at the hands of a bully.  The congregation was concerned.  Should they ban red shirts?  Should they say to the newcomer, “I’m sorry but you don’t belong here if you can’t handle a red shirt or two from time to time”?  How would that help her in her day to day life ?

We have had a similar debate for years that flared up online this week with United Church ministers.  Do we call this service “Mother’s Day Service”, “Christian Family Day Service” or just “Sunday Service”?  For some folks the word ‘Mother’ triggers memories worse than any seen in movies like “Mommy Dearest”.  Others struggle because of fertility issues or because of life circumstances.  Or tragedy strikes when they least expect it, and motherhood becomes a memory rather than a lived reality.

When I was growing up as a child, we didn’t know much about grief.  We didn’t have funeral resources for stillborns, miscarriages and infants.  And we thought that the most loving thing we could do for a person in grief was not to talk about it for fear of upsetting someone.  We pretended the tragedy didn’t happen, or that a pregnancy that didn’t end happily was no big deal as one could always try again.  We didn’t treat single women or couples who didn’t procreate with a lot of respect.  We didn’t make space for the many tiny moments of grief that came into everyone’s life. And we didn’t talk about the ways in which people coped with those stresses, the addictions to cocktails, the risky behaviors, the mental illness, the depression, the abuse or family violence and the anxiety attacks that resulted from trying to live as if pain and grief did not exist.

That was not love.  That was supposed to be love, protecting each other from pain and hurt, but it was not love.  It enabled people to keep stuck, keep the grief suppressed, keep the emotions bottled up, keep the pain at home where it belonged, in private.  It kept people feeling isolated and alone.

Real love says, “I am here with you.  I hear you.  You are not alone.  Your pain may be unique, but others have gotten through what you are going through.”  Real love says, “this is going to hurt but I will hold your hand”.  Real love says, “these are birth pangs and I can’t take them away from you, but I can breathe with you”.  Real love says, “let us weep together a while.  We will one day rejoice together too.”  Real love says, “let us have a memorial service for that stillborn” even if it happened 40 years ago.

Dr. Katharina Manassis, a member of St. Mark’s United Church in Scarborough and both a Child Psychiatrist and University of Toronto Professor Emerita said this about such real love by her congregation:

My introduction to a community of faith didn’t come until middle age, after a traumatic bereavement. The minister on call to the local funeral home listened intently to my distraught, guilt-ridden tale of loss and validated my experience. I was reassured that… my emotional response was not unique… I … became a member of his church. I came to understand that in some circumstances compassionate pastoral care is even more helpful than counseling by a mental health professional, because rather than singling out the person as having a psychological problem, it recognizes suffering as part of the human experience.  Within my faith community, I found supportive friends, inspiring role models, and people who were just good fun. Coffee time, whether in person or over Zoom, is a valuable mental wellness activity for many of us. Knowing there are like-minded people struggling with similar challenges can make a huge difference in well-being, especially when we are feeling alone. 

When we love deeply, compassionately and bravely like this, we transform our world.  Whether it’s getting an ugly flag pulled down in our county, letters written to MLAs about racism in the proposed curriculum, or donating to the Mother’s Day Mission and Service appeal this year, together, when we remember that like sundials we must orient ourselves by the true north of love that Jesus taught, we make a real difference in the world.  May it be so for us all.