The Negative Effect #spark 02

A few weeks ago, I found myself sitting in an old pew in a church that was eerily similar to the church I grew up in.  

White-painted cinder block walls.  Wooden arches climbing to meet at a point in the ceiling.  Ornate, burnished gold cylindrical lighting hanging by chains from the ceiling.  The red carpet stage with the matching red seat on the right for the lead pastor and another seat on the left for the music director.  The imposing wooden podium with the long, thin, bendy microphone.  The organ and piano.  The choir loft with the narrow entrances on either side for the choir members to enter and exit.  The permanent baptismal set in the back center of the stage.  The 80’s stylized wooden cross over the baptismal.  The American and Christian flags prominently displayed to the right and the left.  

I felt like I’d been transported into a memory from my childhood.  The church of my youth preserved in amber.  

It caught me off guard and resulted in an uneasiness in my spirit and stomach.  

Then the pastor got up to speak.  My unease grew.  

The Ghost Of Churches Past

I’d come into this service expecting just another church service, and so I wasn’t prepared for the rush of emotions I felt. Anyone who’s grown up in a church and still attends it knows the oddly discomforting feeling of all the older congregants saying, “I remember when you were just THIS tall!” as they measure your height with their hand just three feet off the ground.  It’s a confusing feeling that signals some sort of sense of stasis or regression in my heart.  Like waking up at 40 years old to find you’re still sleeping in your twin bed at your parent’s house.  Like remembering the awkwardness of your most hormone-ridden middle school days.  

I acknowledged these emotions with some wonder at how powerful they were, and then politely asked them to sit down now that they’d been heard.  I wanted to attend to the service at hand.  My desire was to listen with an open mind, free of judgment (a constant problem for Enneagram 1s), giving the pastor the attention and respect I’d desire if it were me up there speaking. 

But as I listened, the sense of unease continued to clamor for my attention, like a five-year old tugging on my pant leg and saying, “Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad. Dad…”.  

Emotions

God gave us our emotions.  They’re a direct connection to reality that bypasses reason, logic, and all of our carefully constructed self-defense mechanisms, rationales, and worldviews.  They circumvent all the clever mental positioning we do, and they offer us something very important: an understanding of how we’re actually engaging with reality in the moment.  

I grew up with the explicit warning not to trust my emotions, as if Satan had given me my emotions and not God. Emotions couldn’t be trusted because they clouded my thinking and impeded my ability to maintain a stoic, pure, and unadulterated mental assent to a set of theological propositions which comprised the whole of my relationship with our good and beautiful God at the time.  You can see why I took ten years off from Christianity.  

Through the teaching of Saint Ignatius (yes, the 16th century Counter-Reformation Roman Catholic priest who had an incredible insight into the nature of our relationship with God), I learned the importance of paying attention to my emotions.  God gave us emotions to help us understand reality in ways that are challenging to process through reason and logic.  Our emotions are a gift.  Saint Ignatius provided a perspective that brought emotions into consideration in balance with spirit, mind, and body.  

Emotions are like the lights on the dashboard of a car. When there’s a problem with your car’s engine, you’re likely to get a warning light on your dashboard.  This little light tells you that there’s something going on inside your car of which you’re not fully aware.  You might’ve heard a faint knocking sound, but dismissed it as road noise, or as just your imagination.  But when the dashboard light comes on, you know that something is amiss and you need to stop the car, pop the hood, and investigate what it is.  It's unwise to ignore the dashboard lights in your car.  

Our emotions are like these lights in our cars.  When you have a strong sense of unease (like I was feeling at this church service), sudden anger, deep sadness, rich joy, satisfaction, fear, and the full spectrum of emotions, your body is telling you something about your reality that you might not be aware of at a conscious level.  When we ignore these emotional signals from our selves, we do so at our own peril, just like ignoring a check-engine light on our car’s dashboard.  

The fear behind the the injunction, “Don’t trust your emotions,” that I grew up with is often an over-reaction to someone who caved to their overwhelming emotions in the moment.  We’ve all done it.  We’re furious about the email Management just sent to the entire company, and so we reply-all, write a scathing email, and send it.  Moments later, when the flood of shocked and angry emails start flowing in, we realize the foolishness of this choice.  We let our emotions get the better of us. 

But the answer to the misuse of our emotions is not the disuse of our emotions.   

My therapist friend provided me with a wonderful way of thinking about how to engage with my emotions.  He imagined a room full of little me’s, each one representing emotions in the moment.  The real me is on the platform leading the meeting.  Angry Me is jumping up and down and waving his hands, demanding to be given the microphone.  I acknowledge Angry Me, and let him address the group.  He shares his expletive-laced dissatisfaction with the situation, recommends a number of nefarious ways we could get even, and then calls for a vote.  I tell him, “Thank you for sharing. You’ve brought some important things to mind that we hadn’t been considering.  You can sit down now.”  Fearful Me is sitting next to Angry Me, goading Angry Me to action.  Now Fearful Me wants to be heard.  So, I hear him out as well. 

The point is, my emotions are telling me something.  I need to give attention to them and hear what they’re saying, but I don’t have to do what they want.  They represent valuable input for thoughtful consideration.

Paying Attention In The Moment

Sitting in that church sanctuary, trying to pay attention to the pastor, the lights on my emotional dashboard went off.  So, I turned my attention to examine my emotions, and to try and understand what they were telling me.  

The sense of unease was mostly associated with being haunted by being in an environment so similar to the place of my childhood.  It haunts me because after those earliest innocent years, where I gave over my entire being to the program, I was left me with shame and regret over the things I said and did in the name of Jesus.  I rationally understand that I was a child, and that I should extend grace to myself.  A child trusts the adults around them to be good people, and so they aren’t held responsible when those adults lead them astray.  This sense of unease tells me that the healing from those years continues.  There’s more healing to be done.  

As I pay attention, I notice a sense of righteous judgment alongside the unease.  I give this emotion my attention, and it draws my awareness back to the words the pastor is saying.  The pastor has a cadence similar to the one I grew up with.  I focus on the words the pastor is saying, and then it hits me.  The spark.  The holy gift of awareness the Holy Spirit pours into me in the moment.

Everything the pastor is saying is negative. 

He notes that the service is behind schedule because the congregation took too long greeting one another.  He tells a story where he observes someone’s sin and he goes out of his way to tell them about it and to correct them.  He gives someone a complement, but it’s a backward complement.  “You did a great job with that song, especially for a little church like this.”  The qualification diminishes the complement and the individual's contribution.  It reveals a disquieted heart that is dissatisfied with the world as it is.  Significant time is given over to pointing out many of the things that are wrong with this culture.  

In other words, he’s doing it wrong. 

The Negative Effect

I’m judging the pastor in my heart, but as I listen to his words, I’m aware that we’re not that different.  I wrestle with the same never-ending spirit of judgment that sees the world and weighs it against what it could or should be.  I wonder if he’s aware of the negativity flowing under his words like a river.  His cadence and overt loathing for reality feels so familiar to me.  

And then a question occurs to me.

“What if the common thread this man and I share is actually our religious tribe?  What if I struggle so much with negativity, in part, because of the denomination of my youth?”  

I assumed that this church is part of the same tribe as the one I grew up in.  The similarities are so strong. The weighty spirit of the church.  The pervading sense of judgment.  The negative vibe of the place. 

What if spending twelve of my most formative years with this judgmental and unloving tribe formed me and shaped me in ways that resulted in me having to wrestle negativity to the ground every day of my life?  By the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, I think I win this battle more often than not, but it’s exhausting!    

How I long to have my default expression and emotion be joy!  I desire for the first thing on my mind every day to be the grace of Jesus extended to everyone around me. I want to be a blessing.  I want to be a life-giving presence for all the people in my life.  I want first and foremost to demonstrate the love of Jesus in my encounters. 

But every day I awake with the unbidden awareness of all the ways the world could be better.  I submit this to Christ, and he fills me with his grace.  I get to be a blessing to some people.  My desire to show people the love and grace that was shown to me happens.  God is at work changing me into someone more and more like his Son Jesus, as I surrender my will to his.  

Negative is easy.  

Joy and grace are hard.  

A sense of righteous indignation rises in me at the thought that THESE people poisoned me when I was at most vulnerable and impressionable.  I trusted them to lead me into a good and virtuous life with Christ, but instead they doused me with spiritual vinegar and instilled in me an awareness of all that is wrong with the world. They took my sense of wonder and joy, put it in a box, and buried it in an unmarked grave.  

How dramatic. 

This is the point where emotions stop being helpful.  

I ask Righteous Indignation to sit down.  Thank you for sharing.  You’ve been heard.  

The Spark

As I sat there in the pew, the spark in my interior was simply the awareness of all the ways the tribe of my youth may have influenced me.  Christ has already shown me his perspective - the way of grace.  The church tribe of my youth believed they were doing the right thing.  They had no malice for me.  They actually desired good things for me.  They practiced what they believed to be the most perfect expression of this life with Christ, and I can probably trace my sense of devotion to Jesus back to them.  It wasn’t all bad, despite what my one-sentence summary of that time says. 

I was projecting all of this past fear and shame that I carry onto the pastor before me. It was unfair. Judging a person for being judgy is just silly.   

The thing about judgmental people is that they often are painfully aware of all of the ways THEY could be better.  No one meets their expectations - not even themselves.  

What is needed?  

Grace.  

A flood of pure grace that pours into the river of my soul and dilutes the pessimism, cynicism, and judgment.  A light shining in the darkness, pushing back the shadows of my heart.  Christ hanging from the cross and saying, “Forgive them Father, for they don’t know what they’re doing.”  

Grace.  

Righteous Indignation sits down and sulks.  Grace takes the stage, and I return my attention to the pastor with renewed interest in what God might have for me as my brother in Christ pulls back the veil to show me a little bit of his heart.  I take captive the thoughts of judgment, hold them up, and let the wind of the Spirit that is now blowing through my soul carry them away.  

Dear God, please give me the fortitude to demonstrate to others the overwhelming and undeserved grace you’ve shown me.