“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” —Erich Fromm
The Fetzer Institute has just launched a video exploring the role that media and social connection can play in promoting love, empathy, and compassion: “Where is the Love?”
Is it as simple as where we focus our attention, the stories we tell, and the images we show? Why do we nurture such a disconnect between the world we say we want and the kind of world we pay to view?
This series was originally published on the Journey Fellowship website. In Part 1 of the series, we explored the vows that Seventh-day Adventists assent to as part of their baptismal ceremony. The vows shape members’ sense of place within the denomination and the wider Christian Church; they also serve valid institutional functions. What definitions lie beneath these vows? What lies beyond them?
How a tradition defines itself and situates itself on the religious landscape matters: ecclesiology hammered out in seminaries has real, relational implications off-campus. Perhaps the Adventist covenant focus on the denomination’s distinctive beliefs is rooted in the fact that unlike the Roman, Orthodox, Anglican/Episcopal, and mainline denominations, Seventh-day Adventism doesn’t represent itself as a facet of the universal church. Instead it represents itself as “the remnant church of bible prophecy”—the part of the whole that emerged after multi-millennial apostasy.
From Susan Morgan Ostapkowicz’s Painting “The Outsider”
The “remnant” model surfaces explicitly in 3 of the 13 Adventist vows (8, 9a, and 13), suggesting that within the Adventist doctrinal context, one of the most important things new believers could adopt is an identity distinct from their peers beyond the walls. The individual lifestyle vows (6, 7, 9b, and 10) further highlight the differences between people inside the church and those outside it: the remnant church is a micro-community and has its own norms.
Whereas the 11th vow is a catch-all for any belief or lifestyle practice that the remnant church may teach, the 12th points to the baptism ritual itself. The final vow references “people of every nation, race, and language,” but only indicates that many kinds of people may be represented in the remnant. It doesn’t assume that the entire world is part of the Garden of God. [2] So it makes sense that the church’s vows are inward-focused. It also makes sense that as church members glimpse a world beyond these limits, this 13-vow covenant won’t adequately support them.
Eric Moon participates in the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), a tradition that distrusts creedal religion in the same way that the first few generations of Seventh-day Adventists did. In a June-July article for the Friends Journal, he and other Quakers explore their community’s collected experiential wisdom and how it varies from fixed formulations.
“Human beings need words to communicate. But when we codify, make creeds, and canonize a few words, we limit our vision, as well as the possibility of God’s work through us. Walking away from such deified virtues, where might we go instead? What if we were to start with fresh, personal experiences and then shared them in a manner that was as mediated as little as possible by advance expectations?” —Eric Moon
I talked with 12 people recently about their baptismal vow experiences. I’m still drawn to the concept of developing covenants in community that help move individuals and groups towards action and not just towards static opinions. (I’ll admit: in the last 17 years, I’ve developed some fixed beliefs and would not join in covenant with a congregation that did not share them. Fortunately, said beliefs are few!)
Several of the people I spoke with did not find their once-vowed covenants relevant to their spirituality today. So I reflected on which commitments I could agree to that would support my active journey now:
I also drafted some more explicitly theistic comments, but began to wonder what it could mean for a faith community to be able to thrive with members who are no longer engaged in a religious life. The Unitarian Universalist tradition is one that has come to include both religious and non-religious people; Quaker meetings also sometimes include non-religious people, and I’m learning from adherents how that works in practice.
John Spong writes in his latest book on the gospel of John that “While God may not be subject to change, the human perception of God is… God cannot be possessed, nor can the ‘word’ of God ever be reduced to propositional statements.” As I read accounts of the life of Christ and the early believers in Acts and the epistles, I notice how much a living faith can vary from official religious channels, at times extending their teachings and at others overruling them to support the healing of the people. I see that when believers practice not “quenching the Spirit,” wisdom draws us beyond the walls of the familiarly systematic and helps us to grow. Perhaps we need new commitments for such a life.
Tell me in the comments: If you were to write “vows” for where you are in your journey today, what would they include? And what would they inspire in you?
“To learn from our testimonies, to make them our own, we perhaps can meet them again, not quickly via a short list but as John Woolman did: in human faces, on foot, walking.” —Eric Moon
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[1] I asked my network about their baptismal covenants and whether these covenants had shaped their faith journeys. Read what they told me.
[2] Seventh-day Adventist General Conference sessions are held every five years. At the end of the session, church members from every nation-state that has an Adventist presence march into the stadium in national garb and holding their country’s flag. The Parade of Nations is an incredibly powerful visual that highlights the 13th vow’s reference to people of every nation, race, and language participating in the church. It also generates some friendly national pride among church members and builds a sense of community for those within the denominational fold.
This series was originally published on the Journey Fellowship website. Thanks, Kymone Hinds, for the opportunity to write!
Is it possible to geek out over church liturgy? It is, and I did it a few weeks ago. Early in June, I came across this vow from the baptismal covenant reading in the Book of Common Prayer:
I loved it, and not just because of what it said but also because it was so unlike any of the vows I was invited to assent to when I was baptized.
Although I was raised participating in a Seventh-day Adventist congregation, I joined the denomination officially when I was 13 years old, after 9 months of weekly home study with my church’s senior minister. During this study process, I incrementally read and reported to the minister on a thin white book that outlined the church’s then-27 fundamental beliefs. The outlines included biblical references and paragraph explanations, and paired the explanations with quotes from church founder Ellen G. White and from the SDA Bible commentary. At the back of the book, and read back to us in an “examination” on baptism day, was the following list of 13 vows:
Understand that the only “institutionally correct” answer to these thirteen questions is “yes”! But I haven’t heard the full list used at baptisms for several years now. The congregations I’ve worshiped with seem to prefer a shorter version that focuses less on consensus dogma and more on individuals’ belief in Jesus and intent to support the church.
When I looked up the other covenantal vows in the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), I found that they include consensus dogma about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, sin, evangelism, and church life like the dogma in the Adventist list. The BCP vow on striving for justice and peace is one of two that shifts the focus of the celebrant beyond the walls of the church or frames other people as more than potential church members: the other vow invites the celebrant to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.” Not one of the Adventist church’s 13 vows challenges baptismal candidates to do this.
“In my opinion the church is far more enamored with knowing doctrines than with knowing Jesus. The church therefore uses this approach in its ‘evangelism’—if it can get people to assent to 28 creedal statements, they’re ready for baptism and membership.” —Ken McFarland
These new-member covenants are ubiquitous across Christendom, so they clearly serve a purpose; McFarland describes them as a creed-support tool; I’ve described them above as a gate-keeping device. For me, this is not a slur: organizations legitimately use entry initiations to monitor their membership. I only wonder if the vows could become more than that.
What if the Seventh-day Adventist church’s baptismal vows weren’t designed to secure belief compliance or encourage members’ avoidance of certain behaviors? What if they were about more than doctrinal boundary-setting, if they went beyond intellectual constructs by offering candidates a new frame for life? What if they inspired new ways for us to act and live in the world? Could they be more relevant to believers 10, 20, 30, and 40 years post-baptism if they did?
Tell me in the comments: If you experienced adult baptism, did your ceremony include vows? If so, did those vows shape your spirituality? How?
Misanthropes and philanthropists enjoy the same sunlight and we’re naturally interdependent with other living and non-living aspects of our ecosystem. Our ecosystem includes human systems too—families, governments, ethnic-cultural groups, religions, and economic models. Even when we have individual preferences about these things, the dominant models in our environment still affect us. Someone who never builds their own family is still affected by communities of families. Someone who drops out of the church loop is still touched by society’s religions. Someone who is “stateless” is still influenced by a matrix of nation-states.
I could refuse to vote when eligible. I could disavow my religion of origin. I could claim emancipation from relatives. But presence means participation; existence means participation. The only question is what kind of participation it will be.
View Who is my Neighbor? | You are my Neighbor on Storify.
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FYI: Florida is one of several US states that, following a 1970 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, allows for 6-person juries rather than the conventional 12-person panel when the case won’t involve capital sentencing.
And W.E.B.B.I.E’s post flew across Web 2.0 when pop singer Rihanna and others reposted it without attribution.
Who is my neighbor? My neighbor is you.
This morning @mslooola asked: “What would teen you think of adult you?”#noshamemov
So I found Teen Self and we had a chat.
Teen Self: You locked our hair!
Adult Self: Yeah, I like it. Might cut it in a decade or two; what you think?
Teen Self: O_O
Teen Self: You stopped playing basketball. Do you miss it?
Adult Self: I do, but weight training’s not bad; you should try it. Also, get a bike.
Teen Self: You’re a little bit “different,” y’know.
Adult Self: So are you! It’s how your people will find you.
Teen Self: Anything you think I should know?
Adult Self: You’ll learn things that are nice to know by watching people. You’ll learn what you need to know by experience. Everyone around you is doing their best; judge less. You’re not alone in the world even though it sometimes seems like you are. I love you.
We think we’re right. We almost always think we’re right, even when we’re wrong. When we suspect we’re wrong and think we have a chance to be right instead, we think differently, choose differently, live differently—all in pursuit of rightness. So what is it that rescues us from fundamentalism?
We are each doing what we believe is right in the world. The problem arises when we do what we believe is right within the untested delusions of our own private snow-globe worlds. Fundamentalism arises when that snow-globe of our understanding becomes the entire universe in which all other beings must conform to the contours and limits of that glass structure or otherwise be punished. Wrestling with Fundamentalism in ourselves and in this world is daunting but necessary work. Because if we settle for doing only what we believe is right–or project that belief onto some idea of God or Government–as our only rubric for action in the world then we will eventually destroy ourselves with our rightness. —Odd by God
So much yes. Read on: “The Club of the Holy Book Destroyers.”
(c) USA Today | via WikiCommons
“Oh, the places you’ll go!”
The person who introduced me to this story was one of my biggest adult advocates. It’s the kind of “Go and be!” tale that encourages many of us to leave our nests and move out into the rest of the world to do whatever good we can.
But I didn’t know then that having “places you’ll go!” doesn’t always mean being able to take those you love with you. So while I’ve shared a lot of new places with people I love, going and doing has also involved loss as well as triumph: loss and release have been just as much part of my growth, change, and transformation as have gain and harvest.
Growth is disruptive. Sometimes it’s disruptive in fantastic ways, yielding greater intimacy with others and greater knowledge of ourselves than we thought possible. Sometimes it’s horrifically disruptive, breaking open fearsome nightmares and shadowy neuroses, inspiring us to pull back from the open road and hunker down in the familiar. There’s no way to know outcomes ahead of time.
Along with several other relatives, my mother has missed the guts and beauty of the last four years of my life because her beliefs and assumptions block her from fully entering in. She’s remained my mother and I’ll never close my life to her; she just hasn’t always been able to mother me. She’ll always be my noun yet can’t wholly verb me while unreconciled to who I am and where I’m going.
It hasn’t been my orientation or partners who’ve disrupted my family relationships. It’s not mere difference that sparks conflict but how we render difference, what we label neutral or good and what we label dangerous. Heterosexism has hobbled relationships that I’ve prized and whose deterioration I’ve mourned. Heterosexism: the assumption that only heterosexual people represent the human ideal; that only heterosocial and heterosexual relationships are natural, good, right, or holy; that gay and bi people are broken, disordered, perverted, and abominable, that they’re worthy of pity and prayer as if addicts, adulterers, drug dealers, or murderers.
I exaggerate none of this. My mother once sat on my couch to tell me that she’d have preferred me to be a prostitute than bisexual and would mourn over me as if I were in jail as long as she lived. She meant the words she spoke; she said them as part of her process and because of her religious concern. She didn’t say them to wound me. But intention doesn’t trump impact, and we can’t now recover the years we’ve lost. We can only improve our future together.
Purple-striped Jellies at Monterey Bay Aquarium
It’s been more than a year since my mother has verbally or spiritually attacked me, She has not undermined me, my ethics, or my identity in my hearing. She joined the rest of my family and support network in celebrating my doctoral graduation last spring, and I know she’s never stopped caring for me. Still, she struggles to celebrate the me that I am. She lives at the outer limits of the love and embrace that heterosexism and other religious beliefs permit her, and I can’t imagine the conflict that has brought her whenever she’s thought of me or spoken of me with others.
My denomination’s leadership has also been smashing against the outer bounds of its limits in the last few years: General Conference senior leaders sustained their rejection of LGBTI members, wordsmithing a 1996 statement on homosexuality without changing its substance; the British Union Conference formally opposed civil marriage in England, Wales, and Scotland even though proposed legal changes would have no impact on the church’s teachings or practice; and the North American Division president and a prominent Adventist televangelist both pronounced June Supreme Court decisions as perversions not merely of doctrine but also of US legal tradition—as if tradition means automatic validity. Each of these are players in the drama.
It’s the sincerity I perceive in most of these players that keeps me holding my end of our relationship’s rope. I don’t spend much effort on reacting to performed prejudice—discrimination and demonization heightened for an audience, and perfected by Fox News, satellite radio shock jocks, Westboro, and too much public evangelism. That’s not the kind of theater I enjoy sitting through. But sincere souls, I can understand. I can trace their full humanity though they sometimes deny mine. And thanks to my family and denomination, I know not to seek whole-soul nurturing from those who cannot offer it. I know not to beg bread from a quarry or probe for figs out of season. It’s not the season for figs from the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and so I don’t expect to harvest any from it. Yet this doesn’t condemn me to starve.
Hundreds of thousands of LGBTI current and former Adventists around the world have been taught that they’re broken; community affirmation depends on their complying with mandatory celibacy or forming heterosocial relationships. What about them? If the sanctuary is not a sanctuary, where can they turn? Should they seek another sanctuary? Create other sanctuaries with and for other people? If we can’t change the chick’s shell, how do we support the chick so that when its shell breaks, the chick is strong enough to bear the break and deal with the world outside? If your mother can’t mother you, who will mother you and how can you mother yourself?
A kitten that’s unlikely to give up that string. (c) Calculus Jones
When I lost some nurturers, my library gave me others: when authorities disparaged certain sources, I deliberately sought them out and read them myself. This wasn’t about being contrary (contrariness is no more automatically valid than tradition). It was about learning to evaluate sources for myself. As some of my older sanctuaries proved unsafe, I reassessed the limits they had set for me. When those limits failed to support, challenge, and protect me, I established new ones. When they did serve me, I kept them.
I borrowed, bought, and read shelves of new books that I hadn’t known existed, entered conversations I hadn’t known were happening, and joined communities of thought and practice I’d never had access to before. This was how I gained worlds beyond my inherited shell, worlds that supported me when my native land fractured. Without those worlds or the people I met through them, I wouldn’t have made progress. I might not be here. And I wouldn’t still have places to go.
My mother mothered me well until she discovered more of who I was, until I complicated her hetero-centered view of me and her vision of the life I’d live as an adult. Until I varied from her dreams, she held a very powerful grounding space for me and she’s doing her best to do so again. She cared for me materially when I was well and physically when I was sick. She nurtured me educationally and intellectually; she prayed and modeled for me a sense of God and Spirit. She gave me and my siblings the best of what she had—and still does. I’ve made sure to express my appreciation to her for her effort and bequests, and I’ll always care about improving on her legacies of leadership, poetry, industry, nurturing, service, and strength.
I’m not yet able to mother her materially, but I can recognize when she has hit her emotional and spiritual outer limits, when “the places I’ll go” aren’t places she can join me. I don’t know how her limits might change in the future, and I’m not sure it makes any difference to what I can offer her. My mother has gifted me so many amazing things—what more could I ask of her? I’ll take the unconditionality baton from here.
Thanks, Mum, for everything.
The Doubt Essential to Faith | Lesley Hazleton
Abolish all doubt, and what’s left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction.You’re certain that you possess the Truth—inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T—and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism…
Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes, they have no questions, only answers. They found the perfect antidote to thought and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith. They don’t have to struggle for it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad, not only that night on the mountain, but throughout his years as a prophet, with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair, and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know and that they and they alone are right.
And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority. We’ve allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers…
This isn’t faith. It’s fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two. We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. It’s difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it. —Lesley Hazleton
From Robin Carnes and Sally Craig’s book Sacred Circles:
“In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” —Alice Walker
“We might look at our mothers as our first mirrors of ourselves. What they reflected back to us about ourselves we often took as the truth. When we begin to see our mothers as real people, not just as parents, who are struggling as imperfectly as the rest of us to make the journey, we see that what they mirrored back to us about ourselves as children was probably not about us at all but rather about who they were at that time. Talking about our mothers and how we feel about the people they were and are helps us to differentiate ourselves from them, even as we honor our connection with them.” (pp. 138-139)
Differentiating and connecting are both essential and complementary aspects of healthy relationship. Too little differentiation leads to enmeshment; too little connection leads to isolation. Too much differentiation produces distancing; too much connection undermines boundaries.
The metaphor I’ve often used for my own path with and around other people is planetary or stellar orbit: I travel an orbit myself, I have regular companions and am the regular companion of others. I cross orbits with others; I approach more closely at some times and more distantly at others. I attract some and am attracted by some. On rare occasions I crash into other travelers or am hit by one—but I still have my orbit to travel.
Our relationships are similar: partners, friends, siblings, parents, neighbors, coworkers, peer commuters, the panhandlers we pass each day, the accountants we see twice a year, our doctors and consultants, our religious teachers, and on, almost infinitely… Each of us has an orbit to travel. Each of us negotiates our connection and differentiation patterns with the people we meet and know. And both processes are necessary.
This is one of the insights that I processed over several years; it helped me to make sense of my relationships with other individuals but also helped me to understand and shift my relationships with the institutions I’m a part of.
If you missed this week’s series on sexuality and the Seventh-day Adventist church, I’ll be keeping the three installments up on this site:
Part I: The Magic of Shame (6/3)
Part II: Caring for our Mother (6/5)
Part III: Filling in the Gaps (6/7)
From Beatrice Bruteau’s The Psychic Grid.
Why the tenor of your inner world matters and why you might sometimes be your greatest nemesis:
Viktor Frankl stresses the importance of having a strong value system and a convincing worldview in one’s own interior that is life-supporting, that does not encourage weakness. We must avoid the danger of giving up. If we give in to cultural pressures and admit to weakness and helplessness, we will internalize the destructive self-images being projected upon us. In the case of socially oppressed groups, as Mary Daly points out, we will then carry the oppressor within ourselves…
The conviction of a powerlessness that is “natural,” therefore unalterable and inescapable, leaves us defenseless before the power-wielding forces of social institutions and the darker, more hidden powers of our own consciousness.
Why new habits don’t always stick and why conversions—even positive ones—are often traumatic:
There is a heavy emotional investment in our supposedly pure theoretical constructs—the images in which we perceive the world and the attitudes by which we respond to what we perceive.
Images and attitudes are emotionally based entities, not dispassionate at all, and it is they which form the warp and woof of our epistemological frame of reference. Reality for us is what is consistent with this shared (sympathetic) primitive emotional disposition of our consciousness in the midst of the interacting universe. We cannot possibly abandon it without the most extreme anxiety. Our view of the world and our whole personality and action pattern stand or fall together, being commonly rooted in our fundamentally emotional perception of being.
mackenzian 