hope – Inspiring Change LLC

2016 : My Month off Social Media

I recently found this little essay in my Draft folder, and as I read it, I was surprised in 2 ways: What Has Changed (a lot) and What Remains (even more). I recognize the optimism I had just 10 years ago that I could control a lot of my online content. The grind of the digital algorithm was less visible to me then. And AI was just a rumor. Facebook was still a space for individual connection for many, and Instagram more of a photo-centric showcase, instead of a marketplace. While several of the sites have changed (buh BYE Twitter, hello Reddit), the power of these sites are now formidable, particularly for the those 40 years of age and younger. This scatter-shot cultural exchange is how many get their news. Journalism is in battle with influencers, and the loudest, awfullest voices get the clicks. Just look at the White House.

So, I publish it now, more as a reflection piece, observing what has been taking so much of our attention in the last 20 years. I wonder if we have any capacity as a species to claw any of this attention time back.

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My daughter took a course in college last year that considered the impact of social media on the well-being of young women. In short, it’s not good. While it can connect people who are geographically apart, share ideas and inspire reflection, the way we have come to use most social media doesn’t inspire much. Except social comparison. So she left her social media accounts for the month of January. I was impressed. She announced she was doing it again this year, so I spontaneously decided to join her.

I had been growing increasingly sick of my News Feed on Facebook. I noticed myself spending many minutes a day, at various times in my day, just searching for something new or different to catch my attention. Surely I had enough contacts there that someone was doing something inspired, sharing an article I needed to read, or offering some news that was important to know. Well, it seems that those enlightened folks were increasingly off Facebook and living their lives. Who knew? Instead, I fed myself a steady diet of unimportant videos, repetitive misattributed inspirational quotes, and photo after photo that were the central cause of my quiet poor attitude: everyone else was having such a wonderful time, and I was just doing my work, the laundry, going to the gym for the millionth time, and thinking about what to make for dinner.

Twitter, my other account which promises more than it delivers, was much more idea, news and event driven, and to give that up for a month seemed a bit neglectful. But I didn’t miss much. Instead, I spent my Twitter time looking at the Star Tribune, MPR, NPR and NYT websites. I got the news from journalists themselves, and got less snark, smirks and repeats than I might on the Twitter.

The only social media account I let myself check this month, without much guilt I must add, was the beautiful professional and personal photography on Instagram. I always smile, feel calmer and more optimistic after looking at what shows up on my feed. I see yoga poses, black and white photography from NYC and Egypt, fountain pens galore (because, that’s my thing) and smiling faces of acquaintances and friends all living daily life and pausing to share it without much commentary. That is something that I will keep.

So, as January comes to an end, I will say that it was like stepping back in time, before I had a smart phone and two laptops and a tablet. I read more news, listened to more music, and read novels as much as I used to. All that needs to keep happening. I need to reignite the personal free time activities I enjoyed before social media stole my attention. I felt I suddenly had more space in my thoughts and emotions, and was more aware of my own present moments and less consumed by the gloat and glitter of my contact’s vacation photos.

I will be coming back to Twitter and FB but I have committed to myself to be a minimalist user. Twitter gets a check once a day on both my personal and professional profiles. FB? I’m first going to reconfigure what I see when it opens, stop following those who have nothing original to say, and only look at it once a day. And I think I need to get off several group pages, particularly those of the ELCA clergy. Those pastors need to stop arguing online and read some books and go for a walk, for heaven’s sake. Pathetic.

Instagram gets a pass on any changes. I’m there to stay. And Reddit? SnapChat? et al? Forget it. I’m a new Spotify user. Enough said.

Good and Evil : God and Us

I have always thought that suffering makes theologians of us all. In times of crisis or despair, we turn to religious traditions or an intuitive sense of meaning to understand our experience.

The last few years of our social history — including the election of an unfit president, whose term culminated in an attempted insurrection at our nation’s capital, repeated police killings of Black men in the streets of our cities, an increasingly visible global climate emergency, and a two-plus year COVID-19 pandemic — has so disturbed our sense of human progress, justice, and order, that we have few words with which we can describe our current discomfort.

Look around you. There is no shortage of meaning making going on. Some feel a growing loss of personal power and blame Black and brown people for it all. They hoard guns and show up at street protests and state capitals armed with assault weapons. For others, anxious times call for self-protection and isolation, so they move their families ever farther away from people, stocking their bank accounts and pantry shelves so that they might turn away from the world’s chaos. Still others have chosen to frame the simple public health concept of wearing face masks in public as an assault on their personal freedom, joining vehicle convoys that clog the highways and city streets.

And then there are the rest of us. We are exhausted and worried, but still showing up for our jobs, checking in with parents in Florida, getting to the grocery store, and trying to help our kids through another unusual school year. We are just trying to figure it out.

Now the despot leader of Russia has launched an invasion of Ukraine. This country was once part of the former Soviet Union, but since that change 30 years ago has been proudly independent. Death, displacement, and destruction are the consequences of this war, begun by the maniacal greed of one man and his government. As the world responds to assist Ukraine, he threatens to use Russian nuclear weapons.

While we may be half a world away, media bring views of this suffering and chaos right into our homes. Many of us, already exhausted by the demands of the pandemic have felt an increased sense of helplessness in the face of such evil. The age-old question of evil looms large again. Where is God in this terribly broken human world? Can we expect God to be of any real help? If not, what’s the use of belief? Looking up from our televisions and laptops at one another, we wonder how all this makes any kind of sense. And then we try.

Invasions during peacetime are acts of evil. While such chaos can seem like a supernatural force, it’s not: evil is us, an embodied human event. It’s not some personified being or invisible spirit, at loose in the world, stalking the vulnerable, harassing the faithful. Evil is humans raging and running others over seeking power, seeking to hurt, get revenge, control, land, influence or prestige. Embodied evil kills lives, families, buildings, bridges, economies, history and fragile trust.

So then, where is God? We can look for God in the same embodied way. God is spirit until God embodies love in us. God is made visible, discernable, when human beings act with care, compassion, and justice. Halfway around the world, we can embody God for our Ukrainian neighbors: we can contribute money to relief efforts, we can pray, uniting our spiritual and mental energies toward peace. We can open our minds to the necessary political support of human refugees and migrants everywhere, waves of people just like us, fleeing their own land for basic safety.

As a Christian, this is my theodicy, my understanding of a divine, omniscient God in a chaotic and sometimes evil world: God can only be really known in our world when embodied: in words, relationships, and actions of human love, mercy, and justice.

This is how we see God, and how I understand who Jesus was: the unique embodiment of God’s being. In the daily struggle to be human, may love guide your decisions. That’s where you will find the divine.

(Published originally for the Savage Pacer March 14, 2022)

Serious Hope : it’s for Adults

Hope is a powerful mental perspective, best experienced by adults.

During one of the longer dark nights this winter while watching television, I came across an interview with a well-known criminal defense attorney. It caught my attention, as I recognized her name from one or two famous trials that made news over the years. I listened as familiar questions got familiar answers until one question sparked a pointed response I won’t soon forget.

“What gives you hope for the justice system,” the reporter asked the seasoned, serious attorney. Nothing, said the lawyer. Hope is for children.

I have thought often of that comment as we have been struggling with this continuing pandemic. So much of our common focus has been on the future: what to expect with this virus next, how to plan for changing work expectations, what to make of an interrupted school year, whether to schedule a surgery or vacation. We have things that must be done today to best manage tomorrow. Many of these plans have had to be scrapped as the virus spreads beyond our control, even with helpful vaccines, killing 5.6 million people worldwide since 2020.

Is it a childish thing to be optimistic about the future in a natural world like this?

Even before experiencing this pandemic, some found it helpful to expect regular trouble in life. Bad things happen and continue to happen, despite our best efforts of avoidance or preparation, they say. The best way to get through this life is to expect less so that when the rare positive outcome arrives, we are pleasantly surprised.

While this mental frame may seem like a reasonable concession to experience, it’s a short path to emotional stress and depression. Few really live this way; human minds are not patterned to expect suffering with every breath. When all that ahead is darkness, we experience it as a slow death.

What is your natural frame of mind when it comes to considering suffering and expectations of the future? Are you naturally pessimistic, viewing the world as a place of struggle, pain and the occasional sunny day? Or are you more apt to put such ideas aside, trusting that some unreachable power determines our every move anyway?

Serious hope is for adults. I believe that a hopeful view of the future is a mature perspective, adopted by those who observe that within the randomness and chaos of the material world, there is also an observable return to center, to balance, to growth and healing that occurs in daily human life. While we may be swept away by sudden illness, or political turmoil, or personal violence, even these terrors aren’t a permanent state of being.

Everything changes, and as it changes, life has a global orientation that returns it to a new developing state.

As a Christian, I see this life orientation toward renewal a mark of God’s grace and presence in the living world. It’s because I have seen that both joy and suffering are not permanent experiences in this life, that the natural world, us included, is always working to restore and heal itself. I trust that within and underneath this life is an energy far larger than we, the life force that birthed the universe and is still creating it.

Perhaps this time of worldwide suffering has birthed a new life perspective for you. Along with fear, exhaustion and distrust, may you find an optimism that moves you toward hope and renewal. Without it, we are unprepared to embrace the life that awaits us, whatever it looks like, in communities worth living in.

Racism & Me

How I have come to understand my own racism through my life experience of sexism in the church.

We value learning in our church community. I hope yours does, too. In our small Tuesday night book group we have been reading the new book “How to Be an Anti-Racist,” that is challenging us to see American culture and our participation in it with new eyes. The author, scholar Dr. Ibram Kendi, candidly recalls his own struggle as a young black man to see his own participation in the racist structures in our culture. He then encourages us to become people who stop using the term “racist” as a personal slur and instead see how we all, majority white and minority persons of color, live in a society that has organized itself around the myths and values of white control and racial superiority.

This is not a comfortable critique. I grew up in the 1960’s in a solidly middle class, white Protestant, small town family, with two working parents and a public-school education. I was taught to believe that we are all equal though different. That with the right skills and education anyone can succeed. That we may have different skin color, but that somehow, we should overlook that and carry on. I remember my parents and their friends saying things like “We don’t see color” as evidence of racial sensitivity. The only persons of color in my high school classes were foreign exchange students. Racial issues like Jim Crow segregation, civil right demonstrations, lynching and race riots were far removed from my day to day experience in Connecticut: those were the terrifying problems of the post-Civil War south and impoverished inner cities, where true bigotry was on display.

When I spent a couple of summers working at a church camp in the lakes region of New Hampshire, I didn’t anticipate the tension and fear that descended upon us one week when two busloads of children from majority black Roxbury, Massachusetts were dropped off. Years later I wasn’t sure what to think of the dozen or so black classmates at my very white Lutheran college who stuck together like glue everywhere they went and who seemed to shrink into the background when in class, or my black friend who became his class president and seemed to hold that same group of black kids at a distance and with some distain.

I take my education and spiritual life seriously. I never in my life have consciously belittled or spoken words of hate toward a person of another race because of their skin color. But I have participated in the way our majority culture can’t or won’t see the way we have historically created a rigid racial hierarchy; whites at the pinnacle of this value system, and persons of various shades of skin tone, from light to dark, in descending rank. I didn’t spend much time wondering why Native reservations or black urban neighborhoods were chronically poor and underserved. I have not been seriously concerned that my Lutheran denomination is the whitest church in America or why. I have given modest intellectual ascent to preferential hiring of persons of color or college admissions while wondering if it does any good.

Until I became a woman pastor, that is. I was ordained into public ministry 35 years ago. A young, idealistic, energetic minister, eager to begin serving Jesus as a preacher and community leader. But I immediately began to understand in my bones what systemic prejudice looks like and how it functions every day, in every situation, because I was now the unwelcome minority. I was the female body, the female voice, the female profile, who was getting up every morning to lead an organization that was founded, organized and imagined at every level by white men. Many welcomed me and cared for me. But that welcome was a weak counterweight to the attitude, comments, assumptions and barriers I faced every day in the church. It became clear to me quite quickly that in virtually every way, women are not conceived to be legitimate religious leaders. And that men and women, of every age, economic status, educational level and perspective participate in this gendered culture. I am still amazed I lasted 20 years in this system. It became such a personal burden and just wasn’t getting better the longer I stayed, I finally decided to leave the pulpit, change careers, and re-enter the pew.

It has taken me years to better understand the ways race and gender have organized everything in America from neighborhood real estate and poverty, educational disparity and health care, pregnancy leave and lack of childcare support to the lack of diversity in corporate boardrooms. I am still learning and repenting. I believe these are the groans of our culture, struggling in these days of amazing political polarity around issues of race and immigration, to recognize the hierarchical systems we live under and must reorganize if we are to become a real democracy. My prayer is that if you have read along this far, you will join me in this continuous personal and structural awakening.

It takes a commitment to be open to experience we don’t share. To put down our automatic defenses and listen to voices who are trying to express their experience. To tolerate the discomfort when we feel unsettled. Where can you begin? Try listening to new podcasts like “1619,” watching videos like “13^th” on Netflix, reading recent books like “Between the World and Me” and “How to Be an Anti-Racist”, and innumerable fiction works by minority authors like “Medicine Walk” and “Indian Horse.” We can help make our country better for everyone if we begin to understand that racism is built into our society, and it is going to take some deconstruction before we heal.

(originally published Savage Pacer, Online/print 11/13/19)

You Gotta Have Hope

It’s true that all we have is the now. Every moment, lived now, is how we put together a life. Living our mental time too much in the past, or too far into the future, is a sure fire recipe for suffering.

In a previous post I wrote about a few important aspects of changing our body experience in the present: focusing on actions we can take to change our inner world: good nutrition, daily exercise, quieting the mind through prayer, ritual, or meditation, and focusing our time on mutual, healthy relationships.

Here I’d like to talk about the mental attitude of hopefulness, a necessary ingredient to creating a more positive outcome to our efforts toward change.

Have you ever noticed that while you are in that awful process of really being sick with an infection or injury, trying to decide whether to make an appointment or get to an urgent care center, the anxiety about your situation amplifies your suffering? In the same way, I wonder if you have noticed that once you make up your mind to take action, and put yourself in a situation where you can receive medical help, your symptoms begin to subside even before you are examined?

This lessening of anxiety and its effect on our suffering once we are confident we will be helped is known as the placebo effect: the way that hope for change creates an increase in well-being and a lessening of suffering.

That is how powerful the emotional experience of hopefulness is. Part of the therapeutic process, whether in a hospital room or a counseling office, is sustaining hope for change. I believe that human beings can change; I have changed, and continue to work on my own change processes. I have helped many people create their own change, and witnessed healing of heart, mind, and body all my life.

Hope is the confidence that the suffering of the present can be relieved, and that there is a path that can be relied on to attain healing. It is what can carry us through the work of the present to a new future. It’s the most necessary mental ingredient I know when taking on the challenge to create something new in our lives.

If you have hope for a different future, you can often endure the suffering of the now, the work necessary to change your circumstance, and launch yourself into a different tomorrow, next week or next year.

Want to change something now? Grab onto your hope for change and don’t let go.

Willing to Risk Again

Several times this week I have found myself talking to new couple clients about their relationships, and how hurt has caused them to feel withdrawn from their partners. Sometimes this distance has lasted for years, the human need for support, connection and understanding no longer expected from their spouse.

One of the most important aspects of relationship repair is the willingness to risk being open to a partner who has been months or years at odds with our needs and hopes. Couple therapy at its best keeps both people focused on their individual efforts, while being confident, through actions and words in the therapy room and out, that the partner is doing the same hard work.

It can feel like being open to injury. Like you are just asking for your partner to hurt you again. Many people resist, and for every right reason! But repairing such pain means turning toward your partner and feeling what you feel, expressing your hurt and disappointment, asking for what you need again, and being willing to see if your openness can be met with a similar effort of apology, repair, and affection by your partner. That’s what a good couple therapist does every day with couples, with compassion, encouragement and patience. It’s not a free-for-all in therapy sessions. If it is, run in the other direction.

When deciding whether to go to couples therapy, this is one question you will need to answer: am I willing to be open again to this person, this one I once loved, and see what I feel, what they have to say, what they have experienced, and work together for new, common ground?