change – Inspiring Change LLC

Changing as We Age

There is something about life transitions that makes them more difficult the older we become. I have noticed this with my clients as well as myself, and I’m certain that it’s not a simple function of declining vitality or just a well-earned preference for our own habits. What is it about life change in later life that seems to be so challenging?

Human development is a long process of accumulated experience. It seems to take most of us about two decades to become independent of our caregivers, and during those twenty years we experience innumerable changes in our bodies, our environments, our relationships and our knowledge of the world. New people, new shoes, new ideas. Repeat. Whether we are moving from one classroom to another, or one neighborhood, state or country to another, our younger selves are constantly integrating change into our understanding of our self and the world.

I recall being an excited 21-year-old in the late summer of 1979, just weeks past college graduation, packing a dozen cardboard boxes full of records, books, clothes and personal items, weighing them and dropping them off for shipping. And then, accompanied only by my hard-sided sky-blue Samsonite suitcases and my guitar, getting on a series of planes beginning in Burlington, Vermont and landing in St. Paul to begin my new life as a Lutheran seminarian and would-be pastor, never to live in New England again.

Such full-scale moves are the norm for many young adults; new jobs, new relationships, joining the Peace Corp, moving alone to a new city for graduate school. What makes such dislocation possible is the fewer and transitory ties that young adults have made so far in their lives. Change is the standard young lives have known, and it is only by living into later changes of career, marriage, parenthood, childcare, student loans, chronic health issues, mortgages and aging parents do those transitions grind to a slow march.

I have watched this middle life deceleration of change out my living room window. Of the 6 middle-class homes surrounding me, 4 of them, including our own, have had the same owners for over 20 years. I used to think that remarkable. Now I understand what creates that stability because I have sought just that stability for myself. Moving is such an enormous disruptor when over the years you have made a house your home, when you value your children’s school district or your church, when you rely on key friends and health care professionals you know, when you live in a region with enough economic diversity you may be able to change careers in place, as I did. If those core resources have been established, one thinks long and hard before taking a geographic leap to begin putting that all in place again.

But the changes within and around you may catch you off guard. If you are lucky, your children grow and succeed and leave your home for one of their own. The work you sacrificed for changes or you change, or you age out and now it’s done. Your parents, blessed with long lives, die and you are suddenly the oldest generation of your family. Your body, which you’ve trusted to go and grow suddenly stalls and reveals new pain, problems and limitations. How did all this suddenly happen, you wonder, and of course the answer is that it was all happening while you were busy looking down, raising children, earning a living, trying to stay focused enough to create a full-grown life. And before you know it, you’re on the other side of trying. You’ve suddenly arrived, only to have to figure out the next transition into older adulthood.

No one as of yet has handed me a life map. We each end up sketching out our own with just enough foresight to help us imagine what comes next. And that may be the greatest and necessary emotional skill of later life: imagination. The ability to mentally image our next steps with greater wisdom and hard-earned courage than we could have possibly hoped for at 21 or even 41. Because it takes that kind of skill to discern how to live in an aging body, how to let go of old resentments, what of everything we have accumulated to keep and what to let go. If we’re lucky, there is so much left to learn.

(Originally published in the Savage Pacer Online 4/15/19 and in print 4/20/19)

My Christian Faith IS Political

How does human culture change? If we tell the simple story, the kind that gets written for elementary school textbooks, change looks explosive, like it was shot out of a cannon. Continents are discovered by a single explorer, wars end with the stroke of a pen, inventions burst onto the market. But that simple moment is far from the entire story. What lies behind human change are innumerable people, their imaginations, choices and behavior, and the repeated sharing of new information which shifts many toward a converging point of difference. Something new has begun.

Yet while human creativity moves us toward discovery and difference, there is an equally powerful force in human life to prefer the known, the familiar, the past. We are fiercely loyal to what we have been; it has formed our identity. The current presidential administration, with its failure to denounce white supremacist groups, ignoring the danger of climate change, dismissing professional journalism’s historical integrity, isolating our country from our international allies, starting a massive trade war, soft pedaling the rising numbers of school shootings, separating children from parents seeking asylum at our southern border, and attempts to restore glory to the old technology of coal mining, is all about amassing power, promising renewed security and courting those who feel they are losing their assumed, rightful place in America. It is government for those who are fundamentally afraid and believe that security can only be found by returning to an imagined, familiar past.

Unfortunately, nowhere is this drive to preserve the known and idealized American past is more visible than in the life of many Christian church leaders and members. For generations, local congregations have reflected the majority culture and resisted any real move to change the status quo. At every crisis point of growth, a majority of leaders and members hold on to the past. Slavery? Post-civil war racial segregation? Women’s suffrage? Civil rights? Vietnam? Birth control? Treaty rights with native tribes? LGBTQ rights? At every turn, among the loudest and most vociferous supporters of maintaining status quo have been church-going, educated, Bible-quoting, privileged middle-class adults .

Nearly every mainline church in Europe is empty on Sundays. Why? They have failed to respond to the world around them. The generations of children born following the horror of World War II found the focus of church life to be rigidly focused on reestablishing the past, a past that was not important to them as Europe recovered and turned outward. This same loss of importance and impact is happening in our country, too. The old systems are losing ground, and every day churches are closing.

I believe we are in the midst of major culture change, much like that which occurred following the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam protests and Watergate. There is a split in the culture between those who do not fear the present — new technologies driving an ever increasing economic globalism, a lessening of white majority population, smaller and more flexible institutions, an economy based on renewable energy, invention and service, and increased urban populations – and those who want life to return to the last century’s industrial economy fed by mining and burning coal, a massive military, a stable white majority population, clear racial and gender roles, a conservative judiciary, and rigid institutionalism. These tensions led to Donald Trump’s election and now play out dramatically in the news every single day.

I believe that the good news that Jesus preached is a message for all time, to every culture. It is news that God, who is the divine energy of all life and creation, is a God of love, welcome, healing and renewal. And that those who feel that power are called to live into those values in every time and place. The church began as a response to the resurrection appearances of Jesus and to the way his gospel life reshaped his disciples into people of peace, community, healing and hope. If our churches are not about proclaiming and living out this gospel, if all they do is maintain the status quo, it’s time to leave them empty. What many courageous people of faith are doing in this culture now to respond to this cultural change is messy and inspired. I am eager to see what the American church will become. It may need to die in many ways in order to reborn to its original purposes. God give us courage to speak when so many demand the church stay “out of politics,” as if politics, the way we use power to order our common life, was of no concern to Jesus.

(my Spiritual Reflections column, originally published in the Savage Pacer, 6/30/18)

Good Pastors, Bad Congregations

Parish ministry : It’s good I left when I did.

I was shaped as a congregational leader in the 1960’s and 70’s: heady days of steady church membership, confident budgets, and familiar ethic traditions holding everyone together. Despite the daily pain of Viet Nam, race riots, assassinations, and a rising violent drug subculture, middle class Americans believed in the power of their institutions. It was this general optimism that brought the votes to ordain women in my Lutheran tradition in 1970, to start new congregations in blossoming suburbs, and to grow the church publishing houses that served tens of thousands of congregations.

By the time I was a few years into ordained ministry, I could see that church culture had started to change; America was changing. The explosion of affordable, personal technology began to change the way we communicate, socialize, learn, do business, and understand the world. We’ve become a worldwide, 7 days a week economy. We have seen the rise of extremist religious groups around the world threaten our allies as well as our own nation, with youth from our own region joining them. At the same time, religious conservatives calling out for us to become a “Christian nation” ignore the almost daily media stories of clergy sex abuse, its cover-up and current lawsuits.

Our culture has not stopped adapting. In a matter of a generation, church seems completely unnecessary to large numbers of people. Congregations have been slow to notice, even as theologians, seminaries and clergy have scrambled to adapt.

Our churches still use models of volunteer, non-profit, church building- and clergy-centric ways of being church, while our children hold in their hands tools that open the whole world to them. Their schools, their sports teams, and the internet, social media, e-publishing, and online gaming, are the communities that connect our children. While my children have been in worship with me their entire childhood, they do not connect with that community ritual the way I do. The prayers, hymns, creeds and sacraments that shaped me are just a small part of the huge flood of words, music, beliefs, actions and symbols their lives encounter every day.

We as members of churches must stop behaving as if these changes will all go away. If we keep electing lay leaders to manage our congregations who have this perspective, that “we just have to keep doing what we have always done,” we will continue to have buildings that are too big for the budget, clergy who get sick or quit from the stress, and lots of meetings where people wring their hands, demanding some shiny new youth program in order to bring in younger families. We need the best, brightest, most faithful lay leaders to join their pastors in helping recreate congregational life. We who care can’t give up.

Those who live, breathe and study the changing church point to the opportunity for us all to grow into what we have always claimed to be: people set free by grace to embody grace in the world. We must somehow take the best of our institutional life – our worship, our education, and our service – and do that well when we are together, and then keep living our faith in our lives. That’s what we need our clergy to be doing; equipping us through worship, conversation, training, teaching and example to live Christian lives. Not sitting in their offices, overwhelmed by the endless phone calls and paperwork of a shrinking intuition. If you have a pastor who is a good teacher and preacher, who loves God and is constantly out in the community meeting with people, trying to grow the church in the world, love them and join them. They know what they are doing.

Do People Ever Really Change?

The final episode of the season of AMC’s Mad Men has aired, and many of us who have watched the series have spent some time in reflection on its many observations about human behavior. The main character Don Draper, a premier ad man in New York City during the 1960’s, is such a deeply flawed character, it was often painful for me to watch. But with such wonderful writing, I was compelled to watch hour after hour, as I would read a great novel.

One of the lasting questions of this masterpiece of television is an astute observation about the nature of human development and the possibility of change. Since I am in the business of helping people achieve some measure of self understanding, often leading to attempts at change, I was struck by the perfectly wrought words of one television critic, Matt Zoler Seitz, as he wrote his piece about the finale for the online site, Vulture. In sum, yes, people can change. But it takes more sustained effort and energy than most of us may want to muster. (Hence, our need for help, i.e., psychotherapy.) Here’s the core of his essay. I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

“… Mad Men was never so cynical as to say people are never capable of deep and lasting change, only that it requires more sustained concentration, work, and self-inquiry than most of us can manage. The show’s characters tended to be comfort-driven creatures who didn’t know themselves well enough, or understand psychology deeply enough, to repair the damage done by conditioning and trauma, much less the dedication required to follow through on anything they did figure out.

If anything, the series excelled at showing us how people think they’re moving forward, yet keep ending up in a place that looks eerily familiar…

A lot of epiphanies don’t stick, but one that often does is the realization that other people are in just as much pain as we are at times, and that by reaching out, we momentarily heal ourselves as well as them. Once you’ve learned that lesson, you don’t forget it. It colors all the other problems that you continue to deal with, and suggest solutions to them. Whether you decide to pursue them is, of course, entirely up to you.”

Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture: “Mad Men Understood Human Behavior Better Than Any Show on TV”

Disorders of the Will : Happy New Year?!

On this day when so many of us are glad for the blank sheet of paper, the turn of the calendar, the new year’s fresh start, I continue to wonder about how people change. That, after all, is what people are really after when they seek therapy. Some relationship, some turn of mind, a problem beyond their experience to avoid or help draws them to consider the time apart, the confidential help that therapy provides.

After years of reading, debating, writing and anguishing with others about this human problem, I believe that change requires a combination of pain, hope and resources. Personal pain to want to create difference, hope that will pull us forward even when we continue to fail, and the resources that help us act against habit, behavior, will, environment and even genetics. One of those resources is imagination; another, time; yet another, self control.

It’s that self control that is such a stinker for us all. And to that point, I was reading an online excerpt today on the NY Times book review from a new book I may have to purchase soon. This paragraph really stood out; it’s commenting on why disorders like anorexia or ADHD are such common diagnoses now. We have such a wide-open, tolerant culture, that restraints against human desire are fewer and fewer to find:

Maybe this is one reason disorders of the will are so much more common than they used to be. Anorexia nervosa and obsessive-compulsive disorder, both still relatively rare, are nonetheless much more common today than they were fifty years ago, not to mention the explosive growth of attention deficit disorder and addictions of all kinds. Some of this boom is just more frequent diagnosis, but it also reflects changing circumstances. That it’s now possible to be addicted to cocaine, shopping, or sex is evidence of how far we’ve moved beyond the constraints of budget, custom, and embarrassment. There aren’t many compulsive eaters, video game addicts, or — God knows — anorexics — in sub-Saharan Africa, but in the West men and women can be consumed with almost anything, including not eating, because here you can get or do almost anything. Opportunities for obsession abound.

from the new book, “We Have Met the Enemy” by Daniel Akst (Penguin Press, c. 2011)

So, good luck with those resolutions. One of mine is going to continue to be curious about human will (I think Martin Luther may be right: he wrote that our wills are in bondage….) and what to do about those wills when they stubbornly, dangerously, get us into trouble. Happy New Year!

The Church in Recession : What Now?

My occasional column for the Savage Pacer was just published yesterday. I wrote about the financial free fall the mainline denominations are in with the current recession. If you want to read the full column, go here.

Here’s my concluding paragraph:

The storm that my denomination finds itself in will one day blow through, and a different way of being the church in the world will have to be found and lived. In every generation, it has never been the largest, the wealthiest or the most powerful church that makes a difference in the world. It has always been the individual person of faith, who joins with others with that same hope and vision, to feed the hungry, protect the innocent, lift up the fallen, and proclaim God’s vision of peace. It’s the lives of the faithful that proclaim the truth of the Gospel, not their buildings, or budgets, or institutions. And that reality is what holds me, and I hope, holds you, in the midst of our current religious storms.

I believe what I wrote; that size and prestige don’t make a church. But money does matter, in all things that a church wants to do. While I am curious about how this is all going to shake out, I have to tell you, I am very worried for every pastor and career church worker I know. The stress on them in these many months of recession is enormous, and everyone on their leadership board is looking to them for answers. There aren’t any right now, except to hold on, keep doing what is done best, and press toward a different future.

I can’t stress enough the need for every pastor and staff member to mind their own mental health right now. What once was standard procedure is up for grabs. What once was a ‘steady as she goes’ ship is one that is seriously imperiled by its own failures and the hurricane of economic shrinkage, and is taking on water. I pray that those leaders care for themselves, for they are those to whom we look for leadership and courage in difficult times.

I was finishing seminary and waiting for my first call during our last major recession. I am glad to not be doing the same again now. Pray for those leaders and students preparing to serve, their loved ones and families. It’s going to be a very bumpy ride.

And Furthermore

While pain is the energy that moves us toward change, the absence of pain isn’t enough to sustain it. This is one of the factors that makes change so hard: we experience the lack of pain as relief, as a kind of balance or homeostasis. We tend to rest there; we’re comfortable again.

We take a few pills, and our pain decreases. We see a therapist once or twice, and we don’t go back. Many of us aren’t really that interested in change. We just want a rescue from pain.

Pleasure is what I think is on the other side of relief. In order to move us from pain to relief to change, human beings need regular, positive reinforcement. We need to really feel that our effort is giving us something new and different than just relief; it’s creating a welcome, desired difference. And that difference needs to be sustained in order for us to trust our effort is working. We need positive, consistent reinforcement of our efforts. In other words, rewarding ourselves keeps the balance tipped in the right emotional direction.

Take weight loss, for example. Many of us know that we want to have smaller, lighter bodies, but that it takes a great deal of effort to change our food intake. Most of us can create some small amount of weight loss, generating a sense of relief, but if we don’t see regular, sustaining difference, we lose our energy. This is part of the argument among weight loss professionals: should clients weigh themselves daily? On the one hand, small amounts of loss may be visible from day to day, creating a positive reward. On the other hand, not seeing the desired difference can steal motivation fast.

Many of us who try to lose weight give up our efforts when the scale is stalled. We haven’t been able to get the reward we need to sustain our effort. The same holds true for other habits of body and mind, like smoking or drinking. If we don’t constantly work to boost our sense of pleasure and reward for our new behavior, relief will not be enough to keep us there.

If you are attempting a change process this year, and really want to make it work, make sure you have personal rewards built in to your efforts. What is it that gives you a healthy sense of pleasure? Make a list and figure out how you can add those activities, things, and experiences into your life as rewards for your sustained effort. When you see the change you want, focus on how that change feels in your mind and body, and then create a small, reinforcing reward. It’s what keeps our minds moving forward on that narrow, rocky road of personal change.

Be It Resolved

I think about change for a living.

Psychotherapy is an interpersonal process meant to help people achieve personal goals. It’s a form of reflective conversation. Clients talk; I ask questions, make observations, teach them models that describe their experience. Our sessions remind them they are not alone in their private pain or struggle, and that some real things can be done about it.

It’s an assumption in my field that people can’t change until they are ready. Until, (in my theory of change), they feel enough pain that they are ready to move away from the familiar and attempt something different.

That’s why most New Year’s Resolutions fail. Most of us who make these promises haven’t really reached that critical change place of too much pain. Those who do, who have prepared themselves with reflection, remorse, planning, and hopefulness may be successful. They will be the ones who used the calendar to prepare themselves for the new behavior, thinking and emotion that change requires.

The rest of us will fizzle out in a day, a week, a month. Frustrated, chagrined, shrugging off another attempt at New Year resolutions without much thought.

If you are interested, like I am, in how human beings change, I recommend a book to you: Changing for Good, by James Prochaska. Prochaska has studied how people change themselves, such as quitting smoking or drinking cold turkey. He has found a common change process that we can duplicate when we are seriously interested in making changes
in ourselves, or helping others do that for themselves.

As for me, I have personal goals, but I try not to link them to the calendar. I try to pay attention to the level of distress I feel before I attempt change, knowing that I will probably fail if I keep sliding into acceptance or denial. There is a level of comfort in ourselves that keeps us stuck. Turn up the heat a bit, and we will feel the interior pressure more vividly, making us more willing to create change.

Best wishes to you for turning up your internal “heat” as you look to 2010. What kind of change are you pushing yourself toward this year?