Entries in Life

Jim pointed to this article on Mommy Guilt and wondered if mothers in his own church would concur. Well, I’m not a mother (but I’m married to one) and I’m not in Jim’s church, so what I say will be absolutely meaningless.  Still, I can’t shut up.  So here goes. There is so much in the Ms. McCleneghan’s piece that I want to take issue with.  Where to start? First, I should point out that fathers have guilt, too.  We don’t have a cute name for it, at least I’ve never really heard other fathers complain about “Daddy Guilt”, but, all the same, I imagine most dads from the last 20 years feel a little guilty.  For me, I wonder “Am I spending enough time with the kids?” (I work at home, for pete’s sake!) or “Am I providing enough stimulation for the kids?” And lets not get started on the unfortunate fact that I accidentally broke my 11-year-old daughter’s nose this spring.  So, yeah, dads get guilt. But you know what?  Most of it is bogus. If I feel guilty about repeated physical abuse of my children, that’s one thing.  That is valid guilt.  I should feel guilty. And the guilt should be my sign that I need to turn around and do something differently. But disposable diapers? Formula vs. breastfeeding? The world isn’t perfect and we can’t live perfect lives.  And we shouldn’t feel guilty because of that.  But I’m sure I don’t need to tell an ordained minister that. Which brings me to my second point.  I’m gonna go out on a limb a little here, but I feel it is a sturdy one. Prayers of confession should not be done corporately. If the only time for you to practice confession is in a corporate setting, then you’re doing it wrong.  In the Orthodox church, everyone is encouraged to go to a spiritual director and (perhaps separately) individual confession. The spiritual director will tell you “Why are you beating yourself up about this?”  And then your confessor, if you really feel the need to confess your guilt about disposable diapers, will patiently stand with you and listen to you confess your guilt over disposable diapers to God. And then he’ll tell you Now, having no further care for the sins you have confessed, you may go in peace. See, corporate prayers of confession are wrong because they’re generic.  They don’t address my guilt or the things I need to change.  No wonder Ms. McCleneghan is tuning out.  It should be her sign that something needs to change. (Of course, I had to go look up the Methodist Prayers of Confession and I suppose that in some ways they are similar to the prayers prayed during Forgiveness Vespers so you can see I’m even more full of nonsense than usual, but I still maintain that the missing piece — private confession — would be a great way to get rid of silly parenting guilt.  Guilt needs a release valve.  Confession is meant to be that valve.)

(Found this sitting in a queue from a while back.  For some reason, I posted this on LiveJournal, but not here. Now is a good a time as any to get it out of my system.) The recent revelation that Mother Teresa was a doubting Thomas almost the entire time she worked in India but yet remained faithful shows the lie that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens would like to promulgate: belief in God is comforting.  (And here, I thought we were still struggling with Catholic Guilt.) While I’ve no doubt that some believers gain primarily comfort from their belief, the religion that Jesus teaches isn’t very comforting at all. “If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” And, of course, any Mennonite knows that Martyrs Mirror is filled with stories of people who endured a great deal of suffering. My own children have listened to the lives of many martyrs in the Orthodox lexicon of Saints, Nikolai Velimirovich‘s Prologue — so many that whenever they hear the Emperor Diocletian‘s name mentioned, they can tell you the end of the story. Perhaps some people make Christianity out to be a nice bedtime story, but anyone who pays attention to what Jesus said or what Paul wrote knows that any comfort offered isn’t the whole story: we are called to live sacrificially. Which is exactly what Mother Teresa did. What strikes me most among discussions like this one is the idea that Mother Teresa had an obligation to announce her doubts to the world.  “She’s a public figure” the thinking goes “and she kept this from us?” Well, no, her struggle with doubt or the lack of God’s Presence was her own and she kept it between herself and her spiritual confessors.  If she wanted to announce her doubt and be done with it, she could have done that without making her life any more uncomfortable. Mother Teresa was doing something completely foreign to most of us.  Jack Welch was a better humanitarian.  Mother Teresa was not a humanitarian and Christopher Hitchen’s was right to discredit this notion of her.  Jesus said “You will always have the poor” and Mother Teresa understood this to mean that we should be more concerned with loving the poor and having compassion for them than with giving them a handout. “You take care of their tomorrows, I take care of their todays,” she said. Secularists who don’t know Mother Teresa won’t appreciate the way she chose to use her money.  Evangelicals won’t appreciate her Gospel.  Atheists see her doubts as her hypocrisy. But there is something else going on, also.  She identified with the poor in the same way Christ identified with us.  She emulated his compassion. And of course isn’t that the whole Problem of Evil all over again?  As Judas pointed out, the money spent on the perfume Mary poured on Jesus feet was a year’s wages — surely there was a more practical use for it.  Surely Jesus could have done more than forgive sins, couldn’t he?  He was God, after all, shouldn’t he have done more? Mother Teresa is someone many people can admire from a distance.  Most will be repulsed by her, though, if they take a closer look.  She shows us exactly why true religion isn’t comforting.

Via Jim’s Shared Items comes this gem:

According to Psalm 37:21, “The wicked borrow, and don’t pay back, but the righteous give generously.” The money you gave to me was borrowed against your debt. As I see it, this is neither wise nor just.

Like some other commenters, I can’t agree with the list of “people owed” but I absolutely agree that this is a foolish, even wicked, use of government money.

“Forgiveness is the final form of love.” — Reinhold Niebuhr I went and saw “As we forgive those” tonight. It is an amazing account of the process of reconcilliation that some people in Rwanda are going through. The documentary focused on two different genocideres and the reconciliation that they sought with the surviving members of their families they attacked and murdered. Two women whose families had been killed struggled to forgive the men who had killed their families. The process of reconcilliation in “As we forgive those” covered what happened after the Gacaca courts.during reconcilliation workships run in cooperation with the Prison Fellowship in Rwanda. One of the projects the former genocideres participate in is building homes for victims of their crimes. This is especially poignant since they often destroyed those homes during the genocide. (I have to admit that I only saw the last part of the movie. The listing of screenings gave a contact email and said it was being shown by Church of the Apostles in Fayetteville, NC. I sent an email, got a response, found the date posted on the site was wrong, and got a showtime. But no location. So I naturally assumed it was at the Church of the Apostles. No one linked to their website. If I had gone to the website — or even known it existed — I would have realized it was showing 20 minutes away from the church. Anyway… if you post information, make sure it is all connected.) Besides the excellent message of reconciliation instead of retribution, the Church of the Apostles seemed to be using the film as a sort of evangelism. The minister.stood up after the film and said, essentially, “See what Christians are doing? You might have a bad impression of the church, but We ain’t all bad!” I thought it was a bit too pathetic. Still, I think this is a great film for any church to show or sponsor. And it’s great for people outside the church, too. The message is universal.

Forgiveness isn’t human. It is divine. (from the trailer)

It was only because I read about the award that I even found out about the documentary “As We Forgive Those“. The documentary covers two widows facing their families’ killer’s and asks “Can survivors truly forgive the killers who destroyed their families? Can the government expect this from its people? And can the church … fit into the process of reconciliation today?” The last bit seems the most poignant to me. I’m not sure this sort of national reconciliation would work at all if it was merely a civic duty. I’m hoping to see this next week.