Fishes, Loaves, and Spring Quarter

I kind of staggered into this quarter exhausted after a w0nderfully fascinating but rather grueling course load during the Winter. I didn't realize how spent I really was until I was discussing my schedule with one of my advisors and burst into tears as I considered what it would look like to implement it. That is generally not a good sign. And I hate crying in front of people. Bleah!

But what came out of that time was an image that continues to repeat itself throughout the quarter, so I think it's worth sharing. My advisor commented that it seemed like this quarter was one in which I would have to present my meager offerings of energy/mental wattage, or "fish and loaves," to God and trust that God would give me what I needed. [Note: operative word = trust. Not an area of competency for me at the moment...]

Now I have had two different classes meet this week where one of the fish and loaves passages from the Gospel of Mark has come up in depth, and I just noticed that the disciples of Jesus do not "get" him because they are so focused on their understanding of what is possible or not. When I am simply thinking about what I am capable of doing, I really do lose sight of trusting the God who can take little scraps of bread and fish and turn it into a feast for 5,000. It's simultaneously frustrating, educational, and encouraging to be in a position where your resources are running so thin that you are pressed into deeper dependence on God. You'd think God was actually wanting me to LEARN about being a disciple or something...

Leadership and Institutional Pathology

I'm taking a class called "Leadership and Character Development" right now, and admittedly approached it with a heavy dose of skepticism. I kind of thought it would have all these vision-buzzed-out easily excitable people with palm-pilots ready to save the world, with a teacher more than ready to develop all the latent messiah complexes in the room. Fortunately, this has not been the case. There's been a lot of talk of integrity, and leading out of who you are, which I can, surprisingly, actually resonate with and apply.

Much of my skepticism about this class started with perusing the booklist. There's Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People," (which has become the "Chicken Soup for the Aspirant, Trendy Executive Soul,") and "The Servant," which is a story about leadership--basically a distillation of Covey and De Pree for people that don't like the big words/complex ideas (??) in the originals. Cynicism aside, I found the ideas in the books themselves to be worth reflecting on and rather helpful. My cynicism, I realized, developed many years ago from the experience of walking into the office of a boss (who regularly would take food off my desk and calmly start eating it while talking to me, fail to give me eye contact because he was, um, looking at other parts of my anatomy, etc.) and seeing many of these books on his own shelves. I had made judgments about the books because of a person who (ostensibly) had read them. Okay, okay, so I judged a book by its cover.

All this thought about leadership has led me to think a lot about what I have come to fondly call "institutional pathologies." What I mean by this is that, as a lot of therapists who specialize in family systems theory will tell you, there are certain people in any group who function as "problem-bearers" for the collective whole. They tend to manifest problems that are present within the whole institution, but the community kindly relies on certain individuals to act them out so that "all the rest of us can be reassured by our own normalcy." I have seen over and over (to the point of nausea) institutions that rely on the willingness of some of their staff to work long hours, for little pay and great emotional angst, to compensate for the lack of staff, financial, and/or emotional support that should be a part of any decent and equitable work environment.

I am not just talking about myself, although I have had many experiences like this. I have also talked to at least 25 people working at non-profits and churches who are working nights, weekends, nights of weekends, getting chronic muscle pain, etc. because of unrealistic workloads under which they are laboring. And, to be clear, these are people who value work, who care about their jobs and the people they are serving, who are not "whiny slackers" who just want to prop their feet up at work and eat bon-bons.

There's a double bind here. On one hand, you can suck it up and meet the unrealistic expectations, and feel really spiffy about your own ability to produce under less than ideal circumstances. On the other hand, you then realize that you're enabling a sick system because your own work ethic is pumped up on steroids. I think there is a larger trend in our work lives that is present in our personal lives as well. Life is speeding up--we have text messaging, microwaves, e-mail, cell phones, yadayada. But we as people are still finite, and we can only be in one place at a time, despite all the virtual forms of communication we have, and we can only accomplish so much. And yet, declaring our own limitedness seems a confession of weakness (humility?) or laziness--at least that's the fear.

Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to make a conscious choice to not be ruled by a "tyranny of the urgent." This is becoming somewhat of a spiritual discipline: not just frantically plunging into things, but spending about 10 minutes each morning thinking through what my true priorities are for the day/week. On a "larger picture" level, I am starting to think about the fact that first am foremost I am a child of God, not a machine producing papers, reports, etc. My worth is not in what I produce! I think this is something that we all have to remind ourselves of in a "what have you done for me lately" kind of world.

Tookie and Schwarzenegger

I just read an NPR article about Stanley Tookie, one of the original co-founders of the Crips. What an amazing story of someone working through bad choices made earlier in life in such a way that it not only transforms them but others as well. One of the things that really hit me from the NPR article was Tookie's statement that "I was miseducated on manhood. I thought that manhood constituted violence, aggression, womanizing." Tookie is on death row, and because of the ways that he's turned his life around, been nominated for a Nobel Prize, and sought to influence youth, many are hoping he will be pardoned by Schwarzenegger. I think there's a great irony here; think about the type of manhood that Schwarzenegger is known for and has presented over the years on film! He has built his career on courses of action that, when actualized by Tookie, have resulted in the ruin of many people.

If Schwarzenegger does not pardon Tookie, who has been hugely influential among youth who are on the cusp of joining gangs or are already in them, it send the message that "no matter how much you repent, change, try to redeem your mistakes, it makes absolutely no difference." Thousands of youth who have learned to solve problems by killing will watch someone who has told them not to do this be killed himself, even though he has clearly demonstrated that he deeply regrets his decisions and is willing to change by virtue of his actions. This is the stuff that riots are built on.

What was significant about Tookie's experience is that part of his transformation occurred when he had time in prison to read and reflect. I lived in inner-city East LA for eight years; I know that time alone in an urban environment is difficult to find, and given the condition of many public inner city schools in LA, being equipped with the resources to study (books, adequate libraries, etc.) is an even harder commodity. Isn't some of this really about a larger societal failure as well as poor individual choices (which, yes, are there too), and shouldn't we recognize how much Tookie had to overcome to get to the point where he is now? That Tookie's fate hangs on the pardon of a former action hero strikes me as the cruelest of ironies.

Hmm...

I am not what you would call the most technically enlightened person, "becoming emblogged" is a new thing for me. Who knew? You can have vulnerability and anonymity right in the same, nifty cyberpackage.

I'm currently a seminary student, and it's amazing how easy it is to a) take everything way too seriously or b) move into a caffeinated haze where my brain starts making really weird cross references (pun intended...). For example, I was reading something about Pontius Pilate and honestly, for a second started thinking "Pontius Pilates." Let's not even think about the kind of exercise regimen that could lead to.

In class today, one of my profs was talking about distrusting theological fads; I could quite resonate with this. I like some of the stuff going on with the "Emerging Church" for instance, but somehow just can't totally jump headlong into it. I've already jumped headlong into enough different ministry trends over the years to start taking things with a grain of salt.

I have a theory that ministry outreach is all about the fonts. Church outreaches to GenX do a grainy Courier font. Church outreaches to millenials are going more lower-case Arial. Boomer outreach is still hanging out in Times New Roman. Does this mean that boomers are still the "template," while Xers are grainy and raw and millenials are fresh and retro-80's? Which comes first, the font or the culture? This is one to invest great energy contemplating while you're, say, cleaning out the lint from your dryer filter.