[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

I have long since come to terms with the idea that the human psyche can be 
a terribly slithery object, which is why Christianity is a Good Thing. It's 
far too easy to behave in self-serving and manipulative ways while holding 
firmly to the belief that one is a good and loving person, or at least a 
nice guy. All one has to do is to exercise a certain creative ... er.... 
selectivity in examining one's actions and motivations, and especially the 
consequences of those actions and -- voila! -- one can have that cake and 
eat it too.

I ran into this big-time last week. I got handed some distinctly 
non-Christian behaviour: not a big lie, but a little "white lie"; not 
strong-arming, but a bit of (not necessarily fully conscious) manipulation; 
not real exploitation, but certainly the arrangement of circumstances for a 
desirable outcome -- and there I was struggling to fulfil an obligation I'd 
taken on while wanting no more than to retire to the parish kitchen and 
howl because I'd been hurt and manipulated and deeply disappointed. It 
happens. It happens to me because I tend to be a person who takes people at 
their face value and assumes the best, instead of protecting myself. 
Mistake. One I commit regularly. One that I shall go on committing because 
it seems like the right direction, but I really should be more careful. (To 
be honest, attachment to outcomes was also a big part of the problem. Given 
this much experience, I really should know better than to get my hopes up.)

I can safely say that much of the crud in my much-too-eventful life has 
come from Christians who really don't understand, at any deep level, that 
they are screw-ups, and that's it's okay to be a screw-up because the 
screw-ups are the guys Christ sided with.  Much of the crud in my life has 
come from people who were very busy extracting splinters from other 
people's eyes without being in any way, shape or form conscious of the fact 
that maybe they had some personal ocular building materials to deal with. 
It's always infinitely easier to deal with the Problem in someone else's 
yard, because then the fixing-up work belongs to the neighbour, than it is 
to look at one's own personal weed-patch and say "Whoops!" and get out the 
hoe.

And then, when people point out that maybe we've got some personal hoeing 
to do, we may compound the problem by going into denial about it, digging 
in our heels, adamantly refusing to consider the possibility that maybe we 
*do* have some issues to deal with, some mistakes to set to rights, some 
apologies to make.  Weeds? What weeds? I don't see any weeds. They more 
we're pressed, the deeper we dig ourselves into denial and the more damage 
we do. Our Muslim brothers and sisters have, I've been told, the notion 
that deceit and fearfulness are sins. I'd agree, and I'd like to see them 
added to our Seven Deadlies, right up near the top, after Pride and Anger. 
The two combine to form denial, which then becomes more of a problem than 
the original problem. Denial is the nice guy's way of preserving his or her 
self-esteem, at whatever cost to anyone else; the more fearful we are of 
losing that self-esteem, the more we deceive ourselves -- but not others, 
and especially not God.

I suffered on Thursday from some very typical church-type nice-guy sinful 
behaviour: dishonesty, exploiting volunteers to get the necessary stuff 
done, avoiding conflict or unpleasantness, nice-guy manipulation, and 
silencing, with a dollop of denial. It's behaviour that's as common as dirt 
and probably as old. I don't like it, and when I experience it, I will call 
the behaviour. Which is what I'm doing now.

Our Lord didn't call upon us to be nice guys, but to be good people. 
Sometimes it seems to take a while to learn that the two of them are not 
just the same thing, but something more like opposites, and preserving our 
attachment to niceness may come at the cost of love.  We're called upon to 
be self-honest, to accept that we do screw up at times and our screw-ups 
may profoundly hurt others, and to deal with that instead of turning a 
blind eye to it. Yes, you too. Yes, me too.

http://spindlegeek.blog-city.com/


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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.