What Have Nose Rings To Do With Sanctification?
A few weeks ago, I joined several thousand others, including my talented colleagues in the Redbud Writers Guild, for the biennial Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This year’s festival featured several gifted writers, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Marilynne Robinson, and Ann Voskamp. But it wasn’t these writers or even the breakout sessions hosted by Redbuds that inspired me most of all.
It was the nose rings. I’ve wanted one for years. They have always struck me as a blend of elegance and edginess, the perfect accessory for those who color just a little bit outside the lines. As much as I’ve liked them, its never been the right time or place to get one, but seeing so many of my fellow creatives sporting them galvanized me get my own. So, after my usual daily routine of cleaning, cooking, running my daily 5, grading papers, chasing toddlers and changing diapers, when the girls’ bellies were full of vegetable stew and Cheddar Bay biscuits, I slipped off for some “me” time.
To the local tattoo parlor, “Pure Addictions”. On the drive there, I tried to squelch the small alarms bells going on in my head, you know the ones that sound off right before you’re about to do something impossibly stupid? Yeah, those. I rushed in, trying not to think about it. Once inside, the small alarm bells became shrieking tornado sirens. Various erotica pictures hung on the black walls. In the back, a group of disheveled teenagers gathered around a whimpering girl while she got a dragon tattooed on her arm. In the front, a middle-aged, suburban mom talked to a guy named Dave about getting a lip and eyebrow piercing. “I can’t do it today,” she said, “my kids are in the car.” You leave your kids in a hot car while you talk facial piercings?
What on earth am I doing here? All that should have been enough to send me packing. But it didn’t.
There are three things you don’t want to hear when you’re getting a hole punched in your nose. The first is, “Oh no!” The second, “Oh, crap, there’s soooo much blood!” The third, “Ric? Ric? Can you fix this? I messed it up, man!” And those three little sentences led to a fourth, “Um, we’re gonna have to, um, like, pierce it again because the cartilage is so, um, thick where Dave pierced it. I don’t do my piercings like ‘at.” Two holes in my nose? You’ve got to be kidding. That should have been enough. But it wasn’t. In the end, I paid thirty bucks for two holes in my left nostril and a diamond screw.
I didn’t last three days before I unscrewed it (yes, really) from my nose. I didn’t feel edgy. I definitely didn’t feel elegant. I felt … silly. Kind of like the balding, fifty-year-old man that drives too fast in his red convertible because it fools him, for a moment, into thinking he’s young again, with all the world before him. Or the woman who thinks she’s tricked time by spending $4 million on plastic surgery. People get nose rings for lots of good reasons. My friend Lauren got one to honor her husband and children’s Indian heritage. Monica got one for aesthetic reasons and Leah doesn’t remember not having one.
But for me, it was about rebellion. And what I realized was that I didn’t want to be rebellious. When did I go from being the kind of person that pushed every boundary, broke all the rules, to a person whose most rebellious act in a single day was look the other way while her daughter pounds a whole can of Dr. Pepper with her Cheese Puffs? How does that type of change happen, anyway?
It’s not a new question. It’s a question asked every day by by pastors and psychiatrists, by parents and teachers. How do people change? It’s a process theologians call sanctification and it’s a question I (and my two extra nose holes) will be exploring right here in upcoming months.
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On Love as Medicine for Sick Souls
Last year was one of the more difficult periods of my life. The word “horror” comes to mind. Aside from a few years of teen angst and a few months living in the exurbs of Dallas, I’ve never really struggled with depression. Anxiety? Perfectionism? Sure, but not depression. So last winter, I was completely blindsided by an overwhelming sense of dread and hopelessness. It probably had something to do with being pregnant, but mostly I attribute it to living unwisely for a very long time.
During my doctoral program, I worked four jobs and commuted through L.A. traffic two or three times a week. I completed my dissertation in two semesters rather than five. And then a season of loss took its toll as well: I said goodbye to friends and family–home–when we moved from L.A. Said goodbye to a job I loved to be with Ellie and finish my dissertation. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Laska, my sweet rescue dog, before she was shot and killed while staying at my parent’s. I almost said goodbye to Ellie when she contracted RSV.
Ultimately the piper demanded to be paid. The final straw was when winter came here to Holland, Michigan and I didn’t see the sun from November until May. There I was, great with child, staring at gray skies day after day, not knowing what was happening to me. Because of my pregnancy, I refused medication and took matters into my own hands. Although my doctorate is technically in leadership, my work focused also on spiritual formation and soul care. If I couldn’t help myself, well then, I had just paid several thousand dollars to learn something that couldn’t even make a difference in my own life.
Could I practice what I preached? Would it work? I asked myself, what I would say to someone if they came to me with the symptoms I had and I came up with a program of four steps to follow everyday: 1.) Scripture and prayer. My spiritual life needed to increase, not decrease, as is so often the temptation in times like this. 2.) Exercise. The body is important to our spiritual formation, and exercise benefits us not only physically but psychologically as well. 3.) Talk to people. Don’t isolate. 4.) Focus on others. Depression and anxiety become a microscope by which you analyze, over and over again, your own life and the problems you struggle with. Might turning this around and focusing on others, loving others well, get us out?
I made sure to do these steps every day. One, two, three, four, repeat. Of them all, I think number four had the most effect on my outlook, which really isn’t a surprise when you look at some of the research on clinical depression. Although it seems counterintuitive, high rates of depression correspond with high rates of self-absorption. In other words, depression is a vicious cycle because it makes us focus on our own problems, which in turn causes more depression.
See, I don’t think our problem is that we love ourselves too little–it’s that we love others too little. We are so quick to turn inward when things go wrong, and I believe that a great number of suffering people would benefit more by volunteering in a soup kitchen than sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch for an hour a week.
The way out is by loving others well. I’m not saying that medication is wrong or that this is the only solution–each case is different–but I am saying that loving others must be part of of any plan to get well and get whole. In the mind of Jesus, loving others flows out of our love for God. What is the greatest commandment? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength.” The second is like it, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
That is why the second pillar of this blog is loving others–because it is crucial to our spiritual well-being. I don’t exactly know how to love others well, all the time, but that’s what I’ll be exploring here. I do know that we need one another, far more than we realize.
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Let’s Talk About Sex (and Sadism)
When my husband, Paul, tells me he’s going to spend Saturday morning at a meeting called Porn and Pancakes, I don’t even blink. I give him a kiss on the cheek and tell him to have
fun. Since before we were married, Paul’s worked as a therapist for men struggling with sexual addiction. Because of his job, I’ve heard more horror stories about the dark underbelly of the porn world than I care to think about or even count. But because of the violent nature of porn and way porn demeans women and causes a breakdown in relationships, I never thought that women would be drawn to the sexually violent, explicit material. Wouldn’t that, after all, be setting us back 50 years? Au contrare.
In the last few months, E.L. James’ first novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, has gone from an underground erotica novel to
mainstream literature, topping both the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists. Labelled “mommy porn”, Fifty Shades is the story of Anastasia Steele, a naive college student, and Christian Grey, a troubled young billionaire with a taste for BDSM. Fifty Shades, which began as fan fiction for the Twilight series, explores the relationship between the unlikely pair, complete with a plethora of NC-17 sexually violent sex scenes.
From radio to TV to online columns, people are raving about Fifty Shades, so in keeping with my commitment to stay on top of the popular literature in our time (a commitment that has introduced me to character greats like Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Lisbeth Salander), I read Fifty Shades. There is so much to be said about it. It’s poorly written with a terrible plot and poor character development. It’s hard evidence that the use of pornography and erotica is on the rise among women, that it’s not just part of some fringe culture (as I naively mistakenly thought), but mainstream. It is, indeed, a backsliding among a generation of women who take for granted their hard-won equality and fantasize about sexual subservience. It’s an illustration of how far our desires have fallen, how twisted and off-the-mark they have become.
But what concerns me most about the Fifty Shades phenomenon is how deceptive these fantasies are in how they twist the realities of violence against women. This week, The Atlantic published a story that documented the lives of six women from the Pakistani city of Karachi. Aeyesha, 18, was raped in her uncle’s house while she was trying to get bread for her family. Rehana, 37, says that since her husband sees her as an “animal with no rights”, broken ribs, broken teeth, and miscarriages are “routine”. Salma, 39, is often threatened with acid and cries in the shower when she sees her battered body, broken and bruised again and again by her husband.
These are only a few of the handful of stories emerging from Pakistan, the third most dangerous place in the world for women. in 2009, 8548 cases of domestic violence were reported in the four provinces of Pakistan. Four in five women face some form of domestic violence. But that’s Pakistan … surely things are not so grim in the Western world? Au contrare. In the U.S., the number of abused women falls to one in four, but domestic violence is still the leading cause of injury for women between the ages 15 and 44–more than car accidents, muggings, and rape combined. In America, a woman is beaten by her husband or partner every 15 seconds.
But Fifty Shades is all in good fun–it’s consenting sex, and after all, Anastasia is presented with a contract that if signed, will be her consent to be a Submissive. By signing the contract, she will knowingly be agreeing to stipulations such as, “The Dominant accepts the Submissive as his, to own, control, dominate, and discipline during the Term. The Dominant may use the Submissive’s body at any time during the Allotted Times or any agreed additional times in any many he deems fit, sexually or otherwise.”
The real harm in Fifty Shades–and other “literature” like it–is that it dulls our conscience to the hideous crime that domestic violence really is. Studies show that repeated exposure to violent pornographic material–(like Fifty Shades) is linked to more aggressive behavior. Feminist writers have rightfully long argued that pornography ”promotes a (cultural) climate in which acts of sexual hostility directed against women are not only tolerated but ideologically encouraged”.
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Kirk Cameron’s Monumental Problem
Simultaneously published at Her.Meneutics, the Christianity Today blog for women.
There’s a story about a small band of 19th-century pioneers crossing the Mojave Desert to earn their fortune in thepromised land of California. Unprepared for the Mojave’s harsh, arid climate and deceived by length of a desert mile, they died of acute dehydration. The tragedy of their story is not just that they died, but that their death was needless as well: just three feet below the surface of the Mojave’s cracked and dry ground were springs of fresh water. The pioneers were, quite literally, standing on a reservoir yet dying of thirst.
In his heatedly contested debut documentary, Monumental, Kirk Cameron makes a similar claim about the situation facing 21st-century America. With a government debt nearing $16 trillion and a culture that values entertainment over education, innovation over tradition, and individual preferences over moral law and virtue, it’s safe to say that we live in a theological and moral desert. In Monumental, Cameron, an outspoken evangelical Christian, argues that like that group of pioneers, Americans today are standing on a reservoir and dying of thirst.
And the springs of life for our cultural desert are the wisdom of our country’s forefathers.
Cameron’s documentary, which debuted in theaters two weeks ago, is his sincere quest to unpack how our forefathers, the Pilgrims, might help us get back on track. The Pilgrims were a tiny group of religious outcasts traveling to America in 1620 to escape religious persecution in England while still maintaining their cultural identity. Cameron traces the steps of the Pilgrims to discover the source of the principles that were used to establish the American government. “What principles did they use to ultimately wind up with a nation that has received more blessing, security, and prosperity than any nation in the history of the world?”
Cameron concludes that the strategy employed by the pilgrims—then followed by the Founding Fathers—is commemorated in the National Monument to Our Forefathers, a statue located in Plymouth, Massachusetts. On the main pedestal, a figure named “Faith” points towards heaven while clutching the Bible. Faith is buttressed by four figures that exemplify the four principles upon which the Pilgrims established their commonwealth: freedom, morality, law, and education.
According to Dr. Marshall Foster, president of the World History Institute, this “matrix of liberty” shows us how to regain liberty should we ever lose it. Foster states, “[It’s] the only successful strategy of liberty that has been carried out in the history of mankind . . . this strategy is what built America.”
I’ll admit that I approached Monumental with more than a little skepticism; I’m wary of a reductionism that tries to explain massive tides of human history in terms of a single movement or cause. Before seeing it, I worried that the film would diminish history by failing to take into account the full story of the “American experiment.”
As expected, by focusing exclusively on the Pilgrims, the film didn’t even mention the rich diversity of people that came to America—the landed British gentry, the convicts and debtors in Georgia, the African slaves, the poor of Europe, among others. America is, and always has been, a cultural smorgasbord of competing voices and values.
Second, Cameron could have shored up the integrity of the film by consulting experts with more training in history. The “experts” called on in this film may be perfectly legitimate voices in their respective areas of focus, but their expertise in history is dubious and weakens the film’s credibility, even if the movie’s overall message is provocative and convincing at points.
But the most glaring omission of Monumental was the failure to distinguish the motivation of the Founding Fathers for following the strategy outlined by the Pilgrims—not because theybelieved it but because it was useful. They distributed Bibles and endorsed the teaching of religion in school because they understood that morality “was necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind” and they doubted peoples’ ability to achieve morality apart from religion. As George Washington wrote, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion . . . Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail to the exclusion of religious principle.”
But while the film is not exactly right, it’s not exactly wrong. Many philosophers and political thinkers have understood that a democracy that loses its religious moorings will also lose its way. In his magnificent analysis of American democracy, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville said that democracies cause tendencies towards selfish individualism, consumerism, materialism, and equality at the expense of liberty—the very kinds of tendencies that religious beliefs guard against. “The reign of liberty,” he wrote, “cannot be established without morality, nor morality without beliefs.” A democracy is governed by the will of the people, and when objective morality or virtue gives way to subjective values, a society will fail to develop people with the character needed to rule a government with wisdom.
I wish that Cameron had relied on experts with more relevant training so that these issues might have been addressed with deeper clarity. But to his credit, Cameron isn’t sticking his head in the sand and waiting for the Rapture, unlike others from his particular slice of Christendom. “Everybody’s telling me the world’s going to hell,” he says in the film. “To top it off, I have friends in church that tell me that the worse things get, the better it really is, because it means the end is near. Don’t worry that it’s going to hell … the whole thing is going to burn. Really? Because I have kids in this world and I want a great future for them.”
Cameron’s sincerity and affability make it hard for me to completely ignore his concerns. Besides, his core argument is hard to dispute: America is in trouble, and it’s going to be a “monumental” task to set things right.
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Chasing Eudaimonia: The Art of Living Well
This week, we’ll be focusing on the three pillars that serve as the foundation for this blog: living well,
loving well, and leading well. These “pillars” are best conceived as three strands woven together–each one critical to the other. In other words, I don’t think it’s possible to live well without loving well or to love well without living well. And both living well and loving well are important to the task of leadership. Without living well, our leadership becomes hypocritical, hollow, shallow; without love, our leadership is dictatorial and self-serving.
People who want to work towards a better world must have a shared vision of “living well” or “the good life”. But what exactly does it mean to live well? Sometimes its easier to arrive at understanding of something by seeing what it’s not, and I know the ways I have not lived well. The college years of partying and chasing highs through drugs and alcohol. The seminary years devoted to another kind of addiction: workaholism. I broke my own back working four jobs taking full-time doctoral classes. But those are obvious ways I did not live well. Less obvious are the minutes, hours, I wasted on worry or bitterness, or the years I spent turned inwards, focused exclusively upon myself and my problems. In those ways, I failed to live well.
The question of how to live well is a question as old as time. For the Greeks, the concept of eudaimonia (happiness, welfare, human flourishing) was the cornerstone of Aristotelian ethics and political philosophy. Eudaimonia (human flourishing)–or what it is that constitutes the good life–was as heatedly debated in 300 B.C. as it is today–some thought the good life was pleasure and wealth while others thought it was rooted in a virtuous, wise character.
For Muslims, living well was found in worshipping God in all aspects of life and being obedient to what He revealed in the Qur’an. For Hindus the good life is wrapped up in the idea moksha, which is obtained by self-realization through the practice of yoga. For the Israelites and most contemporary Christians, living well means trusting in God and in living in loving obedience to His laws and commandments as revealed in the Scriptures.
But for Christians, the good life–human flourishing–isn’t simply punitive or negative. It isn’t found by looking inward and navel gazing or in looking upward and just obeying all the rules. Jesus taught better than that. N.T. Wright comments, “While other religious leaders of the day saw their task as being to keep themselves in quarantine away from possible sources of moral and spiritual infection, Jesus saw himself as a doctor. There’s no point in a doctor staying in quarantine. He’d never do his job.”
Similarly, the good life is a life focused outward–grounded in love for God and demonstrated through obedience, and love for others, demonstrated by compassionate action, especially for the disenfranchised. The art of living well is discovering what thoughts, attitudes, and habits move us toward the good life and what moves us away.
On January 25, 1996, the rock musical Rent, which tells the story of a group of impoverished artistsliving in New York City, opened on in an off-Broadway theatre. Since that humble beginning, the musical has grossed over $280 million, earning both a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Musical. In the song Seasons of Love, the cast asks how you quantify the value of one year of human life. In daylights? In sunsets? Inches? Miles? Laughter? Strife? There are so many ways to measure a year of human life, the song concludes that love is the only proper measure of the value of human life.
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Remember Your Fairy Tales
Last Friday, NBC premiered the second of two primetime dramas that drawn firmly grounded in fairy tale lore, but Disney never told us about these fairy tales. ABC’s Once Upon a Time centers on a group of fairy tale characters cursed by a spiteful, evil queen to live where there are no happy endings–Storybrooke, Maine. The characters, including Snow White, Prince Charming, the seven dwarfs, Jiminy Cricket, and others, have no recollection of their real identities and their single hope of returning to fairy-tale land is Emma Swan, the rough and tumble daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming.
While ABC’s Once deeply delves into characters we thought we knew, NBC’s Grimm is a “grim” crime procedural drama with a fairy tale overlay. Homicide detective Nick Burnhardt sees things he can’t explain, then discovers that he is a descendant of the “Grimm’s”, an elite group of hunters who chase the monsters fictionalized by German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the 19th century.
Different as they are, neither show resembles the shiny, saccharine Disney films that minimize both suffering and the full gravity of evil. In fact, it could be said that in this way, these modern shows are closer to the ancient stories than the tamer tales we are familiar with. Regardless, art is a mirror of culture, reflecting the guiding assumptions and worldview of a society, and I believe that Hollywood’s recent focus on the fairy tale says something important about the prevailing mindset of Americans.
For centuries, the fairy tale has served as a beacon of hope for dark times. During the Great Depression, many people did not have the money to pay for enough food in their household, but when Disney originally released Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1938, people resonated so much with the film that it made four times more money than any other film released in 1938, garnering $3.5 million in the U.S. and Canada. In a world demoralized by the horrors of World War II, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, respectively.
The appeal of fairy tales is not that they minimize suffering, but that they show a way through the darkest of times. ”Fairy Tales are more than true,” wrote English journalist G.K. Chesterton, “not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
In producing two fairy-tale-themed shows in a single season, Hollywood is tapping in to an ancient recipe to soothe today’s anxieties about the world economy and civil unrest. ”There is something comforting about these stories,” said Once producer Edward Kitsis when asked about a recent slew of fairy tale-based Hollywood product, such as Red Riding Hood, Puss in Boots and others. In these “difficult times,” fairy tales “give people hope,” he added. And as the character Snow White says in the premiere of Once, “believing even in the possibility of a happy ending is a very powerful thing.”
Photo credits: ABC
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To Viv, On Your Three Month Birthday
Begin here. Weak. Fumbling. Grasping. You protest. Indignant, you whimper, and your cobalt eyes cry out, “Why this? I want to move, to walk, to run.” But running, jumping, climbing, skipping, dancing–all movement–begins here. Weak. Fumbling. Grasping. Awkward. To run, to be strong, Viv, you must first understand and experience your weakness.
It is not easy to watch you flounder. I want to press fast-forward, and spare you the frustration. I see how much you love to move your legs so fast in your chair, delighting in the speed you can move them. You are not content to lay down, and you constantly bend yourself to sit, and then sitting, are not content to sit. You grab my fingers and pull yourself up to stand. Your legs certainly seem strong and sure. You grin, and look around. The world looks different when you are standing.
No, it is not easy to watch. But Viv, this is the humble way we all begin. Weak and awkward, grasping towards an ever-distant goal. You know they say that to begin is the most difficult thing of all, but I am not sure this is true. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The act of putting on your running shoes and greeting a cold, frosty morning. To decide and then to act. The beginning is hard, it is true, but I believe the greater challenge is summoning the courage to accept press on through our weakness. To finish the the long journey when our energy flags, to keep running when the tips of toes and fingers grow icy from the chill, to follow through and finish well when our decisions lead us to unpleasant places we had not expected.
And this beginning is not the end. A thousand more beginnings, just like this, will greet you in years to come,
Viv. I pray for grace to meet you in those beginnings, there in your weakness. I pray that the twin virtues, courage and humility, will propel you forward, smiling, through the tough and sticky spaces. I love you, little girl. Happy Birthday.
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(Un)Twisted Sisters
Most of us have memories of them. Those girls on the playground, in high school, in our sorority house and even in our workplace, who were bent on making life miserable for anyone not included in the elite “clique.” They teased, bullied and alienated. These are the girls now epitomized in a slew of Hollywood teen films such as the “Mean Girls,” but it’s a relational dynamic that strings it way through human history all the way back to Rachel and Leah: the harsh reality of female rivalry.
In politics, business and our personal lives, both men and women are guilty of merciless competition, envy and cattycriticism. We don’t need to look any further than ESPN or E! to know that competition and envy abound in relationships regardless of gender, but in relationships between females, it takes on a new form because of the scarceness of opportunities for women and even the scarceness of “good” men.
Often times envy is spurred on by fear: fear of rejection, of alienation, of anonymity, of a perceived purposeless of one’s life because ‘someone else’ did it first. Unfortunately, these expectations and fears can cause women, even more so than men, to have twisted relationships in which we are constantly comparing or criticizing one another.
As Kelly Valen, author of Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships, stated in an interview regarding an incident of alienation and abandonment by her sorority sisters, “Although the incident obviously involved both men and women, it was that lingering hurt that I had from women and that betrayal … we have expectations of support from women.”
Yet, in 1 Thessalonians 5:11-14, the apostle Paul calls Christians to rise above these contentions and set an example for those outside the faith.
In this passage, Paul exhorts us to “untwist” our relationships by encouraging one another, building up one another, helping one another, and seeking the good for each other. Matthew Henry comments, “We should not only be careful about our own comfort and welfare, but promote the comfort and welfare of others also. He was a Cain who said, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ We must bear one another’s burdens, so as to fulfill the law of Christ.”
I’m learning that to truly “untwist” our relationships, as Christian women leaders, we must be willing to stretch ourselves and let go of both our judgments and perceptions about other women—as well as our fears about our own perceived shortcomings—by acknowledging and supporting the giftedness of other Christian women.
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Marriage Matters: All the Single Ladies
I never planned to get married at the early-spring age of 23. While all my friends were either pairing off or pining to do so, I was plotting how to live several years on each of the seven continents (yes, even chilly, dark, Antartica). Husbands and babies were the furthest thing from my mind, and at 23, I had room enough and time to be cavalier about my singleness. I knew my desire for adventure and my lack of desire for marriage were unusual, but I never felt insecure or ashamed.
According to the sprawling cover story of The Atlantic, had I remained single rather than choosing to marry, being a single female would no longer be that unusual. According to Kate Bolick, culture editor for Veranda magazine, more and more women are remaining single due to a shortage of “marriageable” men—men who earn more money and are more educated. The perfect storm of women’s ascent in society and the simultaneous decline in life prospects for men has led to a “crisis in gender” in which women must choose between deadbeats and players.
For Bolick, the economic crisis has split the dating pool into two camps: deadbeats who are unemployed, underemployed, or uneducated, and the playboys who eschew commitment because the demand for successful men outnumbers the supply. These changes come in conjunction with the tendency for people to marry later, marry less, and the ability to have a biological child without a physical partner.
Bolick argues that the world must come to grips about these changes in marriage, intimacy, and kinship in order to have less unhappy families. As an alternative to the nuclear family, she suggests the collaborative raising of children by a group of women who reside together—a variant of the social structure demonstrated by the Mosuo people in China.
Bolick makes some important critiques about the way society views single woman—as if they were adjuncts to society, incomplete in themselves. She urges others to not reduce women’s identity to just whom it is they do or do not marry, but to consider the depth and complexities of the network of relationships that emerge from our roles as daughters, friends, aunts, and cousins. Bolick makes her finest point when she resolves to accept her singleness. “If I stopped seeing my present life as provisional,” she writes, “perhaps I’d be a little more … happier.”
Still, a number of concerns surface in Bolick’s piece regarding the nature of marriage. First, Slate’s Jessica Grose offers an incisive critique that most of the twelve cover stories written by women have to
do with nothing more than specific women’s issues. Second, Bolick states that due to the economy, single women must choose between deadbeats and players. Given that Bolick has more experience than I do in the dating game, I can take this at face value as her experience, but I have trouble equating men who have lost their jobs or have taken paycuts due to The Great Recession as “deadbeats.” Are marriageable men only those who make more than we do? Does that automatically make men “losers” if they don’t? Do we want gender parity, or to be able to marry up?
Second, she places the blame for the shifting state of marriage in America on the broad back of the women’s movement. Due to the women’s movement, we are putting off marriage, marrying less often, and have developed biological means to have children without a man. Although she doesn’t support her claim with evidence, a connection between the two can be reasoned. However, she takes this to nth degree when she proposes to raise children in families of women, and reduce the role of male to a sexual partner. This greatly diminishes the role and identity of men and minimizes the gratifying, mutually beneficial relationship that men and women were designed to have.
Bolick’s article is endearingly rambling—one feels as though they were along on the ride with her as she comes to grips with her singleness. Life experiences are, after all, very rarely as straightforward as a three-point essay. But her perceptions about marriage and men underscore the importance of Christians providing—by rhetoric and by example—a meaningful alternative to the prevailing views about marriage.
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Hope in Time of Recession
It seems like it’s pretty hard to go anywhere lately without hearing talk of the current economic downturn. Even though I’ve been trying to reduce my daily intake of news, people are talking about it at church, at work, even at the little deli I shop at every morning. Christian universities have tightened budgets and implemented temporary hiring freezes. Churches and non-profits are buckling under the strain of reduced donations. According to one expert, churches alone will experience a 3 to 6 billion dollar loss in expected donations over a single quarter.
In a survey posted last December, The Barna Group reported that two out of every three families, including over 150 million adults, have already been affected by the economic downturn. By the time the economy starts to turn around, most of us will know someone affected by the recession – friends and family that have lost homes, lost jobs, lost hope. For many, what once seemed so stable was not so firm and sure after all.
The stark realities of the current economic crisis have caused me to think deeply about other kinds of recessions we face as believers – specifically the emotional and spiritual recessions that are an inevitable part of the Christian life.
A recession of the spirit can be triggered by a personal crisis such as the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, sickness, or difficulties in marriage or ministry or they can be the result of gradual, slow drift away from God. Either way it occurs, a recession of the spirit can leave us feeling rudderless, as if we are blindly groping for answers in a dark room.
So how do you maintain hope in a time of recession, be it financial or spiritual? In my life and ministry, three things have buoyed my spirit even in the most turbulent of times.
1. Telling the truth. Telling the truth means being honest about my circumstances, no matter how difficult it may be. It means admitting and accepting the full gravity of reality. Being transparent and honest about my situation brings down my defenses and allows God a window of opportunity in which to work.
2. Creating a list of “grates.” Creating a list of “grates” is counting my blessings. Everything I am grateful for goes on that list. Everything. Like having an opportunity for advanced education, a fridge full of food, a big, fluffy duvet comforter, a strong marriage, or a healthy baby girl growing strong in my belly. When I’m faced with the list of all my blessings, I realize that most of the things I worry about never come to pass–they never even happen. And all those monsters in my mind start to shrink in comparison to the sheer greatness of the blessings and gifts I have been given.
3. Blessing others. The last thing I do is I try to figure out how to bless someone else. How would I lift their depression or help them in their time of need? What would help them feel blessed, special, and give them the sense that everything is going to be okay? This could be anything from a prayer to a good meal to a listening ear. I’ll freely admit I’m not always the best on this point, but my goal is to grow better at this with time and practice.
We cannot choose whether or not we will encounter times of recession, but we can choose how we respond in those periods. As French theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote, “Hope is a firm advance toward a masked future.”
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