CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter
ARE WE CARRYING PRIVACY TOO FAR?
I was at the doctor’s office recently, because that is how old people get to have a social life. After cheerful nurse Olivia had me stand on the scales, she perkily asked a new question, “Do you want to know your weight today?” What?
I asked Dr. V. “Is that a necessary question? Are there actually people who don’t want to know their weight?” She sighed a bit as she said, “Yes, there are.”
Isn’t that carrying this new penchant for privacy a bit far, keeping stuff private from ourselves, lest someone—like me?—misuses it? No wonder 40% of the US population is obese, if we are that far into denial. [No, of course I don’t mean you!]
WHILE WE ARE ON THE SUBJECT OF BODIES…
In my part of the Christian tradition, because Methodists are “doers of the word, and not hearers only,” [James 1:22] and sometimes doers only without bothering to hear, it is popular to quote Theresa of Avila--even though she was not exactly a Methodist, but she was methodistic--about “Christ has no hands but your hands, no feet but your feet, etc.” We tend to interpret that as “mine are the only hands Christ has, so I’d better get busy.” I have come to think not so much that I am the hands of the Body of Christ as I am one lowly cell in the Body of Christ. All the cells of a body are important, but only as part of the body, not all by themselves. I prefer to think that I am a cell in the hands, but if I’m only a cell in the colon, well, that’s necessary, too.
ELEVATOR SUPERIORITY
Recently someone told me, maybe in a book, about a psychologist and a psychiatrist having an argument. It went like… “You’re being passive-aggressive.” “No, you’re being passive aggressive.” It would have been fun to be there.
A friend told of us of her husband’s experience when he was doing a post-doc in psychology at a major university hospital. There were other psych post-docs, and also post-docs in psychiatry. Psychiatrists always look down on psychologists, of course, because psychiatrists are also MDs and can prescribe medicines. All psychologists can do is say, “Do you want to talk about it?” In this hospital, though, the psychiatrists expressed their superiority by disdaining the psychologists because they used the elevators. The psychiatrists were much too busy and important to wait for an elevator; they ran up and down the stairs.
MYSTERY, NOT MASTERY
In his Foreword to Rachel Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom, Dean Ornish says that “Most books try to lead you out of mystery into mastery.” That is not Remen’s way.
That’s one thing I can claim for CIW: this column is not about mastery, about some number of effective habits or steps to wisdom or helpful hints for human harmony. I do believe there is life and healing just in sharing stories, in the telling and in the hearing. So please forgive me on those occasions when I try to do more than tell a story to which we can listen together. Or when I try to explain the story instead of letting it tell itself.
TOO MANY WORDS
Sometimes a good story is just a single sentence.
Our pastor, Mary Beth Morgan, told of “having a talk” with one of her sons when he was young. At the end, as the professional educator she once was, she said, “So what did I say?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “There were too many words.”
ON THE OTHER HAND
“We think because we have words, not the other way around.” Madeline L’Engle
John Robert McFarland
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