Rod White's Blog

My “psalm” on Aidan Day last Sunday. 

Maybe it was on this day in the 600’s
that Aidan gave King Oswin’s gift-horse
to the peasant he passed.

Maybe the peasant had seen the holy man
coming at a distance, filled with the mystery
of the Holy Island.

Then the mystery dismounted his horse.
I see him silently give over the reins
with a gentle nod and smile.

Later the king fumed and blustered,
and wondered why his horse was wasted
on some poor nobody.

Aidan stood unbowed and undeterred,
“Is God’s beloved of less value than your horse?”
The king bowed, deterred.

We walked on the trail and reminisced
about the simplicity that captured us early on,
and saved us from many kings.

We also got off a few horses to accompany
poor souls who did not amount to much
or warrant stories.

Even Aidan, who made it into Bede’s book,
and is named on Lindisfarne to this day
is an untold tale,

lost in the smorgasbord of media,
digested in a glut of engorged data,
a footnote perhaps.

Yet I am heartened he is no hero,
not a billboard or line of merchandise,
just someone to meet,

just someone on the road who gets down
and is just a person who knows you,
who cares to see,

who cares little for kings and horses
and knows very little about what is right
except to be in Christ.

*****
Today is Peter Claver Day! Honor his devotion at The Transhistorical Body. 

The post Aidan’s example appeared first on Development.

Way back in 1990 Steve Penner invited one of the BIC’s newest pastors to join an MCC learning tour to El Salvador and Honduras. It deepened my love for those countries, for the MCC, and for Steve that remains to this day.

The immersion experience also proved to be full of enduring cautionary tales. Unfortunately, the prophecies I received have been fulfilled. Central America was a training ground for the militarists who are invading our streets in unmarked cars and masks right now. They are making war on their own people just like the U.S. trained and funded nationals to do in El Salvador and Honduras.

Olga Fedorova / AP, 2025

Our little delegation did not succeed in unmasking what the the U.S. government was doing in Central America and now we are having trouble unmasking ICE on our own streets [CNN].

ERP combatants in Perquín, El Salvador, by Linda Hess Miller, 199018-year-olds with machine guns

In El Salvador it was not marginally trained ICE agents rushing into the streets, fueled by the billions provided by the Big Beautiful Bill.  Instead, we were met by 18-year-olds with guns stopping our bus. We were going toward Chalatenango, the mountainous province which was a major stronghold  of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) “insurgents.” The area was the site of multiple massacres committed against civilians by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran military during the civil war (1979–1992).

Our destination was the Mesa Grande refugee camp just over the border in Honduras, where we met a man who escaped El Salvador with barely any clothes on as a child and was still in the camp years later. As the young men prepared to inspect us and our documents, our handlers told us to keep quiet and keep our heads down. There was no telling what the kids might do.

Now we have similar people on our own streets breaking car windows, breaking into homes, and sending untried people to Uganda. I was on edge the whole time I was in El Salvador, now I’m wary of what will happen if we go to Home Depot.

The secrets of Soto Cano

Brunswick, GA (where I visited my relatives and alligators when I was 13) is where the U.S. has a huge center for training ICE agents. Further south in the Everglades, Governor DeSantis spent $250 million on Alligator Alcatraz, which was recently ordered closed by  U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams [NPR]. ICE now has 400 field offices in the US and a growing number of detention centers. The money always flows in the U.S. for violent solutions for relational problems.

When we were in Honduras we somehow got an audience with an officer at the Soto Cano Air Base. I’m sure if I hunted for my journal long enough, I could give you his rank. As was my custom (to the dismay of my handlers), I asked him a question I have not forgotten. The officer had just told us the new capabilities the soldiers were learning about combating insurgencies and conducting “low-intensity warfare,” meaning the enemy does not have giant air bases and cannot be distinguished from the population. (Thus Israel destroys Gaza and kills over 60,000 people to fight Hamas). I asked him, “With all this knowledge and new mobile weaponry, what are the plans for subduing future insurgencies in the U.S.?” He said, “We would never apply these tactics in the U.S.” You can see how that worked out.

Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras was a crucial staging ground for US military operations during the Salvadoran Civil War, serving as a base for intelligence, counterinsurgency, and logistical support. While not located in El Salvador, its role was central to US efforts to support its Cold War political and military interests in Central America. Because the U.S. government did not have public Congressional approval for combat missions from Honduras, it downplayed the constant involvement of the U.S. military in the area’s conflicts. This meant that service members involved often received no awards or official recognition for the dangers they faced. Their service was a secret. And most of us assume the “deep state” has plenty more secrets where those came from (as in the Jeffrey Epstein files).

The subversive cross

We also had the privilege of visiting members of Resurrection Lutheran Church in San Salvador where people told us of their subversive cross. Some of the people we met had been imprisoned, themselves, for their subversive activities — like housing battered women.  Others reported loved ones who were still lost to them in the prison system, not in Louisiana or El Salvador, but lost just the same. The squad that whisked them away was also following orders and “keeping the peace” as if they were the police.

CBN, not a bastion of wokeness, reported on what is happening to Latino Christians across the Evangelical community in the U.S. this year:

The story of the Lutheran Church is like a parable predicting today. At the end of 1989, an offensive by the FMLN resulted in a crackdown on dissenters by the government. On November 16 a death squad murdered six Jesuit priests. That same day another squad came looking for Lutheran Bishop  Gomez with orders to assassinate him. He was safely away. His church was full of victims of the offensive and the soldiers sorted them out.  They captured 12 foreigners and 3 Salvadorans, and they sunk so low as to capture and carry off a cross.

The cross is still a special symbol in the church — after all, now they have to deal with  President Bukele. One day, as a special offering to the Lord, the congregation wrote the sins committed against the people of El Salvador upon a plain, white cross.  As they identified the sins of their country and their people, they committed themselves to work toward forgiveness, and to be strengthened for liberation.  The cross also carried messages of hope and love, as a testimony to the transforming power of God.

The Bishop had found safe haven with friends in Milwaukee. Two months later, he returned accompanied by North American pastors. The U.S. Ambassador interceded and communicated with the President of El Salvador and the “pilgrim cross” made a journey from the prison to the Presidential House. There the cross completed its mission of pointing out sins.

Some time later, Bishop Gómez was again accompanied, this time by pastors from Germany.  They spoke with the President and finally “The Subversive Cross” was handed over, and returned to Resurrection Lutheran Church. The cross now rests in their building, still pointing out sins, injustices and the hard labor its members must do in social action and Christian accompaniment.

After eight months of Trump madness, subversion is growing toward Salvadoran levels all over the country and the whole world. A march to Washington is planned for September, originating in Philadelphia. Governors and attorney generals are figuring out how to creatively secede. Judges are handling cases that have finally made it through  the courts — like undoing Trump’s tariffs.

Debriefing turns to degriefing

A lot of us have been checking out for the past few months because of the Project 2025 onslaught (anti-trans people, etc.), and the tech bros onslaught (DOGE, data harvesting, etc.), the economic onslaught (tariffs now impacting everything), the grift onslaught (bitcoin, Trump family graft), and the compassion onslaught (Medicaid cuts, sneak attack on Medicare, USAID dismantling, etc.). It is all just plain overwhelming. Waiting for Trump to die is not enough hope to live on.

Likewise, in El Salvador I realized that even though I was about as woke as I could get in the 1990’s (I had lived in a commune, after all), I was still unprepared for how huge, ruthless, incompetent and unthought-through our military and political machines were. Sound familiar?

As we debriefed at the close of our trip to El Salvador and Honduras, we had just met Jon Sobrino, the priest who was not killed with his brothers in the raid on the Jesuit mission [my post]. He had just gotten back from the U.S. {Sojourners interview] [1990 commencement speech]. He told us he would never go back. He just did not have the strength to stand up to the soul-killing power of our culture. And, of course, he told us about that power snaking into his own small church and devouring its leaders.

As we sat in Tegucigalpa debriefing I was undone. I had to confess I thought I would have solutions and bring some home. But I had none and I brought home few. I admit, as I took my turn to share my feelings, I broke into tears. The past eight months have pushed me to that edge repeatedly. After all, people from El Salvador are still being brutalized in my own country while legally seeking asylum! Fortunately, I have not forgotten the subversive cross and its inevitable power to undermine the evil of the world and finally defeat it.

The post The present U.S. insurgency: Trained for in El Salvador appeared first on Development.

Spend 30 seconds right now memorizing the words DARVO stands for: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. DARVO is the abuse pattern emerging from the shadows of rape culture and becoming mainstream behavior. The pattern is not new, but it is now prevalent. (Think Brett Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford before the Senate). It goes like this:

Deny:

The perpetrator of abuse denies or minimizes their harmful behavior, even if evidence exists. They may deny the behavior altogether or create an alternative narrative to explain it away.

Attack:

The perpetrator attacks the person who confronted them, attempts to discredit their claims or motivations. They may personally attack them, question their mental state, or suggest they are seeking attention.

Reverse Victim and Offender:

The perpetrator flips the story. They show themselves to be the victim and the accuser the aggressor. They will likely blame the accuser for provoking them or make them feel guilty for causing trouble.

The key to not becoming a victim of DARVO is to recognize when it is happening and refuse to cave in. These days, we all need to become experts, since it has become pervasive with the ascension of Donald Trump and JD Vance who employ it habitually. Most government communication is laced with DARVO these days (watch Karoline Leavitt). You can see the pattern most clearly whenever the government is accused of wrongdoing. No matter how far-fetched the logic, DARVO will be employed.

Perry and Celeste in Big Little LiesJennifer Freyd coined the phrase DARVO

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd  used DARVO to describe a common pattern “when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of ‘falsely accused’ and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.”

Dr. Freyd coined the term in the 1990’s. She said the idea grew from watching “the [confirmation] hearings for Clarence Thomas and the response to Anita Hill.”  Hill is the law professor who in 1991 said the Supreme Court nominee sexually harassed her, only to see her own reputation dragged through the mud.

“Clarence Thomas had a leadership role” in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” Freyd said.

“So it seemed to me like if there’s anyone who would have had a different response to the accusation, it was him. He would have said something like, ‘My memory is very different than yours; I’m disturbed to hear this is how you experienced things. I know these are very difficult conversations to have, and I want to understand what leads you to say this.’ But instead he and the other people who enabled him, it was a gang that attacked Anita Hill … and then I was seeing [the behavior] all over.”

Thank God most of us won’t be on TV getting raked over the coals! But you may have been an “accuser” who ended up being accused sometime in your life. For you, maybe DARVO  sounded like this:

“Why are you always trying to make me the bad guy?”
“I never hit you. I just pushed you away when you were being dramatic.”
“You’re so sensitive. It’s like I can’t do anything right around you.”
“You’re making me feel so bad. I don’t even want to talk to you anymore.”
“You’re abusing me, too.”

This kind of abuse chips away at your sense of reality over time. Many victims of it question whether what they experienced was real. And many turn the blame on themselves –which is exactly the goal of the person reversing the offense.

Now it is REALLY all over

Like I said, Trump and his comrades use the tactic reflexively. Some of the examples have become famous. We watch men, for the most part, get away with blame shifting like sexual abusers have been convincing their victims they are to blame for centuries.

Trump employed DARVO when he blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, didn’t he?

Trump said about Zelensky: “You’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it. … You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

Most people know Russia’s army crossed the border on Feb. 24, 2022, in an all-out invasion that Putin sought to justify by falsely saying it was needed to protect Russian-speaking civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO.

D —  Russia did not illegally and unjustly invade. A — You should have ended it. You could have made a deal. RVO – Russia is really the victim here. Ukraine is wasting U.S. money,

Trump has famously discredited women who had accused him of sexual assault.

Just before his Presidential debate with Kamala Harris he spoke to reporters about the first verdict E. Jean Carroll won against him for rape. He was in court to hear his lawyers argue for overturning a jury’s $5 million verdict. The former president  repeatedly implied he would not have assaulted two of his accusers (from the past) due to their looks. He said of a woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct on a plane in the 1970s “she would not have been the chosen one.” He said of  Carroll, “I never touched her. I would have had no interest in meeting her in any way, shape or form.”

At the point he said those things, juries had twice awarded Carroll huge sums from Trump for defamation because he claimed she made up a story about him attacking her in a department store dressing room in order to boost sales of her memoir. The judgments did not stop him. Just before the debate, he again said that Carroll was telling a “made up, fabricated story.”

D – “I never touched her. I would have had no interest in meeting her in any way, shape or form.”  A – She’s a liar. Besides, “she would not have been the chosen one.” RVO – She made it up to use my fame to boost her memoir. She wants to take me down. I’m the victim.

J.D. Vance contribute to the confusion people have about what is fake and what could be true.

After the outcry over Trump falsely claiming that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Dana Bash asked Vance, formerly a Senator from Ohio, “Once and for all, can you affirmatively say that the rumors about Haitians eating dogs and cats have no basis with evidence?”

Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

D – He would not respond to the question. It is the American people, not Haitians who are suffering. A – The media, like you Dana Bash, are not doing a good job. RVO – I have to create stories. The media does not respond to what I say. I’m the victim.

DARVO appears in quite a few scripts, too

In Big Little Lies every time Celeste calls out Perry’s violence, he flips it. First, he denies hurting her. Then, he accuses her of provoking him. Finally, he becomes the one who’s suffering – “I’m only like this because I love you so much.” It’s textbook DARVO.

In You,  Joe consistently manipulates women into believing he’s just a misunderstood romantic, even as his behavior becomes controlling and violent. He denies, attacks, reframes, over and over again.

You may have experienced some DARVO in your own house (or applied it). For instance, when a partner cheats, gets caught, and they might say, “You’ve been so cold lately, what did you expect?” Or when you confront a friend about a boundary they’ve crossed, they might respond with, “Wow, I guess I’m just a terrible person then.” Suddenly, you’re the one doing damage control, even though they hurt you.

DARVO can be defanged.

If you’ve experienced DARVO, you know how disorienting it is. Why? Because it’s not just a lie—it’s a reversal of truth. It puts you on the defensive. You begin questioning your memory, your motives, even your sanity. I was DARVOed in a big way a few years back and I felt that way myself; I am more aware now.

DARVO often overlaps with gaslighting, intensifying the psychological damage. Both aim to erase your reality. But DARVO goes further: it tries to make you feel morally wrong for even speaking up.

That’s why so many women in emotionally destructive relationships stay silent. They know what happened, but they can’t explain it in a way others will understand—especially when the abuser is charming, respected, or skilled at playing the victim (or might be a sociopath).

Numerous clients have validated that, over time, experiencing DARVO repeatedly leads to:

Self-doubt: “Maybe I am too sensitive.”Isolation: “No one will believe me.”Shame: “Why can’t I just let it go?”Despair: “I’ll never be safe or heard.”

These effects are real. DARVO not only blocks accountability — it compounds the trauma of the original harm. It damages your trust in your own perceptions and can even alienate you from your community or church, especially if others are drawn into the reversal or support your abuser.

Being informed about DARVO can reduce its persuasive effects.  In other words, people who can spot DARVO are less likely to fall for it. Knowledge can act as a vaccine.

The next step is refusing to let it rewrite reality. Trump’s attempts to deflect responsibility and blame for the results of his tariffs are not just political maneuvers. They are calculated efforts to distract and confuse you. By exposing DARVO for what it is, we can ensure that his gaslighting does not win out over the truth.

Five ways to respond to DARVO

When you begin to recognize DARVO, you gain power. You may not be able to change the other person, but you can refuse to internalize their twisted version of events. Try these things:

Name it without shame.

Recognize that DARVO is someone else’s behavior, a tactic of self-defense and domination – it is not a reflection of your character. You are not “too sensitive” for noticing harm. You are not the problem because you “set some boundaries.” Naming the pattern is the first step toward clarity. “Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them” (Ephesians 5:11).

Stay grounded in reality.

You could keep a journal of what happened and when. If possible, seek out a wise, safe counselor or support group that affirms your experience. You may also consider working with a therapist who understands emotional abuse. Truth-telling without malice is not gossip. It’s part of healing and it’s how we stay aligned with God.

Resist the urge to over-explain.

DARVO thrives when you start defending yourself. But you don’t owe a manipulator your constant justification. “No” is a complete sentence. “That’s not true” is a legitimate response. Jesus often refused to debate with those who had no intention of listening. You can do the same.

Define your limits without guilt.

It is godly to protect your heart (Proverbs 4:23). You are not responsible for managing another adult’s emotions, especially when they attempt to use those emotions to control you. Whether it’s a temporary separation, a clear boundary around communication, or removing yourself from a toxic church, these are not acts of rebellion — they are acts of obedience to your own healing and to God.

For the Church: Please recognizing and resist DARVO.

Too often, leaders and Christian communities are unwittingly complicit with DARVO. If the church automatically “stays neutral” or encourages the victim to reconcile before repentance, it reinforces the reversal and deepens the harm. Neutrality in the face of abuse is not peacekeeping—it’s injustice. Accountability is not unloving. Grace is not enabling. The church must be a place of truth-telling, not image management.

When someone speaks up about abuse or betrayal, our first response should not be, “Are you sure?” or “Let’s not judge.” Instead:

We ask them, “How can I listen and support you?” and “What do you need right now to feel heard, believed, and protected?We ask ourselves, “What does justice and healing look like here?” and “How can we hold leadership or offenders accountable in truth?”You’re not crazy, and you’re not alone

Maybe reading this caused you to recognize DARVO in your life. You may be the perpetrator or you may be the victim. You are not alone. If you are to blame, you can be healed and forgiven. If you have been abused, you are not likely to be imagining it.

If you have been abused, please don’t forget:

Your voice matters to God.Your safety and your capacity to say “No” and be heard matters.Your healing matters.

You do not have to prove your worth to someone who constantly rewrites your story to protect themselves and manipulate you. God is your witness and is the One who sees it all and stands with the oppressed and the voiceless. “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18) — even when you feel alone. Wisdom, courage, and the strength to stand are all available to you, too.

If you are a married couple and you practice DARVO on each other because you learned it from TV or the internet, please find some hope in the fact there are other ways to relate and you can learn them. You’ll have to let go of DARVO and very possibly will need to find someone to help you learn some new ways to love. But you can make things better.

The post Recognizing DARVO is the first step to freedom: 5 practical responses appeared first on Development.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — key bros in the “PayPal Mafia” who went on to lucrative projects after PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, have now gone on to government-breaking so they can perfect their power-grabbing. Thank God people are talking about Palantir all the time!

The unexpected consequences of the bros’ brazen tech-authoritarianism is an outbreak of creativity on the part of the resistance. For instance, Governor Newsome’s Trumpesque Tweets are a hilarious and creative way of asserting California’s right to exist without thugs in their faces (as they experienced when Newsome spoke about redistricting the other day). Old ladies fomenting “Be Brave Day” last Friday is anther version of resistance; they were saying “No! We exist.” The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church titled his Fourth of July message: “Once the church of presidents, The Episcopal Church must now be an engine of resistance.” That’s unexpected!

There are a lot of smart, energetic people out there creatively resisting! They are not shutting up (even though you can get fired for saying the wrong thing — like my friend was fired from her job last month for being outspoken about starving Gazans). For instance, two months ago Tad Stoermer decided to speak up and made this video about the difference between protest and resistance. It finally caught up with me as it wound its way through the algorithm. He insists the present broken time is not calling for reform but for creative transformation.

Existence is resistance

Back in 2011, “existence is resistance” became my new favorite phrase. I learned it from Palestinians, like those from Stop the Wall, and from the Christian Peacemaker Teams in At-Tuwani, south of Hebron. They were creatively resisting. They certainly did not expect Israel to reform (and it did not!); their only hope was transformation. And that begins with their insistent existence. Their continual “No!”

In At-Tuwani, our MCC Learning Tour delegation met a woman from Switzerland who had been living in the village for six years as part of CPT’s work of support. That’s committed resistance. She was about ready to return to Europe, since the villagers were organized enough to do without the protection of witnesses from the U.S. or Europe.

At-Tuwani was in “Area C” of the apartheid system Israel was perfecting in its occupied territories. That means the village was under direct military control. Living in Area C meant that almost anything could happen to a Palestinian for “security” reasons (some say the U.S. is following the Israeli model now). It meant one’s rights were adjudicated by military justice. Practically, it meant one’s land was subject to seizure and the housing developments being planted on your grazing and farm land could supplant your long-held practices – and would be protected by the military (which, by the way, is still protected by the United States). The village was something of a showcase for people devoted to nonviolent resistance. They have been dedicated to the proposition that existence is resistance (and they are still hanging in there).

at-Tuwani 2011

We listened to one of the village’s activists talk about the awakening that caused him to be a leader in direct nonviolent action. When the nearby Israeli settlement was built, it disrupted all the village’s ways. The “settlers” commandeered farmland and claimed grazing areas for their use. One day they beat the man’s mother when she dared to graze sheep in land they were trying to control. As we looked over the village he described how he had participated in securing its ongoing existence against the constant pressure and harassment of the Israeli settlers, military and bureaucracy. Their existence is resistance.

Slaves of Christ

It seems like the Church is usually in need of a refresher course on being an engine of resistance. It is usually the oppressed of the world who can provide the seminar.

In 2017 our old church did some refreshing theology. As I look back on our work from the era of Trump 2.0, I like our thinking even more. Our work came to some truth about our calling to resist antichrist powers — which the Church had been downplaying right down to the way it translated the Bible!

We were concentrating on Paul’s “two-tiered” theology applied to our “social action.” You can see my treatment here in this article.

One of the places where we could see Paul’s thinking was when he related to slaves. In our day, when people are into the idolatry Trump preaches, in which young people are chained to their survival jobs and debt, when white supremacists are trying to re-enslave African Americans, and in which we are all tempted to bow in fear before the Tweeter-in-chief, we may need to think about freeing the slaves more consciously than ever.

Be small

First, if we want to get anything out of Paul’s thoughts on slavery, we have to remember that when he speaks to women, Gentiles and slaves seriously as members of the church, his respect is subversive. Some of us forget, as we turn our “imperial gaze” on the “others” who are so-called “minorities” and so marginalized, that Paul is writing as one of those “others.” He and his little groups of persecuted misfits who are beginning to infect the Roman Empire are not speaking from a position of privilege and power. His view is small; he has become small; the people in his church plants are the “others” in their towns and villages. So he writes from “under” not “over.”

One of the first tasks in understanding him is to let go of any imperial outlook, the supposed privileges of being an American citizen, the protection of the huge military apparatus, even the exceptionalism of being a better Christian than others, and become small enough to need a Savior, to act as a slave of Christ.

Bible translators during the Reformation. And subsequently,  undermined our understanding when they decided that rendering the common Greek word for “slave” as slave was too demeaning, so they tidied things up by using the word servant, instead (which is a big difference). Philippians 2:7 in the KJV is a good example. There Paul describes Jesus as taking on the condition of a slave. But the KJV calls him a servant. I think Paul meant what he wrote. It is much more realistic, to see how humankind oppresses Jesus than to see Jesus as serving up salvation to us as we decide whether we want it or not. In order to hear what Paul, the slave of Jesus, is teaching, we’ll have to get into his slavish shoes.

Practice slaving

Once in Paul’s shoes, we can see what he is talking about. His thoughts are a lot bigger than whether a person is going to gain social or political freedom. That achievement would be frosting on his hope cake. The cake is being freed from the need to be freed from what humans do to you and being a grateful slave to the salvation that Jesus is working into us. Here’s just one example of how he thinks:

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving” – Colossians 3:23-4.

That last clause could better read: “It is for the Lord (master) Christ you are slaving.” That is his first-tier thinking. He knows a truth, the Truth, the world does not know and he is living in it, no matter who he is in the eyes of the world or according to its ways.

Everyone who is thoroughly trained in democratic equality and the centrality of human choice (the general God-free zone of Western thought these days) is likely to think those lines are heresy; it might even feel icky to read them, taboo. Slaving?! Paul has none of those qualms. He finds it an honor to be a slave in Christ’s house as opposed to being a ruler in a house of lies. God is a “master” beyond anything Hobbes, Rousseau or Ayn Rand could imagine. You can see that he is not interested in reformation, he’s experiencing transformation.

So when Paul goes on to talk to slaves, getting into the matters of their everyday lives, as they are locked in their situation with masters, benign or despotic, he has a variety of options for them. His first tier thinking makes them completely free to do the best they can with what they’ve got in the day-to-day, passing-away, fallen world. So he says to his brothers and sisters in Colossae:

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord…. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism.” — Colossians 3:22, 25

Note that Paul is likely writing his letter to Colossae from house arrest in Rome. His slavery to Jesus has resulted in becoming enslaved by the Romans. So he can write from personal understanding. Basically, being a good slave who resists the master by obeying out of love and freedom instead of fear is good Christianity. It is possible to exude “no” when you are doing a submissive “yes” according to Jesus. Elsewhere, of course, Paul advises slaves to get free if they can. And he tells Philemon to treat his runaway slave as a brother, or just charge him whatever it costs to set him free.

There are no disempowered people in Christ, even our suffering has the power of grace and love in it. A slave in the world is God’s free person. A free person in the world is God’s slave. This is hard to translate for people who believe the delusion that law makes them free and rational rules and education will prevent suffering. Paul might respond to such ideas, as he did, and say, “Though I am blameless before the law, I am God’s prisoner, a lifelong felon freed by grace.” Similarly, no Jesus followers merely work for human masters, we do whatever we do with the Lord. Even when oppressed, we experience the hope that we will have our reward and the oppressors will get theirs.

How do we take action?

So what do we do in the face of the oppressive masters beating down on us and the world? Pray harder, safe in our salvation? Absolutely. But that is not all. You’re probably taking action in many creative ways.

Our old church summarized what we do in our statement of our mission and put it on a t-shirt:

Loving the thirsty people of our fractured region,
we keep generating a new expression of the church
to resist and restore with those moved by the Holy Spirit.

We resist. I am Christ’s slave. That is a defiant statement of resistance. My existence is resistance. I will never be a slave to a human, no matter what one does to me: buy me, imprison me, or take away my livelihood. I will always belong to the Lord, forever. And, as he demonstrates, in a very real sense, Jesus will always belong to me, forever. He has made Himself our slave.

We restore. I am an obedient slave. My work is well-ordered. Jesus is the Lord of all and we are making that known and effective, day by day. We restore by reorienting people’s identities to align with their salvation. We restore by relentlessly loving in the face of hate and indifference. We restore by telling the truth in the face of lies. We restore by sharing our resources and making peace. And, I think most important, we restore by practicing the kind of mutuality that creates an alternative community that is not allied with the powers that dig up the world and destroy connections between God and people like hurricanes blasting through our village.

Our existence is the foundation of our resistance. We can only hope that the country will be put to right soon. But even if it isn’t, we know who we are and what to do.  Being knit together in the love of Jesus is more important than ever, isn’t it! Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are intent on taking over the world and believe they deserve to! What else would we do but resist?

The post Time to perfect resistance appeared first on Development.

In a new survey, the Gallup organization interviewed people across 142 countries and asked them a series of questions to determine whether they felt they were thriving in their lives or struggling or, worst of all, suffering.  It reminded me of a presentation I made in 2016 to small group novices about how the church could be a place to help people thrive.

Last week David Brooks interpreted the Gallup findings for us in the New York Times:

The number of people who say they are thriving has been rising steadily for a decade. The number of people who say they are suffering is down to 7 percent globally, tying with the lowest level since 2007. This trend is truly worldwide, with strong gains in well-being in countries as far-flung as Kosovo, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Paraguay.

Unfortunately, there is a little bad news. Some people reported sharp declines in well-being. That would be us. The share of the population that is thriving is falling in America, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. In 2007, 67 percent of Americans and Canadians said they were thriving. Now it’s down to 49 percent….

People thrive when they live in societies with rising standards of living and dense networks of relationships, and where they feel their lives have a clear sense of purpose and meaning. That holy trinity undergirds any healthy society. It’s economic, social and spiritual.

I spoke with Dan Witters of Gallup, who broke down some of the contributors to social and spiritual health. People who are thriving are more likely to feel a strong attachment to their community. They feel proud of where they live. People are more likely to experience greater well-being when they join congregations and regularly attend religious services. Feeling your life has purpose and meaning, he adds, is a strong driver of where you think you are going to be five years from now.

The sociopath president Trump is terrible fruit of this awful decline of  economic well-being, relationships and meaning. He’s bankrupting us, dividing us, and doesn’t mean a thing he says, much less attends to deep meaning.

The young people in the West are the hardest hit by the decline in thriving. So my wife and I decided our basic reaction to Trump had to include starting a small group. Our first try has not totally failed yet. But we quickly found out just how hard it is these days to get people together who don’t know a lot about getting together.

The small group is the basic unit of the Church.

In the U.S. we Jesus followers might think the individual is the basic unit of the Church. If we are moral, we might think it is the family. But I think the Bible and common sense tells us it is a small group which is the basic unit. Many church people call that small group a cell, a construct within the Body of Christ held together by the Spirit of in love — not born of flesh but of God.

In Acts 20:20 Paul notes how he has been teaching the church in Ephesus in public, like most churches do on Sunday morning, and from house to house — or in all the places where they are gathered to love or serve as a small group. The house to house groupings were like cells in the body of Christ.

The towns and cities Paul visited were relatively small. The churches in them were small in number, too. His teaching assumes people know each another. He’s not writing for the internet. We say “it takes a village to raise a child” because we need to remind ourselves  we are that village. If we did not reinforce our relationships, we might be swallowed up in the huge media machine that makes sameness a substitute for connection. Being the church might become attending a Sunday event featuring Joel Osteen, thinking our common experience or common connection with the person on the screen is connection with each other.

We can lose the essence of what Paul is teaching house to house — to people who are supposed to love each other like family in practical ways, even though they are only family because of Jesus. If we are not a vital part of the basic units of the church, we not only lose the redemption inherent in those relationships, we lose the psychological development inherent in struggling to build them and we remain unfaithful and unhealed.

What do you think of that? Do you have a place in your church where you are the body of Christ? Where you can be healed and be a healer? Where you learn to love? Where you can have healthy conflict that convinces you the process of facing difficult things is not so scary?

Creating groups

I have spent my whole adult life trying to create a place where people can receive what Paul is talking about. So often church people have been in class where they are thinking about doing what Paul is talking about sometime after class! Then they go to the service, which is often another lecture and mainly individuals consuming a religious product.

When Jesus was walking around with his disciples, he was demonstrating the basic wisdom of living as a small group. People caught stuff as they went along. They found some people they could follow and discovered who was a betrayer. They fought over who was the greatest. They were indecisive and unsure. But Jesus was in the midst and they figured stuff out together. They learned self-giving love, they learned how to doubt and be restored, to grumble and be corrected, to ponder and come to agreement. They got a chance to earn a secure attachment, differentiate from their past, learn a new script and act it out in a safe place. In a lot of places the church has deprived people of a chance to mature in Christ, so twentysomethings want to go to therapy when they are mildly anxious – their therapists end up being substitute friends and spiritual guides.

The paradigm we came up with in my former church was simply designed to fly on two wings: a large group wing and a small group wing, everyone energizing our movement. Everything we did was done in groups. Even the pastors of the 4-5 congregations did most of what they did as a team. I think this is so important because the essence of what we do is love. We are meant to be together as surely as the godhead forms a small group – father, son and Holy Spirit.

In the early years, I had some interesting and sometimes wild cells.

In one new cell, we had multiplied from another one that got too big to be face to face enough. Our core group included a somewhat shy Asian architect, our host, a loud South Philly guy who had a coke habit he was trying to kick and his longsuffering wife, and a woman who had just come off heroin and had wandered into the church for a meeting because she saw “hope” on the door — a genuine borderline personality. There were a couple of others who were not so comfortable and me. I did not have my doctorate yet, but I was beginning to earn one practically through my work with this little system. It was a very dysfunctional system I remember fondly. The couple  would continue arguments in the group. The recently-clean woman was an expert at pointing out the vulnerabilities in everyone. The architect wondered why she had ever allowed these people to meet in her apartment, since she had mainly done it to get some friends, not experience this challenge.

Needless to say, this was not a cell that worked out for long. It died. Some groups must die a natural death, otherwise it is hard to get one to live.

Even though we did not thrive, I learned a lot about how to nurture a small group and help people live in them.

The couple needed marriage counseling, so my wife was already inventing Circle Counseling, since you can’t solve every problem in the small group, especially when it is not professionally led. This is often the problem with church groups – they are not porous, their “holiness” requires them to have all the answers so no one can admit they don’t have the answers.White corpuscles gathering around the injured or unincorporated massPlus I began to think about how some situations, like a couple having conflict or a person addicted to cocaine, might need to get some space in a relational container to heal — a small group with a purpose, like white corpuscles rushing to wounds.And I had my second chance to make a treatment plan for a borderline person to be part of the church. It would not be my last.

Most people who have BPD suffer from:

Problems with regulating emotions and thoughtsImpulsive and reckless behaviorUnstable relationships with other people.

People with this disorder also have high rates of co-occurring disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and eating disorders, along with self-harm, suicidal behaviors, and completed suicides. The malady can be inherited. Is likely trauma-based or family-induced.

Borderline people are attracted to groups in the church but they often kill them. They desire stable people to balance their instability. Unfortunately, they like the ready “hosts” loving people are to feed their insatiable neediness.

Growth requires risk

The needy woman got better and ended up in her own apartment. Her growth required risk — hers and ours. I am amazed that a good third of the Christians in the country are obsessed with their own safety and are filled with fear. We should be the ones safe to risk our utmost and undermost for God’s highest.

A lot of small groups create a nice homeostasis that feels like mother’s milk but often curdles. Groups centered on Jesus need to keep moving with the Spirit, keep growing and renewing, to be healthy. Some churches have Sunday school classes that began when the members were the “young married” class and they are still together in their sixties!

Church leaders need to keep things flexible and changeable, as various and unpredictable as are the members. One reason for this is that spiritual and psychological growth takes risk.

Personal growth requires the interacting flows of relationship building and faith development. Healthy small groups have these complementary flows swirling around in them. That flow makes them good delivery systems for the spiritual food we need to grow and act. It’s a bit like I need to keep the air moving in my basement so the water that recently flooded it does not stay there long enough to grow toxins.

Small group leaders attempt to maximize the positive impact of the movement while minimizing the impact of the inevitable perils. They are always gently helping people to take the risks they need to take.

Making a relationship with a Christian, listening to the story of Jesus, entering a small group meeting, telling one’s story, listening to others, daring to express thoughts and gifts, praying with others, taking responsibility for others and the cell, bringing another person to Christ and the small group, joining in the Sunday meeting, taking action to serve others, making a covenant with the others in the church, giving birth a new cell — there are many risks along the way.

Here are some examples of the elements of each flow that we can encourage, and the risks we can learn to encounter with wisdom:

Do you have any experiences in small groups in the church that just didn’t work out well? Or just felt too risky to you?

Many times the risk reaps benefits

Not long after that other cell died, I formed a cell with a couple of bike messengers and their girlfriends. They all knew “A,” who was a sweet, but not-too-Christian guy in the church. This time the experience was electric and formative. These people became so close they met quite a bit outside the meeting. Some of them eventually became roommates and four of them became two married couples. They loved the opportunity to grow deep in love and to tackle the hard questions of faith and justice together. The group got so large that we multiplied it three ways and they sent me out to make another one from scratch.

What was so different about this one?

Groups like their homeostasis and if they can’t form it, they do not cohere. This one became a safe place.Leadership. They liked “A” a lot and me enough. I was a lot older than them, but since they all came from relatively unstable families, I provided some parent power. If you therapists have twentysomething clients you are probably doing that, too.Youth. They were pliable. I think groups are especially important for young people because they have so much to learn about having relationships. And do we really want to send people out into the world thinking that they can or must face all the huge issues of our day and the huge organizations that run it by themselves with only their hand held computer?They wanted what the group offered. At least enough of them did so the others either went with it or kept their criticisms quiet.

Have you ever been in a group that worked out well? What was the best thing about it for you, personally?

A few main themes for training leaders

My presentation was mainly to leaders who were training leaders. So we concentrated on that quite a bit. Training small group  leaders is a lot like training group-therapy leaders. The big difference is the church’s twin flows of real relating and real-time experience of God’s presence.

Regardless of the flow, it is a major temptation to turn an expansive cell into a closed therapy group. People love therapy groups. Once they have been vulnerable with a small group, they don’t really want to repeat the initial risks of forming more relationships.  But it is just that risk which makes them alive and valuable.

Leaders who catalyze the growth we all need to keep experiencing are precious. Here are a few of the important things they must help us do to form life-giving small groups:

Learn how to listen and teach people to listen, to God and each other. — Everyone is writing their story, day by day, and they need to tell it.Create an environment of safety. Leaders always need to wonder if they are controlling things out of their own fears and needs or effectively shepherding people along their uncertain, God-directed way of love and truth.Encourage the dance of the big and small. The individual and group both matter. The promise of freedom and our deep need for covenant are dancing. We must honor uniqueness and promote mutuality.Protect the EGR – There is always and extra-grace-required person — at least it will feel that way to people who are not good at relating. The leader protects that person from the group and protects the group from that person. We are all moving somewhere deeper and fuller. We are unfinished. Our present weaknesses and sins have hurtful consequences. That’s a given the leader monitors.Embrace before people believe or behave. One does not have to believe to belong. A small group is like meeting Jesus along the way — therapists might call it “client-driven.” Implying that someone is not “doing the group right” probably won’t help them face the risks they must take to connect with God and their true selves.Don’t deprive people of reproductive rights.  If a church expects their small groups to grow and change, we all learn there is enough love to go around. Love grows as big as it needs to be. We are always changing which always feels risky. When we give birth to the next basic unit of the church, we all get the thrill of bringing new love into the world.

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Today is Clare of Assisi Day! Celebrate her at The Transhistorical Body.

 

 

The post Your small group in the church: Key to thriving? appeared first on Development.

Have you ever tried to list the times you felt like you had touched a dimension of reality that is beyond your purely physical senses? The first experiences that came to my mind were a moment in a prayer meeting as a teen, a time I turned the the corner and viewed Yosemite Valley, a waking dream that became a series of visions, and many times in worship as we sang a song. Once I got started, these spontaneous experiences began to multiply. I began to think “When was I NOT aware?”

Maybe we’ve all been getting more aware for decades

The whole way we got sucked into the internet and now A.I., even if it is becoming one giant advertisement, might be a societal yearning for the mystery in the machine and an overwhelming need to know. The way people are loading up with myths about their coercive and fraudulent leaders all over the world may actually be them loosening the chains of rationalism and looking beyond what has passed for truth into something larger.

Those are not new theories, of course. The militaristic capitalism of the U.S. has been pushing people into a new dimension for decades. In the 1980’s, my literary mentor, Morton T. Kelsey was writing, “The Greeks have twelve different words to describe their intercourse with a nonphysical dimension of reality.” (And, no, he doesn’t think “intercourse” means they spawned The Devil’s Child). In English, on the other hand, we have “at least thirty expressions to convey psychological depression but only one moth-eaten and much abused word to describe our relationship with a spiritual dimension of reality: the word mysticism” (in Companions on the Inner Way).

Hindus have twenty to thirty words to describe various aspects of spiritual experience but relatively few words to deal with different aspects of physical matter. Eurocentric people, on the other hand, have dozens of words for matter and, of course, came up with the periodic table to describe over a hundred different elements of it.

Aldous Huxley 1946

This lack of development in his culture disturbed Aldous Huxley, who went on to experiment with some consciousness-expanding “elements” to heighten his spiritual experience. He lamented that humans are equipped to have a vast array of experiences but are preoccupied with sense perception. He said our preoccupation with processing sensory data acts as a “reducing valve.” What’s more, language itself gets in the way. The limits of our native tongues reduce our awareness of non-physical reality to the words we have to describe it, and trick us into confusing “words for actual things” (in The Doors of Perception).

We experience the spiritual dimension

Of course, Huxley is railing against being stuck in an “immanent frame” as he is repeatedly speaking from outside it. He is far from the only one seeking and finding what is beyond our materialist prison. I think most of us have some stories to tell about what we’ve discovered about the other side of life.

Kelsey noted dozens of distinguishable, non-physical experiences and classified them in five groups of different kinds:

Direct, spontaneous experiences that happen as a “surprise” and often prove life-changing.Common experiences that intimate or reveal another dimension of reality (rainbows, sunsets, childbirth).Experiences sought after by various methods, especially religious. They are often also spontaneous.Neurotic or psychotic. These are also natural, but not typical: voices, visions, dissociation. Some people hide their experiences because they will be thrown in this category.Sought-for experiences that could prove harmful to the naïve.

I have been a lifelong Christian largely because I wandered into territories that were non-physical and indescribable with the language I had to use. Unexpected, spontaneous experiences made a permanent change in how I viewed myself and reality. I understood what upended Paul’s life on the way to Damascus, and I could see why Francis of Assisi left his life of privilege behind to obey God’s call to “restore my church.”

To hear the media talk about it, we Americans are more materialistic than ever, led by Christians who equate faith with power and wealth, and by a godless president bound by his own self-determination. But I’m not sure about that. I greeted a young woman in my elevator yesterday whose cell phone screen was a picture of Buddha. Like the movie I linked above, our screens are also full of supernatural experiences — it is kind of a joke that I like Moana so much. People who use ketamine and other drugs continue to follow Huxley’s lead to seek pathways to enlightenment. Maybe we are actually becoming more spiritually aware than ever.

Characteristics of spontaneous experiences of the spiritual dimension

Leaving the other four of Kelsey’s categories for later, I would like to note the characteristics of the first, “spontaneous” group. I suspect you have been invited into the non-physical world (or just call it the other part of your life) for as long as you have been alive. You might not have told anyone about your experiences, since someone might think they aren’t normal.

We can start with the four characteristics William James offered in The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, compiled from lectures he gave as a psychologist from Harvard.

They are experiences, not ideas. They are hard to explain to someone who hasn’t had one.They convey understanding, illuminate, reveal. We know we are meeting something or someone beyond our own limitations. They carry authority.They almost never last for more than half an hour and usually just for a few seconds, Trying to stay in one can cause psychological problems.They can’t be achieved, just given. We are passive responders, like trees in the sun, not agents.We are drawn toward the reality in spite of ourselves. We are satisfied by something we did not know we wanted.The encounter is more than we can cope with. We are likely confronted by a sense of our comparative nothingness and our infinite faultiness.The experience could be dazzling darkness or the clearest of pictures. It could be seen as a sense of abstract merging or personal presence, depending on whether the focus is detachment or attachment, which are complimentary yearnings.Christians often report meeting the Lover whose awesome goodness is consummated in self-giving love. Sufi and Hasidic traditions also note this.You may have experienced this otherness in your pit of despair or been touched in your core torment. You may have been healed or comforted. If you have focused on detachment, as Buddhists or mindfulness practitioners often do, this is an unlikely experience.

I have focused on the positive-feeling spontaneous experiences we all may have had. There are other “numinous” (some say “paranormal”) experiences that also point to non-physical reality.

The dead. TV shows are full of references to meetings with or senses of the deceased (like Aunt Ada and Madame Dashkova in the Gilded Age).We also have visions and fertile imaginations. Jung called us to swim in the collective unconscious.We may be guided by someone speaking for God, or something. We may hear a voice we trust to lead us, which should be validated by others we trust.There are psychological patterns of one’s culture or of all humanity which empower or possess us.The fearsome spiritual darkness we encounter convinces us of the evils of the non-physical world.Many people have described their brief view into an “out of the body” realm when they faced death.

Why don’t you try out my suggestion for making a list? It would be interesting to see how many encounters you could name . You may have been talked out of admitting them because someone thought it might be dangerous to “open that can of worms” and convinced you to shut down that part of your capacity and “stay safe.” But we are not really in control of all the dimensions of reality, not even what’s being worked out in us, so you may have gotten a good idea of something beyond the reducing valve, anyway. Honoring the experiences we’ve had, softens our hearts and minds for receiving all the rest of our lives that may yet to be enjoyed.

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Yesterday was Alexander Solzhenitsyn Day! We decided not to have him compete with Flannery O’Connor, so we invite you to celebrate his life today at The Transhistorical Body.

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My title is the question we all need to ask, whether we want to or not. I’m sure you have better things to do with July than fuss about the public servant who serves himself (as in,  you might be trying to survive what he’s already done). But we need to work together to get out of this mess before even worse things happen. Just the implementation of the huge bill the Congress just passed is going to do a lot of damage.

I’ve been trying to make “doing something about Trump” part of my life. For the most part, I like to leave government to God. But I keep getting the impression that the love of Jesus would lead him right into the middle of this mess.

Maybe I’ll post this again next week, too.So I went to the John Lewis event on July 17 — I did not stay for the whole thing, but I added my presence and took a good picture (above).I stopped being neutral with people about what I think about the destruction of the U.S. government and the economic consequences – housing crisis, healthcare gut, climate ignorance, gulag creation and military insanity are all high on my list.I studied sociopaths and wrote that Trump qualifies.I signed up to hear about the We Are America March from Philly to Washington DC Sep 6-19.Facebook is certainly not enough

And yes, I posted the following on Facebook the other day (even though I’m not sure how anyone sees anything on Facebook, especially if they are under 45):

We need to keep up lest we just go along with Trump’s perverse playbook (like Congress does):

This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that’s not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’” — HC Richardson et al

I don’t think posting things, even by the brilliant Heather Cox Richardson, is enough. Even though Trump’s approval ratings are at 37% (thus he says they are soaring), we need an even greater tsunami of protest to wash away this scourge before more people die — and I mean that literally. Trump’s administration gutted the HIV/AIDS program which was the best thing Bush ever did. They put a 50% tariff on Lesotho and denim factories are already shutting down in one of the poorest places on earth (where they make Trump t-shirts for his own company). They destroyed USAID and are destroying FEMA. They are complicit in starving the Gazans. The spending bill will knock millions off already-unaffordable health insurance. They are wrecking the already-paltry Medicaid. It goes on and on, and the shoes are just beginning to drop. Most of them are scheduled for after the midterm elections.

Arguing seems to go nowhere

I would like to win the argument we are all having, if we are not numbed out. But if you look at the “dialogue” my Facebook post generated, that seems unlikely.

Here’s how it went after I shared the quote from Richardson:

Church friend:  And the walls came tumblin’ down
I would love to see this scumbag brought down by his own perverse and despicable behaviors

Childhood friend: Everything comes to light.
There’s a Bible scripture to that effect. I know the gist of the Bible but I cannot quote verses!?

Cali church member: Then the main stream media needs to come clean and admit they were lying to the American people for everything they said during the first term and here’s the tape https://x.com/highway_30/status/1948374675873993074?s=46

Church friend: I believe holding Trump accountable is a crucial primary step.
Additionally, Main Stream Media needs to stop succumbing to Trump’s moronic, baseless lawsuits and focus on reporting factual truth.
Regards Trumpy’s First Term, let’s talk about the Insurrection and start with naming Trump as its Leading Orchestrator and Traitor.
Let’s also hold him accountable in factual statements about Covid and his complete and utter mishandling of the devastating and horrific pandemic. Because of his lies and ineptness, 1.2 million Americans died needlessly. As he fed the American People false information about preventative measures & vaccines.
Regards your comment about Main Stream Media needing ‘to come clean and admit they were lying to the American people for everything they said during the first term’ … personally, I believe we received more accurate information about the damage from Trump’s first term than you are alluding to in your comment. Further, let’s look at Fox News and the Republicans who very literally are complicit in enabling Trump to promote his false rhetoric to the American People.
So, rather than putting the target solely on Main Stream Media, whose constantly being falsely attacked by Trump, barred from Press Conferences (which is cowardly, at best) and whose reporting is continually attacked by frivolous, baseless lawsuits, let’s place it where it truly belongs.
Let’s place responsibility accurately on: SCOTUS, for enabling a convicted felon to run for the office of president; Republicans, especially those in office, who deny the truth & facts about Trump; Tabloid ‘news’ organizations like Fox who blatantly report lies as truth.
If you want to talk about accountability than start with truth, honesty and legitimate facts.

Cali church member: so let the media slide in their false accusations? False accusations that the peddled every day of the 1st term and during the Biden administration? Oh yeah and about COVID. He went with Fauci’s plan to “flatten the curve” and allow the state governors to make their own decisions. Before I go any further did you agree with the rollout of vaccines?

Cali church member: https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/1839635641019081160?s=46

Church friend: Clearly you have chosen to buy into the completely false rhetoric that Trump & those who choose to deny medical facts and scientific reality. While you are certainly entitled to your opinion, when leaders indulge in this dangerous & false information, innocent people get hurt. Such as recommending ingesting bleach or Ivermectin. Reality is that real people, who were foolish enough to buy into those lies were seriously hurt.
Of course I agree with Vaccines, as any rational person should. Those vaccines were in process, 12 years prior to the pandemic. They were studied, tested and reviewed, fortunately. So when Covid hit, they were able to adjust & adapt the vaccines to utilize in fighting Covid.
The proof is in the reality that Covid was reigned in, here and throughout the world.
Vaccines have been used for decades safely and with tremendous efficacy. Like the Polio, Measles, Small Pox vaccines and many, many other vaccines.
Do me a favor and don’t bore me with your BS commentary any further, as they are taken straight from moron Trumps playbook, who is a serial liar, conman and has zero clue about these matters. Anyone that is willing to listen to him, and, worse, believe him, as far as I’m concerned, only shows how unwilling they are to deal in reality, facts and truth.
So, we shall part conversational company here, as I am unwilling to participate in this idiotic nonsense any further.
Buh bye

Former neighbor: They need an independent council for Obama if he or anyone on his team or is found guilty they need to suffer capital punishment. That is clearly a crime against humanity

High school friend: everything Barack Obama claimed was true. Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the court found that to be true but it did not affect the vote in any substantial way. That was the courts finding , let’s keep it real bro

Former neighbor: Cite the court case. please. Not some link to a news article. You could easily be lying.

High school friend: they need an independent council on the Epstein files because Donald Trump’s name was mentioned several times and no one has seen it.

Former neighbor: absolutely agree. the problem I see, is don’t you think Obama/Biden would have released that information during the election?

Church friend: Get a grip. There is no foundation in reality to the accusations against Obama for God’s sake! It is pure deflection against the Epstein scenario.
If ANYONE should be looked into regards cheating to become President it is Trump. And in that context I’m all for Capital Punishment for that sexual predator!

Former neighbor: And yet you make that statement without knowledge or even seeing the documents. Like I said appoint an independent council. They did it with trump and and independent council rule there was nothing.
The larger issue is how did we end up with people like you who make statement with no basis. Public Education at it’s finest.

Church friend: When? When was the independent council appointed regards Trump cheating in either election? Musk alluded to him cheating recently. Know why, cause he’s the one who helped him.
What possible reason would Obama have had for cheating in 2016? He wasn’t even running for election brainiac! What an asinine accusation.
Further, regards Epstein, not only is there basis, there are endless individuals stating Trump’s disgusting involvement, not to mention pictures and written comments from dumbass himself.
To your point: ‘how did we end up with people like YOU who make statements with no basis’

Dignity

Thanks to you if you got through my Facebook friends talking to each other. Some of them were dismissive. I think a few comments are a bit delusional. But they all represent some concentration, and they bothered to get engaged. I appreciated the responses. And I actually care about these people. If I met them at a party, I would talk to them. I have seen most of them in the past decade and one high school friend who resurfaced would be fun to catch up with. They matter.

Why in the world would we let someone like Trump make us argue? If he were your boss, you’d look for another job. If he were your uncle, you’d probably skip Thanksgiving. If he were your friend he would not be for long, since you see what he does to his friends (like Epstein). Manipulating us with lies and causing enough trouble for others in order to protect his personal power is what he has mastered.

When you read the comments to my Facebook post, you probably don’t see the beauty in each respondent. You don’t know them. We all know social media does not represent real persons, just a snippet of verbiage or snapshot of a moment. I have the benefit of knowing how each of these people care for others or are brilliant in their own way, I know a bit about their struggles and successes, their losses and graces. Most of them have faith.

Yet the Trump effect warps their dignity. Whatever distorted politics we are sorting out, we at least need to say a tidal wave of “NO!s” to dismissing our friends and hating our enemies. That may not be enough to stop the tyrants, but it will mean we have something left when they have passed through the social digestive system — which can’t be soon enough for me.

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Today is J.S. Bach Day! Somewhat respected is life and strangely dishonored after his death. His genius was later rediscovered along with the deep faith it served. Get to know him better at The Transhistorical Body.  

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The little back plot of land behind our new house needed to be reclaimed. Some kind of bamboo-like shrubs had overtaken it over 15-or-so years of neglect. We could not dig them up by ourselves, so our GC found Anthony from the Northeast who came in with his backhoe. He arrived later than promised, since he tried to get his too-tall trailer under a bridge and had to back it out of a single-lane road full of honkers. He had a long day.

Nevertheless, he worked hard. And we had a nice time getting to know each other. He was happy I guessed his unpronounceable last name was Polish. Similarly, the man from Guinea who had been working that morning on our cul-de-sac garden out front was happy I thought he might be from Conakry, which he was. The whole strange day felt like an island of mutuality in an ocean of polarization. My neighbor came out to explore gardening with me. The father groundhog came out at dusk to see what became of his wilderness. The first bird came to the new feeder. We were all in it together.

While Trump vainly tries to reignite the smoking heap of the Reagan Revolution, even as his past with Jeffrey Epstein nips as his backside, we all seem to be wishing for togetherness more and more. Last week lots of us were out in the street on John Lewis’s death day remembering how much we want to live in community. We really like mutual respect and we do not like diseased predators. The burgeoning protests are a natural reaction to the unnatural, survival-of- the-fittest heresy perpetrated by Eurocentric colonizers who still think their ill-gotten gains make them the fittest to rule.

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Mutualism

Contrary to the new Darwinism-by-keyboard we face, there is a small backlash of mutualism that lapped on my doorstep last week and then kept reappearing when I got outside my living room and into my new neighborhood.

For instance, I learned in biology, when a symbiotic relationship between two different species is mutually beneficial, it is called a “mutualism.” This month, scientists studying ant plants in Fiji discovered a variation on mutualism. In a particular ant plant, two normally-antagonist breeds of ants were housed in adjoining chambers of the plant’s reproductive chamber. The ants were fed, the plant was fertilized, warfare was averted. The discovery took the biological study of mutualism to a new level [Phys.org]. Christian skeptics of Darwin’s natural selection theory of evolution, based on competition, quickly noted how his theory falls apart if animals and plants of different species are cooperating [UCG Canada].

The original sin may, in fact, be competition. The major achievement of mental and spiritual health may , in fact, be mutualism – a return to nature as built by the Creator for the way of love. As a marriage and family therapist I can give witness to the reality that competition for scarce resources of grace and hope (and the less-useful justice) can destroy one of the main factories of mutualism in the world: marriage.

My testimony this week is a paean to mutuality, again. I may have failed to bring about a golden age of togetherness through the church, as I intended to do. But every day is a new opportunity to be a true self, reflecting the glory of Jesus, who is the ultimate example of mutualism, becoming one with humanity and so teaching truth and love. From Guineans to groundhogs, we are designed to live in harmony. The more survival-of-the-fittest, the less fit we all are.

Three contrary things mutualism teaches

Christians need to outthink this era like they did for the first three hundred years of church history. So Morton Kelsey said when he took one look at Reagan. At the protests, I take heart when I see people outthinking the fraudulent leaders we have in the U.S. You can see their genius in their signs (well, not mine, usually). For example, my favorite sign last Thursday was this lovely piece of 3D art depicting the despicable Stephen Miller as a puppeteer. I wove my way through the crowd to get a close up picture. People who are carrying the weight of art and literature now are important.

Every scrap of community needs to be nurtured. Tony the backhoe man usually takes one-half down, these days, before he gets started because people don’t pay him. He told me he once took a sealed envelope from a business owner he respected and assumed the $8700 in cash he was owed was in it. He did not want to look disrespectful by opening it up and counting it. When he got home it was $8200. He went back in the morning and the guy said, “Get off my property. You should have counted it before you left.” Nevertheless, he took the risk to trust me. Some people never learn how to be bad. I gave him a tip.

Hope will not disappoint us. Ants look for food all day and ferry it back to their queen and the next generation. They are tempted to fight for it. Then an ant plant adapts to their differences and provides a way for both needy groups to get what they desire and provide what they can. It feels miraculous. We wander into goodness all the time, as well; we’re surrounded by it. For instance, we finally got our new backyard to square one by the surprising efforts of someone who went through hell to get to us and was suspicious we might not pay him, but who hoped it would all work out.

If we don’t find our way into Creation’s mutualism we will likely compete ourselves to death, saying that “selfishness is natural” on our way to the grave. If we keep hoping that love will find a way, we might be surprised that the best we could do to help it along, even though we are just one plant in a forest, is more than enough.

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I was languidly reading this Morton Kelsey book from 1983: Companions on the Inner Way: The Art of Spiritual Guidance, when I got stuck on Chapter 5: “Atheism, Agnosticism and Spiritual Guidance.” I discovered that long before I had to disable Copilot (a Microsoft A.I. invader hoping to monetize my creativity), Kelsey pondered the spiritual diseases of modern/post-modern life. That sickness is coming to the fore, right now, since the electorate (probably) unleashed the sociopathic Trump on the world and he brought a slew of grandiose, incompetent individualists with him. Their wickedness is infectious.

Just last week the Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Collins “doubled down” on “no amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers and implied that a mythic number of “able-bodied” Medicaid recipients could fill in for them, all in the cause of creating an “all-American workforce” [YouTube]. Then President Trump hosted a televised roundtable with African leaders in which a favored reporter asked the group if they would support Trump receiving the Nobel Peace Prize (for suggesting the depopulation of Gaza and sending stealth bombers from the heartland to bomb Iran, I suppose). Several fawning leaders cravenly supported the notion. Then the President complimented the Liberian president, Joseph Boakai, on his good English, apparently not knowing that Liberia was created by Americans and the official language has been English since 1847 [YouTube]. Once again, the slavers and the autocrats who enable them are set loose on the world. It is depressing. Many of us can’t see a way out of it, yet.

The abyss

Not seeing the way is just what Kelsey was exploring, too. So I had to pause. He realized his way of seeing was too shallow. His intellect was not enough to keep him in the faith he needed. Like Abbe Huvelin said, “In faith we have just enough light to follow the right way, but on either side there is the abyss.” Kelsey saw that, left alone with his own understanding, he would keep falling into the abyss.

It was getting to know about Carl Jung  that helped him come to “realize that the spiritual world was real and the Divine Lover could be known and shared.” After that realization, his experience of love plus intellectual belief kept him out of the pit. He says,

Later I met Jung, who told how he was jolted out of the rational, materialistic agnosticism of his medical training. He learned that there was a nonphysical dimension to reality, which was observable to anyone who would take the trouble to experience it. It was, as he said, as experienceable as were the two moons of Jupiter to those in Galileo’s time who would take the trouble to look through the telescope. He believed that one of the most important therapeutic tasks was to free people caught in the constricting materialism of our time and open them up to a more adequate view of reality. He viewed the person wholly caught up in materialism as more sick than amoral or immoral. We need to outthink our materialistic world, just as the early Christians outthought the ancient world.

Kelsey was writing during the “Reagan Revolution” years which did not come to full fruit until Trump and his minions took over. The unleashing of sick, unfettered greed backed by the power of the American war machine is overwhelming. It is not hard to see a wave of depression rippling through the country in reaction — and it has to be depressing for African leaders to abase themselves on international TV. If there is no more meaning to life than winning the economic battle for supremacy there are steep personal prices to pay.

We have meaning

One of Jung’s important contributions to psychology and theology was his recognition that the inability to believe in anything, or the belief in a meaningless world, can be classified as disease or sickness which can cause as much damage as childhood trauma, acute tension or a dose of poison. If anyone believes they have no meaningful place in the universe, it can result in emotional and physical illness.

We yearn to join in the meaning of the universe. But it is all-too-easy to fall into the abyss when we are overwhelmed by meaninglessness. Suicide studies draw the simple conclusion that relying on hotlines to give desperate people attention and shore up their reason to live, providing a moment of community to shore up their capacity to take up their lonely responsibility, are not enough. The linked study concludes what I think is obvious: “Giving a person a job or proper health care can also be a suicide-prevention tool,” since such care allows for a minimal sense of meaning and value.

The present regime calls such practical, caring measures “socialist,” I think. Instead, they practice devaluing people, like when an ICE army invaded the heart of Los Angeles last week, teaching kids at a summer camp to hide [YouTube]. The message the regime delivers everyday is clearly received, especially by the most vulnerable. For instance, the Trevor Project reports a huge increase in the use of their hotlines after Trump’s election and inauguration.

The six signs of the abyss

Kelsey lists six “devastating emotions” which result from a sense of being an alien in a hostile or indifferent universe. The first three are related.

Fear

The sense of being an alien is a hostile or indifferent universe leads to fear of meaninglessness, fear of extinction at death, fear that we are faced with more than we can handle, fear that no one loves me, and fear of sickness.

Anger

Anger is the aggressive reaction to the same threatening feelings. Sometimes we turn our anger inward where it burns like a slow smoldering, consuming fire. Sometimes it strikes out in hatred and revenge.  Many say we are living in an “age of rage.”

Stress

Stress is the understandable result  of our belief that we, alone, have the power to protect ourselves from threat and we must do this by our own relentless alertness and energy. In a meaningless world we are faced with an impossible task, so stress is inevitable.

Depression

Depression is the unconscious twin of stress; it is giving up in the face of hopelessness. When there is no friendliness in the universe, there is less reason to expect it from human beings and less reason to reach out.

Loneliness

A gnawing loneliness is the inevitable circumstance that accompanies separation from social meaning. It is presently epidemic. Before DOGE got to HHS, the agency advised us on health issues. The Surgeon General produced a notable study on loneliness in 2023. Now we have RFK Jr’s “MAHA” report.

Psychic infection

All these things make us susceptible to psychic infection, which is the contamination  by the fear, anger, stress, depression and lonely hopelessness of others. Drugs of every kind have been unleashed to combat this infection, but they don’t quite hit the spot. When we are wallowing in our own and in society’s abyss, we need some meaning, some love, some supernatural connection. As Jung said, “The approach to the numinous is the real therapy.”

People are fond of saying things like “The world has been crazy before, we’ll be OK.” I appreciate those good people who have a psychological KN95 mask to wear and seem immune to infection. I, on the other hand, am suffering the wounds of political disaster, climate change, out-of-control militarism and whatever A.I. is going to do to me. What’s more, I experience Kelsey’s six devastating emotions in my beloved clients, who are bravely struggling for meaning in the middle of our oppositional society.

Rather than relying on Nature to right itself, I turn to Jesus who has two important things to say to us today. I hope focusing on them is like seeing the moons of Jupiter. They are a lens that reveals meaning in our suffering and a lens that looks beyond the borders of our understanding into Love.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” – John 16:33

“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” – John 6:67-69

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Speaking of people who know how to suffer for righteousness’ sake, today is Argula von Grumbach Day! This Reformation era woman used her gifts and people noticed, to good ends and bad. Get to know her at The Transhistorical Body.

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I am eating salad.
The cat,
the cat finds a way,
finds a way to knock the Tibetan bell,
the singing bowl, off the shelf.

I put down my fork.
I feed,
feed the next disaster,
the thing that needs fixing or finding
so the next problem can happen.

I gnaw a new problem.
The garage,
the garage door won’t close;
the door thinks it’s squashing a baby,
not landing on a vintage slab.

I know vintage.
The turn,
the turn is one thing I learned:
any move needs time for moving,
time to turn toward eternity.

I eat in an eternal now.
The right now,
now is for feeding on the future,
the future-present ordering of your love,
a whisper away in this breath.

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