Redefining Patience

At my job, the company is in the process of a very long reorganization which will radically change the lives of many, particularly me and my staff. The frustration with the leadership is that the process to rethink how the organization will function is being done solely by a small group of senor level staff. It is the classic situation where the few on the top are acting for the whole, keeping the process and content secret.

I understand the secrecy is being maintained out of a concern to protect the rest of us from the difficult and painful choices that are being made. At the same time, secrecy itself creates many destructive undercurrents within any system, whether a family or an organization. It is difficult to trust people working in secret when they do not trust you enough to say what is being talked about behind that wall of secrecy.

So when I ran across a subchapter of Seasons of Strength*, titled Patience in Disguise, it grabbed my attention:

"We can recognize three faces of patience, the first being its political guise. This is the virtue that is counseled to persons or groups seeking change. Thus women and blacks and the poor are told, “Be patient.” Here patience usually equals passivity. The communication is, “We will take care of it. Don’t rush us.” When this political advice is heeded, the “patient” mumbles that “nothing can be done” and succumbs to
impotence and inactivity. A virtue is twisted into weakness for purposes of social control.”

This accurately describes the feeling many staff are experiencing at my office. When the reorganization was first announced in January, many responded with a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. I encouraged my staff to consider this an opportunity to rethink and improve our work for our customers. At the same time, I urged each person to consider his or her own strengths and weaknesses, to update résumés, and prepare to offer their skills to the leaders. In spite of some trepidation, they followed my urging with a positive spirit.

However, we learned recently that the final unveiling of the reorganization plan will not occur for another two months. Even though I had urged up the chain of command that a clear date to be announced, because it is easier for people to adjust to a concrete date than have no idea when it would occur, I was not prepared for the amount of negative emotions it triggered.

Now, I sense, both in myself in others, a second way in which patience is acted out.

“The second visage of patience, that of the Stoic, appears at the other extreme. Stoic patience is a tough virtue, able to tolerate a great deal of pain. This “virtue” enables one to surmount feelings of loss or injury. Gritting his teeth, the Stoic keeps going. The Stoic “plays through the pain” with an iron will. In such an exercise of patience the person often denies the feelings that accompany the experience. . . . But in a deeper sense, it is a defensive lack of “patience” that we see – the refusal to be open, to receive, to be moved.”

There is a strong emotional appeal for a shut-down way of dealing with the situation. I lived through that my personal life very recently. While the Stoic way of patience can be sustained for short periods of time, it does lead to a complete closing down of one’s feelings, the good and the bad. You cannot allow only the good ones to come out, because once the door is open to the Pandora’s box, everything that is inside wants to be expressed. Many around me are hunkering down to do this over the many weeks ahead.

I know how exhausting and ultimately life-denying the Stoic position is, so, returning to the next passage from the Whiteheads’ book:

“Between these extremes of passivity and compulsive endurance is the active virtue of patience. . . . When we exercise this virtue we do not merely undergo an experience, such as illness or loss, but actively go through it. We are not just passive victims of the crisis; we face it. We can look into it and search out its meaning. This stance differs from both personal passivity and the gritty, Stoic denial of feeling. The virtue of grief, an offspring and heir of the human strength of patience, demands an acceptance of loss. This acceptance comes only with a patient attention to the experience, to both its absurdity and its meaning.”

So, there is the “acceptance of loss” and the “patient attention to the experience, to both its absurdity and its meaning.” I have been working on that sense of having lost something, and the initial work of grieving what was good and nurturing for so long. This process of writing about what is going on, using an external concept to structure my internal process, is one way I engage in paying “patient attention.” It helps in staying out of extremes of passivity or Stoic control.

The authors later note that “shadows of ambiguity and conflict” are a part of the experience. Those shadows really are quite dark at times, obscuring a sense of where to go or what to do next. I sense it when other staff describe how they are coping with the situation. However, it is encouraging that the authors support the kind of internal work I am doing:

“In psychological terms, this virtue demands receptive mastery. . . . to allow myself to fully savor and experience – whether of loss or delight. . . . Without this strength of receptive mastery, lacking the virtue of patience, we may be unable to “hold still” long enough to attend to what is happening to us.”

Just out of curiosity, I searched the Internet for the use of the phrase “receptive mastery,” thinking there must be come intellectual sphere in which it is part of the jargon. Indeed, I found the phrase is used in the study of how people learn a new language. In those situations, “receptive mastery” is a learning stage which may move forward into “productive” or “expressive” mastery in which what has been learned receptively reaches a level of active use. So before one can apply what is being learned, one has to actively “fully savor and experience” it. This engagement with the situation becomes essential in learning from it.

As I struggle to know how to lead my own staff out of the shadows, it is encouraging to know that I must also engage in developing my own self-awareness. I know I must continually be doing my own internal work so as not to manipulate or use them to meet my own personal needs. I know that in being a non-anxious presence with them, I can lead them with my own calmness and focus.

But that is not enough It does not lead me toward how to move ahead. The book fails to offer any further advice, turning its focus to other topics. So I will try to focus on paying attention with patience, knowing I will slide to the extremes of passivity or Stoicism. Maybe in that way I will discover some vision to follow.

*Seasons of Strength: New Visions in Adult Christian Maturing by Evelyn Eaton Whitehead and James D. Whitehead. Authors Guild Backinprint.com edition, 2003, p.89-90.

Trusting God to be God

The words jumped out at me as I read the page, resonating beyond my half-focused attention to the book in my hand. “[W]e are primarily or even exclusively trusting God to be God in the ways we have become accustomed to thinking about God.*”

How true that is. It is so easy to settle into a habitual and narrowly defined relationship with God. Habits grow out of a desire for some predictability and stability, like the morning routine I follow to get ready for each day. While a morning routine cannot hurt you with its automatic patterns, habitual ways to approaching and thinking about God eventually will shut God out.

The routines or habits, done without thought, get in the way of seeing or responding to what has changed around us. Those accustomed ways of thinking about God become sinful, when sin is understood as a willful separation or turning away from God, because there is no attention focused on how God may be present or available in the moment.

Continuing reading, “Trusting God beyond the God we have understood or known up to now can feel very uncomfortable.” Learning to trust God is much more complicated than human relationships. It is easy to lose the sense of ongoing connection with God. There are times of doubt, times of wondering if God is even there or a self-delusion. Praying can feel like leaving messages on an answering machine. The words are said and the feelings expressed, but we are often left wondering if God is screening the calls, not picking up the phone.

Listening to directees, I hear a common experience of waiting without knowing, wanting some sense of connection and often finding none. Those times of not knowing undermine a sense of trust, especially during times of fear and emergency when the need to trust in God’s concern and support are the highest.

Over and over again we need to be alert to how God may be reaching out to us, in a new way, and learn to trust that God is there even when we do not perceive it. As I have re-read old journals, I have been able to see God’s action in my life in retrospect, even though I could not see during those periods of my life. Sometimes the ways God reaches out to us is so outside our understanding that God seems absent and invisible. It is only after the old understanding is broken apart that the new understanding can be found.

Bakke then points to the hardest part for me to swallow, “we are called to depend more on God than we do on ourselves – a very unlikely possibility unless we are aided by grace.” Or, in other words, only through acknowledging and accepting the grace that God extends to us will we be able to depend upon God. I struggle with this because it has a circular logic, or begs the question. In order to depend upon God, I need to be aided by grace which comes from God, and if I don’t recognize or accept the grace, then I cannot depend upon God.

I am quickly getting to the edge of what I learned about logical fallacies in college some (let’s leave the number out) years ago. I know that from a logical perspective, Bakke’s statement is false, but that doesn’t make it false as a faith statement. Since I claim to have experienced God in some small way, can I let go of my aversion to the circular argument, rather than getting caught in the intellectual barbed wire?

This is the leap of faith, moving far beyond my comfort zone at this time. I will leave it there for now, but it will still be nagging at me.

*Holy Invitations: Exploring Spiritual Direction by Jeannette A. Bakke. Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 2000. page 63.

One of 1.8 Million

Why was I on the Mall to see Barack Obama take the oath of office as President of the United States? Living five blocks from the Mall certainly made it seem an easy choice. Even though circumstances led to me being there alone, wrapped up in many layers against the temperatures in the low 20s, I knew I had to be there.

Perhaps it was the memory of January 1981, when I stood with feminist friends on the side of Pennsylvania Avenue waiting for the car with Ronald Reagan. We held up our signs proclaiming “ERA NOW,” one last argument against what Reagan represented. It was meaningless. It could do nothing to stop the self-interested, conservative era that has dominated the county for the last 28 years. So I needed to be on the Mall to see and believe in the dream of our country in which the values of compassion, respect for all people, and the protection of civil rights would be reaffirmed.

Perhaps it was the need to feel the positive energy of this time of transition. I don’t need to say “I witnessed history” as so many stated to reporters. That puts it immediately into the past tense, already written down. I needed to feel people around me who believe in the hope for a new way of honoring each other through our differences. I needed to be around others who want a new definition of what it means to be an American. Well, not really a new definition, but a return to a previously held definition, one that I find in the best times of our history.

Perhaps it was the belief that this man who knows discrimination and has been attacked because of a core part of who he is will understand how destructive that discrimination is to all of us. A man who is bold in stating his belief that those of us who are different from him in our sexual orientation are still to be treated as equals. A man who invited the Gene Robinson, a proudly gay man who also is a Bishop of my church, to begin a concert with prayer.

Perhaps I needed to be there for those who I know and love who could not. I have been surprised by how family members and others have responded to my talking about attending the inauguration ceremony. Even though I was at least a mile away, I stood there for others, representing their hopes and dreams for new possibilities. They can see the pictures of the crowd of 1.8 million, and know I am there, standing 50 feet in front of the Washington Monument. Sorry Dad, I did not wear anything on the top of my cap so you could pick me out, but I am there.

My prayers are with this new President, his administration, his family, and my country, that we can find a way out of fear into faith, out of manipulation into respect, and out of secrecy into mutual respect and trust.

Always an Amateur

In a story recently told by a recorder teacher, she described one time when she took intensive lessons with a world famous recorder player. Within minutes of starting the first lesson, the famous one announced, “Well, it is clear you will always be an amateur.” How that must have sunk in deeply and hurt. Yet, it is also the reality of what I encounter in my own recorder practice and music making.

I have just finished working on two measures of a Handel sonata, running through it over and over again to get my fingers to know where to go next and my tongue to know exactly where it needs to be and how to open and close off notes. I spent maybe fifteen minutes on the recalcitrant notes, breaking them down, noticing each movement, trying to get them smooth, graceful and reliable. It was frustrating, hard work, and now I have knots in my shoulders and a bit of a headache.

The difficulty I have reminds me that I will never be more than an amateur, and never will play as well as that “amateur” teacher. So why is it so hard to admit I will never be more than an amateur? Why do I keep pushing up against those barriers of learning as an adult, at a time of life when my mind and my fingers are in decline, and will never reach the heights of technique to which I aspire?

Maybe it is the sense that I am still making progress, that I can get better, and the music will be able to find expression in my efforts? Even though the sonata is not considered among the most challenging or artistic of pieces, it still provides a challenge to my skills. It demands my attention, my practice and my commitment to turn it into something of beauty.

Maybe it is because my audience is so impressed with even the amateur level of playing that I can do? Let’s face it, when the only recorder you have heard is your child in third grade squawking through “All through the night” in a way that is anything but soothing, then my playing is virtuosic. Having an audience with no or little basis of comparison gives me a decided advantage.

Maybe it is because I appear to be having fun with the music, and the pieces are fun to hear? The audience doesn’t need to know how furiously my brain is working, noticing how many glitches there are along the way. If I am lucky, they will not where I lost my place and have to find my way back. They just know that it captured their attention, drew them out of their own distracted thoughts into a new sounding world.

Maybe I can find a way to let go of feeling that being an amateur is a failure? While I will never be paid for making music, I have paid to hear many famous musicians and wondered with some why I wasted my money. I might not be able to make the commitment that being a professional requires, but I can still commit my time and continually learn to be better. I can still be an expert with those who know so much less.

Maybe I can see join with the “amateur” athletes who train for the Olympics. Although they are able to dedicate mcuh more time, I can make the commitment as they have to become as excellent in their chosen sport as they can be. I can maintain a regular discipline of practice and working with coaches to continually refine my technique and build my own style.

There is one etymological perspective on the word amateur that I find appealing. In “What’s an Amateur” the Latin word “amator” which literally means “lover of” is the root of our current work. There is no better way to say it, since I am a lover of the recorder, of its many forms of expressiveness and the music written for it over the centuries.

So, being the lover of the recorder, I can bring my love into other peoples lives, and maybe I can inspire them to try it for themselves.

Sidewalk Directions

I was walking from my home in DC to a movie theater, a journey that takes me across the Mall, with its views of the Capital to the east and the Washington Monument to the west. A young, clean-cut man in his twenties, who was pushing a stroller, asked me which direction he would find the Museum of Natural History. He had emerged from the Metro station and lost his way, several blocks the wrong direction. As I gave him directions, he started out to find it, but since my trip was going the same direction we settled into a conversation.

He told me his name was “Christian.” That caused a bit of surprise, and led me to pay closer attention. It is not everyday you meet a person who introduces himself as Christian! A flag went up in my mind signaling that this could be one of God’s playful intrusions into my life.

It was not a dramatic conversation. He had newly moved into the area and was just beginning to explore it. As a long time resident, I noted how there is always much to do, especially with children. I realize now that I never even saw his child or learned anything about her. Or maybe it was a him? Talking about children isn’t the usual male topic.

He explained why he chose Alexandria after leaving the Air Force, with family near by and lots of opportunities matching his “skill set.” I answered his question about what I do. It is the common getting-to-know-you chatter in a city of career focused people.

As he turned left to walk down towards the museum while I was continuing straight, the goodbye was a simple and understated as our getting to know each other. His “Thank you for helping, Sir” caught me by surprise. Clearly his military training to respect an elder, but I am unused to being called “Sir.”

During those few minutes we walked together along the sidewalk, I experienced more than I expect in casual sidewalk encounters or providing directions around a confusing city. I cannot say with certainty that God was with us. I cannot know that anything happened beyond the unusual event of one man asking another for directions, and our breaking through the usual anonymity of city life to actually talk together for several blocks.

I walked on toward the theater with a new sense of hope for him, for me, for our future as two men journeying through life. For a short time we experienced community, which is definitely a gift from God.

Cross Purposes

I have not been posting here over the last few months as daily life has distracted me from the process of intentional reflection. Now as things settle down, in spite of it being the height of holiday rush, I hope to return to my discipline.

It is not that I haven’t been writing. Pieces were begun but got stuck or lost their focus or became too personal for public reading. So, reaching back to a piece I started about a year ago, here is something for Advent.

In “Joseph’s Dream,” an essay posted on Episcopal Café, the Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo reviews Joseph’s perspective on the birth of Jesus. Ferlo reminds us how much inner conflict Joseph must have felt when he discovered his wife-to-be was pregnant. How it was during a dream that Joseph learned who this child would be. What caught me was Ferlo’s reflection on how that inner chaos of Joseph matches ours:

“. . . our deepest desires at cross-purposes with each other. We feel it when we want at the same time to embrace our families and to escape them; when we harbor private grief or grievances in the midst of public joy; when in spite of the holiday, or because of it, we seek to escape to a darkened room, to banish all semblance of dreams, to sleep in blankness.”

I have been experiencing that kind of internal chaos. The sharp contrast between simultaneous feelings has been startling and confusing. My desire is to banish the negative and only feel the positive, which is impossible. They both demand attention, and are part of the same experience, engaged in the chaos.

I can only blame myself. I have been working for years to notice my feelings, and to notice when I have moved into denial. In my experience, denial shoves the negativity being avoided into a secret bank account, where it accumulates compound interest at high rates. When the denial fails, the bank account automatically opens to show all of fear and pain that has collected in the darkness, battering my soul.

So, I try to deal with things as they come, not bury them inside. However, that requires being open to my emotions, which do have a life of their own. Last year during a baptism at church, I found myself brimming with hope for the little girl who I don’t even know. I felt proud yet humbled in making the promise aloud that I would support her in her life in Christ. Tears came to my eyes as we sang a hymn while she was processed around the congregation. It was embarrassing, wiping my tears and blowing my nose during the last verse.

My tears came partly from my knowledge that I would not be remaining in that congregation, that my time within that community was temporary. Even as I made the promise, I knew I would not be available to care for her. My path would take me away to a different parish. While I try to justify it by saying I would fulfill my promise with some other child where ever I might be, I had a deeply felt desire to care for that particular infant.

So often, we are all like Joseph, with our “deepest desires at cross purposes.” As we enter Advent this year, “as with Joseph, the dream will come however much we try to block it, making of our mixed desires and the world’s distress the stuff of revelation.”

May God grant all of us the courage to be open to God’s revelation this Advent.

A Time for Empty Space

At the end of September I heard an interview of Dar Williams, a composer and singer, on National Public Radio. She was describing her “need to take the time to structure my life to create the empty spaces, so every story really has its due."

Many of us struggle with setting aside time for the “empty spaces” in which we can pay attention and listen to our inner conversations, maybe even get a peek into our souls. Much of life distracts us from being able to shift our attention that direction. Sometimes, when we are anxious about what we might learn, we search for distractions to avoid listening to what is going on inside.

As the long gap in my entries on this blog indicates, I have been struggling to find that time for several weeks now. It is too easy to postpone it, thinking I will be able to fit it into the weekend, or maybe late at night after turning off the television. Of course other things crowd into the weekend, and I am usually too tired late at night.

I am not complaining, because my life has been rich with many things that engage and challenge me. But, when the “empty spaces” keep slipping away, I also find it much harder to notice God.

Dar Williams describes the necessity of time by herself:

“I say to my husband, to the people around me, sorry I cannot do this right now because I have to go wander in a field. Its really what I do for a living . . .”

So, what if I were to claim the same statement, that “its really what I do for a living.” I don’t mean “living" as punching a time clock or producing a commodity to earn an income, the way she is using that phrase. But “for a living” can mean an intentional, purposeful way of living one’s life.

I know when I insist on regularly including those spaces in my schedule the quality of my life improves significantly. I am more creative in working with others, I can better resist the anxiety of the times, and I can offer a sense of being present to all I meet. All aspects of my living is better.

At one time in my life I believed the promises of a personal planner company, that by using their product and taking their training I would be able to control my schedule, make all of the pieces fit, and live a balanced life. Our society constantly promotes that fantasy in order to manipulate our self-image and sell us products.

Then I asked a coworker, who is also a visual artist, who she keeps her office job and her art in balance. She shocked me by saying there is no way to keep them in balance. She found herself fully focused on one because of the intellectual and emotional demands to do the work while nothing happened with the other. Over a period of months or even years she hoped to get a balance for herself, but not on a daily or weekly basis.

While it is hard keep that longer-term model of balance, I found it to be both true and healthful. Even though I have not been able to do this kind of writing as much as I have liked, I have been able to find times for private writing in my journal, which records thoughts and feelings for later review. There has been time found for making music on my recorder, both individual practice and rehearsing with my group. I have been able to use my time to enjoy different friends and family, while also making time to meet and learn about people at my new church community.

While that has all been good, I have still struggled to fit in the “empty spaces.” But, as long as I keep aware, and asking the question, I believe I will find the blend of what will sustain me, even if it is not in balance.

Thank you Dar Williams for your insight!

P.S. Writing this essay has been an experience in how much I have needed to work through this topic since first hearing the interview three weeks ago. So much has been working in my head, below my awareness, that there is a rush to get it all onto the page, to bring the pieces together, and to follow the newly noticed threads. Writing becomes one way in which I can listen in the “empty spaces” to what is important, meaningful, and what I want to communicate to others.