Thursday, September 17, 2009

"People of the Lie" excerpts

from "People of the Lie: the hope for healing human evil" by M. Scott Peck page 71ff (excerpts from Chapter 2)

As I have written elsewhere: "Blessed are the poor in spirit," Jesus began when the time came for him to address the multitudes. What did he mean by this opener? . . . What is so great about feeling down on yourself-about having this sense of personal sin? If you ask that, it might help to remember the Pharisees. They were the fat cats of Jesus' day. They didn't feel poor in spirit. They felt they had it all together, that they were the ones who knew the score, who deserved to be the culture leaders in Jerusalem and Palestine. And they were the ones who murdered Jesus.


The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who worry about betraying themselves. The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.


Unpleasant though it may be, the sense of personal sin is precisely that which keeps our sin from getting out of hand. It is quite painful at times, but it is a very great blessing because it is our one and only effective safeguard against our own proclivity for evil. Saint Therese of Lisieux put it so nicely in her gentle way: "If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.~~*


The evil do not serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to themselves. In fact, they don't bear it at all. I could not, for instance, detect a hint of self-recrimination in Bobby's parents. And it is out of their failure to put themselves on trial that their evil arises.

The varieties of people's wickedness are manifold. As a result of their refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness, the evil ones become uncorrectable grab bags of sin. They are, for instance, in my experience, remarkably greedy people. Thus they are cheap-so cheap that their "gifts" may be murderous. In The Road Less Traveled, I suggested the most basic sin is laziness. In the next subsection I suggest it may be pride-because all sins are reparable except the sin of believing one is without sin. But perhaps the question of which sin is the greatest is, on a certain level, a moot issue. All sins betray-and isolate us from-both the divine and our fellow creatures. As one deep religious thinker put it, any sin "can harden into hell":


· Marilyn von Waldener and M. Scott Peck, "What Return Can I Make?" (awaiting publication).


· . . There can be a state of soul against which Love itself is powerless because it has hardened itself against Love. Hell is essentially a state of being which we fashion for ourselves: a state of final separateness from God which is the result not of God's repudiation of man, but of man's repudiation of God, and a repudiation which is eternal precisely because it has become, in itself, immovable. There are analogies in human experience: the hate which is so blind, so dark, that Love only makes it the more violent; the pride which is so stony that humility only makes it more scornful; the inertia-last but not least the inertia-which has so taken possession of the personality that no crisis, no appeal, no inducement whatsoever, can stir it into activity, but on the contrary makes it bury itself the more deeply in its immobility. So with the soul and God; pride can become hardened into hell, hatred can become hardened into hell, any of the seven root forms of wrongdoing can harden into hell, and not least that sloth which is boredom with divine things, the inertia that cannot be troubled to repent, even though it sees the abyss into which the soul is falling, because for so long, in little ways perhaps, it has accustomed itself to refuse whatever might cost it an effort. May God in his mercy save us from that.*


A predominant characteristic, however, of the behavior of those I call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection. Take a simple example of a six-year-old boy who asks his father, "Daddy, why did you call Grand-mommy a bitch?" "I told you to stop bothering me," the father roars. "Now you're going to get it. I'm going to teach you not to use such filthy language, I'm going to wash your mouth out with soap. Maybe that will teach you to clean up what you say and keep your mouth shut when you're told." Dragging the boy upstairs to the soap dish, the father inflicts this punishment on him. In the name of "proper discipline" evil has been committed.


Scapegoating works through a mechanism psychiatrists call projection. Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others. The father perceived the profanity and un-cleanliness as existing in his son and took action to cleanse his son's "filthiness." Yet we know it was the father who was profane and unclean. The father projected his own filth onto his son and then assaulted his son in the name of good parenting.


Evil, then, is most often committed in order to scapegoat, and the people I label as evil are chronic scapegoaters. In The Road Less Traveled I defined evil "as the exercise of political power-that is, the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion-in order to avoid . . . spiritual growth" (p. 279). In other words, the evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Spiritual growth requires the acknowledgment of one's need to grow. If we cannot make that acknowledgment, we have no option except to attempt to eradicate the evidence of our imperfection. *· Ernest Becker, in his final work, Escape from Evil (Macmillan, 1965), pointed out the essential role of scapegoating in the genesis of human evil. He erred, I believe, in focusing exclusively on the fear of death as the sole motive for such scapegoating. Indeed, I think the fear of self-criticism is the more potent motive. Although Becker did not make the point, he might have equated the fear of self-criticism with the fear of death. Self-criticism is a call to personality change. As soon as I criticize a part of myself I incur an obligation to change that part. But the process of personality change is a painful one. It is like a death. The old personality pattern must die for a new pattern to take its place. The evil are pathologically attached to the status quo of their personalities, which in their narcissism they consciously regard as perfect. I think it is quite possible that the evil may perceive even a small degree of change in their beloved selves as representing total annihilation. In this sense, the threat of self-criticism may feel to one who is evil synonymous with the threat of extinction. How this is so will become clear as we go more deeply into the subject of narcissism.


Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves. As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life-usually in the name of righteousness. The fault, however, may not be so much that they hate life as that they do not hate the sinful part of themselves. I doubt that Bobby's parents deliberately wanted to kill Stuart or him. I suspect if I had gotten to know them well enough, I would have found their murderous behavior totally dictated by an extreme form of self-protectiveness which invariably sacrificed others rather than themselves.


What is the cause of this failure of self-hatred, this failure to be displeasing to oneself, which seems to be the central sin at the root of the scapegoating behavior of those I call evil? The cause is not, I believe, an absent conscience. There are people, both in and out of jail, who seem utterly lacking in conscience or superego. Psychiatrists call them psychopaths or sociopaths. Guiltless, they not only commit crimes but may often do so with a kind of reckless abandon. There is little pattern or meaning to their criminality; it is not particularly characterized by scapegoating. Conscienceless, psychopaths appear to be bothered or worried by very little-including their own criminality. They seem to be about as happy inside a jail as out. They do attempt to hide their crimes, but their efforts to do so are often feeble and careless and poorly planned. They have sometimes been referred to as "moral imbeciles," and there is almost a quality of innocence to their lack of worry and concern.


This is hardly the case with those I call evil. Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal. They are acutely sensitive to social norms and what others might think of them. Like Bobby's parents, they dress well, go to work on time, pay their taxes, and outwardly seem to live lives that are above reproach.


The words "image, appearance, and "outwardly" are crucial to understanding the morality of the evil. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their "goodness" is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the "people of the lie."


Actually, the lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves. They cannot or will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach. The decorum with which they lead their lives is maintained as a mirror in which they can see themselves reflected righteously. Yet the self-deceit would be unnecessary if the evil had no sense of right and wrong. We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit. Some rudimentary form of conscience must precede the act of lying. There is no need to hide unless we first feel that something needs to be hidden.


We come now to a sort of paradox. I have said that evil people feel themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, I think they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature. Indeed, it is this very sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At one and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality, like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness. For everything they did, Bobby's parents had a rationalization-a whitewash good enough for themselves even if not for me. The problem is not a defect of conscience but the effort to deny the conscience its due. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil Originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.


It often happens, then, that the evil may be recognized by its very disguise. The lie can be perceived before the misdeed it is designed to hide-the cover-up before the fact. We see the smile that hides the hatred, the smooth and oily manner that masks the fury, the velvet glove that covers the fist. Because they are such experts at disguise, it is seldom possible to pinpoint the maliciousness of the evil. The disguise is usually impenetrable. But what we can catch are glimpses of "The uncanny game of hide-and-seek in the obscurity of the soul, in which it, the single human soul, evades itself, avoids itself, hides from itself.*


*Buber, "Good and Evil", p. 111. Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture? In India I would suppose that the evil would demonstrate a similar tendency to be "good" Hindus or "good" Moslems. I do not mean to imply that the evil are anything other than a small minority among the religious or that the religious motives of most people are in any way spurious. I mean only that evil people tend to gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them.


In "The Road Less Traveled" I suggested that laziness or the desire to escape "legitimate suffering" lies at the root of all mental illness. Here we are also talking about avoidance and evasion of pain. What distinguishes the evil, however, from the rest of us mentally ill sinners is the specific type of pain they are running away from. They are not pain avoiders or lazy people in general. To the contrary, they are likely to exert themselves more than most in their continuing effort to obtain and maintain an image of high respectability. They may willingly, even eagerly, undergo great hardships in their search for status. It is only one particular kind of pain they cannot tolerate: the pain of their own conscience, the pain of the realization of their own sinfulness and imperfection.


Since they will do almost anything to avoid the particular pain that comes from self-examination, under ordinary circumstances the evil are the last people who would ever come to psychotherapy. The evil hate the light-the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that exposes them, the light of truth that penetrates their deception. Psychotherapy is a light-shedding process par excellence. Except for the most twisted motives, an evil person would be more likely to choose any other conceivable route than the psychiatrist's couch. The submission to the discipline of self-observation required by psychoanalysis does, in fact, seem to them like suicide. The most significant reason we know so little scientifically about human evil is simply that the evil are so extremely reluctant to be studied.


If the central defect of the evil is not one of conscience, then where does it reside? The essential psychological problem of human evil, I believe, is a particular variety of narcissism.



NARCISSISM AND WILL

Narcissism, or self-absorption, takes many forms. Some are normal. Some are normal in childhood but not in adulthood. Some are more distinctly pathological than others. The subject is as complex as it is important. It is not the purpose of this book, however, to give a balanced view of the whole topic, so we will proceed immediately to that particular pathologic variant that Erich Fromm called "malignant narcissism.


Malignant narcissism is characterized by an un-submitted will. All adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than themselves, be it God or truth or love or some other ideal. They do what God wants them to do rather than what they would desire. "Thy will, not mine, be done," the God-submitted person says. They believe in what is true rather than what they would like to be true.


Summary: to a greater or lesser degree, all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves to the demands of their own conscience. Not so the evil, however. In the conflict between their guilt and their will, it is the guilt that must go and the will that must win.


The reader will be struck by the extraordinary willfulness of evil people. They are men and women of obviously strong will, determined to have their own way. There is a remarkable power in the manner in which they attempt to control others.*


* The over-controllingness of evil is well expressed through the Mormon myth in which Christ and Satan were each required to present God with his own plan for dealing with the infant human race. Satan's plan was simple (of the sort that most business and military leaders today would come up with): God had armies of angels at His command; just assign an angel with punitive power to each human, and He would have no trouble keeping them in line. Christ's plan was radically different and more imaginative (and biophilic): "Let them have free will and go their own way," he proposed, "but allow me to live and die as one of them, both as an example of how to live and of how much You care for them." God, of course, chose Christ's plan as the more creative, and Satan rebelled at the choice. The controlling nature of evil is also treated at length by Marguerite Shuster in her unpublished dissertation, "Power, Pathology and Paradox" (Fuller Theological Seminary, 1977).


Theologians speak of evil being a consequence of free will. When God, creating us in His own image, gave us free will, He had to allow us humans the option of evil. The problem can also be envisioned in the secular terms of evolution theory. The "will" of less evolved creatures seems largely under the control of their instincts. When humans evolved from the apes, however, they largely evolved out from under such instinctual controls and hence into free will. This evolution leaves humans in the position of being either totally willful or having to seek new ways of self-control through submission to higher principles. But this still leaves us with the question of why some human beings are able to achieve such submission while others are not.

Indeed, it is almost tempting to think that the problem of evil lies in the will itself. Perhaps the evil are born so inherently strong-willed that it is impossible for them ever to submit their will. Yet I think it is characteristic of all "great" people that they are extremely strong-willed-whether their greatness be for good or for evil. The strong will-the power and authority-of Jesus radiates from the Gospels, just as Hitler's did from Mein Kampf. But Jesus' will was that of his Father, and Hitler's that of his own. The crucial distinction is between "willingness and willfulness.'*

This willful failure of submission that characterizes malignant narcissism is depicted in both the stories of Satan and of Cain and Abel. Satan refused to submit to God's judgment that Christ was superior to him. For Christ to be preferred meant that Satan was not. Satan was less than Christ in God's eyes. For Satan to have accepted God's judgment, he would have had to accept his own imperfection. This he could not or would not do. It was unthinkable that he was imperfect. Consequently submission was impossible and both the rebellion and fall inevitable. So also God's acceptance of Abel's sacrifice implied a criticism of Cain: Cain was less than Abel in God's eyes. Since he refused to acknowledge his imperfection, it was inevitable that Cain, like Satan, should take the law into his own hands and commit murder. In some similar, although usually more subtle fashion, all who are evil also take the law into their own hands, to destroy life or liveliness in defense of their narcissistic self-image.



"Pride goeth before the fall"

"Pride goeth before the fall," it is said, and of course laymen simply call pride what we have labeled with the fancy psychiatric term of "malignant narcissism." Being at the very root of evil, it is no accident that Church authorities have generally considered pride first among the sins. By the sin of pride they do not generally mean the sense of legitimate achievement one might enjoy after a job well done. While such pride, like normal narcissism, may have its pitfalls, it is also part of healthy self-confidence and a realistic sense of self-worth. What is meant is, rather, a kind of pride that unrealistically denies our inherent sinfulness and imperfection-a kind of overweening pride or arrogance that prompts people to reject and even attack the judgment implied by the day-to-day evidence of their own inadequacy. Despite its fruits, Bobby's parents saw no fault in their child care. In Buber's words, the malignantly narcissistic insist upon "affirmation independent of all findings.~~*


What is the cause of this overweening pride, this arrogant self-image of perfection, this particularly malignant type of narcissism? Why does it afflict a few when most seem to escape its clutches? We do not know. In the past fifteen years psychiatrists have begun to pay increasing attention to the phenomenon of narcissism, but our understanding of the subject is still in its infancy. We have not yet succeeded, for instance, in distinguishing the different types of excessive self-absorption. There are many who are clearly-even grossly-narcissistic in one way or another but are not evil. All I can say at this point is that the particular brand of narcissism that characterizes evil people seems to be one that particularly afflicts the will. Why a person should be a victim of this type and not another or none at all, I can only vaguely surmise.
It is my experience that evil seems to run in families. The person to be described in Chapter 4 had evil parents. But the familial pattern, if accurate, does nothing to resolve the old "nature versus nurture" controversy. Does evil run in families because it is genetic and inherited? Or because it is learned by the child in imitation of its parents? Or even as a defense against its parents? And how are we to explain the fact that many of the children of evil parents, although usually scarred, are not evil? We do not know, and we will not know until an enormous amount of painstaking scientific work has been accomplished.


Nonetheless, a leading theory of the genesis of pathological narcissism is that it is a defensive phenomenon. Since almost all young children demonstrate a formidable array of narcissistic characteristics, it is assumed that narcissism is something we generally "grow out of" in the course of normal development, through a stable childhood, under the care of loving and understanding parents. If the parents are cruel and unloving, however, or the childhood otherwise traumatic, it is believed that the infantile narcissism will be preserved as a kind of psychological fortress to protect the child against the vicissitudes of its intolerable life. This theory might well apply to the genesis of human evil. The builders of the medieval cathedrals placed upon their buttresses the figures of gargoyles-themselves symbols of evil-in order to ward off the spirits of greater evil. Thus children may become evil in order to defend themselves against the onslaughts of parents who are evil. It is possible, therefore, to think of human evil-or some of it-as a kind of psychological gargoylism.


There are other ways, however, to look at the genesis of human evil. The fact of the matter is that some of us are very good and some of us very evil, and most of us are somewhere in between. We might therefore think of human good and evil as a kind of continuum. As individuals we can move ourselves one way or another along the continuum. Just as there is a tendency for the rich to get richer, however, and the poor to get poorer, so there seems to be a tendency for the good to get better and the bad to get worse. Erich Fromm spoke of these matters at some length:


"Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life. The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens-or better perhaps, comes alive."


from pg 83:

In my own view, the issue of free will, like so many great truths, is a paradox. On the one hand, free will is a reality. We can be free to choose without "shibboleths" or conditioning or many other factors. On the other hand, we cannot choose freedom. There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one's own will- which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil. We must ultimately belong to either God or the devil. This paradox was, of course expressed by Christ when he said "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it. And whosoever shall sole his life, for my sake, shall find it."... As C. S. Lewis put it, "there is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan." I suppose the only true state of freedom is to stand exactly halfway between God and the devil, uncommitted either to goodness or to utter selfishness. But that freedom is to be torn apart. It is intolerable... we nmust choose. One enslavement or the other.

Hell is a CHOICE

"God does not punish us; we punish ourselves. Those who are in hell are there by their own choice. Indeed, they could walk right out of it if they so chose, except that their values are such as to make the path out of hell appear overwhelmingly dangerous, frighteningly painful, and impossibly difficult. So they remain in hell because it seems safe and easy to them. They prefer it that way. This situation and the psychodymamics involved were the subject of C. S. Lewis' fine book The Great Divorce. The notion that people are in hell by their own choice is not widely familiar, but the fact is that it is both good psychology and good theology." --M. Scott Peck

"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside." --C. S. Lewis

"It's not a question of God 'sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud. The matter is serious: let us put ourselves in His hands at once---this very day, this hour." --C. S. Lewis

"While He nurtures us, He also desires to penetrate us"

from "People of the Lie: the hope for healing human evil" by M. Scott Peck pg 11-12


So I ask you to be careful in this respect also. Great evil has been committed throughout the centuries-----and is still being committed-----by nominal Christians, often in the name of Christ. The visible Christian Church is necessary , even saving, but obviously faulty, and I do apologize for its sins as well as my own.

Crusades and inquisitions had nothing to do with Christ. War, torture, and persecution have nothing to do with Christ. Arrogance and revenge have nothing to do with Christ. When he gave his one recorded sermon, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth were, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Not the arrogant. And as he was dying he asked that his murderers be forgiven.

In a letter to her sister, Saint Theresa of Lysieux wrote, “If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.” To define a “true Christian” is a risky business. But if I had to,.my definition would be that a true Christian is anyone who is “for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter.” There are hundreds of thousands who go to Christian churches every Sunday who are not the least bit willing to be displeasing to themselves, serenely or otherwise, and who are not, therefore, for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter. Conversely, there are millions of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who are willing to bear that trial. There is nothing in this work that should offend the latter. Much may offend the former.

I feel compelled to make another “nonapology.” Many readers are likely to be concerned my use of masculine pronouns in relationship to God. I think I both understand and appreciate their concern. It is a matter to which I have given much thought. I have generally been a strong supporter of the women’s movement and action that is reasonable to combat sexist language.

But first of all, God is not neuter. He is exploding with life and love----even sexuality of a sort.

So “It” is not appropriate. Certainly I consider God androgynous. He is a gentle and tender and nurturing and maternal as any woman could ever be. Nonetheless, culturally determined though it may be, I subjectively experience His reality as more masculine than feminine. While He nurtures us, He also desires to penetrate us, and while he more often than not flee from His love like a reluctant virgin, He chases after us with a vigor in the hunt that we typically associate with males. As C.S. Lewis put it, in relation to God we are all female. Moreover, whatever our gender or conscious theology, it is our duty----our obligation—in response to His love to attempt to give birth, like Mary, to Christ in ourselves and in others.

I shall, however, break with tradition and use the neuter for Satan. While I know Satan to be lustful to penetrate us, I have not in the least experienced this desire as sexual or creative— only hateful and destructive. It is hard to determine the sex of a snake.

I have made multiple alterations of detail in every one of the many case histories given in this book. The cornerstone of both psychotherapy and science are honesty and accuracy. Nonetheless, Values often compete, and the preservation of confidentiality takes precedence in this book over the full or accurate disclosure of irrelevant detail. The purist, therefore, may destruct my “data.” On the other hand, if you think you recognize one of my specific patients in this book, you will be wrong. You will, however, probably recognize many people who conform to the personality patterns I will describe. That will be because the many alterations of case-history details have not, in my judgement, significantly distorted the reality of the human dynamics involved. As this book has been written because of the commonality of such dynamics, as well as their need to be more clearly perceived and understood by us humans.

Monday, January 19, 2009

kephale- source of strength

from "Livin' it and Lovin' it" by Joel and Kathy Davisson

Source of Strength

Source of strength or source of life as the meaning of “kephale” makes sense. Its reality is seen – for good or for bad – in every Christian marriage. Some men use this principle to feed life into their marriage; some men feed death.

The wrong belief that “headship” means authority or rank has never helped anyone! It has only served to validate selfish and controlling men. Men who are naturally good husbands don’t concern themselves with questions about who is in authority in their homes.

Good husbands are servants. They have great marriages because they have been nurturing their wives all along without understanding the true concept of headship. When the good guys (hmm… one out of 500?) were taught that headship meant authority, they heard “servanthood.” Clueless husbands want to talk in terms of “leadership.” The current buzzword is “servant*leadership.” Great husbands don’t care. They are too busy thinking of ways to bless and serve their wives and children.

If your wife asked you to read this book then you*can be pretty sure that you are not one of these naturally born good husbands. You are like me and the other 499! You probably try but you have had a lack of knowledge about how to have a great marriage. Your wife is praying desperately that you will hear this message loudly and clearly!

We, the 499, thought that our wives were not allowed to tell us what to do. Why? Because we believed that we were in charge! We were taught wrongly that we were the “head of our homes,” being interpreted “You are in charge!”

We believed that our wives were trying to control us when they expressed insecurities and fears. We told them point blank, by word or action, “You can’t control me! I will do whatever I want! I am in charge of me and I am in charge of you!” Why? We believed that we were the boss! What is the truth? A husband and wife are to be*one flesh. They are to come to decisions together. They are to lead together as a team. He is not her boss and she is not his.

The key is that marriage is equal.

Equal servanthood. Equal authority.

The idea that headship bestows final authority upon a husband is just plain wrong. What did Jesus say about this?

But JESUS said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers over the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you.” Mark 10:42-43

When a husband treats his wife well by validating and affirming her she is strengthened.

When he honors her, assuring her of his love, she is energized.

When he is being gentle, loving and kind, she is enabled to become his dream wife. She abounds with energy. She becomes easy going and looks for ways to please him. Her self-image is strong. Her confidence skyrockets. She is healed of past wounds and abuses.

When a husband treats his wife poorly by devaluing, dishonoring and ignoring her then her energy is depleted. Her self image suffers. She acts out in passive or aggressive ways. She has no confidence and her lack of self esteem is evident in her countenance. She may hide it behind a façade that blusters with arrogance or an overblown sense of ego. She might be honest about how she feels and cry a lot.

When a wife is mistreated for an extended period of time she goes downhill as she struggles to survive. She is always living in her last ounce of strength. She walks in the pain and insecurity of past abuses and has no natural motivation to please her husband. Some wives dutifully look for ways to please a husband who is bringing death to her. She hopes that she can convince him to love her by treating him well. This seldom works.

It normally makes things worse.

Other wives give up trying and could seemingly care less. They do care. They care deeply. Some wives care so deeply that they finally file for divorce to ease the pain. When a man is becoming the husband that his wife needs him to be – he is becoming the man that God has called him to be. She then increases in stature, strength and inner beauty with each passing year.

Yes, a husband is the head of his wife but that does not mean at all what you have always thought that it meant. It means that your marriage rises and falls on what a husband does or doesn’t do. A husband is a source of life or death. You can’t argue or deny it. You can only choose how you will respond.

What will you feed into your marriage? What will it be? Choose today. Life? Or death?

Monday, December 22, 2008

Defining "femininity"

quote from Ruby Slippers* by Jonalyn Fincher


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
is femininity just too difficult to nail down?

How Philosophers Help Women

...
Philosophers define such slippery things using family resemblance, a list of the many ways things resemble each other. Family resemblances are a list of common but not required characteristics. We know and accept that some members do not have all resemblances. They are still "in" the group because they have enough on the list. As a philosopher, I think this approach works well with femininity.

Family resemblance helps us explain femininity because it keeps our notions of femininity clear yet flexible. We can come up with a list of recurring resemblances that many, though not all, women have. Some items on this list will be characteristic of many women, but all together they may nor be true of every woman. The key is that all women will enjoy at least one of these family characteristics. One is sufficient for a woman to be feminine...

A person has a woman's soul by having the first characteristic. The first family resemblance is something essential to all women. The rest are more commonalities that more women than men share, hence family resemblance.

~~~~Family Resemblance~~~~~~~~~~Description
  1. Female body---------> A soul interwoven into a female body
  2. Vulnerability--------->In body and soul
  3. Interdependence----->Identity emerges from intimacy
  4. Sensitive awareness-->Soul radar for others and ourselves
  5. Emotional intelligence-> Experience in management of intense emotions
  6. Cultivation------------> Ability to tend others, ourselves, and the world

These are just the beginning of a list of natural feminine resemblances- there may be more. These qualities, as gifts from God may come more easily yo us. These are not things we should have to try to do as much as they will be part of who we are....

Natural femininity is the way we live with our female body and the way we use our soul for vulnerability, interdependence, sensitive awareness, emotional intelligence, and cultivation. The latter five characteristics are not requirements for all women. A man may be sensitive, vulnerable, or a cultivator, but that doesn't make him feminine. A man can never be feminine in his soul because he doesn't have the essential ingredient: a female body. (clips from pages 101-106)
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* FINCHER, JONALYN. Ruby Slippers : How the Soul of a Woman Brings Her Home. Grand Rapids, Mich. Zondervan, 2007, pages 101-106.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Re-Thinking Eve...

Quotes from Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge

When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. “It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]” (Gen 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is “notoriously difficult to translate”. The various attempts we have in English are “helper” or “companion” or the notorious “help meet”. Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat... disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing “One day I shall be a help meet?” Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it “sustainer beside him.”

The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately.

Most of the contexts are life and death, by the way, and God is your only hope. Your ezer. If he were not there beside you... you are dead. A better translation of ezer would be “lifesaver”. Kenegdo means alongside, or opposite to, a counterpart.


quote:

Your feminine heart has been created with the greatest of all possible dignities- as a reflection of God’s own heart...

...the story of Eve... We clearly haven’t learned its lessons- for if we had, men would treat women much much differently, and women would view themselves in a far better light...

Adam steps forth, the image of God. Nothing in creation even comes close. Picture Michelangelo’s David. He is... magnificent. Truly the masterpiece seems complete. And yet, the Master says that something is not good, not right. Something in missing... and that something is Eve...

She is the crescendo, the final astonishing work of God. Woman. In one least flourish creation comes to a finish not with Adam, but with Eve. She is the Master’s finishing touch... His piece de resistance. She fills a place in the world nothing and no one else can fill... (Ladies) Look out across the earth and say to yourselves, “The whole, vast world is incomplete without me. Creation reached its zenith in me.”

And she, too, bears the image of God but in a way that only the feminine can speak. What can we learn from her? God wanted to reveal something about Himself, so he gave us Eve... Eve is created because things were not right without her. Something was not good. ...Something is missing? What could it possibly be? Eve. Woman. Femininity. Wow. Talk about significance.


quote:

Back in Genesis when God sets his image bearers on the earth, he gives them their mission:
Gen 1:26-28.

Call it the Human Mission- to be all and do all God sent us here to do. And notice- the mission to be fruitful and conquer and hold sway is given both to Adam and to Eve. “And God said to them...” Eve is standing right there when God gives the world over to us. She has a vital role to play; she is partner in this great adventure. All that human beings were intended to do here on earth- all the creativity and exploration, all the battle and rescue and nurture- we were intended to do together. In fact, not only is Eve needed, but she is desperately needed.

When God creates Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo. “It is not good for the man to be alone, I shall make him [an ezer kenegdo]” (Gen 2:18 Alter). Hebrew scholar Robert Alter, who has spent years translating the book of Genesis, says that this phrase is “notoriously difficult to translate”. The various attempts we have in English are “helper” or “companion” or the notorious “help meet”. Why are these translations so incredibly wimpy, boring, flat... disappointing? What is a help meet, anyway? What little girl dances through the house singing “One day I shall be a help meet?” Companion? A dog can be a companion. Helper? Sounds like Hamburger Helper. Alter is getting close when he translates it “sustainer beside him.”

The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other instance the person being described is God himself, when you need him to come through for you desperately.

Most of the contexts are life and death, by the way, and God is your only hope. Your ezer. If he were not there beside you... you are dead. A better translation of ezer would be “lifesaver”. Kenegdo means alongside, or opposite to, a counterpart. Pg 31-32


quote:
clips from pages 82-85
The story of the treatment of women down through the ages is not a noble history. It has noble moments, to be sure, but taken as a whole, women have endured what seems to be a special hatred ever since we left Eden. ...

You might know that through the thousands of years of Jewish history recorded in the Old Testament, Jewish women were considered property with no legal rights (as they were and are in many cultures). They were not allowed to study the Law, nor to formally educate their children. They had a segregated place in the synagogue. It was common practice for a Jewish man to add to his morning prayers, “Thank you, God, for not making me a Gentile, a woman, or a slave.”

...
The assault on femininity- its long history, its utter viciousness- cannot be understood apart from the spiritual forces of evil we are warned against in the Scriptures. That is not to say that men (and women, for they, too, assault women) have no accountability in their treatment of women. Not at all. It is simply to say that no explanation for the assault upon Eve and her daughters is sufficient unless it opens our eyes to the Prince of Darkness and his special hatred of femininity.
...
Satan fell because of his beauty. Now his heart for revenge is to assault beauty... he hates Eve.
Because she is captivating, uniquely glorious, and he cannot be.

Eve is his greatest human threat, for she brings life. She is a lifesaver and a life giver. Eve means “life” or “life producer”...

Put those two things together- that Eve incarnates the Beauty of God and she gives life to the world. Satan’s bitter heart cannot bear it. He assaults her with a special hatred. History removes any doubt about this....

The message of our wounds nearly always is, “This is because of you. This is what you deserve.” It changes things to realize that, no, it is because you are glorious that these things happened. It is because you are a major threat to the kingdom of darkness. Because you uniquely carry the glory of God to the world.
You are hated because of your beauty and power.

quote:
Pg 91
You really won’t understand your life as a woman until you understand this:

You are passionately loved by the God of the universe.
You are passionately hated by his Enemy.

And so, dear heart, it is time for your restoration. For there is One greater than your Enemy. One who has sought you out from the beginning of time. He has come to heal your broken heart and restore your feminine soul.



Thursday, December 4, 2008

Sex is a "type" of heaven

from "Sex God" by Rob Bell

quote:
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If marriage is meant to show people what the oneness of God is like, what happens when everybody is one in the presence of God?

If marriage is a picture of something else, what would happen to marriage if we found ourselves living in the midst of that something else?

Is sex in its greatest, purest, most joyful and honest expression a glimpse of forever?

Are these brief moments of abandon and oneness and ecstasy just a couple of seconds or minutes of how things will be forever?

Is sex a picture of heaven?...

Maybe Jesus knew what was coming and knew that whatever we experience here will pale compared with what awaits everyone.

Do you long for that?

Because that's the center of Jesus' message.

An invitation.

To trust that it's true,

to trust that it's real,

to trust that God is actually going to make all things new.
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