“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” Viktor Frankl
I struggle with the idea that I can choose how to respond. My immediate responses are emotional. When something happens or is said I feel it… physically. My first response is based on that physical feeling.
When someone says something that I feel is critical of me I get angry and want to shout at them and tell them they are wrong because it has hurt me and I don’t want to feel that way. If someone praises me I want to bask in whatever glory is going because I feel good and I like that. Neither response is particularly helpful in the moment because often the comment made isn’t really about me, at least not fully.
When someone is critical at least part of that criticism is that I have said or done something that makes them feel bad or has affected them negatively. I need to hear that and take responsibility for my part in that. But there is also a conversation to be had about why they feel bad about what I have said or done, especially if it was unintentional.
If someone feels I have done something well it’s often because whatever has I’ve done has made them feel good or valued or helped and that’s good. But, to be honest that may also have been entirely incidental to what I thought I was doing. That shows itself in those ‘that sermon was just for me’ type comments. Great, but I didn’t write it for you. In fact, I have no idea what you’re talking… about and that’s not even what I think I said!
So, I try to notice how I feel but choose not to put too much stock in my initial response.
One of my discoveries over the years is that I have much more control over that initial response than I imagined I did. The old adage that you should ‘hold your breath and count to 10’ is a good one for two reasons. Firstly, it puts a cutout between an event and your response and, secondly, it develops a sustainable habit where you take a moment before responding. That helps me be more measured and on the whole I think I respond better when I do this.
But what about my responses to other people’s issues? How should we respond to difficult and painful things that happen to them?
One of the things I see often in life and maybe especially in church is people being nice.
When confronted with a difficult situation people say something positive because they want to make the person feel better. They want to offer some sense of hope that things will improve. And because they feel bad and so they want to say something positive so they feel like they have helped. That’s a good intention, but often it leads to responses like:
‘It’ll all be better tomorrow’
‘Things will all work out, you’ll see’
‘What’s for you won’t go by you’
And my personal favourite; ‘God won’t give you more than you can handle’
None of these are based in fact or evidence. And the last one is incredibly bad theology. Things may or may not improve. And do we really believe that God is punishing people?
I want to be clear. There is absolutely a central place for hope in our conversations with those experiencing difficult times. Things will not be like this forever.
However, false hope and vague platitudes which deny the reality of the situation are unhelpful precisely because they divert attention away from how others feel and they limit how we choose to respond to the moment we are in with them.
‘Compassion’ means to be alongside someone in their suffering.
So, to be compassionate we need to recognise the reality of someone’s suffering and be alongside people in it. That’s not about enabling people to wallow in self pity or to only ever talk about what is wrong. It is simply about recognising that things are tough and painful and scary and hard, and that feeling those things is a perfectly normal response to what is happening.
We might want to rush to ‘this won’t last forever’ but to jump to that without first recognising what ‘this’ is leads us to missing out something vital… the reality of our present experience.
A map is completely useless if you have absolutely no idea where you are. We may be able to work out where we are by looking at far off landmarks, places we could be heading, but we can’t plot a route until we know where we are and what our immediate context is. We could also work out where we are by retracing our steps. What are the decisions and turns that brought us to this point? Could we perhaps undo any of that or use that experience to help in the here and now?
All the tools and responses and help we might bring to assist someone are useless unless we know what the problem is. Part of that discovery is acknowledging the reality of how someone feels at this moment.
If our only response to sadness is to try to make jokes to make someone happy then we miss the reason for their sadness and, worse still, we delegitimise how they feel. Doing that will never help them acknowledge or address the issues that are causing them to feel sad in the first place.
This began as a series about the church and where it finds itself at the moment. My fear is that as an institution we are ignoring everything I’ve just written.
We have no idea where we are. We know it is painful but I’m not even sure we know what it is that hurts.
We have little knowledge of how we got here and even less idea of where we are going.
We have resorted to vaguely positive platitudes to help each other to feel better.
And in the middle of that we are failing to acknowledge how people (both members and ministers) feel. We’re rushing to make it all better because we know that it is painful and we don’t want people to feel bad… but in doing that we are skipping past some vital stuff about what matters, what has been lost, what our hopes are, and what we need to do to address any of that.
We’ve implemented a one size fits all solution with no real understanding of what the problem is and I fear that’s not going to be helpful in the longterm.
Perhaps taking a moment to count to 10… to realise that some of this is about us and we should absolutely own that and work on it, and that some of this it about the society around us and we should do our best to understand that too. The only way we can really help is firstly to be compassionate, to be alongside people today and learn what they feel and why they feel that way.