Humility and Curiosity

According to Wikipedia, the Johari Window is a technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. It was created by psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) in 1955, and is used primarily in self-help groups and corporate settings as a heuristic exercise. Luft and Ingham named their model "Johari" using a combination of their first names.

I first encountered it as a mentor of the Education for Ministry (EfM) program decades ago. It has stayed with me as a very helpful tool, but I admit I don't see it very often and have no idea if it's something still used or not. It's relatively simple to understand and straightforward, I think - the image makes it pretty clear. In the upper left box are things we know about ourselves that others also know about us. In the upper right box are things everybody else knows about us, but that we are blind to ourselves. In the lower left box are those things which we know about ourselves but keep hidden from others. And in the lower right hand box is the unknown. We are a mystery even to ourselves. Theologically, we might say "God knows" if we are so inclined. But in my experience this is a challenging one because if we don't know something and others don't see it either, how do we discover it so that we might be changed for the better? 

I'll leave that question for now, but hold this thought about Johari's Window...

I've been ordained for more than thirty-seven years, and have done hundreds of funerals over the course of that time. I still find it fascinating to sit and talk with family members about the deceased and even more fascinating when the circle expands and friends are included, or share a reflection at the funeral. Even the most integrated person has different relationships with different people. There are jokes we share with some and not others; ideas we share with some and not others - for a whole bunch of reasons. So an oldest child tells me that mom, who has just passed, was a strict disciplinarian. And then the youngest child, maybe number five or six, says that mom was a pushover - and let her get away with everything. 

You get the point, I trust. The goal for me is not to solve the mystery and figure out who is right. Rather, every time I have this experience I ponder anew what a great mystery we all are. There is only so much those in relationship can share - only so much that is known to them. Much is hidden and all is filtered through the particular nature of that relationship, and time, and place. 

I have been thinking a lot lately and trying to pray with the ways that "so-called liberals" and "so-called conservatives" knew Charlie Kirk. I put myself in the former group but have to admit I did not have the animosity toward him before his murder that some did, mostly because he wasn't really on my radar. For whatever reason, I knew very little about him. But what I knew (and what I have learned) made me believe that those on the other side who would make a hero of him in death - even a martyr - have been ill informed. 

But what if, even if there is truth in that. we literally heard and saw and felt different things based on our own self-understanding?  What we think we know is very limited - for all of us.

I was and continue to be fascinated by this post from a journalist I have a lot of respect for, Van Jones. If you've not seen it, please watch it. 

Are you still with me? This may or may not be a helpful post because I'm still working through all of this but what I find so compelling about Van Jones' reflections are that (a) he's not a friend and in fact (b) he strongly disagreed with Charlie Kirk on almost everything and (c) he shares a heartfelt story that affirms the claims about Charlie Kirk wanting to engage respectfully across difference and (d) he says that maybe this will help someone - maybe on the right or maybe on the left. 

It is a reminder to me that no one knew Charlie Kirk. Not even Charlie Kirk. Not even his wife. Not the person who murdered him. Not the people who showed up at the funeral/rally this weekend. Not Van Jones...

What Johari's Window ultimately taught me a long time ago is to be humble about what I know even of myself, let alone others. So much is hidden. Our lives are complex. Only God knows. 

The internet, however, and our current climate, are fast and furious. Some of my conservative friends were posting almost immediately about how liberals would not mourn the death of Charlie Kirk and yet without irony that when an elected official in Minnesota and her husband were murdered in their home, they didn't mourn or demand that flags be flown at half-staff. 

I'm weary of the posts - even the ones I agree with - that have come from this day. I've read that some people celebrated his death but no one I know did and liberals for whom I have great respect all condemned the violence and offered condolences for his family. Bernie Sanders was incredible. It's almost as if in some circles that was not enough, however. I don't know how, or if, we will sort through it. I don't know how, or if, we can tone down the rhetoric. 

But for me there is an underlying epistemological question of what we know and how we know it. Many of us, on the left and on the right, claim to "know" far more than we do. Other than Van Jones, most of the commentary I read comes from people who never met the man. We know far less about the clearly disturbed young man who killed him. But as best I can tell after a little time has passed, the simplistic polarizing narratives that were initially put out there have little truth to them. Life is more complex.

In addition to cultivating humility, I am praying that we can also learn yet another lesson from Ted Lasso: to be more curious. To practice staying open. In all those funerals I've presided over, through almost four decades of ministry, I have never once felt that I had to come up with the definitive eulogy about the deceased. I feel that same way about preaching Jesus. How to stay open, to listen, to learn, to be unafraid of complexity?  There is a reason we get four (canonical) gospels rather than one, and five if you count Paul's Letters taken together as a kind of fifth gospel. In truth as much as we learn about Jesus, we learn from the New Testament that we are hearing how Paul, and Matthew, and Mark and Luke and John felt about Jesus. 

It does seem to me that if we can cultivate these practices of humility and curiosity we will, in God's own time, find a way forward. And we may even learn, or remember how to  engage one another across differences as we seek to bind up the wounds of this nation. 

Rise Up!

The Revised Common Lectionary is an ecumenical plan for reading the Bible in church, over a three-year cycle. What that means is that the readings we just heard read are also being read not only across the country in Episcopal congregations today but also among Roman Catholics and Lutherans and United Methodists and liturgical Congregationalists. There are some slight variations along the way but what this means is that the preacher doesn’t pick the readings: the preacher’s work is to engage with what comes up that week.

I said a three-year cycle. Why am I telling you this? Because twenty-four years ago today, when people showed up in Church, these were the very same readings that they heard read. I was serving at that time as the rector of St. Francis Church in Holden, Massachusetts. The church was full that morning, because of what had happened earlier that week, on September 11, 2001.

The lector got up to read that first reading from Jeremiah, the same words we just heard a few minutes ago:

For my people are foolish,
they do not know me;

they are stupid children,
they have no understanding.

They are skilled in doing evil,
but do not know how to do good."

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.

I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and lo, there was no one at all,
and all the birds of the air had fled.

I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before his fierce anger.

 

You could have heard a pin drop.  Honestly, it seemed a little “too soon.” And as a preacher, I knew all those visitors were coming to church to hear a word of comfort, a word of hope. I needed the same thing myself. And yet this was what we got.

 

It occurred to me, however, that just one week earlier and certainly most of the September Sundays prior to that day, the words of Jeremiah would have felt like something, well, kind of Old Testament-y. Not relatable. Easier to skip over and move on to the Gospel.

 

And yet, what dawned on me that day is that we were in a place where Jeremiah’s words were precisely descriptive of what we were experiencing as a nation. A city in ruins. We knew what that looked like. Bruce Springsteen wrote a lament with that very refrain, not about lower Manhattan but about economic challenges in his beloved New Jersey, with the boarded-up windows, the empty streets, the churches where the congregation’s all gone, and my brother down on his knees. My city of ruins.

 

We needed to grieve in that time after 9/11, and I think we still need to grieve because, honestly, as positive-thinking North Americans we aren’t so great at it. Whether we go through a personal trauma and the loss of someone we love before they have gotten to live their life, or whether we experience a community trauma, or betrayed trust, or whether we experience a national trauma or just the loss of what we knew, what we believed, what we put our trust in, we need to grieve. And grief takes time. And intentionality.

 

Elizabeth Kubler Ross taught us that grief is not linear but it does have stages, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We tend to want to move through those stages as quickly as possible. We say we want to “get back” to normal. But grief takes time and there is no going back – only forward.

 

When I was a young associate priest in Westport, Connecticut one of my parishioners was a sportswriter some of you may remember, named Frank Deford. Frank and his wife, Carol, lost a daughter, before my arrival, to cystic fibrosis and part of Frank’s grief work was to write a book entitled Alex: the Life of a Child. After her death they adopted a daughter from the Philippines, Scarlett, and Scarlett was in my confirmation class. So that was how I got to know the Deford family pretty well.

 

When the time came for me to leave Westport, having been called to serve as rector at St. Francis, I asked Frank a question. I asked him if he had any advice for me when the day came when I would have to officiate at the burial of a child. What should I know about his cand Carol’s experience?

 

I’ll never forget what he told me. He said people assume that you are grieving the same way, that it can bring you closer as a couple because you both loved that child so much. But he said that their experience was the opposite from that and he felt more common: that they grieved very differently and they were in different places at different times and that put stresses on their marriage. They survived. But he told me to always remember how hard it is, not only to experience that loss but to try to stay in synch through the grieving process. Or because you won’t be in synch, to be sure you are communicating with each other when one is still dealing with anger and the other might be closer to acceptance. My pastoral experience has born it out that this was very good advice.

 

On that September Sunday in 2001 when the pews were filled in Holden, I felt inadequate to the task because all I could do was point toward grief, and hope felt far down the road. There were no easy answers to offer. A national tragedy like that one or the COVID epidemic simply affect people differently – and grief takes time. I felt some of that coming back to the surface again this week after the murder of Charlie Kirk, which stunned the nation. In spite of some placing all the blame on liberals, I read Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s and Gavin Newsom’s and Bernie Sanders’ heartfelt condolences. I have seen us all grieving – liberals and conservatives. Yet we are grieving differently and we saw the deceased differently and ironically we seem even more divided as a country than we were last Sunday. This breaks my heart. When will we learn that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind?

 

But here is the good news, if you are ready for some good news. We trust in the power of the resurrection and the good news of Easter and we know that death never ever gets the last word. Never. We trust and we know that the prophet Jeremiah was not in denial: he spoke from the heart about the pain of the Babylonian exile. But he also knew that beyond all the deconstruction there would eventually be seeds to be planted and building to be done. Eventually telling the truth about the loss would lead to hope again, and the possibility for new life. Not a return to “things as normal” but a new normal, a new reality.

 

In that same song I quoted, Springsteen sings a powerful refrain to make this same point: come on rise, up. Rise up. Rise up

 

What does this have to do with us? Jeremiah lived at a time of incredible social upheaval, but it was 2600 years ago. There are people in this room who were not even born yet on 9-11-2001, so it feels like something from a history book for them even while others of us remember exactly where we were on that September morning.

 

But we are here right now, today. We are living in perilous times, I think. But even if you don’t agree with that, you know that at any given moment we are not all in a great place. We grieve old losses and new ones, unresolved hurts and wounds that pierce deeply. We grieve the church that once was, and that can kick up denial and anger and bargaining and depression before we get to acceptance. Some here are in a great place in life. Others are worried about their job, or their marriage, or their kids, or their grandchildren – growing up in an unsteady and confusing world. Political violence is on the rise.

 

And still we sing, in our own way: rise up. Rise up. Rise up. 

Still we sing, there’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea. 

Still we sing,

Praise my soul the king of heaven, to his feet thy tribute bring; ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, evermore his praises sing:

alleluia, alleluia, praise the everlasting King.

 

The Church exists, it seems to me, to help us to grieve, to tell the truth, and then to put our whole trust in God’s love and mercy, knowing in our bones that God is not finished with us yet. And so we live toward hope; not passively but actively. We rise up.  We rise up. We stand together. We weep with those who weep but we remind one another that joy cometh in the morning.

 

I think one of the prayers I pray a lot lately is for patience to allow people to be where they are. Because none of us can be where we are not. We need, I think, to hold space for each other, and for pain and grief and loss and confusion. Even as we continue to make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Even as we continue to rise up.