Movie Review: Higher Ground

I watched the 2011 movie Higher Ground a few nights ago.  Higher Ground is about a woman named Corinne, who converts to fundamentalist Christianity and later leaves that belief system.  Vera Farmiga starred in and directed the film.

Here are some things that stood out to me in the movie:

1.  I liked Corinne’s alcoholic father.  He was so easygoing, even around people who had strong religious beliefs and who probably didn’t think he was saved.  I wish I could be that easygoing around opinionated and patronizing people (without drinking, of course).

2.  What sets Corinne on her path to doubt is when her best friend Annika has a brain tumor, and the operation leaves Annika mute and bound to a wheelchair.  This was an especially sad part of the movie, for Annika prior to the operation was so vibrant, eccentric, funny, and ironic, plus she prayed in tongues.  I had to admire Annika’s husband for sticking with her after the operation, both out of his faith in God and his love for his wife.  But I could understand why Corinne was doubting God.

3.  Corinne sees a Christian counselor, who expresses concern about her doubts and her backsliding.  The counselor tells Corinne a story about how God told him to publicly confront an adulterous city councilor, who soon thereafter died in an accident.  The Christian counselor did not come across to me as a mean person, but I did not care for his use of fear tactics to keep Corinne on the straight and narrow.  I liked Corinne’s skeptical facial expression when he was telling the story!

4.  Corinne was at her church’s small group.  One guy testifies that he has been falling into walking after the flesh, for he really lost it recently, and he needs God’s help and people’s prayers to walk in the Spirit.  The pastor replies that God will honor a contrite heart.  Corinne looks bored throughout the small group meeting, and her husband later tells her that she shouldn’t go if she hates going so much.  I could identify with that one guy’s vulnerability and desire to feel whole, but I could also identify with Corinne not wanting to be in the small group.  When everyone else is on one page, and you’re on another, what should you do?

5.  Corinne liked to read poetry.  She almost had a romance with a mailman who liked poetry, but it turned out that he was with another woman.  The reason that her love for poetry stands out to me is that poetry is about the highs and lows of life.  So is religion, but a lot of what Corinne’s fundamentalist friends were saying came across to me as predictable platitudes, even though those platitudes did help Corinne’s friends to get through life with strength and a sense of meaning.  I can sympathize with Corinne looking to poetry to learn from fellow pilgrims in the journey of life.

6.  In the final scene of the movie, Corinne stands in front of the church and says that she admires the people’s faith, even if she is not sure if she shares it.  What I particularly admired and respected was that the pastor allowed her to talk (since this was a somewhat patriarchal church), and he nodded with understanding after she was done speaking.  I agree with movie critic Roger Ebert that the movie largely depicts the fundamentalists as good people (see Ebert’s review here).

Good movie.  It generated some discussion!  See here to read an article about the book on which the movie was based: Carolyn Briggs’ The Dark World.

Book Write-Up: The Myth of Persecution, by Candida Moss

Candida Moss.  The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.  New York: HarperOne: 2013.

Candida Moss is a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame.  Her book The Myth of Persecution was widely discussed in the biblio-blogosphere and other media outlets over a year ago (see here for my post about this).  I had already read a number of reviews of the book, so I thought that I had a good idea what Candida Moss’ thesis was.  Still, when I saw the book at a local library about a month ago, I decided to check it out.  In my experience, reading what others say about a book can be quite different from reading the book itself, for reading the book myself allows me to have my own unique experience of it—-to notice and to appreciate what stands out to me personally.  Granted, I cannot read everything out there, so there will be times when I may have to rest on book reviews or scanning to tell me what a book is about and what its main arguments are.  But, whenever I can, I like to read a book for myself.

Candida Moss’ overall argument in The Myth of Persecution is that ancient Christians were not singled out for religious persecution by the Roman authorities.  Indeed, Christians were deemed to be rather subversive, for they refused to participate in the imperial cult and to serve in the army, plus they were not exactly cooperative in court, for some of them refused even to give their names and instead just identified themselves as Christians.  Their belief that Jesus should be obeyed over Caesar also did not endear them to the Romans.  But Christians were not specifically targeted for persecution just for being Christians.  Roman emperors were not demanding adherence to the imperial cult in order to single out Christians for persecution, but rather the emperors were doing so for political purposes: to consolidate their own political power in uncertain times.  Moreover, Romans even allowed Christians to serve in governmental positions of authority.  In a time when the bar for execution was low, there were Christians who were executed for subversion.  At the same time, in discussing the Book of Revelation’s depiction of martyrdom, Moss contends that the number of martyrs was probably quite small, since the authorities in those days lacked the capacity of later totalitarian states.

Moss examines accounts of martyrdom, ones that have long been believed to be historically-accurate (i.e., Polycarp, Perpetua, etc.).  She notes anachronisms and historical implausibilities, as she compares what the accounts say with when historical trends emerged as well as Roman procedures.  She dates many accounts to the third century C.E., which is some time after the time that they purport to depict.  Moss also questions Tacitus’ claim that Nero blamed the fire that he caused on the Christians, for she doubts that Christians were a distinct group in Nero’s day, and she maintains that Tacitus was projecting the opposition to Christians in his own day onto Nero’s time.

In addition, Moss observes literary patterning in martyr stories: many of the stories look similar or follow a pattern, or they resemble early stories about martyrdom or the death of the righteous, such as the story in II Maccabees 7 about the martyrdom of the seven righteous sons, and the death of Socrates.  Moss is open to seeing some historical kernel in these stories, but she maintains that they have been edited for specific purposes.  Moss argues that even a story about Jesus’ death—-the inspiration to Christian martyrs—-has been patterned after Socrates.  Moss is definitely not a Christ-mythicist, for she believes that Jesus existed and was arrested and died, but she thinks that the Gospel of Luke makes Jesus’ death look like that of Socrates, as Jesus follows the ideal of greeting his death with calm, in contrast with how Jesus is in Mark.  Moss also notes an ancient Christian comparison of Jesus with Socrates.

According to Moss, there were a variety of reasons that ancient Christians emphasized martyrdom.  Some wanted a straight ticket to heaven rather than going to purgatory first, or to hell, and they believed that martyrdom would guarantee that for them; later, in medieval times, several Christian Crusaders would view themselves as martyrs.  Martyrs also had a certain authority, and Christians appealed to their alleged statements to combat what they believed to be heresies, or to get a church built in their area.

Moss believes that her historical analysis on this topic is important for today, for so many people depict themselves as martyrs.  There are conservatives and Christians who believe that they are being persecuted, and this promotes an us vs. them mindset that demonizes the other side rather than seeking common ground.  (Moss still acknowledges that there is a place for fighting oppression, however.)  Moss favorably refers to Christians such as Justin Martyr, who engaged pagan philosophy and sought commonalities with the Romans.

A common Christian apologetic claim is that Christianity is true because Jesus’ disciples were willing to die for it, and they would not have died for something that they knew was a lie.  According to this rationale, the disciples were so willing to die because they had seen the risen Jesus.  Moss actually engages this argument, or at least a version of it: she says that she heard a version of it as a young girl in school, and she also refers to Justin Martyr’s argument that the Christians are right because they are being persecuted, whereas the heretics are not.  Moss does not buy this argument, for she notes that all sorts of people—-including non-Christians—-have died for a cause.  Moreover, she refers to various contradictory stories about how the disciples died, and not all of them depict them as martyrs.

I have little quarrel with Moss’ historical arguments, but I do have slight disagreements with her application of them to contemporary debates and issues.  First of all, I do not think that she successfully refutes the Christian apologetic argument that Christianity is true because the disciples were willing to die for their belief that Jesus rose from the dead.  She acknowledges that ancient Christians died for their beliefs, and, even if many did not, they still suffered or experienced inconvenience on account of them.  While people have died for all sorts of beliefs, skeptics of the Christian apologetic argument should address why the early Christians were willing to die for Jesus specifically, a man who had been shamefully executed.  Why did this cause survive, and is his actual resurrection the only explanation?  Many skeptics have explored this territory, to their credit.

Second, while I agree with Moss that having a persecution complex can lead to an us vs. them mindset rather than seeking to understand other points-of-view and find common ground, I do not think that she really sought to understand the viewpoint of conservatives and Christians claiming to be persecuted.  What leads them to think that way, and what (if anything) can be done to ameliorate their concerns?  Maybe it’s a lost cause: some Christians do not want their business’s health insurance plans to cover certain forms of contraception, or they do not want their adoption agencies to recognize same-sex couples, whereas the other side thinks that they should.  Common ground is not always easy to find.

In addition to reading Moss’ overall argument, there were other interesting things that I learned from the book.  First of all, Moss claimed that the vast majority of Christians in the ancient world did not go to church.  On page 283, she refers  to Ramsay MacMullen, who argued in The Second Church: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400 “that only 5 percent of the Christian population actually attended church services” (Moss’ words).  So much for “forsake not the assembling of yourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25)!  Second, Moss states on page 285: “The Romans acquired their knowledge about the gods through observation.  It was empirical and factual.  The Christians spoke about ‘trust’ and ‘belief.’  Why anyone would want to die for something as flimsy as a belief must have seemed quite curious to an ancient Roman.”  I want to learn more about this, and I see that the book that Moss cites for this claim—-Clifford Ando’s The Matter of the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire—-is at a local library, so I may just check it out!  I wonder how the Romans empirically justified their belief in many gods.  I know that Roman philosophers, such as the Stoics, had their arguments for their beliefs about the divine.  Third, Moss tells the story of how a Buddhist tale became a Christian tale in the course of its transmission.

Good book!

Book Write-Up: Religion in the Secular City

Harvey Cox.  Religion in the Secular City: Toward a Postmodern Theology.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

In Religion in the Secular City, theologian Harvey Cox critiques modernity and reflects on the future of religion.  He looks closely at religious trends that either depart from modernity or stand in opposition to it, such as fundamentalism and liberation theology.  Cox argues that the future of religion in a postmodern age will rest with those who are marginalized from modernity, such as the poor, and that it will include an emphasis on the physical (i.e., rituals).  Cox also explores such topics as pluralism and interfaith dialogue.

So what is modernity?  According to Harvey Cox and other thinkers, the Enlightenment is especially relevant to this question.  During the Enlightenment, the Christian religion was arguably becoming undermined and marginalized.  Immanuel Kant was coming up with a secular basis for morality, apart from religion.  Historical-criticism was depicting the Bible as the flawed product of human beings rather than the infallible word of God.  Science and technology were advancing, as was capitalism.  In the course of the modern age, Christian theologians of different persuasions sought to make Christianity look reasonable to the modern age, or at least to protect Christianity from modernity.  One path to this was to reduce religion to a personal experience of the divine.  Religion was put on the margins.  For Cox, it could not be thoroughly discarded, for capitalists and authorities liked how it kept the masses in line, plus there was something special about its beliefs and rituals in promoting morality, community, and social cohesion.  But religion was deemed to be irrelevant to the public square.  Whereas Christianity for a long time criticized usury, for example, now it was assumed that the invisible hand would take care of things and thus Christianity did not need to serve as a voice of conscience in the economy.  Christianity was also deemed to be irrelevant to the political sphere, as religion was confined to the private realm.  While there did emerge a social Gospel, which promoted compassion for the poor, Cox laments that it did not question existing societal structures but rather sought to persuade the authorities to be more compassionate.

Well, Cox narrates, modernity led to problems.  Commercialism and advancement were leaving people with feelings of emptiness.  The Holocaust came to be deemed by many as an outgrowth of modernity.  In the Third World, people’s land was being taken so that it could be used for cash-crops within global capitalism.  Cox is not totally opposed to modernity, for it did emphasize reason, and that is preferable to blindly accepting the cultural ideas of the Volk, as the Nazis did.  But, for Cox, modernity has resulted in problems.  And different people have been reacting against it.

First, there are the fundamentalist Christian “rednecks” (a term that Cox uses, not disparagingly, and that some fundamentalists even use for themselves).  They do not agree with how the Enlightenment cast questions on the infallibility of the Bible.  Some conservative Christians Cox profiles are not anti-science, per se, but they attempt to unite science with their religion, as is the case with creation science and defenses of the Shroud of Turin’s authenticity; in a sense, this focus on showing that Christianity can be backed up by evidence or rationality is rather modernist, yet it departs from modernism’s separation of religion and science into separate, distinct spheres.  Meanwhile, the Moral Majority was picking up steam in the 1980′s, uniting religion with politics, things that modernism had long kept separate.  Fundamentalists also did not care for the big city, an icon of modernity, for they considered it to be a haven for vice and immorality.

Second, there is liberation theology, which was particularly popular in Latin America.  Liberation theology differs from modernity in that, like the Moral Majority, it unites religion with politics.  Rather than appealing to existing authorities to show compassion for the poor, as the social Gospel did, it calls for dramatic social restructuring that it believes can benefit the poor.  While Moral Majoritarians and liberation theologians most likely did not care for each other—-the former were right-wing Republican defenders of President Reagan, whereas the latter were considered to be Communists or Communist sympathizers—-the two actually overlapped on cultural conservatism: the Sandinista Minister of Culture, after all, took extreme measures against pornography!  Unlike the fundamentalists who repudiate the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible, liberation theology is not opposed to historical-criticism, but it does not emphasize it in its readings of Scripture, nor does it really attempt to demonstrate that Christianity can make sense to the modern mind.  Rather, its Scriptural exegesis is about the poor—-both the Bible’s championing of the poor, and also the ways that the poor read the Scriptures in light of their own situation.  Liberation theology is also about political action more than academic discussion, and it disturbs people in the upper economic classes who look to religion primarily for personal solace.  Cox also portrays liberation theology as grass-roots: the poor meet together and discuss Scripture.  As far as its political program is concerned, Cox acknowledges that there is a spectrum within liberation theology between support for revolution and a more peaceful approach.  Cox says at one point in the book that certain liberation theologians support violence as a last resort or in self-defense.  I was hoping that Cox would flesh out more what a peaceful political program of liberation theology would look like, and probably the best that I saw was his account of peasants uniting to defend their traditional land from capitalists who wanted it.

Cox acknowledges that both fundamentalism and liberation theology have valid critiques of modernity, but he believes that liberation theology is a more constructive option than fundamentalism for the postmodern age.  Fundamentalists can be rather divisive, plus fundamentalist right-wingers tend to embrace a part of modernity that Cox believes is part of the problem—-capitalism—-so Cox hopes that liberation theology will be the wave of the future.  Cox navigates his way through more left-wing criticisms of liberation theology—-that its Christian and Latin American focus makes it insensitive to issues surrounding religious pluralism, that it does not take feminism seriously enough, etc.  My impression is that Cox promotes a pursuit of common ground between liberation theologians and their more left-wing critics.  Religion, one thinker Cox discusses maintains, should be about everyone feeling at home in the universe.

Is Cox in Religion in the Secular City consistent with what he wrote in his classic from the 1960′s, The Secular City?  In areas, he is.  In The Secular City, Cox championed the city as a place where people can be anonymous and freely associate with people who share their values.  I detected a similar tone in Religion in the Secular City.  At the same time, my impression (which is open to correction) is that Cox in The Secular City was more open to secularization, the loss of power and influence by religious authorities.  He noted that the Bible itself was critical of religious authorities, and that there are movements towards secularism even within the Bible (i.e., monotheism desacralized nature).  (I should also note that, in Many Mansions, Cox argues that secularism is consistent with biblical prophetic passages in which people know the Lord within speaking about him, or lose the need for rituals like the Ark of the Covenant.)  Cox’s Christian concern for the poor is a constant throughout his works, but he strikes me as rather inconsistent on whether secularism was positive or negative (and yet, I must admit that it has been years since I have read The Secular City).  Perhaps Cox tries to see something positive or redemptive in all sorts of developments, or he is seeking to show how different developments can be taken into a positive or redemptive direction. (UPDATE: In this 2009 interview, Cox states that the thesis of The Secular City was that "the decline of institutional religion should not be viewed as a catastrophe, because God is not just present in religious institutions. God is present in all of creation, in other kinds of movements and institutions and to be discerned, presence of God to be discerned there and responded to...I wouldn’t swear by every sentence in that book. Nonetheless, the central thesis of the presence of God in all of creation and historical institutions, culture, and politics and family I would certainly hold to enthusiastically and say that what I say in this book is the decline of creedal Christianity and hierarchical Christianity is also not a catastrophe.")

My impression of liberation theology was a bit different from that of Cox.  Whereas Cox depicts liberation theology as not particularly academic, Gustavo Gutierrez’s Theology of Liberation looked very academic to me (see my review of that here).  Cox does point out ways, however, in which liberation theology departed from customary Catholic academic approaches.  Liberation theology focuses on Scripture, and its writings usually do not refer to Catholic encyclicals.

I guess that my overall question is where I fit in, in terms of what Cox discusses in Religion in the Secular City.  There are areas in which I am on society’s margins, and areas in which I am not.  Either way, my situation is not even remotely like that of a Latin American peasant!  Are the poor the only people who can contribute valid religious opinions?  I do not think so, but I do believe that their voices and their stories should be heard, and that concern for the poor should be a significant part of all Christians’ beliefs.  Religion, for me, is a matter of personal solace, but it should not be just that.  Moreover, I am in favor of private charity and for encouraging the powers that be to be compassionate towards the poor, but I also believe in seeking to correct the social structures that create and maintain poverty.  All of this is important.

The Holy Spirit: An "It" or a "He"?

At church this morning, the Pastor Emeritus was preaching.  He said a couple of times in his sermon that the Holy Spirit is a “he,” not an “it,” and that to call the Holy Spirit an “it” is to denigrate the Holy Spirit.

This stood out to me.  I grew up in Armstrongism, which maintained that the Holy Spirit is an “it”—-not the third person of the Trinity, but rather God’s power.  I’m not sure to whom exactly the Pastor Emeritus was responding this morning.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses regard the Holy Spirit as an “it,” so maybe he was responding to them.  Regarding Armstrongism, it does not have the fame that it had in the past, but its offshoots have their TV and radio programs and publications, which do get out, so the Pastor Emeritus could be responding to something he heard from one or more of those outlets.  Or, since the Pastor Emeritus is in his nineties, perhaps he remembers when Armstrongism was in its prime, and its view on the Holy Spirit is still in his mind.

I have a couple of books about the Holy Spirit that I will read someday.  One is Michael Welker’s God the Spirit, and the other is Jurgen Moltmann’s The Spirit of Life.  I’m curious as to when exactly the Holy Spirit came to be regarded as a person.  I am doubtful that the Spirit of the Lord was regarded as a person in the Hebrew Bible, for my understanding is that the Hebrew Bible does not regard the God of Israel as multiple persons in one being.  There, the Holy Spirit could be God’s power.

In the New Testament, things may be more complex.  Who exactly indwells the believer: Christ or the Holy Spirit?  I see both.  That makes sense if the Holy Spirit is Christ’s power: Christ dwells in believers through his power, the Holy Spirit.  At the same time, I am hesitant to deny the personhood of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament.  There are times when the Holy Spirit does personal things, and I suppose that one could come back and say those are personifications—-that the Holy Spirit is an “it” but is being described in personal terms.  But how can an impersonal force intercede for believers, as Romans 8 says the Spirit does?  Moreover, the Holy Spirit can be blasphemed.  Can a non-personal force be blasphemed?  Maybe: perhaps all sorts of things can be cursed.

I’ll stop here.

I Chronicles 8

I have three items for my blog post today about I Chronicles 8.  This chapter concerns the genealogy of Benjamin.  It includes a genealogy of King Saul, who was a Benjaminite.

1.  V 8 states: “And Shaharaim begat children in the country of Moab, after he had sent them away; Hushim and Baara were his wives” (KJV).  Why was the Israelite Shaharaim in Moab?  One explanation is that it was for the same reason that Elimelech in the Book of Ruth left Israel to go to Moab: to escape famine.
The words that the KJV here translates as “he had sent them away” are “Shilcho Otham,” and its literal translation is “his sending them.”  According to the Orthodox Jewish Artscroll commentary, this phrase has been interpreted in a variety of ways:

—-Shilcho Otham was a name of another of Shaharaim’s wives, meaning that v 8 is saying that he begat children in Moab from his wife, Shilcho Otham.

—-Shaharaim is being sent away from his place of exile, since v 6 states that he was one of the people removed to Mahanath.

—-Shaharaim divorced Hushim and Baara: he sent them away.

—-Shaharaim is actually Boaz, the person who married the Moabitess Ruth in the Book of Ruth.  The Jewish interpreters who arrived at this view did so by making associations between the words in v 8 and words elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible.  For example, Shilcho in v 8 means “his sending,” and Genesis 46:28 states that Jacob sent Judah.  Boaz was a descendant of Judah.  A Jewish interpretation that identifies Shaharaim as Boaz states that Boaz was trying to allow female Moabite proselytes to get married to Jewish men.  This was a tricky issue because Deuteronomy 23:3 bans Moabites from the congregation of the LORD.

Why would Boaz, a descendant of Judah, be included in a genealogy about Benjamin, another son of Jacob altogether?  The Artscroll refers to the view that it was because Boaz had the same sort of zeal for his mission that Benjamin was said to possess in Genesis 49:27.

2.  I Chronicles 8:32 states: “And Mikloth begat Shimeah. And these also dwelt with their brethren in Jerusalem, over against them” (KJV).

Saul’s ancestors dwelt in Jerusalem.  This puzzled me, for was not Jerusalem occupied by the Jebusites until David claimed it for Israel in II Samuel 5?  According to Judges 1:21, however, the Benjaminites did not expel the Jebusites from Jerusalem and ended up dwelling with them there.

3.  I Chronicles 8:35-38 contains an extensive genealogy of King Saul.  I read in commentaries different views about how far this genealogy extends: to late pre-exilic, exilic, or even post-exilic times.  Whichever of these is correct, there are people who believe that this genealogy contradicts I Chronicles 10:6, which states that Saul, his three sons, and all of his house died together, which would presumably preclude him from having descendants in late pre-exilic, exilic, or post-exilic times.  Interestingly, there are times when the Orthodox Jewish Artscroll attempts to harmonize or to get profound spiritual or homiletical insights from the contradictions within Chronicles, or those between Chroniclers and other parts of the Bible.  Sometimes, however, it just acknowledges that Ezra the Chronicler used contradictory sources.  A professor teaching Jewish theology once told me that Books in the Writings (which include I Chronicles) are lower in authority than the Torah.  I wonder if that is why the Orthodox Jewish Artscroll acknowledges contradictions when it comes to I Chronicles.

The question of whether all of Saul’s sons died with Saul in battle is an interesting one.  Obviously, II Samuel 21 assumes that some of Saul’s sons survived, for, long after the death of Saul, when David was king, David hung seven of Saul’s sons on account of Saul’s sin against the Gibeonites.  Some have argued that Mordecai in the Book of Esther was descended from Saul, and that the story of Esther is about a descendant of Saul defeating a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag, since Saul in I Samuel 15 kept Agag alive, displeasing God in the process.  In this interpretation, Mordecai does right what his ancestor Saul did wrong!
My opinion is that Saul had descendants, and that I Chronicles 10:6 states that Saul’s whole house died with Saul for rhetorical effect: to convey that Saul’s reign had come to an end as punishment for Saul’s sins, and that the way was prepared for David to become king.

I forget where exactly I read this, but there is at least one rabbinic tradition that is pro-Saul.  Louis Feldman argues that Josephus is rather pro-Saul.  Saul’s influence survived, even beyond Saul’s death.  Perhaps one reason is that Saul still had descendants long after he died.  Another reason could be that he is a morally ambiguous character in the Bible: he disobeys God, yet he does some heroic and godly things.

Giving Oneself Permission to Be Happy

Over the past year or so, I have told myself something to keep myself from drinking.  There are seasons in my life in which I have to tell myself this more than once.

The deal is this.  There are things in my life that I am unhappy about.  Perhaps they can be fixed, perhaps they cannot, or perhaps I do not have the will or the discipline to fix them.  I don’t know.  The thing is, why do I feel like drinking when those problems are foremost on my mind?  Because I want to feel happy.  Drinking will not fix those problems.  And, even though it may give me a buzz and that will make me slightly happy, I will crave more and more alcohol.  Drinking, for me, was like a bottomless pit: the vast quantities of alcohol could not fill the hole in my heart.  (I know, that sounds rather cheesy, like dialogue from the Ten Commandments!  But it’s an apt metaphor.)

So what do I tell myself to discourage me from drinking, or at least to lessen that desire to drink?  I tell myself this: If I am willing to drink to be happy, even though my problems are there and unresolved, then why can’t I just choose to be happy without drinking, notwithstanding my unresolved problems?

You see, I have to give myself permission to be happy, because, deep down, there is a part of me that says I should not be.  If, say, I am unpopular, a voice tells me that I should not try to be content with that but should try to solve the problem.  If I am happy in the midst of my unpopularity, I am in denial, or I am fooling myself by telling myself that I am happy when I really am not, that little voice tells me.  The message that infiltrates my mind is that my problems have to be fully resolved before I can be happy, that I cannot be happy if something is wrong, with myself or the world around me.

There is a place, in my opinion, for trying to change one’s situation.  A person once used a simile to describe to me recovery from alcoholism.  Suppose I’m in a dark closet, which had lots of boxes on the floor on which I keep tripping.  Quitting drinking is like the light in the closet going on.  But the boxes are still there, and working the twelve steps (preferably with a sponsor)—-doing the hard work of self-analysis, making amends, and reaching out to others—-is like moving those boxes so that I do not trip anymore.

I guess what I am trying to sell to myself is that I can be happy, even though the boxes are still there!  People can probably stand in line and tell me that I am fooling myself.  They may have a point, but I still don’t think that I have to be negative because I am not perfect, or because things do not go as I would like.  I am tired of fighting battles with people in my own mind.  There are so many things out there in life to enjoy.  I give myself permission to be happy, against any voice that tells me I am wrong to do so.

Coping with Negativity

My mind can easily go in a negative direction.  Lately, I have addressed that problem by praying in my mind.  And my prayers in this case have not been me complaining to God about my situation, for that is negative thinking.  Nor, on the contrary, have they been me trying to reassure myself with positive thoughts that I do not truly believe.  Rather, I have been asking God to fill me with love, joy, and peace.  I have been asking him to bless me.  I have been asking him to help me not to despise certain people.  When my mind turns to my flaws and I begin to feel hopeless, I ask God to help me to be a better person in the areas that are perplexing me.  And I have prayed for others, too, when their needs and desires have come to my attention.  Some of my requests are pretty outrageous, but, hey, I’m putting the ball in God’s court!  Maybe he’ll answer as I want, and maybe he won’t!  My goal is mainly to get through the day without feeling rage or depression.  Prayer has enabled me to interrupt my negative thoughts and to replace them with some hope, or (when I pray for others) love.

So far, so good!  Or at least, so far, not so bad!  There are times when more heavy-duty prayer is needed: when I need to go to my room, close the door, and speak my prayer aloud for ten minutes, maybe longer.  These are times when there is a lingering bitterness inside of me that is not necessarily being caused by thoughts that are in the forefront of my mind.  It is just there, in the background, sowing its seeds of discontent.  In those times, I need to take a time-out and interrupt my bitterness with prayer.  I need to tell God—-aloud, so that my prayer is focused and is the main object of my attention at the moment—-what it is that is bothering me.  But, in times when my mind is just wandering and moves in a negative direction, I find that just interrupting my thoughts with prayers of request has worked.  Or at least it has for the past week.

There is a place for talking things out with others, too.  I am not as comfortable doing so, maybe because I fear being judged, or I fear being told that nothing is wrong when there is, or I fear hearing certain advice that in the past I have not found particularly helpful.  But one reason that talking things out with others has worked for me in the past (at least sometimes) is that it allows me to put some things into perspective: I am not a bad person just because I am struggling with a social encounter, the other person is not bad either, here are some suggestions on what I can do, here is a better way to see the situation, I am not alone in my struggles because others have them too, etc.

I am not suggesting these ideas as a cure-all for everybody.  I am just sharing what I have done.  If it resonates with you, I am happy.  If it does not, I hope and pray that you find your own way to cope with yourself and the world around you, if you have not already.