Community and Purpose

There are lots of different kinds of communities that meet different needs for people. We've been exploring what intentional components contribute to meaningful, authentic community. Mutual self-disclosure, active and unconditional love, hospitality, truth-telling, and sincere affirmation work together to meet people's needs. In other words, people need a place where they can:

• know others deeply and be known deeply by others,
• love others and be loved by others,
• serve others and be served by others,
• hear others and be heard by others,
• celebrate others and be celebrated by others.

Healthy boundaries, on the part of the community itself and on the part of its members, make the community a safer environment for all of these intentional practices. The last necessary piece we need to acknowledge is purpose. When a community lacks a sense of shared purpose, it's more difficult for people to feel a sense of belonging. 

A purpose can be a restatement of shared values. A community's purpose may be to promote a specific value (or set of values) in the world. In many cases, it would still be helpful to clarify how the community intends to promote those values. A community can value the inherent worth and dignity of every person, but it's even more clear when that community says, "We're going to honor the inherent worth and dignity of every person by ending homelessness in our region." That's a clear, audacious purpose that can give people who align with that vision a sense of belonging. 

If someone comes into that community and says, "I care about organic farming," they may not be strongly aligned with the shared purpose of the community. They might not feel like they belong in a community united around a purpose of ending homelessness. This is OK. That individual can decide whether they want to buy into the shared purpose of the community or whether they want to find meaningful, authentic community elsewhere. The community doesn't need to launch an organic farming program. This would potentially compromise the sense of belonging and shared purpose it has already cultivated. Unless organic farming clearly ties in with ending homelessness (and there may be a way that it does), the community can say no to focusing on organic farming. Members of the community already have a clear focus that defines what they want to do in the world.

Some communities have a clear focus that doesn't create greater wholeness in the world. Having a shared purpose still contributes to a sense of belonging for members of those communities. The KKK may not meet the criteria of our five essential ingredients, but their sense of shared values and purpose is undeniable. It's the clarity of the KKK's identity that makes it possible (and just and compassionate) to oppose the organization. Yet, the KKK still exists today because our society doesn't equip people to manage their anxiety and dismantle their irrational fears. When people find groups that legitimize their anxiety and fear, they feel accepted. They feel as if they belong to something larger than themselves. They feel a sense of safety in the midst of a world that is hostile to their perspective. Fundamentalist religious groups offer the same thing. They reinforce people's anxieties and fears in order to provide a sense of belonging and purpose. 

This is one reason the conversations about essential ingredients for meaningful, authentic community happened before the conversation about clear shared purpose. If you get a sense of belonging from a community because they seem to be anxious about the same things you're anxious about and they seem to fear the same people you fear, run for the door. A shared purpose that fails to create greater wholeness in the world is not a purpose that will ultimately serve you or anyone else. This is not to say that every organization that claims to create greater wholeness is legitimately beneficial, but a purpose that doesn't clearly lead to greater wholeness is not a worthwhile purpose. 

A community's purpose can only be evaluated if it's clear. I once heard a community leader speak at a fund raiser and say, "This organization has done great things in the past, and it was because of your contributions. I don't know what we're going to do next, but whatever it is, it will be because of your support." Not a very inspiring sense of purpose. This organization may have a set of values that a lot of people agree with, but without a clear statement of shared purpose, all the members of that community can run off in different directions doing what they think will support their shared values. And none of them are likely to be as effective as an organization that unifies people around a clear vision. 

Some communities care a great deal about inclusion. This is a wonderful and praiseworthy value, but it cannot be a community's purpose. A clear purpose is actually a specific kind of healthy boundary for a community. Including everyone isn't possible within the context of a clear purpose, because everyone doesn't hold the same values or passions. At best, a community can be inclusive of every person who aligns with the clear shared purpose of the community. But a single community's purpose cannot accommodate every person who walks in the door with a personal agenda. This winds up creating a sense of belonging for nobody.

Imagine a mosque attempting to be inclusive by serving communion for the sake of a Christian couple that wanted to start attending. That mosque would fail at its purpose of creating Muslim community. It would alienate the majority of its members. It probably would not provide the same caliber of communion experience that a Christian community would provide. It would compromise its clear shared purpose (unless that clear shared purpose was to become a more Christian community). And it would probably fail in its ability to set healthy boundaries. Now, hopefully the community of Muslims that gather at that mosque have a greater shared purpose than simply to gather together and be Muslim. Hopefully, they have a sense of how they want to engage in the larger community to live out their Muslim values in a way that creates greater wholeness. That shared purpose probably does not need to include serving communion, no matter how lovely or insistent that Christian couple may be. Inclusion has its limits, and those limits are set by the clear shared purpose of a community.

Within the boundaries of a clear shared purpose, of course, inclusion can be a powerful value a community holds. True inclusion is a lot of work, though. It often requires a lot of time and energy, and it often means being hyper-conscious of socially accepted metaphors and practices. A group of people recently became offended because the metaphor of walking was used throughout an event. They claimed that this metaphor was a repeated act of verbal violence toward people who use other forms of mobility. This presents a real problem when commonly used phrases or familiar songs (with no intent of excluding anyone from their message) use a metaphor of walking. Being inclusive sometimes means creating new language, and this new language can sound stilted at first. Unless the shared purpose of a community clearly connects with creating new language so that everyone is included in the words used by the community, this call for inclusion can be a hindrance to the community. If an entire community is able to align with the need for new language, however, it can be a powerful unifying and strengthening factor.

Claims of verbal violence and calls for greater inclusion often fail to take a community's purpose into consideration, however. Angrily insisting that a community accommodate one's personal values is not necessarily the most self-differentiated approach. If you want to be part of a community, and you feel in some way ostracized, the very best approach would seem to be connecting the practices of a community to its clearly stated purpose. Even if a community values the inherent worth and dignity of every person, if its clearly stated purpose is to honor the human value of people around them by distributing shoes, it isn't really appropriate to insist they also build houses, even if building houses would also align with the community's values. If that community is failing to distribute shoes effectively, though, or if its distribution seems to repeatedly avoid a certain neighborhood, there's a clear line of connection to follow. When inclusion clearly connects to a community's shared purpose, it's hard to argue with. 

Personally, I find it difficult to be in communities with religious identities. Songs that praise or petition a supernatural are antithetical to my personal beliefs. Public prayers rarely call upon the strength and capability of human beings, but rather ask an external deity to provide things for people. Speeches or sermons often proclaim things like, "It's all part of God's plan," or, "God is in control." I feel like an outsider in the presence of those songs or prayers or speeches. I can choose to be personally offended, or I can look to the clear purpose of the community. If a community's practices are clearly in alignment with its identity and purpose, then I really have nothing to complain about. I simply won't feel a sense of belonging in that community, because my personal identity and values are different from what the community promotes. 

If the community's practices seem not to be aligned with its clearly stated purpose, however, then I have a reason to speak up. It's often the case that a community and its leaders are unconsciously making assumptions that aren't true. If I feel an affinity for the community's purpose and my values and identity align with the community's stated values and identity, it's up to me to point out how the community's unintentionally exclusionary practices can shift to include my perspective while remaining clearly aligned with the community's shared purpose. When a community lacks a clear purpose, it's much easier for me to feel angry, offended, and alienated, especially if community leaders express a value of inclusion or claim to be welcoming to all people. At the same time, I don't believe that I should be made welcome by every community I might visit. Some communities have a purpose I don't share and don't have any interest in sharing. Neither I nor the community need to change. We all just need to be honest about what we are choosing to make our lives about.

Just as all of us need a clear sense of purpose to make our lives meaningful, communities need a clear shared purpose. The clearer and more specific the purpose, the more confident people will be in their sense of belonging. The more confident people are in their sense of belonging, the more easily they will participate in the mutual ingredients that make community healthy, authentic, and meaningful for everyone. The more vague a community's purpose, the more tentative people will be in their sense of belonging, and the more likely they will be to feel anger, hurt, or sadness when the community fails to meet their personal expectations. Lacking a clear purpose that's shared by its members means a community will have greater challenges in creating safe space for people to practice those five essential ingredients. It's better for people to leave with a clear understanding of how their personal identity doesn't mesh with the community's identity, even if this means that a community remains small. A community serves its current and future members best by having a clear purpose that all its members can share.

The Basics of Boundaries

A lot of communities are familiar with boundaries. Boundaries are often used to define who is an insider and who is an outsider. Religious communities often use belief as a boundary. (Members of this community believe in X, Y, or Z, and if you don't believe in X, Y, or Z, you can't be a member of this community.) Some communities use behavior as a boundary. (Members of this behavior abstain from alcohol, or pray at certain times of the day, or wear special clothing, and if you don't do these things, you can't be a member of the community.)

Especially for people whose entire social circle is comprised of a single community, these rules and restrictions are a means of controlling people. Stepping out of bounds can mean being ostracized or disowned. This sort of boundary is harmful when shame, rejection, and condemnation are used as enforcement. The message from many religious communities is that certain people are unacceptable, unlovable, or unworthy because they don't fit within the community boundaries. In many cases, boundaries become walls, shutting people out of community, imprisoning people in relationships, or preventing safe self-disclosure, honesty, and affirmation.

Healthy communities, on the other hand, set boundaries based on what behaviors align with the shared values of the community. A healthy community doesn't need to distinguish between insider and outsider, because the community's commonly held guiding principles and shared purpose are clearly defined. Rather than controlling people's behavior, healthy boundaries are collaboratively defined practices that reflect the community's values.

For instance, if a community has decided to practice mutual affirmation, self-disclosure, hospitality, active and unconditional love, and honesty, they may agree that some behaviors reinforce those values and some behaviors run counter to those values. Let's say, for instance, that a community recognizes that gossiping about someone isn't congruent with those five characteristics, but that it reflects those values to speak honestly, directly, and respectfully to a person when there's conflict. The boundary for the community, then, is that communication within the community reflects the community's shared values.

If Alex goes to Bethany to complain about something Charlotte said, that doesn't mean Alex should get kicked out of the community or shamed. It does mean that Bethany has an opportunity to help Alex make a course correction and realign with communication that reflects the high aspirations of the community. Bethany could do this in a variety of ways. She could guide Alex toward speaking directly, honestly, and respectfully with Charlotte -- or even offer to go with Alex if the conversation seems challenging. She could also help Alex empathize with Charlotte. Remaining detached from Alex's anxiety might be challenging for Bethany, and she may be tempted to take sides or spread further gossip about Charlotte (or Alex). Having clear boundaries in the community and giving everyone responsibility for upholding those boundaries will hopefully make it clear to Bethany how she can respond more intentionally.

This is an important point, because many communities have specialized people who are boundary enforcers. If you have a problem with someone, you go to the boundary enforcer and file a complaint, the boundary enforcer looks into the situation and decides if a boundary has been crossed, and then (ideally) a system of justice is activated to provide just consequences. This system lets most people off the hook for enforcing community boundaries. In a large society, this has some benefits. Our national justice system is severely flawed, but it's at least an improvement on vigilante justice or the escalations of retributive violence that happen in some cultures. In smaller communities, though, people can collaborate to create community boundaries that reflect their shared values, and everyone can be equally responsible for enforcing those boundaries by their own intentional behavior. Bethany doesn't need to go running to a community elder to inform on Alex. She's capable of being intentional in her own behavior when Alex's anxiety gets activated.

Each community has to determine for itself what level of boundary-crossing warrants greater attention. There are times when people may be resistant to correction when they are acting in violation of a community's shared boundaries. People can engage in conflict when they are anxious; fear prompts defiance in some folks. It's important for a community to know how it will respond to this kind of anxiety or fear in a way that aligns with its guiding principles and values. Community members should know ahead of time what the consequences are for persistent boundary-crossing, and as many members as possible should be empowered to hold one another accountable to the community's shared values and guiding principles.

Boundaries can also help provide a sense of safety in a community. Background checks for people working with children is a boundary. Clear lines of financial accountability may be another community boundary. Sometimes these sorts of boundaries are rooted in fear and anxiety about people. The same boundaries could flow from a community's intentional identity, however. The difference is not necessarily the boundaries themselves, but the foundation on which the boundaries are built. Well-defined community values and shared vision undergird healthy boundaries.

Healthy individuals have boundaries, too. And individual boundaries may not be identical to community boundaries. One person may choose to be vegetarian, while the community as a whole doesn't make such a choice. It's the responsibility of the individual to clearly state their boundaries, and it's the responsibility of the community to respect the boundaries of individuals. Emile has the responsibility to say, "I won't eat the chicken casserole Devon brought to the potluck, because I don't eat meat." No one has to apologize for the presence of a chicken casserole, because vegetarianism isn't a shared value of the community. Likewise, no one in the community gets to force Emile to eat the chicken casserole, or shame or pressure Emile (or Devon). Radical hospitality may prompt someone to take action to make sure Emile has something to eat, but this can be a loving act that respects the boundaries of those present.

Sometimes personal boundaries are the result of false beliefs, and sometimes personal boundaries are inconvenient for a community. Healthy community can recognize these realities and remain respectful of the boundaries that individuals set, as long as the community's shared values and guiding principles aren't compromised. Say a community decides that its shared values are non-theistic -- that as a community they will not promote supernaturalism through any of their common practices. If Gerry prefers to pray before a meal, it's fine for Gerry to pray. It isn't fine for Gerry to insist that everyone else pray. If Gerry wants to listen to overtly theistic music, that's fine. Gerry just doesn't get to require everyone to sing theistic music together.

The same would be true for a theistic community that determines its shared values to include affirming and promoting affection or gratitude toward a supernatural. If this is a shared value of the community, Fabian's personal boundary of refusing to pray doesn't get to define the practices of the entire community. The community's boundaries also don't mean that Fabian can be forced to pray, however. Fabian can choose not to sing the community's theistic songs, but if the community's shared values include gratitude toward a supernatural, Fabian should expect them to sing praises to that supernatural as a community practice.

For some communities, the challenging part is defining these boundaries clearly so that individuals will know whether their personal boundaries will be in conflict with the community's practices. If a community expects everyone to do something, it's best to be honest and direct about that expectation. Too often, communities claim to welcome everyone and fail to provide a clear indication of what they're welcoming everyone into. It doesn't matter to me if a Christian community acts like they welcome me; if they're going to expect me to participate in blatantly Christian activities, I'm not going to feel welcome. I'm not going to feel like a respected, valued, accepted part of a community that expects me to act in opposition to my own personal beliefs. When a community is clear about its boundaries and practices, and an individual is clear about their personal boundaries and practices, people can easily see whether they are a good fit for the community. Hopefully, a community's shared values and guiding principles are directly reflected in their boundaries and practices.
   
I mentioned that sometimes personal boundaries are the result of false beliefs. As long as those personal boundaries aren't in conflict with the community's boundaries, it's still best to be loving and respectful of those personal boundaries that may be misguided. As a person grows in their ability to practice mutual self-disclosure and honesty, and as a person participates in giving and receiving sincere affirmation and active, unconditional love, their beliefs -- and therefore their boundaries -- may change. People first need to feel safe in community before they can engage in the challenging work of defining personal guiding principles and casting vision in their lives. Respect for their personal boundaries, and clear community boundaries, can help provide that sense of safety.

All of this conversation about boundaries is within the context of a community that is practicing the essential five ingredients we've already explored: mutual self-disclosure, mutual hospitality, mutual active and unconditional love, mutual honesty, and mutual affirmation. Some people may need a lot of help from their community to learn how to establish healthy personal boundaries. Boundaries can also be abused to preserve a community at the expense of the individual, or to create power-over structures rather than power-with systems. This is one reason community boundaries should be collaboratively created by the members of a community, with a clear connection to the shared values and guiding principles of the community. With these elements in place, a community can incorporate one more vital piece to creating greater wholeness in the world: a well-defined shared purpose or vision.

There are several books and web resources that carry this conversation about boundaries deeper, but one of the best is still Boundaries by Henry Cloud and John Townsend. Even though this is touted as a Christian book, Cloud's observations are valid beyond the sphere of Christianity, and his recommendations are easily interpreted into a sound Humanist framework for relationships. He's also released a number of spin-offs that may be helpful to people looking for guidance on setting healthy boundaries in specific relationships.

Selfishness 3

One last little piece of the illusion of selfishness. We've seen that there is no credible evidence for an afterlife where people are rewarded or punished for anything, and we can see evidence all around us that supernaturals are not providing for the real needs of people. We can even see that the figures who serve as examples of behavior in various religious traditions habitually took responsibility for their own well-being, as they were able. Still, we encounter this idea that focusing on your own personal growth is selfish time and again, especially from religious leaders. Perhaps one final piece of the problem is our tendency toward either/or thinking.

Our brains still work in mysterious ways, even as science continues to reveal more and more about human thinking and tendencies. Thinking in either/or propositions is a common way to address issues. "Either I can exercise, or I can sit in front of a screen." "Either I'll be a leader, or I'll be a follower." "Either I can focus on my own well-being, or I can tend to the well-being of others." In logic, this kind of argument is called a fallacy -- a "false dichotomy". This flawed thinking isn't necessarily intentional, but it is lazy. There are so many more options than we usually choose to consider, and we often fail to seek out both/and solutions, maybe because they require a little more work. Our idea of selfishness is caught up in this flawed thinking.

If there really are only two options that we're willing to consider, it may be simply a matter of changing our thinking habits. "I want to exercise, and I also want to watch a movie. How can I figure out a way to do both?" If we really believe that focusing on our own well-being and tending to the well-being of others are competing goals, then we can change our habit of either/or thinking and ask something like, "How can I be personally responsible for my own life and tend to the well-being of others in a satisfying way?" We can re-frame what seems to be a choice between mutually exclusive options once we are willing to admit that our thinking is problematic.

The logical fallacy of our either/or thinking actually disguises something even deeper than the possibility that we can think in terms of both/and propositions. Those who decry selfishness might consider the options to be, "I can do what I want, or I can do what someone else wants." Obviously, to choose what you want is "selfish," and to choose what someone else wants is selfless. Religious traditions often mistakenly teach that selflessness is the preferred option. A more open-minded person might shift to a both/and formula and ask, "How we can we both get what we want?" The most honest question, though, is "What do I really want?"

All of this talk about selfishness only makes sense in terms of surface level desires. When we stay on the surface of our being, we might believe we want things we don't actually want. And we might think we don't want things we actually do want. We might say we don't want to do laundry or wash dishes, but we actually do want clean clothes and dishes. On the surface, we focus on avoiding pain or inconvenience or frustration, but when we get past that and ask what we really want, it becomes clear that doing the laundry and washing the dishes gets us what we actually want. It's a matter of more mature awareness of what we value, not merely a matter of "selfishness."

Likewise, we might say we want something awful to happen to a rude driver, or a malicious co-worker, or an incompetent retail clerk. When we think more deeply about our own lives and experiences, though, we have occasionally done something that inconvenienced (or even endangered) another driver on the road because we were in a hurry or we weren't paying attention. Perhaps we have also made decisions that other people didn't like because it was part of our job. We may even have been thrown off by a simple process because one little thing in our environment was different, or we were distracted by something else in our personal lives. 

As much as we may get angry or frustrated when other people's behavior inconveniences us or challenges us, we actually don't want to live in a world where a sort of vicious karma punishes our every mistake with misfortune. We actually want people to be graceful with us when we almost miss our exit on the freeway, or when we make a thoughtful decision that has painful consequences for someone, or when we just have a moment when our brains aren't firing on all cylinders. We want to be known and understood. We want other people to see our inherent worth and dignity -- and to acknowledge and respect our unique abilities and strengths that may have required a lot of hard work to cultivate. 

Our anxiety prompts us to hold ourselves apart, to demand something different for our own lives than we hope for in the lives of others. Our fear prompts us to defend our own difficult decisions by mocking the difficult decisions of others. Our fear prompts us to refuse rights to other people because we think their freedom will somehow jeopardize our own rights and freedom. Our fear prompts us toward scarcity thinking, believing that I can't have what I need if someone else gets what they need. Either/or propositions are fueled by our anxiety, just as the idea of "selfishness" is really a way of saying that we allow our fear to convince us that we want something we don't actually want -- our anxiety doesn't let us get past the surface level desires to what we most deeply value.

When we are able to connect with what we most deeply value, we begin to realize that what we want requires well-being in our own lives and well-being in the lives of those around us. When we are willing to cast a vision of wholeness for our lives -- or our neighborhoods, or our workplaces, or the world -- we see that our lives are interconnected with the lives of others, that we cannot experience wholeness and well-being in our lives without contributing to wholeness and well-being in the lives of others. Yet we cannot connect with what we most deeply value, what we most deeply want, without learning to manage our own anxiety and confronting our tendency toward lazy thinking. And we cannot learn to manage our own anxiety or confront our mental laziness by focusing on other people. We have to turn our gaze inward and develop our own selves if we want to maximize the meaningful contribution we are able to make in the world.

So, there is really no such thing as selfishness. There are degrees of emotional immaturity and maturity. There are habits of lazy, flawed thinking that we can change and develop into more mature, intentional thought processes. There are anxious, fear-driven reactions that keep us from living with integrity to what actually matters most to us. And there are more emotionally mature, self-aware actions that align with our deepest values and create greater wholeness in our own lives and the lives of others. Well-being is only an either/or proposition when we allow our flawed, surface level, anxious, scarcity thinking to run the show. When we are honest, we acknowledge that well-being in our own lives is inextricably connected to well-being in the lives of others. And when we focus on our own capacity to clarify our deepest values and live with integrity to those values, we transform the world. 

John 20: Our Resurrection and Meaningful Hope

We blew right past a lot of the mythological details in the passion narrative. Some believers focus much more on the details of John 19, and there are legendary tales regarding the mystical powers of the spear that pierced Jesus' side. Since this is rather like spending time dwelling on the actual powers of a harp played by the Norse god Bragi, we've quickly arrived at John 20, which is a somewhat altered resurrection story than what we find in the synoptic gospels. Again, we need not worry about comparing the details of who arrived where first and who said what; these are authorial creations intended to tell a story a certain way. We can turn our attention in other directions.

Most importantly, there is a resurrection. We observed previously that the suffering of the crucifixion was a result of remaining self-differentiated and maintaining integrity in the midst of anxious people who allowed fear to drive them. Here we see that suffering was not the end of the story. The outcome of suffering for the Jesus character is that he rises and assumes an exalted status. Perhaps we too might expect that on the other side of our suffering is a sense of renewed life, not on the other side of the grave, but while we are still alive and walking around.

The persecution we might face for creating a life that aligns with our deepest, most noble selves is painful, but we also gain something greater than that suffering -- namely, the more fully alive life that we create. We gain alignment with our deepest, most noble selves, which is a way of being that allows us to be more fully alive -- as the Jesus character seems to be in the resurrection story of the gospel of John. He is barely recognizable to people who knew him well, just as our way of aligning with our deepest, most noble selves may be barely recognizable to people who knew us when we were less fully alive.

There are a few other details in the story from which we might also draw some meaning. For instance, Mary arrives at the tomb, sees something she doesn't expect, makes some assumptions (based primarily on fear), and runs off in reaction to those assumptions. She finds two other people, who hear her anxious conclusions and run off in reaction to her story. These two people make their own assumptions and -- without fully understanding what is happening -- go home, satisfied with the reliability their conclusions. At this point in the story, none of these characters know what is happening, but they all are convinced that they have a full grasp of the situation. They aren't happy about it. In some cases, they are overwhelmed with anxiety. But they believe that they understand the situation fully.

We don't ever understand a situation fully. We might understand things accurately in part, but we can't know all that there is to know about a situation. There are historical events that contribute to a situation and yet their connection might remain unnoticed. Each person in a situation brings their own perspective and baggage into it, and we can never know fully what goes on in another person's head. Before our anxiety carries us off into Autopilot Reaction Land, it's worth remembering that we don't know all that there is to know. If we can remain curious and ask questions, we might just short circuit our anxiety, even if we still fail to grasp a situation completely.

The second portion of this passage from the first half of John 20 has a lot of mystical implications, which were probably very important to the community for which the gospel was originally written. The dialogue between Mary and Jesus indicates that the community thought some very specific things about a post-resurrection Jesus. These ideas are not based on factual data, but rather on the assumptions of a community -- what made sense to those people at that time. We follow the same process too, often arriving at strange conclusions.

For the community in which this gospel was written, it made sense for Jesus to be unrecognizable and to say, "Don't touch me because I haven't yet ascended." They essentially made things up about what a resurrected person might say, based on their assumptions about the world. Some people today think it makes sense to conclude that wild conspiracy theories have merit, or that alien visitation is a viable explanation for some experience. These conclusions make sense to the people making them, even if they don't hold water under objective scrutiny. People today believe a literal interpretation of biblical stories, even though such an interpretation is incompatible with what is demonstrably true about the world.

Anxiety can make us forget things we actually do know. When we are anxious, our brains find it easier to latch onto any explanation -- even explanations that don't make a lot of sense -- because we want our anxiety to go away. When we think we understand something, we feel like we can have some control. We can put tin foil on our heads to protect our thoughts. We can amass a stockpile of resources in a fallout shelter to prepare for a societal breakdown. We can do something based on what we think we know, forgetting that there are pieces of contradictory evidence we aren't considering.

Sometimes, we hold two mutually exclusive competing ideas in our head without even realizing it. We think that our bosses hate us no matter what we do, yet we keep trying to find ways to please them. We think that our spouses love us, yet we behave as if they are our enemies. We believe that we are part of a religion founded on unconditional love, yet we pronounce hateful judgment on people who seem different from us. Somehow, these contradictions make sense in our anxious mind.

Our anxiety makes us forget what we know about people or about ourselves or about reality, and we go off on some fear-driven tangent without even realizing that we aren't acting in accord with what we believe most deeply. If we are willing to stop and think through our behavior, based on a deeper connection with our clear guiding principles, our actions might more often align with our vision of a best possible version of ourselves.

Now, there's no way to know what the characters in this story believed most deeply. One thing that is clear, however, is that there is some emotional volatility at play. Their anxiety is powerful. Yet, at the end of this particular passage, Mary's behavior is very different from the ending of the gospel of Mark, in which the women run away scared and tell no one what they've seen. Mary finds a sense of hope and runs to share that hope with others.

Obviously, hope is more uplifting than fear. Our hope can still be based on unrealistic or dishonest beliefs, though. In the story, of course, Mary accurately identifies a resurrected Jesus. This is just a story, not a historical account. In our own lives, we might be tempted to invest a lot of hope in things that we know aren't likely to happen. Hope in the impossible is not useful hope. In fact, hope in the impossible is most likely an anxious reaction in disguise. We feel powerless, so we place hope in something beyond our control.

An overwhelming majority of parents think that their high school athletes will have a career in professional sports, when it's obvious that only a minuscule percentage of high school athletes will go pro. Often, we expect that people in our lives are going to change into the people we want them to be. While we will surely influence people, we can't control how they will change as a result of our influence. We might hope for a mystical experience with something supernatural outside of ourselves, but every piece of evidence we have points to the conclusion that what we consider to be mystical experiences happen inside our own brains. We mistake internal chemical reactions that we don't understand for external supernatural experiences -- which we somehow believe we do understand.

It's important for us to share our hope with others, and it's important for us to maintain a sense of reality in the midst of our hopefulness. Realistic hope can prompt us toward actions that align with that dream of what could be. And it's important for us to share our anxiety with others too, if we're conscientious enough to share our anxiety with people who will help us shift out of autopilot and back toward a more intentional approach to how we manage our anxiety. Mary is a great example of connection in this passage. Everything that happens, she runs to tell someone. She isn't a great example of personal responsibility, though. We can forgive a fictional character in the throes of grief for not being grounded and centered. In our own lives, we can strive for a sense of connection with ourselves even as we foster connection with other people.

We can draw a lot of lessons from these short paragraphs, then. First -- even though our integrity may be seen as sedition and anxious people may persecute us for our intentional alignment with our deepest, most noble selves -- when we engage in fully alive lives, our experience might be beyond what we ever dreamed life could be.

Second, our anxiety can convince us that we know things we don't know. It's important for us to remember that we can't know everything. Our sense of curiosity can help us manage our reactivity.

Third, our anxiety can make us forget things we do know. We can become sharper about examining our beliefs and identifying when we are holding two mutually exclusive ideas in our heads. We can choose to follow the belief that aligns with our deepest values and let the other one go as a product of our anxiety.

Finally, hope is important, and it's most powerful when it's balanced with reality. When we hope for things that are impossible, we can't move toward them in any meaningful way. When we hope for things that are possible, we can act in accord with that hope and create more meaningful lives for ourselves and for the people around us.

John 19: Personal Sedition and Its Consequences

Following the episode of Pontius Pilate's compromised integrity, the established community's reactivity to the message of radical love and authenticity culminates in an execution. This execution was nothing special within the context of the Roman Empire. Thousands of men were crucified for the crime of sedition, the public torture and capital punishment serving the additional purpose of dissuading other would-be insurrectionists. The Jesus character in the gospel of John is someone special, but the means of his execution is by no means unique for the time.

Like other gospel authors, the author of John can't resist telling the story so that some quips from the Hebrew scriptures seem prophetic. By the time the gospel of John was written, it was already part of Christian culture to look at their Jewish sacred texts and imagine that the earlier authors were writing about Jesus, which is to say that they imagined that the texts were about them. When the followers of a messiah claim that words written centuries ago were about the individual they revere, they are essentially asserting that they have special knowledge. "We are enlightened enough to know who these words really refer to. Everyone else is ignorant. We are special; you are not. You should listen to us, but we have no reason to listen to you."

If I looked back at something written in 1555 and decided that those words were actually referring to a twenty-first century individual, most folks would think I was a bit off my rocker. Except that, people do exactly that with the predictions of Nostradamus. Though the prophetic accuracy of Nostradamus has been debunked (along with much of his legendary biography), some people somehow think that a person living five centuries ago could see into the future and write actual predictive prophecies. At least with Nostradamus, he presumably had some idea that he was writing predictions of the future. The early Christians took things a step further and imagined that many different authors from centuries past were unknowingly writing about a particular individual, who just happened to be the legendary founder of their sect.

Thus, portions of the passion narrative in every gospel wind up being a somewhat cobbled together string of short excerpts from various authors within Hebrew Scriptures, interpreted as a sequence of events which then appear to have been prophetically predicted. It's a clever way to tell a story that legitimizes one's beliefs, and it also seems to have enough depth of meaning without digging any deeper than the appearance of prophetic fulfillment. Once you realize that what happens in the story seems to be the fulfillment of prophecy, there might seem to be no reason to look for a deeper meaning than that.

One way of seeking deeper meaning in the story is to reject the idea of a singular historical messianic figure and instead consider the personal application in our own lives. If the Jesus character here continues to be an exemplar who represents us, what does this story say about us? That we should placidly go to our death at the hands of angry and fearful religious conservatives who abdicate their violent desires to a cowardly, complicit government? Maybe not. Perhaps a more metaphorical approach will continue to serve us.

Crucifixion was the punishment primarily for sedition -- a crime which the Roman Empire considered to be worthy of public humiliation and torture, as a means of control as well as a means of execution. We know how poorly capital punishment works as a deterrent, and yet we're still strangely committed to that idea as a society. We can't really expect that the Romans could have been any more enlightened about its efficacy that we are. Sedition is rebellion against an authority, attempting to upset the balance of an existing power structure or social order. That is the explicit crime for which the Jesus character is executed. We know that the story doesn't end with the Jesus character's death, but he is effectively removed from participating fully in community in the same way he had been.

In our own lives, growth sometimes means committing acts of sedition, not against an actual government, but against some established social order or authority in our lives. Claiming our own personal power and creating a life that aligns with our deepest, most noble selves sometimes means upsetting some patterns that other people find comforting. When we act in a way that seems to threaten other people's sense of security -- especially if those people believe they are in positions of power over us -- those people are likely to react. Few people know how to manage their reactivity in a healthy way, and even fewer people are willing to do it, even if they know how. That means that our own growth and empowerment sometimes evokes fear in other people, because it seems like we're upsetting an order that they find comfortable.

Their reaction toward you may begin gently, with some effort to kindly guide you back into the patterns they find comfortable. They may escalate into threats about what will happen to you if you continue to upset the status quo. Eventually, some kind of violent reaction might close the door on your participation in that social structure. This doesn't necessarily mean that people will kill you or even physically harm you for outgrowing an established way of being, but emotional violence can still be devastating. People might kill a relationship by cutting off contact, by sowing rumors, or all sorts of other social and emotional executions. It isn't at all pleasant, but other people's reactivity is not your fault. Some relationships can heal again (which we'll consider as the gospel narrative continues), but they won't ever be quite the same. Once you leave a particular orbit, you can't quite forget all that you know from seeing things from a broader perspective.

We get into habits. It's easy to do, and it saves us having to consider every moment carefully, which could mentally incapacitate us. When we grow into a more intentional way of aligning with our deepest life-affirming values -- our personal guiding principles -- we inevitably have to examine some of the habitual ways we participate in our social structures and relationships. Living into a vision of a best possible version of ourselves may mean adopting some radically different behaviors than what we've habitually done in the past. This is not just an internal shift. When we change the dance, everyone on the dance floor with us is affected. Ultimately, we strive for our commitment to integrity and intentionality to improve the well-being of everyone around us. But change is unsettling for people, and they may not be ready for improved well-being if it means changing familiar and comfortable patterns.

Our decisions can be based on other people's anxiety. In fact, we often decide what to do based on how we think other people will react. We may be afraid of rejection, of being "unacceptable", or of losing a sense of belonging. We create limitations for ourselves based on what we think other people can handle. We play it safe. We might understandably choose the safety of familiar and comfortable patterns over the riskier path of personal empowerment. Many people seem content with conformity.

Or our decisions can be based on our own sense of self. We can prioritize our own deep values -- our own vision of a best possible version of ourselves -- over and above the anxiety of people around us. It's true that pursuing a path of greater integrity to our deepest, most noble selves might get us metaphorically crucified for sedition against an established social order. It's also true that alignment to our deepest life-affirming values creates greater wholeness not only for us, but also for the people around us. There is always more to the story than mourning what anxiety destroys.

When we dismantle our own irrational fears and live toward a vision of a best possible version of ourselves, we will necessarily connect with other human beings. We may end up finding new people to connect to, and we may connect with people differently. One way or another, though, we need connection with other human beings. It's scary to feel unwelcome, but there will be new places of welcome that we can't discover if we stay entrenched in old habits. It can be painful to be the object of other people's anxiety, but we are capable of experiencing pain and emerging on the other side of it.

Most importantly, our willingness to risk doesn't necessarily mean that we'll lose something. Sometimes, our journey toward greater integrity will actually inspire people around us rather than making them anxious. Sometimes, our commitment to our deepest values will make our bonds with other people stronger. Rather than compromising our sense of safety and familiarity, we might create something new with the people who are already a part of our tribe. It's up to us whether we're willing to risk losing comfortable patterns in order to build something better in our lives.

John 18-19: External Challenges to Internal Integrity

Once again, we might find ourselves relating to various characters in the next portion of the passion narrative in the gospel of John, in which the characters of Jesus and Pontius Pilate interact. This passage is very dramatic and weaves a compelling tale, and although we have noted this time and again, it bears repeating once more that there are no transcripts of a conversation between Jesus and Pilate. The dialogue here is creative license on the part of the author.

We do have a bit of evidence that Pontius Pilate was an actual historical figure (more evidence than we have that Jesus was an actual historical figure, to be frank), but at this time there is no authentic artifact reflecting what the historical Pontius Pilate thought of a historical Jesus, or even that the two interacted at all. What we know of Pilate, however, is that he became increasingly unwilling to bend to the will of Jewish mobs, preferring to have soldiers kill unruly crowds of locals who disagreed with his decisions. The pleading, reluctant procurator depicted in the gospel of John might therefore be a bit of wishful thinking on the part of the author, or this depiction may have been an effort to avoid persecution from Rome, or it may have been to heap the full weight of blame on the Jewish religious leaders in the story. No one can say with certainty what the author was thinking, but we can at least be sure that the image of Pontius Pilate here is not a full picture of the man's behavior in historical reality.

Since we cannot know the full intention of the author, we might as well see what we can draw from the story for ourselves. Can the figure of Jesus still serve as the depiction of an idealized us? Is there something else for us in this passage? As we have observed, the passion story is a central element to most Christianities, but the themes and metaphors of the narrative are present in the tales of many religions and mythologies. Here, strength takes on a distinct quality when anxiety and fear are not the driving forces behind a person's decisions and behavior. The Jesus character might represent to us a self-awareness that goes beyond self-preservation -- a commitment to one's identity and principles that matters more than personal safety.

We plan much of what we do based on the risks involved. Do I say this difficult thing, if it might provoke a reaction I don't like? Is my authenticity worth facing rejection? Are my principles worth dealing with hostility? Are my needs important enough for me to be vulnerable and say them out loud to another human being? Often, our answers are No. We decide that our deepest values are not worth the risks we might face -- that we are not worth the risks we might face -- if we live with authenticity. Our integrity winds up being less important than our sense of personal safety and acceptance.

The passion story may not serve as much encouragement for us to do otherwise. After all, the character who represents us in the story winds up suffering more than we ever want to. The lesson is not that our authenticity will get us crucified, however. The complete perspective of the lesson, as we will acknowledge in the weeks ahead, is that our authenticity leads to being fully alive -- more alive than we can be when we play it safe and act based on a fear for our own safety. Fear and anxiety limit us from being fully alive in our relationships and in our actions.

Impulsive, "honest" words and behavior are not really much better. Just saying or doing the next impulsive thing that crosses our mind doesn't lead to a fully alive life. In fact, most of our impulses are still going to be driven by fear. That's just the way our minds work. The goal is to be intentional and to have integrity between our actions and what we care about most deeply. In the story, then, we see an example of a person who knows themselves so fully that there is no place for fear to drive their behavior.

You might also notice that the Jesus character doesn't insult or provoke Pilate in the dialogue. He states clearly that his purpose as a leader has nothing to do with political power (contrary to what those who claim to follow him have done with his legacy). He clarifies that he is interested in truth, unadulterated and untainted by fear. He suffers torture and abuses at the hands of those who are less emotionally mature, and even in the midst of that profound pain, he doesn't give himself over to anxiety and fear. His integrity is not just about his internal state of being, it has ramifications for how he relates to the people around him.

The author does have Jesus say something interesting, to pursue a theological rabbit trail for just a moment. The last words the Jesus character speaks to Pilate here are, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given to you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin." The gist of the argument here seems to be: (1) God authorizes people in their positions of power, therefore (2) people are not culpable for exercising that authorized power, and yet (3) those who interpret their power based on biblical principles from the Hebrew scriptures are more guilty than political leaders who use their positions of power to do harm. There is no way around the conclusion that God authorizes people to do harm to others (which is really nothing new from the Old Testament), nor is there any way around the idea that those who do not use their power ethically are guilty of "sin." If the same rules apply to God, then, the only logical conclusion from this theological statement is that God is guilty of the greatest sin, authorizing harm and failing to use power ethically. Of course, none of that really matters if God is a fictional supernatural, but these theological diversions are sometimes intriguing.

What can we say about the Jewish leaders and Pilate in this story? Do we find ourselves in these characters as well? Certainly, the Jewish leaders continue to be caught up in their fear. When a more rational voice tries again and again to offer a more reasonable course of action, they dig in their heels. There are all sorts of fears that could have been fueling their drivenness. At the same time, they are anxious to be technically clean even though there is nothing life-affirming about their behavior. They want to maintain an appearance of being beyond reproach by abdicating the harmful action to someone else. They do not want ownership of their decision, but they are committed to getting what they think they want.

In many cases, we still attempt to use the government in this way. We don't want to be responsible for making the changes we think are necessary, but we want someone to be responsible on our behalf. We don't want to be culpable for the harm that is done to others, but we are strangely comfortable with other people being harmed so that we feel safer. All the while, our own anxiety continues to soar, and our integrity is practically nonexistent. The two operate at inverse proportions. When we are committed to greater integrity and intentionality, our anxiety necessarily shifts to lower priority -- we cannot serve our fear and our deepest values at the same time. The question is whether we will be intentional about which we are serving or whether we will let our fear drive us as the Jewish leaders of this story are unequivocally driven.

Pilate, as he is characterized by the author, seems to be aware of what his values dictate and yet is still unwilling to take responsibility for living with integrity to those values. Where the Jewish leaders have completely lost touch with their deepest, most noble selves, Pilate seems to engage in sincere wrestling between his authentic, life-affirming values and the safety of pleasing other anxious people. (Again, this is a literary fictional character we're talking about and not the actual historical Pontius Pilate.) If his integrity were simply a matter of being internally aligned with deep guiding principles, he would seem to be on track. When his integrity requires managing himself in relationship to other people, however, he faces difficulty. The bizarre picture here is of a person with the greatest amount of authority and legitimate power bows to the most anxious voices in the room, because life-affirming values were given less priority than fear of the consequences of disappointing the least emotionally mature people involved.

This is clearly a picture to which we can relate. We like it when we are the most anxious voices in the room because it feels powerful to get our way. Screaming at someone until we get what we want can feel very vindicating, as long as we get what we think we want. Outrage and indignation seem to be preferred methods for people to force others to bend to their will. These are all fear-driven behaviors, however, and thus they cannot be reflective of our deepest, most noble selves. Whatever life-affirming values you think you have, these go out the window when you choose outrage and hostility as weapons of coercion.

When we fail to exercise our authority in the midst of hostility and coercion, however, we fail everyone in the scenario. Just as the Pilate character in this story, we can become so focused on making angry people go away and stop threatening us that we forget ourselves. We forget that what we care about most is not that every outraged person is mollified. We lose sight of our deepest principles because it seems risky to live with integrity to them when people are screaming at us. We become more interested in defending ourselves and being safe than we are interested in integrity.

We could spend eons peeling back the layers of Pilate's deceptively simply musing, "What is truth?" He is in the midst of an internal conflict, as we all most likely are. The Jesus character seems to know truth, however, and he is apparently calm in the midst of the chaos around him. We might assume that he experienced some internal conflict, especially as he was experiencing the pain inflicted on him. Perhaps he called himself names, as we so often do. Stubborn Fool. Idiot. Masochist. The end result, though, is that the truth he knows is more powerful than the suffering he experiences. The truth he knows is worth his integrity, and while some people assume that this truth has something to do with a supernatural, we will see next week that there is another, more useful possibility for us.

Today's passage shows us three possible points on a spectrum. The Jewish leaders are so driven by fear that they are completely unaware of their deepest life-affirming values. Pontius Pilate is aware of his deepest life-affirming values, and he tries to make them important; he foregoes integrity in the face of anxious aggression, however, and loses himself in order to appease other people. Jesus is not only aware of his deepest life-affirming values, he is unwavering in his integrity, making the moment-by-moment intentional decision to live according to the guidance of his deepest, most noble self rather than living according to other people's anxiety, even though he experiences some pain as a result.

Where are you on that spectrum? Are you aware of your deepest values? Do you place them as a higher priority than your anxiety? Do you find artificial power in using outrage and coercion to alleviate your fear in the moment? Are you prone to give in to other people's anxious demands rather than exercising your personal authority to live with integrity? Or do you live by a standard of authentic power and intention that reflects a vision of a best possible version of yourself?

Wherever you place yourself on that spectrum today, where do you want to be? When you consider what leads to long-term well-being for yourself and the people around you, in what direction would you like to move? If you want a more deeply satisfying experience of life, what will you need to do to move toward that? And what little step are you willing to take today to move in that direction?

John 18: The People Fear Makes

We arrive now at the story that all four biblical gospels hold in common, the arrest and execution of Jesus. The version of the story in the gospel of John has some distinctions from the other texts, which is perhaps striking, since it was apparently written after the other three texts were in circulation. (It could also be said that we have no idea what the original versions of any of these texts contained or omitted because the earliest complete copy we have of any of the gospels is from the third or fourth century.) For whatever reason, the author of John told a slightly different "passion story," so we can take a look and see if there is anything of value in those distinctions as we seek value in the story as it is.

The scene shifts to an unnamed garden across the Kidron Valley. The author of Mark indicates that this garden was named Gethsemane, and the author of Matthew copies him. The author of Luke places the scene at the Mount of Olives. The author of John leaves the place unnamed. He also leaves out the embarrassing story about the disciples falling asleep while Jesus was in distress. In the gospel of John, there is no scene of pleading with God. It just seems to be the meeting place where Judas will bring guards. We also don't see any betrayal with a kiss, as the other gospel stories include, Judas is simply a guide for the guards and police. The author of John does include the bit where Peter slices off the ear of one of the guards -- a detail that is in every biblical version of the story, although Peter and the guard are only identified by name in the gospel of John. In this version, however, Jesus does not heal the injured man.

Once Jesus is arrested, two events are described as occurring simultaneously by all four gospel authors, although the events are not described consistently among them. Jesus is put on trial by the Jewish high priest -- a sort of religious court martial that seems to operate under different rules than one would expect from a legal proceeding. Obvious and contradictory false charges are leveled, and Jesus' words are interpreted to be evidence that he is guilty of blasphemy, an offense punishable by death according to Jewish law. (We have previously observed that a great many offenses carried a death penalty in the Hebrew Scriptures.) Interestingly, blasphemy seems not to have been a crime according to the Roman government, but the Jewish authorities didn't have the power to carry out a legal execution under Roman rule, so the religious leaders twist the story further in order to prompt Pontius Pilate, the local governing Roman authority, to pay attention to the case.

As all of this is going on, Peter, one of the disciples closest to Jesus, is questioned three times about his connection to Jesus, and he lies about their relationship all three times. Dramatically, the rooster announces dawn as Peter utters his third denial. In all four of the gospel narratives, Jesus predicts that Peter will deny their relationship three times and then the rooster will crow. Although the wording is slightly different in all four gospels, of course Jesus' prediction comes to pass in an appropriately dramatic fashion. As we will see later on, only the gospel of John takes steps to "redeem" Peter with a similarly dramatic epilogue.

Although we've acknowledged it many times, it bears repeating that any dialogue in the gospel narratives is creative license on the part of the authors. Even if the events described actually took place at some point, there were no recording devices and no transcriptions of conversations. Especially with the number of years that would have passed between historical events and the authoring of the gospel stories, there is no point in getting hung up on the actual words spoken by anyone in the story except to consider what the author was trying to get across. The author is creating a drama and chooses words that heighten that drama and convey certain qualities of the characters in that drama.

Where are we in this drama? This is a particularly low point for many characters in the story, and we might identify with various groups when we are at our most anxious and reactive.

There is Judas, who plays little role dramatically except for impotently following through with a course of action because he's started down that road. He could have thought things through at any point and decided that the eventual outcome of his actions would lead to another person's unjust execution. There would likely still have been consequences to his actions, but he could have altered his course at any point. That he didn't change direction suggests that he was in the thrall of his own fear and anxiety. He could have been driven by anger at Jesus or his cult. He could have been driven by fear that powerful people would eventually catch up to them, and he wanted to end up on the surviving side of that conflict. It doesn't really matter what the fear was that propelled him forward. The bottom line is that he never stopped to connect his actions with his deepest, life-affirming values as a human being. He allowed his fear to run him, and he went into autopilot mode.

Then we have the police and guards loyal to the religious authorities. They are, of course, just following orders. This can be a convenient excuse, or it can reflect a level of trust for the existing power structure. These people probably had little opportunity to evaluate the situation and think things through for themselves. They knew only what they were told.

The disciples, on the other hand, supposedly had plenty of reason to trust the example they had seen lived out in the life of their teacher. The author frames the flight of the disciples as all part of the plan, but wouldn't emotionally mature, principled individuals remain calm and accept the consequences of their choices rather than running off into the night? Or drawing steel and attacking? They are the very epitome of fight or flight reaction in this scene. As things progress, Peter even resists multiple opportunities to authentically express his convictions, presumably due to fear of hostile reactions from the people around him. The disciples literally figuratively hide themselves away.

Whether we choose to see them as the villains of the story or just human beings who felt threatened, the religious leaders demonstrate another anxious reaction. They are unwilling to consider a challenging perspective because they are already convinced that they know all they need to know. They are comfortable enough with things the way they are that they don't have a compelling reason to consider a different way of being. They respond with lies and violence to a perceived threat to their comfort, compromising their principles (and their religious laws) in order to preserve a sense of security and familiarity. They misuse their authority and power because they are insecure in their authority and power.

And why shouldn't they be insecure? The Roman government was already making exceptions and bending its own policies in order to appease the Jewish people, and still there was one uprising after the next. "Messiahs" came along pretty regularly and raised militias to fight futile battles against the Romans. The ease with which Jewish rabbles were roused to violence eventually provoked Roman officials to order the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and scatter the Jewish people throughout the empire so they couldn't wreak more havoc. The religious authorities, comfortable in their relationship with the Roman officials, must have seen this possibility on the horizon. Anyone in their position would feel anxious. Their response to anxiety, however, was to forget themselves and their values in order to make a problem go away.

Finally, there is the Jesus character. While there are some aspects of the Jesus legend that kick in with the passion narrative, up until this point we have taken the gospel of John's portrayal of Jesus as an example for what it is to be a fully alive human being. Continuing in that perspective, Jesus maintains his own sense of personal authority and self-differentiation throughout the scene. The author of John likes to play with the language of having Jesus say "I am," since that is the translation of the name of the god of the Hebrew scriptures. The Jesus character speaks and embodies this sense of self so fully that the people who come to arrest him are taken aback. He speaks openly and directly to his accusers, perhaps with a bit of an edge to his tone as the author of John depicts it. We don't see any sign of a flight or flight or freeze instinct driving Jesus' behavior. He maintains his sense of self in the midst of the rampant anxiety around him, even though that leads toward devastating consequences.

We can probably recall points in our lives in which our anxious responses looked like several members of the cast in this drama. We have continued to follow courses of action despite realizing that they were in conflict with our deepest values. We have remained ignorant of situations in order to limit our responsibility. We have run away from challenging situations, literally or figuratively, and hidden our true selves safely out of sight. We have become so driven about a goal that we stopped caring whether our means of reaching that goal had integrity. Hopefully, we also can find moments when we have calmly and confidently stood in the midst of chaos and maintained our sense of self. If not, it is certainly a target we can move toward.

It may not seem like it when we are driven or fear-filled, but we always have choices. We might be headed down a path that is completely contrary to what we really want to stand for, but we don't have to continue down a road just because we took a step in a particular direction. How often do people change careers or employers, change relationships, change diets and exercise patterns? We are wonderfully capable of change. The moment we realize that we are headed off course from where we really want our lives to lead, we have the opportunity to change direction. There may be consequences, and it may not be the easiest thing to do, but change is possible.

Likewise, we have choices about how we take responsibility for our role in things. It's easy to exonerate the guards in this story perhaps. They really had no way of knowing anything different than what they were told. In our lives, we are told a lot of things. We know enough to recognize that everything we are told is filtered through someone's biases. At least some of what we are told is patently not true. We can find some comfort in remembering that we can only act on what we know, even though what we know is sometimes inaccurate. However, it's also our responsibility to test what we think we know -- to verify the information we receive as much as possible -- so that we can continue to act with integrity to our deepest values as much as possible.

There are times, though, when that feels like more trouble than it's worth. Maintaining integrity to our guiding principles in the face of hostility may be the hardest thing we have ever considered doing. We may feel content just to sit back and stay comfortable, avoiding any external conflict. At some point, though, we will have to deal with the internal conflict of living in ways that are not congruent with our deepest life-affirming values. Our greatest hope of being fully alive human beings is to fully inhabit ourselves -- to be incarnations of our deepest, most noble selves in the world -- to live into a vision of a best possible version of ourselves. This takes consistent and disciplined effort over time, but it is possible for us to stand in the midst of chaos and remain calm and centered, clearly expressing who we are and what matters most to us.

It may be easy to live a complacent life, to keep coasting on autopilot and let things be just as they are. It's even easy to live life under the illusion that you are helpless victim of the way things are. It's unpleasant, but it doesn't require much effort. What you may not expect, though, is that being fully alive is also easy. Once you have habits and practices in place that keep you grounded in your principles and focused on a vision of a best possible version of yourself, engaging fully in life is not constant hard work. The hard work is in shifting from one to the other, moving from one set of complacent, autopilot habits to a new set of intentional, fully alive habits.

The real decision, then, might actually be whether you are content to be the person fear makes you, or whether you are willing to be the person you most want to be.

John 16: No Messiah Needed

When reading words attributed to Jesus, it is important to keep in mind that we have no record of Jesus from the time during which he was supposed to have lived. We know that some other individuals mentioned in the gospel narratives were historical figures, but we have nothing written by or about Jesus during the first half of the first century. In the case of the gospel of John, it's likely that more than 50 years passed between the supposed time of Jesus' crucifixion and the recording of the gospel text. If someone gave a substantial speech in your presence half a century ago, would you remember it word for word? The long term memories of the gospel writers weren't any better than yours. In John, we even see what appear to be attempts to correct (or at least play upon) earlier gospels.

It is for this reason that we ask, "What might the author have meant by this?" rather than, "What might Jesus have meant by this?" when we read the gospel narratives. Jesus is a character in a story, and we have imagined for our examination of John that Jesus is an exemplar, a representative of an idealized version of ourselves. There are some instances, however, in which it is obvious that the author is writing about something specific to his own community of persecuted believers. John 16 is one such instance.

We have just read the bit about the world hating the disciples. The author follows this by indicating that the followers of Jesus will be ostracized from Jewish places of worship and community, and that they will be killed by people who think they are being righteous. These things had already happened to the author's community by the time the gospel was written. Placing these predictions in Jesus' mouth helped to legitimize the experience of the author's community as part of a divine plan. "If Jesus knew about all of this terror ahead of time, then we can trust that he knew we would survive."

These words, then, are not really to Jesus' disciples on the eve of his crucifixion. They are to a community of people struggling to survive in a world that seemed highly committed to harming them. 

There have always been these people, and the descendants of the gospel writer's community have sometimes been on the side doing the persecuting. Africans were brought to the United States as slaves and treated as less than human, and some of the people in power justified it by their Christian scriptures. Even today, the educational and justice systems in place in the U.S. seem orchestrated to persecute people with darker skin tones. And many people think they are being righteous in perpetuating injustice. Some of those people are Christian. The author of John might suggest that such people have never known God or Jesus.

The LGBT community is another group facing constant persecution in many parts of the world, including the United States. Progress has been made, but there are still places of worship and community where LGBT folks are ostracized. There are still people who inflict harm on LGBT people and think they are doing God's work. The author of John might suggest that such people have never really known God or Jesus, else they would never be able to hate so intensely.

The author of John also provides an answer, and surprisingly the answer is that people do not need Jesus. In fact, in this passage, Jesus tells the disciples that he must be out of the picture so that they will learn to trust an "Advocate" or "Helper" within themselves. The author of John suggests that this internal guidance system cannot function if Jesus remains, perhaps because the disciples would never learn to trust their own sense of what it is to love radically, to live with purpose and integrity to their own principles, to be agents of transformation. 

Whether there was ever an actual Jesus or not, the example set by the gospel narrative is not that far off from the guidance of our deepest, most noble selves. We know what fear looks like, and we know what love looks like. We know what it is to be guided by our anxiety, and we know what it looks like to be guided by solid values. We lift up people who live with purpose and intention because we think of them as extraordinary, but the truth is that it could be very ordinary human behavior to live with a sense of purpose, in impeccable alignment with a clear set of guiding principles. 

Integrity need not seem so extraordinary. 

Our human fears do not have to carry more influence than our human connection. 

Our anxiety need not be more powerful than our ability to love and thrive together. 

We do not need a messiah. 

We need to pay attention to our own selves, our internal sense of what is ultimately true about ourselves and others, once we have cleared away all of the irrational fear and anxiety. 

We are so accustomed to listening to our anxiety that many of us have forgotten what the voice of actual truth sounds like. 

We don't need a savior. 

We just need to learn to listen to ourselves better. 

And that takes courage. 

Integrity seems so extraordinary now because living by clear principles is counter-cultural. In many ways we are addicted to anxious reactivity. 

It takes courage to stand for something besides fear. 

It takes courage to establish values in our lives that acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of every person. 

It takes courage to recognize that violence and entitlement always come from a place of fear. 

It takes courage to stand calmly in the midst of reactive people and not be swayed by their anxiety.

And no one else can be courageous for you. 

No one else can dismantle your fear for you. 

No one else can have integrity for you. 

This is the human work of human beings, not work to entrust to a supernatural. 

Others can support and encourage and empower you, but the work is yours to do. 

It's what human beings do when they are ready to be fully human.

So, are you ready?

John 15: Criticism Is Not a Righteousness Indicator

Immediately after having Jesus telling the disciples to base all that they do on love, the author of John observes a dichotomy between the way the disciples are supposed to live and the rest of the world. The author of John asserts in John 15:18-27 that the world will persecute the followers of Jesus because they do not know (or willingly remain ignorant of) the truth of Jesus' message.

Some people wear persecution as a badge of honor. Some people even read in the Bible that they should expect persecution if they follow the example of Jesus, and then they go out of their way to make sure others will criticize them. The problem is that some people believe that if other people criticize what they are doing, they must be doing something right. They use persecution as confirmation that they are being righteous. This is horribly misguided.

When we decide that other people's derision is a sign that we are headed in the right direction, we walk a very dangerous path. We need other people's insights and observations, because we cannot see everything ourselves. We have blind spots. When we refuse to consider the feedback other people offer to us, we miss opportunities to adjust our behavior when we are misaligned with our deepest values.

The author of John is suggesting that if people take seriously the call to radical love, then there will be others who attack that position out of fear and ignorance. The point is not that if people criticize you, you're doing something right. The point is that if you're doing what is right, some people will criticize you. There is a huge difference. Criticism is to be expected, and we should prepare for it so we don't get knocked off course. Criticism is not a measurement tool, though. We can't assume that all criticism is an indication that we are effectively basing all that we do on sound principles in alignment with our deepest values. 

Anxiety causes people to base their decisions on all manner of things that are worthy of criticism. People crave more wealth, more exclusive neighborhoods, more toys, more isolation from people who seem different, more access to high quality healthcare and education and food and entertainment. We see suffering and we often run the other way, trying to escape it in our own lives because we can't stand seeing it in other people's lives. We build walls of protection around ourselves so that we don't have to face a reality that might cost us something. We fail to love because we are too busy being right, we just don't always know what we're trying to be right about. We lose our sense of our principles and our values because we are too focused on making our anxiety go away.

We have to know what we value first and foremost, and we have to live with integrity to those values. If we envision ourselves as loving people, for instance, that value is the guide by which we evaluate our behavior, not people's criticism. If we want to be loving, and other people give us feedback that we aren't being very loving, we need to pay attention to that feedback. Using criticism as an indicator that we must be on the right path can lead us far astray from the principles upon which we most want our lives to be built.

As the author of John suggests, we have within us an internal guidance system. Some of us may not pay a lot of attention to it, especially if we are accustomed to writing off criticism as validation. Yet, we know when there is something off about our behavior, or when there is something off in our relationships. The author of John probably experienced some persecution as he and his community strove to build their behavior on the foundation of radical love. The radical love was the goal, though, not the persecution.

There are those today who believe that their religious liberties are threatened when other people gain equal freedoms under the law. When they speak out in hatred and fear, they are sometimes criticized, and sometimes they turn to passages like this one and claim that the people doing the criticizing are misguided and ignorant. Such fearful and hateful people often miss the context of the passage, that love is intended to be the foundation of every action. 

Hatred and violence are worthy of criticism, and any belief system that promotes fear and violence is worthy of all the admonishment we can muster. We can speak words of admonition without becoming hateful and fearful ourselves. We can be loving and still provide strong corrective feedback when others allow their fear to run away with them. We absolutely must offer boldly loving admonition if we want our world and our relationships to be just and equitable.

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"If people hate you for being loving and for living with integrity, be aware that people have always done so. If you had their level of unchecked anxiety, you would fit right in and people would accept you more easily. Because you have taken on a more intentional way of being, some people are going to hate you. You are not alone. Many other people before you have been persecuted by fearful people. But there have also always been people who sought a better way of living.

"If people had no resources to manage their anxiety and live more intentionally, it would be easier to forgive their ignorant hatred. By now, though, there have been plenty of examples in every religious tradition that could equip and empower people to live with integrity to the deepest value of love. When they hate you for being loving, they wind up hating the very thing they say they most value, even their own gods. They have no justifiable reason to be anxious, but they refuse to realize it.

"You have a connection with your deepest, most noble self. Nurture that connection and let it guide you into integrity with what you value most. Your very life will be a testimony to those who are willing to listen, and a model for those who are willing to follow your example."

John 15: Vines and Branches

The narrative at the end of John 14 has Jesus suggesting that his disciples were going to get up and go somewhere. John 15 starts with more teaching in the voice of Jesus. Did they go somewhere? Are they packing up and getting ready to go somewhere while Jesus keeps talking? It doesn't matter. This section of John is not about the plot of the narrative, but about the spiritual paradigm the authors want to promote. Remember that this is not direct quotation. No one was transcribing what an actual historical Jesus said. This is a theological idea created by someone decades after a historical Jesus might have lived, and the likely purpose of putting these words in Jesus' mouth was to clarify the identity of a particular religious community.

With that in mind, is there anything we can glean from John 15 without accepting the premises of the ancient community for which it was written? We'll tackle the first half of the chapter this week, and we'll look at the second half of John 15 next. We can't just translate the idea of the Father deity in this passage as a deepest, most noble self, because it's obvious that the authors conceptualize a supernatural who intervenes in the lives of people, taking action to "prune" some people and to gather others up and throw them into the fire. There is little of value in such a fear-based motivation to cling to a certain teaching or belief.

However, there may be some truth underlying the mythology. Perhaps one could observe that people who respond to their circumstances with integrity learn how to maintain integrity such that it becomes easier and easier to live intentionally by a clear set of guiding principles. This would be the pruning that enables one to bear more fruit. The pruning is simply the result of experience and practice rather than the active will of a supernatural.

What of those who are gathered and burned? For some readers, this is a clear threat of Hell, which they imagine is an eternity of torment. The authors actually don't suggest anything of the sort. The authors suggest destruction, and they don't even clarify whether they mean physical or spiritual destruction. Readers bring their own mythologies to the words of the text and assume that they know the mind of the authors. One of my professors used to say, "Let the text be specific where it is specific and vague where it is vague," and then he would proceed to fill in any vagueness with his own theological convictions. Human beings use their own creativity to fill gaps in knowledge. Perhaps the responsible thing to do is to be aware of the line between one's creativity and actual information.

So, if experience is what results in "pruning" such that a person becomes more and more comfortable and confident with responding to life with integrity, the opposite might also be true. When we become convinced of our own false beliefs about ourselves, other people, and the way the world works, we can head down a spiral of destruction. Letting our fears run us can destroy our relationships, our opportunities for meaningful work, and even our sense of connection with ourselves. If we consistently doubt the viability of our deepest values, there is no way for us to live into them. We could become predictably reactionary to every circumstance, leaving a trail of anxiety-fueled chaos behind us until we self-destruct.

The authors seem to have Jesus say that he is the vine and his disciples are branches of that vine. Then, they have him claim that they are not servants, but are friends. Friends are more or less equal, which the authors demonstrate by asserting that Jesus disclosed everything to his friends. They had equivalent knowledge. The authors still had Jesus issuing commandments to his "friends," though, and appointing them to "go and bear fruit." Maybe the word friend means different things to different people.

If we interpret this business about Jesus being the vine a little differently, it might be more useful to us. If Jesus is intended as the Exemplar of the narrative, then Jesus as an individual isn't the vine so much as the example he sets is the vine. The way of being that connects with one's deep values and acts with integrity to those values -- that is the vine. People who adopt that way of being are branches off of that vine. That practical ideology is built on something deeper than irrational fear, so people who branch off of that way of being must commit to dismantling their fears. Actually, you can't act with integrity to your guiding principles and simultaneously be controlled by your anxiety. Living intentionally cannot coexist with living reactively. 

People who can't or won't let go of their irrational fear, then, can't be connected to that way of being that prioritizes deep values and lives in alignment with those values. Those people are cut off from the vine, not by a supernatural, but by their own choices. Maybe they are cut off because they don't yet have the ability to live with integrity. They have to become more skillful if they want to be a branch of that practical ideology. Which means that they can be "grafted on" whenever they choose to (or learn to) live more intentionally, based on their clear guiding principles. If they never learn or choose to connect with their deepest values and live according to those values, then we see people who only know how to react out of their anxiety -- a habit that eventually consumes them like a fire.

Or maybe the business about the vine is slightly different. If the vine is the practical ideology of living with intention based on a clear set of guiding principles, maybe the branches could also be seen as the various choices that a person might make. Those choices that do not align with that way of being are cut off, or avoided, because integrity prompts a different decision. Those choices made in integrity lead to more satisfying options, yielding a life that is even more fulfilling. Even if we choose to interpret the vine and branches in this way, the bottom line is that integrity yields more satisfying lives than anxiety does.

It may also occur to you that one cannot be consumed with anxiety and also love other people well. The guiding principle the authors of John commend, to love one another, necessitates learning to manage one's anxiety -- learning to dismantle irrational fears. Love is not a haphazard, coincidental occurrence. Love is an intentional act, or an intentional way of being in relationship with another person. Love and fear don't play well together. If love is our priority, then we have to deal with our fear healthily.

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"The way of being that I've demonstrated to you is like a vine, and your deepest, most noble self nourishes that vine. If there is something my anxiety prompts me to do that doesn't line up with my guiding principles, my connection with my deepest, most noble self helps me clarify how to make decisions that have integrity. I cut off the options that don't align with my deepest values, and the principled decisions I make lead to more opportunities to live into my guiding principles. 

"You have already learned how to dismantle your irrational fears and clarify your guiding principles, because I've taught you how. You aren't a slave to your anxiety. Keep living with integrity, as the way of being I've modeled continues to take root in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you create the life you most want unless you live with intention. The way of being I've demonstrated to you is like a vine, and your lives are like branches off that vine. Those who live intentionally, aligned with their deepest values, have transformational lives. Whoever does not live intentionally, aligned with their deepest values, lives a life consumed with anxiety until they burn out. 

"If you live intentionally, and if you are clear about what actually matters most to you, you can accomplish things that other people only dream about. Your guiding principles run deeper than your fear. Your deepest, most noble self isn't represented in your irrational fears. Your deepest, most noble self understands that fulfillment in life is sourced by genuine love. As I understand the principle of love -- demonstrative concern for another's well-being -- so I have loved you; live with that model of love in mind. If you do what I've modeled for you, you will live with that kind of love as a guiding principle. I have said these things to you so that you will experience the same exuberance in life that I have experienced.

"If you still don't know your guiding principles, begin with this: love one another as I have loved you. When you feel obligated to give up something of yourself for another person, that is your anxiety and fear speaking. When you freely choose to let go of your own wants in order to meet the needs of someone else, that is love. Love is not an obligation, but a free choice -- saying 'Yes' when it would be equally safe to say 'No.' In the same way, don't try to live with integrity because you think you are obligated to me. The point is not for you to prove something to me. The point is for you to have the most satisfying life possible. I've told you and modeled for you everything that I have -- vulnerably and authentically -- because I believe in your ability to live intentionally into a best possible version of yourselves. If you connect with yourselves and align with your own deep values, you can create a life that is truly fulfilling. And part of that fulfilling life is in choosing to love one another, and to hold demonstrative concern for one another's well-being as a priority."