Monthly Archives: August 2010

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Are We More Narcissistic? Part 2

Read Part 1 on the “epidemic of narcissism” here. .

My sociology 101 professor at Rice, Bill Martin, once told us that his primary goal for the class was to help us develop our “built-in crap detector.” (He may have substituted a more colorful word for “crap” but you get the idea.) He hoped that as a result of the class that we would be able to analyze the news and culture and look beyond what seems obvious to what is really going on.

For example, I’m planning to let Caroline walk the half block from her bus stop to our house by herself this year. I will do this because despite widespread parental worries about kidnapping, I know that kid-snatching is NOT more prevalent than it was when I walked the two miles home from school in the 1970s. Human beings are terrible at assessing risk, it seems. But a built-in crap detector  looks at actual rates of kidnapping rather than focusing on the exceptionally rare (though admittedly heartbreaking) stories that make the news.

The built-in crap detector also helps us deal with “trend” articles in which writers for the New York Times style section dig up several egregious examples of something weird and breathlessly announce the latest fad.

Anyway, my built-in crap detector goes off all over the place with this narcissism stuff. Let me say that it is entirely possible that I am wrong, and that there really is an epidemic of narcissism. Or, I am partially wrong, and that there is merely a terrible outbreak of narcissism, plus a generous sprinkling of hysteria and savvy PR to make it look like an epidemic. Could be. It does feel like there is less of an emphasis on the common good than in the past. And the culture of celebrity gets kind of gross.

My skepticism may also be wishful thinking. Maybe I just don’t want to believe that my kids are growing up in a world in which narcissism is epidemic… not just because it will be a less pleasant place for them to live, but because if it’s true, then our planet is doomed.

With those caveats in place, here we go.

The primary statistical evidence for a rise in narcissism, especially among the young, is a survey called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, studied by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. Apparently students’  scores have risen steadily since the test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, the researchers said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982. Twenge says it is the self-esteem movement, among other factors, that have caused this sharp rise in the stats.

So here are some things that cause the crap detector to go PING!

1. There is something psychologically satisfying in the “epidemic of narcissism” narrative. Almost too satisfying. Our intuitions are powerful guides, but they can be duped. It just feels correct to say that we’re getting more selfish as a culture and to pine away for a better time when people weren’t all about me me me. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re right. I’m reading On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not right now, and hoo boy!

A related point: Presbyterians and other Calvinists just looooove to talk about pride as the fundamental sin of humanity. Add a rise in narcissism to that long distinguished tradition and the sermons just write themselves. I’m not saying there isn’t truth to it, but I’m wary of the relish with which some of us approach this topic as well as the pat manner in which we talk about it.

2. Cries of narcissism are tailor-made for anecdotal evidence. Everyone knows a story of a sullen twentysomething sitting around in his parents’ basement, a parent who inflicts their unholy terror little darling on a poor defenseless group of restaurant patrons, or a boorish driver on the highway. These seem to bolster the claims of the study. But for narcissism to be epidemic, or even widely prevalent, you’d have to know a great many people who exhibit this behavior. Maybe my sampling is off, but I just don’t know that many. Carol Merritt has a nice post on this, and she hits other points as well.

3. The fact that Twenge first published her findings in a book called Generation Me, frankly, makes me trust her less. Children learn what they live, and if they’ve been taught by us to be narcissistic, you’d think a responsible discussion of this matter would focus on where WE have gone wrong and how to change things for the better, rather than on how freakishly entitled “kids today” are. The fact that she decided to point fingers at an entire generation, with lots of juicy and outrageous anecdotes, causes me to doubt whether this is anything more than the “get off my lawn” carping that has been directed at the younger generation forever.

4. As far as I can tell, there’s no study of how these college students change as they mature. Many young adults are self-centered. It may even be developmentally normal. I can remember doing some things as a college student that make me cringe now. What we need more than continued studies of college students is to study people as they develop into adults. Are they still narcissistic as they get out into the world? Or are we seeing a larger swing toward narcissism in recent years, but one that will later equalize? (It’s also possible that people of all ages are edging toward narcissism, but again, let’s see the study and not just anecdata.)

5. Some suggest that the NPI is not a great tool. Check out the quiz yourself. I have no expertise in designing these intruments, and must defer to those who do, but I see a lot of false binaries in these questions, as well as questions that show shifts in cultural norms. The stuff on “showing off” one’s body, for example, may not be about narcissism but about a comfort level with one’s body that is actually healthy. Many girls in my high school wore big shirts and slouched because they were embarrassed by their developing breasts, and I’m hard pressed to see how that’s somehow better than the stylish, confident way that many young women I know carry themselves today. (That said, have the pants with writing across the butt gone out of style yet? Because No. Just No.)

6. Finally, I am certainly not alone in raising questions about Twenge’s research. Here are a couple of articles that provide a balanced approach.

Why does all this matter? I started out wanting to comment on an article I read in Relevant magazine about Facebook and its impact on our spiritual lives. In the article, the author talks about narcissism in the same broad terms I have critiqued here. Which is a shame. If we rely too easily on the narcissism trope, then it impacts our ability to talk about technology and social media in any useful or nuanced way. There’s nowhere to go from there that’s helpful. I hope to inject something useful into the technology discussion later in the week.

Thank you, by the way, to those of you who read my ruminations and hang with me as I play armchair sociologist.

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Are We More Narcissistic? Part 1

Narcissus by Michelangelo

I read an article the other day about the implications of Facebook for our spiritual lives. I’ll blog about that specifically later this week, but in the meantime I wanted to talk about the so-called “epidemic of narcissism,” because the author of the Facebook article cited that in his article.

People talk about a rise in narcissism as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I’m not completely convinced, for reasons that I’ll talk about in part 2 of this post, but here are some preliminary thoughts:

Several of us got into a discussion on FB recently about manners. One good friend speaks for many of us when he wrote, “What concerns me is a purely anecdotal perception of a rise in… rudeness and anti-social behavior. Among adults and young people today, more and more, I encounter a complete lack of, well, basic manners. [What concerns me] is a sort of ‘nobody matters but me’ narcissism.”

I often think the same thing when I encounter people with bad manners and boorish behavior—that they think the world revolves around them and that they’re too good for the rules of polite society. Google “narcissism epidemic” to see how pervasive this story is.

I find myself wondering whether this is the right story, however. I hit upon an intellectual exercise: just for fun, to see how many different theories I could come up with to explain the rise in bad manners that didn’t involve narcissism. What if the party line that so many of us parrot these days isn’t true? Or maybe the party line has some truth to it, but is way too simplistic.

Here we go:

Assuming the premise that bad manners are on the rise (which I also think you could argue against), here are some possible explanations that do not include the narcissism meme:

1. We no longer live in the “children should be seen and not heard” society. Children are now empowered to speak and interact a lot more than they used to. I think most of us would see that as a good thing. At the same time, however, they’re still learning what is and is not appropriate behavior. So yes, we will see them slip up. And we’ll see that more because we see them more.

2. Children (and adults) mirror what they see on TV, which is full of wisecracking characters that say things that are designed to make us laugh, but are often not appropriate for polite society. And children are watching TV unsupervised more than they used to so they don’t get the countermessage that “we don’t do things that way.” I’m not saying this is a good thing, mind you. But it’s not really narcissistic either.

3. We are much more culturally diverse than we used to be, with a lot more mixing, so what looks like boorish behavior to us may simply be a different way of being.

4. There are just a lot more people in the world, so we’re bumping up against each other more, which increases the likelihood that we’ll see people not at their best. A related idea: people eat out a lot more than they used to, which means that ill-behaved kids [and adults, actually] are going to be more visible now. Breaches of manners that would have taken place in the privacy of the home now occur in public.

5. The pace of life feels overwhelming to us. We go too fast and demand too much of ourselves and others, and so we have no mental buffer in place when things get stressful. We find ourselves lashing out, giving the finger on the freeway, saying things we never would have said if we’d been in our right minds. Maybe people lack training in emotional intelligence rather than in good manners, but again, that’s not narcissism, but a lack of self-awareness.

6. People who are self-centered and demanding are actually NOT always  narcissists. They are people who feel invisible, like they are not being acknowledged. This is why family systems folk will tell you that people who lash out at clergy are actually seeking connection with them. Ignoring them or cutting them off is actually the worst thing you can do—the behavior will only increase in frequency and severity. (Of course we need to help people express their needs in appropriate ways. But that’s another post.)

7. There’s no question that manners relax over time. I don’t find it rude for children to call me by my first name, for example, assuming they are basically respectful when they do it. But to people who were brought up in a time when you NEVER did that, it seems like an incredible breach of respect, or at very least, jarring to the ears. And then when you see outlier behavior beyond even that, forget it.

In other words, if people did X when you were a kid, and Y was the extreme, it’s going to seem like the sky is falling now that everyone does Y, especially if you see someone doing Z.

Next up: “narcissism and Facebook.”

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To Err is Human, To Fail Divine

Happy: The Patron Saint of HappyNews.com

I can’t remember who turned me on to Happy News, but what a great addition to my Google Reader. If you find yourself getting depressed about the state of the world, check it out. It’s real news—no treacly chicken-soup stuff—but with a positive spin.

One recent story talked about a study which shows that failure is a better teacher than success. Now that’s something a lot of us already know, but to recap:

While success is surely sweeter than failure, it seems failure is a far better teacher, and organizations that fail spectacularly often flourish more in the long run, according to a new study by Vinit Desai, assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado Denver Business School.

Desai’s research, published in the Academy of Management Journal, focused on companies and organizations that launch satellites, rockets and shuttles into space – an arena where failures are high profile and hard to conceal.

Working with Peter Madsen, assistant professor at BYU School of Management, Desai found that organizations not only learned more from failure than success, they retained that knowledge longer.

“We found that the knowledge gained from success was often fleeting, while knowledge from failure stuck around for years,” he said. “But there is a tendency in organizations to ignore failure or try not to focus on it. Managers may fire people or turn over the entire workforce while they should be treating the failure as a learning opportunity.” [emphasis mine]

Good stuff, but I sat up and took extra notice at this bit:

“Despite crowded skies, airlines are incredibly reliable. The number of failures is miniscule,” [Desai] said. “And past research has shown that older airlines, those with more experience in failure, have a lower number of accidents.”

I started thinking about our little church, almost 100 years old. They’ve had their share of failures over the years. Yet through it all they have survived. That longevity gives us a tremendous leg up; if we were to take a great risk and fail—even fail spectacularly—I’d like to think we have enough history to know that there is much more “to us” than one particular failure. Of course, there is an unfortunate paradox at work as well—the older an institution is, the more set in its ways it can be. It seems one of the tasks of leadership is to help an organization live into the gift of longevity as a foundation for risk, rather than a plateau on which to become complacent.

There might be some middle ground with this failure business. A few summers ago I was speaking with a man about his trip to Boy Scout camp with his son’s troop. “Well, how was it?” I asked. “Great,” he replied, and told me about the guiding principle for the week’s activities, a concept called “managed failure.”

The idea is to set the bar high for the boys, exposing them to tremendous challenges, giving them the training and equipment and support they need, and then letting them succeed, or fail, knowing that big successes are that much more gratifying, and in failure comes great learning. The father told me that his son had been doing a metal-working project when a piece of metal had chipped off and flew into his face. I gasped, but the man said quickly, “No no no, but you see? He was fine. He was wearing protective gear. That’s why it’s managed failure!”

I’ve been looking for references to this idea elsewhere and haven’t come up with much—but it seems like something for organizations to pay some heed. Most sessions (church councils) I know, given their druthers, would like to know ahead of time whether an idea will work. Failure is “not an option,” to use the cliche. The problem is, some ideas look great on paper but bomb in reality. Other ideas seem kooky but turn out to be transformative. A culture of experimentation, of “managed failure,” might make room for the kooky-yet-God-inspired options.

Have you failed spectacularly lately?

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Ghosts in the House, Performed by the Dana Children

A few weeks ago, Margaret “read” the book Ghosts in the House to me. You can see it below. Sorry the sound is so quiet—you can turn up the volume after 20 seconds in, which is when I shut up. Transcript appears below the video.

There was a girl who lived at the edge of the town.
In a cozy cottage.
But there was one problem.
The house was HAUNTED!
But the girl wasn’t just a girl. She was a witch!
She knew how to catch ghosts.
She continued to catch the ghosts in the house.
~~dramatic pause from technical difficulties~~
How lovely, she said. I hope there are some more!
And there were.
She continued to catch all the ghosts in the house.
She brung them to the kitchen and put them all in the washing machine.
Then she hung them out to dry. It was a fine day for drying.
Some became nice curtains. Another became a nice tablecloth.
The girl was tired after her hard work. She knew what to do with the last two ghosts.
And they all lived happily (non-ghostly*!) ever after.

*original midrash by Meg

Fast forward a few weeks: James decided to read me the book today. I think you should be able to figure out what he’s saying without subtitles.

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Facts, Schmacts

“Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true. Facts, schmacts.” -Homer Simpson

Oh Homer, even though you said that almost 13 years ago your words are so prescient. (Prescient, Homer. It means foreshadowing.)

This morning Newsweek magazine, in response to polls indicating that as many as one in five people think President Obama is a Muslim—he’s not—published a slide show of other “Dumb Things Americans Believe.” Their examples:  witchcraft (21%), death panels (40%) and that the sun revolves around the earth (amazingly, 20%). Just 39% of people believe in evolution, despite widespread scientific consensus. Newsweek’s title is perhaps unhelpful, but the point is sound. And I found the piece refreshing in a journalistic culture in which the press, in the name of objectivity, reports both “sides” of an issue, even in cases where one of the sides is wrong on the facts and/or fringe in its belief.

I have to say, this is something that I think about a lot. I suppose that misinformation is nothing new, but the Internet is like a Wild West free-for-all when it comes to rumors and misinformation. If you want to believe something, you can and will find support for it. But it makes it very difficult to communicate. It makes it difficult to preach when literally everything we know is up for grabs.

I can’t find it now, but did you catch the study a few months ago about attitudes among scientists about global warming? Many layfolks who are climate-change skeptics say that the scientific community is not united in its beliefs about the human causes of global warming—that there are a lot of scientists who doubt it.  That’s true, but among scientists who study it most closely and have published peer-reviewed research, the sense that humans are to blame is much clearer. Not everyone who calls him or herself an expert actually is an expert, in other words… but that’s not welcome news in a culture that disdains elitism, a culture in which people want to “decide for themselves.”

Earlier this month I attended portions of the Faithful Politics conference at Montreat. I was technically on vacation so I didn’t attend it all, but in one of the sessions I did attend, the speaker talked about the need for empathy as we seek to understand people with whom we disagree. I think that’s very true and as Christians, how we engage the questions of the day is as important as (more important than?) the answers themselves, which is really the message of my sermon on Sunday. Bickering and in-fighting is a pretty poor witness. As Tony Jones has said, “Two generations from now we will no longer be arguing about gay marriage, but we will be arguing about whether cloned humans are entitled to receive communion. So we’d better develop some norms for working through our differences rather than continuing the tired win-lose way we go about it now.” (I’m paraphrasing.)

But empathy and norms only get us so far, when we can’t even agree on what the facts are.

Lately we’ve been talking to Caroline about the difference between fact and opinion. She will ask a question like, “What’s the most beautiful thing in the world?” and after giving our thoughts we’ll usually say, “That’s an opinion question though, which means there isn’t one right answer. Different people will answer it differently.” Then she will ask “What’s the largest thing in the world?” which, once we clarify what “largest” and “thing” mean, is obviously a question of fact. (What is the largest thing in the world?)

This lesson we’re trying to teach Caroline seems very quaint, in a way. One of our cultural challenges is that, because we can find anything out there to support our own views and biases, we have forgotten that there are in fact differences between fact and opinion.

It doesn’t matter how many websites argue the contrary: whether the President is an American citizen is not up for debate. It’s not a matter of opinion; it’s a matter of fact. He’s a citizen or he isn’t, and even if 80% of the public thought he was born in Kenya, it wouldn’t make him born in Kenya. (Incidentally, why are we polling on matters of fact anyway?)

I’m very willing to listen to people who disagree with me on matters of opinion—I’ve heard from some church members after Sunday’s sermon who explained their thoughts, and some differed from mine, but we heard each other. But it’s much harder—impossible, even?—to engage with someone who doesn’t even subscribe to the same facts you do. I’m not sure how useful it is to try, actually.

We’ve always had disagreements in our nation. When people say we are more polarized now than ever before, I want to say, hello, Civil War? But it does feel very intense and unsettling to me, and I think this Internet free-for-all doesn’t help.

Finally, I have to turn all of this back to myself, too: are there things that I take as bedrock that are not actually factual? Are there things that I hold so rigidly that others cannot engage me?

Image is from the Newsweek feature mentioned above.

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Last Sunday’s Sermon on Park51

Several people have asked to read the sermon from Sunday. I’ve been waiting for it to go up on the church website, but until then, here it is.

It’s funny, looking at it now. It really doesn’t feel all that controversial.

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Idylwood Presbyterian Church
August 22, 2010
“God’s Greatest Hits”: Sermon Series
Baby Moses: Exodus 2:1-10

Among the Reeds

We’ve heard a lot of great stories this summer in our series, many of which were chosen by members of the congregation. Today’s text is one of my choices. I distinctly remember learning this story as a child in Sunday School, and can picture the coloring page that our teacher handed out with an adorable baby Moses nestled in the basket while his big sister looks on.

As I learned the story, Moses’ sister (Miriam) was the clear hero, quick to jump in with a solution, ready to manipulate Pharoah’s daughter into not only allowing their mother to continue to nurse him, but to get paid for it! Quite a clever girl indeed. In my childhood remembrance of the story, Pharoah’s daughter has a less prominent role.

Now, it’s certainly possible that Pharoah’s daughter is “played” by Miriam. It could be that she’s set up to be nothing more than a dumb member of the ruling class. This is a well-established framework for these kinds of stories, from the book of Exodus to Br’er Rabbit. But I think Pharoah’s daughter knows exactly what’s going on. I think she understands the situation quite well: that this baby, and the young girl looking on, and the woman who will nurse him, are all part of the same family, victims of a heinous plot cooked up by her father to decimate the Hebrew people by eliminating the sons (see Exodus chapter 1).

But what is it about Pharoah’s daughter that gives her the generosity to let the woman nurse the child—and pay her for it? Where does she get the compassion to let this Hebrew child, a child of another race, not only live, but be raised as royalty?

The other night I was working on the computer and a friend (who’s a big fan of musical theater) sent a message: “Hey, South Pacific is on Live at Lincoln Center!” I had some laundry sitting in the basement to be folded so I thought Sounds good! Many of you know South Pacific; it’s one of the great musicals from the 20th century. It takes place during World War II and addresses themes of racism.

I tuned in just in time to see the scene in which Nellie finds out Emile (her love interest) has fathered two children. Nellie, from Arkansas, just cannot handle the scandal of this news. In the next scene, another character (dealing with his own prejudices) says such feelings are “not born in you” and he sings the famous song:

You’ve got to be taught To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught…

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

I’ve read that Rodgers and Hammerstein were under great pressure to change the song and to soften the themes of the show. In fact the Georgia legislature wanted to outlaw entertainment they saw as sympathetic to communism. One legislator said interracial marriage was “implicitly a threat to the American way of life.”[i] Sad, isn’t it?

Somehow, Pharoah’s daughter was not taught to hate the people her father hated. For whatever reason, she missed that lesson. Which is amazing, really. Her father had a campaign underway to slaughter the Hebrew sons, because he felt threatened, because he hated and feared the people, but somehow his daughter didn’t get the message. Something in her took pity on the baby in the reeds. Something in her heart softened toward him and his plight. And thank God for that, because if Pharoah’s daughter hadn’t done what she did, the little baby among the reeds would not have grown up to be a man who would one day stand before Pharoah’s corrupt regime and say, “Let my people go.”

I remember watching South Pacific as a teenager in Dallas—and I specifically remember this scene in which Nellie finds out about Emile’s interracial relationship. And I remember thinking Really? This was an issue? Thankfully we’ve moved on though. How quaint this show is—a period piece, for sure—but how relevant really is this musical to the world that we live in now?

Oh, how naïve I was… to think that we were past all that.

You only need to listen to the rhetoric of the past several days, over the so-called “ground zero mosque,” and the fact that many think anti-Islamic sentiment is on the rise, including a Christian church that is planning a “burn the Quran” party[ii], to see that issues of race, and culture, and how we accept people who are different, are absolutely still of utmost importance today.

I’m going to thread the needle as best I can with this, because tempers are hot around this one, and a sermon is intended to start a conversation, not finish it. This conversation takes place among you and me and scripture and the culture, with the Holy Spirit knitting it all together.

I must first say three things:

  1. 9/11 is a terrible wound. The trauma of that day may never fully heal.
  2. There are people in the world who want to do harm.
  3. Good people can have different ideas about the appropriateness of Park51 (the community center and mosque project) at this particular place and at this particular time.

That said:

What an opportunity this public discussion could have been—an opportunity to talk with one another about who we are and who we want to be as a society. What is appropriate? What does sacred space look like? If not a community center, built by a Muslim group (with the approval of rabbis and clergy, by the way, who will serve on the board), then what do we want to see in that space? How do we react to the two mosques that are already in the neighborhood? If there can be a Muslim place of prayer at the Pentagon, how is Ground Zero different? Is it different? How do we uphold the values of our nation while acknowledging the pain of those who grieve?

That would have been an important discussion, a healing discussion.

That is not what has been happening.

Instead, most civil and respectful debate has been drowned out by fear-mongering and scapegoating. One person has called the planned project a “command center for terrorism at the 9/11 site.” Imam Rauf, who has a long history of interfaith work, who attended Daniel Pearl’s funeral and spoke as an honored guest, who is widely considered to be a moderate Muslim, who somehow earned the trust of two administrations such that he is on a State-Department-sponsored speaking tour, has been branded as a radical. An extremist. Someone who is out to get “us.” The evidence for this is sketchy, to put it kindly—the best people can do is a kind of guilt by association.[iii] One person even said, “after you’ve killed 3,000 people, you’re going to now build your mosque?”, as if the 9/11 terrorists and the Muslims involved in the Cordoba Project are one and the same.[iv]

To put it bluntly, the Muslims we know in our workplaces and neighborhoods have as much complicity in 9/11 as you and I do for the KKK. Our former President, George W. Bush, said, “Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.”[v] He said that six days after 9/11.

Salman Hamdani was a police cadet, part-time ambulance driver, incoming medical student, and devout Muslim. When he disappeared on September 11, law enforcement officials came to his family, seeking him for questioning in relation to the terrorist attacks. His remains were finally identified 6 months later. He was found near the North Tower, with his EMT medical bag beside him, presumably doing everything he could to help those in need.[vi]

The God I believe in was as heartbroken at the death of Salman Hamdani as with the death of any other innocent victim that day.

Pharoah’s daughter peeked through the reeds of the river and looked into the face of the stranger. The other. Different race, different culture. It would have been no skin off her nose if she had just put that basket back and tiptoed away. Let someone else deal with him, or not. It’s not her problem. But she couldn’t ignore him. She couldn’t leave. I hope we as Christians, who are supposed to be about loving our neighbor, would be no less compassionate with the other than she was.

“You’ve got to be taught…” the song goes. What are we teaching as this debate rages? What are we teaching about Jesus? What are we teaching about hospitality? There’s a lot of heated rhetoric, not just about the Park 51 project, but all kinds of issues of the day. And as I said, good people can disagree. But are we going to add heat or light? Are we going to speak out against the hate and noise? Are we going to bear witness to the Prince of Peace? You’re a teacher. I’m a teacher. What are we teaching about the God we follow?

. . . . .

My poor children have my seminary training inflicted on them from time to time.

Years ago I was reading this story to Caroline from a children’s Bible. The last line was “and she named the baby Moses.”

What I said was, “she named the baby Moses, which is Hebrew for ‘pulled out,’ because she ‘pulled him out of the water.’ ”

From the other room I heard Robert say, “Give the poor child a break, she’s four!”

But you see… the name of Moses is the key to the whole thing.
This business of being “pulled out”—that’s the beauty of the whole story.

And you know, it wasn’t Moses who was pulled out.
It was Pharoah’s daughter who was pulled out.

Somehow or other God reached into her sheltered upper-class existence and pulled her out to a new place.

God pulled her into a place of empathy for the oppressed.
God pulled her out of the cocoon of self-interest and said, “This foreigner needs your care. ”

And God’s pulling us out—
pulling us out of our own agendas,
our own tightly-held prejudices,
into a new place, an uncomfortable place, to be sure, a vulnerable place, where not everybody looks like us or dresses like us or thinks like us or worships like us.

But it’s a good place we’re being pulled into.
It’s a place that looks a whole lot like the kingdom of God.

This I believe.

[i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_to_Be_Carefully_Taught references the following article:

Andrea Most, “‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’: The Politics of Race in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific” Theater Journal 52, no. 3 (October 2000), 306.

[ii] Religious Freedom, Free Speech Face Off Nationwide, by David Shaper on NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129330121&sc=fb&cc=fp

[iii] For Imam in Muslim Center Furor, a Hard Balancing Act, New York Times, August 21, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/nyregion/22imam.html

[iv] http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/44403/

[v] http://www.religioustolerance.org/reac_ter1.htm

[vi] http://islam.about.com/blvictims.htm

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Technology and Preaching

You might want to read yesterday’s post on Evernote to get some context.

All this business about technology and preaching has me thinking random thoughts…

First thing is the positive stuff: because I am anal retentive hyper organized, it is a relief to have all of my ‘output’ in one place. This is the basis of David Allen’s Getting Things Done—get all your tasks and reference material into a system you trust so it’s not taking up space in your psyche. There’s nothing worse than that low-level anxiety from fear you’re forgetting something. GTD and my Evernote system take a load off my mind. (Yes, that means I would be even more high strung if I were less organized. Did I just blow your mind?)

I also think the way we are writing sermons is changing. Spirit works in many ways. If faithful sermons were written by a pastor in the 1950s, working in his [and only occasionally her] study while consulting a stack of commentaries, I absolutely think the Spirit can work in my clipping an article on stewardship in May for use in October. (Anyway, haven’t we always done this? We just used folders and file cabinets before.)

However.

Just as all technology has a shadow side, so does this organizational system. In a busy week of ministry, it can be very tempting to do a paint-by-numbers job on the sermon using bits and pieces I’ve collected from random places, rather than really delving into the text. Nick Carr is right—having information at our fingertips means that we can forgo deep reflection for the sake of readily available data.

I’m not one for self-punishment over this, by the way. Weekly preaching (as opposed to monthly) has meant lowering my standards a bit… which is a gracious thing to do for yourselves, fellow perfectionists. It’s meant trusting the preaching relationship more than the power of a single sermon. But I can tell when the work is getting superficial, when I feel like Bilbo Baggins, “Sort of stretched, like… butter scraped over too much bread.”

As with most things, the fact that something (in this case, a certain technology) can be abused isn’t an excuse not to use it. It’s a discernment process.

I also think a lot about hoarding. Because Evernote makes it so easy to save stuff, it can be easy to overdo it. Do I really need to clip and save this bit about Lent in the middle of August? Can I not trust that when Lent rolls around, there will be something provided right when it is needed? Am I hoarding by saving this? [Separate but related issue: The importance of reading for its own sake, not thinking about how I might "use" it later.]

I recently read about the difference between hoarding and saving. The former is done haphazardly and with a scarcity mentality. The latter is purposeful. It seems that storing up tidbits, stories, archives of stuff, can go either way, into the realm of hoarding (I’m going to hold onto this because I’m fearful about the future), or purposeful saving (the Boy Scout motto comes to mind).

Final thought: there’s something bizarre about having an archive of sermons that, at their core, are very of-the-moment pieces of writing. I believe and was taught that sermons are events. After I preach one, I tend to obsess about how it could have been better, so I often do a mental exercise in which I imagine myself flying a kite, and I cut the string and let it float away. It doesn’t belong to me anymore. It’s over.

This is all true, and yet… I have a record of every sermon I’ve ever preached. They don’t really go away. Strange, no?

Preachers: how has technology changed how you write and (more deeply) how you think about what a sermon is? Sermon listeners, and writers of other stripes, chime in too.

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Evernote for Preachers and Other Smart People

UPDATE 8/23: Someone requested that I share the list of Evernote notebooks I use. I’ve added that to the end of the post.

I wrote this for our presbytery’s monthly newsletter several months ago…

“I read a great story a few months ago that would fit perfectly in this weekend’s sermon… now where on earth did I read that? A blog? CNN’s site? I wish I could remember.”

A good organizational system needs to be easy and fun, otherwise people won’t use it. I also think a good system doesn’t take over your life, but it works for you. (What’s that thing about the Sabbath existing for humanity and not the other way around?)

Evernote is the system I use to store sermons, stories and quotes, prayers, orders of worship, and anything else I want to keep in an archive. It has a desktop application, a smartphone app, and a web client you can access anywhere. It’s a free application (with a paid version) that stores text files and web pages. You can cut and paste into Evernote, type directly into the program, or “clip” websites with the touch of a button. Evernote also accepts  photos and images, the text on which is searchable through some voodoo I don’t understand.

You can sort these items into “notebooks” depending on your own needs. For example, I have a notebook called “quotes and stories” (e.g. that great human-interest piece I heard on NPR) and another called “general ministry” (e.g. a blog post I ran into on how to run a good meeting). Not only can you sort things into these notebooks, but you can tag them with searchable keywords. So if I am doing officer training and I need stuff on “change,” I can find that easily.

The paid version of Evernote allows you to load PDFs, so I’ve uploaded all of my past sermons, and they’re (of course) searchable. I don’t do complete re-preaches much, but I have adapted old stuff for a new occasion. And Craddock says if a sermon’s not worth preaching twice, it probably wasn’t worth preaching the first time, so there!

Of course, this system takes time to set up, but not as much as you think. Loading past stuff into Evernote is very easy to do and doesn’t require a lot of brain cells. (Do it during commercial breaks of your favorite show.) Of course, if you’re not fundamentally an organized person, Evernote isn’t going to make you one. What it does is maximize the impact of your organizational efforts.

It sure beats manila folders that are never where you need them and that require you to make decisions (does this poem about the mother of Jesus go under “Mary” or “Advent” or “Gospel of Luke”?).

And it beats the heck out of metal file cabinets.

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As I read this article, having spent more time with Evernote, I’m thinking more philosophically about technology and its impact on preaching. Think I’ll share that in a separate post.

And finally, no, I do not get a commission from Evernote. Don’t I wish!

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Update:

Here is the list of notebooks I use. It works for me, but there are many ways to slice and dice it.

Sermons: I actually have two separate sermon notebooks, one for my previous call and one for this one.

Papers: I’m in a lectionary group with some clergy and I have all their papers loaded and tagged in Evernote.

Orders of Worship: This is contains complete bulletins from past worship services. This is nice as a kick-start, like if I’m preaching a text and want to recall what hymns I used last time. (Hymn-picking is the bane of my existence. That and prayers of confession.)

Prayers and Liturgies: Stuff I’ve written or picked up along the way. Eugenia Gamble’s fantastic benediction, the Brief Statement of Faith of the PCUSA, some hymns written by my friend Michael.

Church Members: I have a separate file for each member of the church, where I put grandkids’ names and similar stuff I want to remember. I also keep track (very imperfectly) of pastoral calls and visits.

Each file within these notebooks is tagged topically: everything from Ash Wednesday to conflict to eschatology to grief to tithing to Zechariah.

I also have some personal notebooks:

Crafts: stuff I can do with the kids

Recipes: self-explanatory

Personal: gift-giving ideas, restaurants to try

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how statistics lie

There’s an old episode of the West Wing in which a pollster is trying to get the President to sign onto a measure that would ban flag-burning. It’s an easy way to gain a few votes, the pollster said. A constitutional amendment to ban flag burning is never going to happen, so what’s the harm? It shows the POTUS to be a patriotic American. Is there anything wrong with that?

The president’s staff arranges for Bartlet to sit through various town hall meetings with people hectoring him over the issue. Finally he asks, “Is there an epidemic of flag-burning I don’t know about?” and walks out.

Later, a couple of staff people are talking about the polls in which a majority of Americans support a constitutional amendment prohibiting flag-burning. A cool-headed pollster points out the flaw: that figure may be true, but the percentage of people who rate that issue as important or very important is low. Very low. A simple yes-or-no question is not going to capture the intensity of the opinion.

I’ve been thinking about this since the controversy over Park 51 has begun.

Apparently, around 70% of Americans think that the community center and mosque shouldn’t be built so close to Ground Zero. Let’s set aside whether constitutionally protected actions should be subject to the will of popular opinion. (Here’s a thought: No.) What I haven’t seen is anything about the intensity of that 70%. People are certainly pontificating about it in the media and on the Internet, and unfortunately, it’s the panderers and bigots who seem to be loudest. And those folks keep trumpeting the 70% figure, as if every one of that 70% is as deeply offended as they are. I would be willing to bet good money that they aren’t.

My guess is that if you take out the members of Shoutytown, and the people who have been convinced by them that this is a “victory mosque” or that all Muslims are evil, that much of the opposition is somewhere in the universe of “I know there’s no rational reason why this should bother me, but I have to admit it does. 9/11 is such a profound psychic wound for our nation that we need to proceed with utmost caution. If another site could be found that wouldn’t jeopardize the project’s mission, I would favor it. But if this is the location, eh, the world will go on.”

The only thing I have found that even comes close to addressing this is a poll of New Yorkers. A majority favor another site, AND a majority agree that the Cordoba folks have a right to build there. This suggests to me that people are able to separate their personal feelings about the project from whether it should be allowed to continue.

Absent some nuance, we will continue to have political figures exploiting this for cheap electoral gain and using this as a litmus test to show who’s more patriotic and reverent toward the events of 9/11.

Meanwhile, some more people starved to death in flood-ravaged Pakistan today.

Photo: Off-track betting; one of the many businesses located near Ground Zero. More here.

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writing practice

Bruce Reyes-Chow and I got into a brief exchange on twitter about writing practices. He’s feeling angst, though I have to disagree with his blog post–he is anything but lame. He’s a rock star who just happens not to have written a book (yet).

Someone recommended The Artist’s Way to him and suggested morning pages as a way to get unstuck. I have a complicated relationship with The Artist’s Way. I have several of Julia Cameron’s books, and even facilitated a writing group at Burke Pres. using bits of TAW. I think many of her principles are right on, and I’ve have gone in and out of morning pages for years. It’s as good a way as any for clearing the clutter out of one’s mind. But I think my sister-in-law, speaking as a fellow writer and mother of young children, put it best: “If I have 30 minutes on my hands, I’d rather spend it polishing a great paragraph than doing morning pages.” For multi-vocational folks, unless you absolutely can’t get unstuck any other way, MPs can become a practice that just eats into your writing time.

After trying to explain this ambivalence to Bruce in 140 characters, he asked, “So what’s your writing practice?”

I responded: “Writing.”

I was glib partly because I don’t feel like my practice is all that great. My friend and former Writing Rev Carol gets up at 5 a.m. to write every day. Let’s just say that’s not my fruitful time of day. I like to quote a preacher who said, in response to an invitation to lead an Easter sunrise service, “Sorry, I don’t even believe in God until at least 10 a.m.” Then again, Carol’s written two books, so there you go.

My life doesn’t work like that—could be lack of discipline, could be the three amigos, could be both. But I do have certain practices and rhythms that have been indispensable. I offer this to anyone who wants to do creative work but must find ways to do that work around the edges of other vocations and in the nooks and crannies of one’s schedule. No claims of uniqueness, by the way:

  • The most important thing I’ve done is join a group. Our poor Writing Revs have been stricken with illness and injury this summer but I really hope we get back into it. We meet twice a month (ideally) and e-mail each other stuff to read beforehand (ideally). It’s love, accountability and feedback with a tall decaf latte on the side.
  • Thursday is writing day–especially sermons but also other projects. Not that I don’t write on other days, and [sadly, perhaps] my writing day does get supplanted by other stuff. I also write many evenings after the kids are in bed.

Those are the big things, but there are a few medium-sized things too:

  • I am a Getting Things Done fanatic, and I’ve got all my writing tasks integrated into my to-do list. David Allen recommends breaking projects down into manageable chunks and making to-do items as specific as possible. So I rarely have something as general as “write article” on my list. Instead it’s a bite-sized, achievable piece like “read scripture and jot down notes on it.” (This is a classic Bird by Bird maneuver.)
  • I picked up a trick from Lauren Winner, who picked it up somewhere else. She suggests that when you’re ready to finish writing for the day, you should stop your writing mid-sentence and/or at a point where you know what you’re going to say next. It’s the equivalent of parking downhill; it’s going to take less mental bandwidth to get started the next day.
  • Along those lines: I’m writing a memoir-type thingy at the moment, which I made amazing progress on during a writing retreat in Collegeville, MN. Near the end of the week, I free-wrote about 50 opening sentences that are the beginnings of vignettes. Now when I find myself with a free half hour or so, I find these prompts, write one down at the top of a clean page, and go. My current favorite: “On the upside, my mother’s divorce lawyer lent our family a full-sized Donkey Kong arcade game, which we set up in a corner of our living room.”
  • Hanging around with writers: In addition to the Writing Revs, I attend writing conferences and workshops whenever I can. It’s good for the mojo.
  • Sh*tty first drafts. This is a bit of genius from Anne Lamott and is the single most important thing in my own psychological arsenal. All I have to do is write something, anything, no matter how pathetically bad it might be. SFDs are a way of pulling a fast one on my internal perfectionist, who would much rather keep the stuff in my head, where it can be flawless (yeah right).
  • I also am a big believer in this mental hack for those days when I’m on a deadline but the lure of the Internet and its shiny objects is just too great to ignore. I’ve adjusted it slightly; I will write for 12 minutes, then goof around for 3. Lather, rinse, repeat until the job is done. I’ve written entire thousand-word articles this way.

In the spirit of disclosure, here’s some stuff I need to work on:

  • being more disciplined about personally imposed deadlines. If nobody else is expecting the finished product, if it’s just something I want to do, it’s too easy for everything else to take precedence.
  • spending more time reading about writing than actually writing. There are so many great books out there about the writing life and/or the practice of writing. That’s another reason I have shelved Julia Cameron for the moment.
  • setting aside longer periods of time to think and write—an entire day or more. It’s like prayer and meditation—you can only get by with short bursts for so long without feeling scattered and the work becoming superficial. My friend Ruth is really good about this; she books writing time at the monastery pretty often.

So, that’s what I do. What do you do?