#kent hoffman

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Social Dignity

Social justice can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of [people]. The person represents the ultimate end of society, which is ordered to [them]: What is at stake is the dignity of the human person, whose defense and promotion have been entrusted to us by the Creator, and to whom the men and women at every moment of history are strictly and responsibly in debt. John Paul II.…

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The good thing about weakness

The good thing about weakness

  We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us.

— Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

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[sixsecondspirituality]

The most life-changing idea.

[snacksizespirituality]

You're lesson to learn while on Earth.

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Lo, I Am With You

Isaiah40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39

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Lo, I am with you ‘til the ends of the earth, Lo, I am with you when you leave self behind, Lo, I am with you when you suffer for love, Lo, I am with you through the changes of life, Lo, I am with you in the darkness of death.

Lo, I am with you ‘til the ends of the earth.

           ­- “Lo I am With You” by John Bell

Our Dean, Bill Ellis, and I spent the better part of this past week at a retreat for clergy from across the Diocese of Spokane. It was a delight, as always, to have time with colleagues – the clergy in this Diocese are genuinely fond of one another, and that is bigger accomplishment than it might sound like. And it was an uncommon privilege to have almost four days with our retreat leader, Kent Hoffman.

Many of you will remember Kent from the extraordinary series of classes that he offered here at the Cathedral in the fall. For those of you who weren’t there – or for those of you who are ready for a refresher – Kent is one of the architects of Circle of Security, a science-based strategy for teaching parents to create strong and loving connections with their children. Kent and his colleagues variously call this connection “resonance” or “soothing” or “a holding environment” or, wait for this one, “communion.”

Over the course of our time together, Kent gave us a crash course in Circle of Security and the research that lies behind it. Particularly powerful were a series of videos showing interactions between real parents and toddlers. The basic scenario in all of them was identical: the parent would exit a room, leaving the child in the care of a stranger. And after a set period of time – three minutes (or shorter if the child became started to cry or otherwise became distressed), so long enough for the toddler to begin to wonder where the parent was and to call out for him or her – the parent would return. And we would observe what their reunion looked like.

In some of the reunions, we got to see what it is like when soothing is disorganised. Here were interactions in which a parent was withdrawn or distant and the child would become withdrawn or distant in response. And here were interactions in which, without realising it, the parent was doing more to meet his own needs than those of the child. During and after these interactions, the researchers found that the child remained really anxious, that their heart rates and the stress chemicals in their bodies remained sky high.

Kent’s goal in showing these videos is not to say, “Look at these awful parents.” To the contrary, he emphasises that these parents are employing the very strategies that they themselves learned as children. Through these interactions – interactions that these children had experienced in similar ways thousands of times before – each of these children were slowly but deeply internalising the message that, “if I am going to function in this world, it is up to me, and it is up to me alone.”

Maybe that’s a message that you recognise from your own life.

We also got to see what it looks like when resonance really works, when communion just sings between a parent and a child. Here was as beautiful, as inspiring, a video as I have ever watched. The parent, in this case a mother, reentered the room to see her crying child. And immediately, the child crawled over to her and raised up his arms. (Kent says that this “pick me up” or “hold me” gesture is seen universally in secure children. They are confident that they can and will be soothed, they are confident that good things follow bad things.) The mother held him and spoke with him. And in fewer than 10 seconds, the child’s crying stopped, he became calm, and he became curious about something else in the room, about the lights set into the ceiling.

This ability to sooth quickly, to find resonance quickly, to “fill your cup” quickly, is what deep security looks like. Over forty years of research, Kent and his colleagues have found that the children who experience this kind of security will grow up to be adults who are capable of vulnerability and autonomy in equal measure. Vulnerability: the ability to open your heart to other people, to experiences, and to God. And autonomy: the ability to act independently with confidence. Vulnerability and autonomy, two things that God hopes all of us will find. Vulnerability and autonomy, which maybe we could paraphrase as joy and freedom.

Now, Kent is forthright in admitting that these videos are all rated PG for “parental guilt.” For those of us who are parents, whether our kids are small or all grown up, it is kind of hard to see view materials and not say, “My God! I’ve broken my kids. I am breaking my kids.” But precipitating guilt isn’t Kent’s goal in sharing his research – and nor is it my goal in telling you about work with you this morning. Rather, Kent shows us these videos as a way of setting the stage for the rest of his research, as a way of getting us ready to hear three really important things.

First, Kent wants us to recognise that, no matter who we are, no matter how old we are, whether we are a toddler or in our nineties, we need resonance. We need soothing. We are all of us the child in the video holding out our arms and looking for communion. Kent says that he has never met anyone who would not have benefited from more soothing. And, when you get down to it, I don’t think that I have ever met such a person either. I have met lots of people, however, who wonder if real soothing is possible.

There is an emptiness in all of us. A hole built out of all of the hurt we have given and received, all of the loneliness we have known, all of the times we have been unheard and misunderstood, all of the unfair things that has ever happened to us, all of the things and ideas and places and people that we have lost. Most of us don’t want to spend a whole lot of time with that emptiness. Most of us have constructed a lot of strategies to stay well away from it. Strategies built out of alcohol, out of a pathological relationship with food, out of shopping, out of the screens on our computers and TVs and mobile phones. Anything to stave off silence and stillness, lest the emptiness sneak in. Anything to stave off the fear that there is nothing beyond the emptiness, that we are the child to whom the loving parent will never come.

Now, that sounds pretty bleak. So here’s the second thing that Kent wants us to know: all of us can get better at communion. We can get better at lowering the walls that keep resonance out and we can learn to transmit resonance. And, more than that, it’s never too late for us to get better at communion. Kent speaks parents whose children are teenagers or in their twenties or thirties or forties or beyond who have crafted new relationships with their children, who have found a new way to resonate with their children. And Kent speaks parents whose child has died – and I know that there is more than one person at this Cathedral who has endured the awful responsibility of burying a child – who, even in their children’s absence, have found a new way to resonate with them. These parents tell of experiences that they cannot entirely explain, experiences of resurrection, in which they came to understand their relationship with their child had shifted and grown.

The last thing that Kent wants to share with us he phrases as a question. Look at the video of the mother in communion with her child. Look at her holding that child, at her helping her him to fill up his cup. And ask yourself: how many of us believe that God does that for us?

Whether we realise it or not, a lot of us believe in two Gods: the God of love who interacts with rest of the world and the God of judgment who interacts with us. This is the God who looks into our history and our hearts and finds us wanting. This is the God who says: you aren’t good enough. This is the God who is incapable of loving someone like you or me.

There aren’t two Gods. There is only the God of love, for you and for me and for everyone. When you start looking for that mothering God in scripture, you suddenly notice that she is everywhere. Consider the reading from Mark today. Here is the God who holds our hand in our time of lostness. Here is the God who heals us. Here is the God drives the demons away, the demons who tell us that the emptiness has no end. Here is the God who descends with us into that emptiness, into our darkness, and who calls us into the light that lies beyond it.

The purpose of a spiritual practice, such as coming to church, is in large part to learn – or, perhaps, to remember – how to hear that God. To remember how to accept resonance from the God who, when we reach out our arms and say, hold me, always says, yes. To remember the God who is with us ‘til the ends of the earth.

[martinelfert]

Who Are You?

Martin Elfert Pentecost 23 November 16, 2014

Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 Psalm 90:1-8, (9-11), 12 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 Matthew 25:14-30

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Have you ever done that spiritual exercise in which you read a Bible story and then picture yourself – and perhaps other people whom you know or knew – in the scene described? Maybe you close your eyes and become the first man or the first woman standing before the tree of knowledge and wondering about its fruit; maybe you become one of the Israelites crossing the damp floor of the Red Sea, a few startled fish looking at you through the wall of water; maybe you become one of the people standing around the Lamb at the end of days, a loved one who has been gone for years at your side as you your sing praise; maybe you become one of the people sitting at Jesus’ feet as he tells folk tales, as he touches you and heals you, as he hangs from the cross, as he dances out of the tomb. Maybe – and I don’t know if this is an act of imagination that indicates hubris or humility or something in between – maybe you become Jesus himself, walking the dusty roads of life.

There is a teacher who tells the story of doing this exercise with a group of students. The text upon which they were meditating was one of Jesus’ most famous parables, the parable that we know as the Prodigal Son. The teacher asked the students gathered around the table with him who each of them imagined themselves to be in the story. And they responded: the father, the brother, the son, the hired hand. One young woman had said nothing. And so the teacher asked her if she wanted to share. But she said: No. No, it’s stupid. The teacher, as good teachers sometimes do, gently pushed. He asked again: Who are you in the story? And so the young woman said: I’m the fatted calf. I’m just standing in the field, enjoying the sun, enjoying chewing on the grass. And all of a sudden I’m dead and on the dinner table.

And just like that, the teacher understood the Prodigal Son in a whole new way.

Today we hear the story known as the Parable of the Talents. “Talenton” is an ancient Greek and, later, a Latin word that means “weight or sum of money.” It gives us our contemporary word, “talent” – natural aptitude or ability – and there are linguists who believe this parable is actually directly responsible for “talent” meaning what it does in modern English. Think about that next time that you watch America’s Got Talent.

The contemporary definition of “talent” profoundly shapes our understanding of this story. And should we engage in the spiritual exercise of imagining ourselves within this tale, it profoundly shapes who we will picture ourselves to be. My guess is that, if I were to take a survey, the vast majority of us in this room would say that we imagine ourselves to be one of the three slaves.

Now, maybe you are the slave with a lot of talents: you’re good looking, smart, charismatic, and athletic (that describes most of the people here this morning) and you have used your gifts to do some amazing things; you have doubled your money. Maybe you are the slave with but a couple of talents, but you have nonetheless figured out how to find success and do good work with what you have.

Or maybe you are the slave with but one talent. And out of fear or foolishness, you have hidden that gift in an old and dusty drawer, you have forgotten it behind the couch, you have put it into a bank account in which the service charges are higher than the interest. You have done nothing with your life.

If you are that last slave, this parable has a clear message for you: God, who is unmistakably the master, is very disappointed in you. God will abandon you in the dark. God will leave you. God is sorry that he made a failure like you. God doesn’t love you.

Is that right? Is this what Jesus is hoping to teach us? Is this what Jesus wants us to know about ourselves? Is this what Jesus wants us to know about God?

Listen:

Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, `Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.'

But his master replied, `You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'

Does that sound like God to you?

This slave with one talent gets his or her chance to speak with the master at roughly the three quarter-mark of the parable. And I’d like to suggest that Jesus puts his or her line and the master’s response at this point in the play as a kind of twist ending. This conversation is here in order to destabilise our mental casting, in order to subvert our picture of who we are in this tale and, maybe this is even more importantly, of who God is in this tale.

Notice just how startling the exchange is that Jesus gives us: the slave accuses the master of being harsh, of inspiring fear, of basically being a criminal: reaping where he didn’t sow, gathering where he did not scatter seed. And the master doesn’t disagree. Sitting behind his desk like Don Corleone, the master says: You’re right. What are you going to do about it? Given that you know that I am the kind of person who deals in deceit and rejection and violence, I’d have expected you to be smart enough to do a better job.

Friends, God has never, never spoken to me the way that the master speaks to the slave. And I’m going to risk being presumptuous and say that God has never spoken to you that way either. God doesn’t speak to anyone like this. I, on the other hand. Well, I have spoken to myself in this way lots of times.

And that makes me wonder: what if? What if who you and I are in this tale isn’t one of the slaves? Or, let me phrase that question a little differently, what if who you and I are in this tale isn’t only one of the slaves? What if who you and I are in this tale is all three of the slaves and the master?

If you have been hanging out on Wednesday evening during Kent Hoffman’s extraordinary classes, you will likely remember the story that he shared on our first night together. Hoffman works closely with homeless teens. And he works similarly closely with privileged college students. One of the exercises that he does is to asks the young people in the former category to write down the thoughts about themselves that they wish weren’t running through their heads. The thoughts that these homeless teens share go something like this: “I’m not good for anything,” “No one will ever trust me,” “No one could ever forgive me,” “No one could ever love me.” Hoffman asks the privileged college students to do the same exercise. And their responses go something like this: “I’m not good for anything,” “No one will ever trust me,” “No one could ever forgive me,” “No one could ever love me.”

The fear that we are unworthy, that we are not good enough, that we are unlovable is universal. And in the culture that we live in, a pretty common way of combatting that fear is to achieve: to accumulate money, to accumulate possessions, to accumulate status. And for a while, it feels like that strategy might actually work. For a while, it feels like we might have done enough to buy love, done enough with our talents that God might look at us and say, “Well done, good and faithful slave.”

But that strategy doesn’t work forever. It doesn’t last. Sooner or later we slip back to being the second slave – the second slave, whom we all know is the first loser. And then we fall back to being the third: we get laid off, we fail a big test, we don’t get the job we were hoping for, we succumb to addiction, we get sick, we get old. We run into our limitations. We do less than we had dreamed we would with our talents. And we wait for God to reject us, for God to kick us into the outer darkness.

But God doesn’t do that. God refuses to do that. No matter how much – or how little – worldly success we have, God keeps on saying to us the words that have formed the cornerstone of Kent’s presentation these several weeks. Maybe you remember them: You matter, and you matter absolutely. Perhaps we could express that even more simply, no matter how much or how little worldly success we have, God keeps on saying, I love you.

Richard Rohr puts it this way: The Biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. The testimony of the Gospel is that you can’t do anything to make God love you. And you can’t do anything to make God not love you. The testimony of the Gospel is that God insists on loving you, no matter what. Our choice is whether we will notice that love or not, whether we respond to that love or not.

The Parable of the Talents isn’t the exception to the Gospel witness, it isn’t the minority report, it isn’t the dissenting voice that says actually you do have to earn God’s love, actually heaven really is a meritocracy. Rather, it is a story that shines a light on the way that we reject ourselves, that we that we speak to ourselves in harshness, the way that we become our own cruel masters.

Who are you in this story?

Well, here is the answer that I think Jesus hopes you will give. You are the one who says I reject the casting choices that are available to me. I am not a slave. I am not the master. I am not my talents. I am not my successes or my failures. You are the one who looks God in the face and, in spite of everything, sees God looking back with the deep and total love of a mother for a child. You are the one, in spite of everything, who hears God say: You matter. And you matter absolutely.