Tears: Helping Us See Clearly

Like a lot of men, I have very little experience with personal tears. I bet that I have such limited experience with tears that I can name 90% of the times I have had tears (not as the result of being kicked in the groin or allergies):

1. I “sports cried” when I watch Dirk hold up the 2011 NBA championship. Yes, I joined the rest of the human race in tearing up watching the opening sequence in “Up”.

2. I was caught off guard when tears came over me when I was talking about the beauty and brokenness of the UMC after returning from General Conference 2016.

3. When I was appointed to a new church and had to say goodbye to a dear friend, I was grateful that she was shorter than I was so she could not see me ugly cry when we hugged for one of the last times.

4. Seeing my children for the first time was a big tear moment. So was waiting at the end of the center isle when those doors flung open and there stood the one person who I was about to make covenantal vows with. Then there was those two times where I sat in a parking lot and heard a song that made my eyes so red that I drove around the block just to try to minimize my eyes puffiness.

5. I suppose there where those three Easter sermons over the years where I was so moved by the story of light and hope and resurrection accompanied by images of love and delight that were also very tearful.

That is it.

There are many stories of ancient desert Christians (called the Abbas and Ammas) that feature tears or weeping. Often in these stories, tears and weeping come with of some understanding of sin or awareness of truth or revelation of love. In fact, it might be argued that tears did not come as a result of new awareness but the new awareness was the result of tears.

Meaning, it was the tears that helped the ancient one see more clearly than they had before.

We are told that tears in our eyes cloud our vision, however, that is not always true. Many times tears allow us to see more clearly by washing out what was clouding our vision to begin with. Tears are not the product of, but the initiation to new sight.

Maybe this is why so many of us (and I am talking to myself here) are blind. We have little experience with tears to wash out our blind spots and ignorance.

The Good Little Giants “Birdsong” has a stanza that goes:

Sometimes a grown man cries
To grieve the years he spent believing lies
He sees more clearly now through tears in his eyes
Maybe sometimes, baby, sometimes

And so, may we be blessed with tears.

Christianity: A Bounded Centered Set

Maybe you have heard that there are a ways to categorize people and things. Two common ways to think about categorization is either as a bounded set or a centered set. Do not let the language trip you up, they are very intuitive once you know.

A bounded set is defined by its boundaries. If it metal and has wings, it is a plane. If you have blue eyes you don’t have brown eyes. We can group things into “sets” based upon the boundaries we draw. This is so common of a practice, that I bet you had no idea it had a name!

The other type of categorization is what is called a centered set, which is a group that is not defied by it’s boundaries but by the center. If a bounded set is concerned with who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, a centered set is concerned with the direction a person is moving. Are they moving toward or away from the center.

Image from: https://thehappypastor.wordpress.com/tag/bounded-set/

It might be easy to break this into a conservative/orthodoxy/bounded set verses a liberal/orthopraxy/centered set debate. However the reality is that Christianity is not a bounded OR a centered set.

Christianity is both.

Christianity is a way of living in that world that puts Christ at the center of our lives. Thus it is a centered set. It is a faith that understands that Christ and Paul and the early church worked did so much to break the idea of religion as a bounded set. When Jesus ate with prostitutes and Paul welcomed gentiles, when Jesus called a tax collector and Peter was told to not deem anything unclean which God declared clean, it is clear to me that one of the Christian projects is to dismantle bounded set categorization of people.

And yet, you may see, that to be a people who are centered on Christ who calls us to reject bounded set thinking, Christianity paradoxically becomes a bounded set.

To put it another way: Christianity is bounded set centered on the one who calls for the dismantling of bounded thinking.

This is a paradox, a mystery of the faith. Be mindful of those who might say that Christianity is only one or the other. To remove one set from our call is to cheapen and soften the challenging call of Christ.

Why We Fail At Self Control or Self Control as Pomegranate

“By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”

— Galatians 5:22-23

Self control is like a pomegranate of the fruits of the spirit. It is the fruit so many of us want to want to like but it is just too difficult to access.

By in large it seems that I fail at self control because I conflate self control with restraint. Restraint is a part of self control but self control is more complex than simple restraint. When I act as though self control is simply restraint then I am not only restrained from the behaviors such as lashing out and yelling, but also from the embracing and showing grand gestures of love. Restraint is great for a stoic, but Christians are not stoics. Christians are called to the fruit of self control.

But what is self control?

Perhaps it is helpful to think of what is the opposite of self control. The opposite is not unbounded emotion, but rather other control. When we are attempting to control others we are doing the opposite of self control.

Controlling others what we do when we are fearful. It is not lost on me that people on line who cause all sorts of heartache as “trolls”. Trolls take delight in controlling others by causing others to get into a rage as a result of the trolls actions. The troll operates from a place of fear that they are not being heard or they have no power, and so they control others out of that fear in order to get heard or feel powerful.

It is said in 1 John 4, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” When we try to control others we are in the presence of fear and if there is fear then there is no love. All of this to say, when we feel like we are loosing control or not practicing restraint it might be because we are lacking love in the moment.

And so, we might fail at self control not because we are not trying, but because we lack the love that drives out fear in that moment.

The next time you feel a lack of self control or even restraint, ask yourself what are you afraid of in that moment. Then, and this is the courageous move, ask yourself, “what do I love about this person?” It has been my experience that when I discover the love in the relationship, I no longer seek to control the other person. When I discover love, fear is cast out.

The pomegranate is not as difficult to eat. We just have been trying to access it in the wrong ways.