Last weekend, Dr. Richard Blackburn, Executive Director of the Lombard Mennonite Peace Center, was at Christ Church Cranbrook to lead a Healthy Congregations Workshop. The guiding principles of this workshop are derived from the work of Dr. Murray Bowen and Rabbi Edwin Friedman in family systems theory.
“Family systems theory postulates that the operation of the emotional system reflects an interplay between two counterbalancing forces – individuality and togetherness.” Of particular significance is their study of how anxiety affects any emotional system and the individuals in it.
Anxiety is the response of an organism to a real or imagined threat and is present in every person and relationship. Acute anxiety is a response to a real threat and most people usually adapt fairly successfully to acute anxiety. Chronic anxiety occurs in response to imaginary threats and often strains people’s ability to adapt to it.
An emotional system may be a family, a company, a sports team, a governmental entity, or a congregation. Individuals find ways to adapt to the anxieties of the family systems from which they come and bring those behaviors into other emotional systems.
Two key objectives of the workshop were to help each person explore and manage the anxiety in his or her life and to learn to recognize and appropriately respond to anxiety at work in the emotional systems in which they are involved.
An example from the story of our faith is the reaction of the Hebrews when Moses was on the mountain and did not return to them as soon as some expected (Exodus 32). Aaron was left in charge of the people while Moses was away. The people gathered around Aaron and expressed their anxiety about the delayed return of Moses. Instead of responding to the anxiety of the people from grounding in the divine values and principles that shaped them as a people and him as their leader, he reacted by abdicating his leadership role and instructed them to make a golden calf, which they could worship. As a poorly defined leader, Aaron let the anxieties of the herd take charge and proposed a quick-fix solution to the imagined problem they brought to him. When Moses confronted Aaron about what he did, he blamed the people instead of accepting responsibility. He even went so far as to give a completely passive explanation for the idol’s existence: “So, I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off’; so they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
Moses himself failed in leadership in the face of the fears of the people at Kadesh-barnea. When the spies brought back a fear-laden report from the land God had commanded them to enter, the people said, “Our brothers have made our hearts melt in fear” (Deut.1:28 NIV). Instead of responding to their fear of an imagined threat from the reality of God’s promise of protection, Moses reacted by caving in. The result, as you know, was that the people had to wander around in the wilderness until that faithless generation had died and Moses was not permitted to enter the Promised Land.
Contrast these two examples with the leadership of Jesus during his temptation in the wilderness, where he responded to Satan by managing his own inner being, during the occasion at Caesarea Philipi when Peter urged him to take another path than the one that would lead to the cross, and during his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane when his struggle with anxiety was so intense that he sweated blood.
Maybe Lent can be a time for us to search ourselves and discover the anxieties that interfere with our life in community and our ability to remain calm when others around us are losing their heads. When we do that, the life of the emotional systems of which we are members become healthier and we become more human, because we make better use of the uniquely human part of our brain that allows reason to overcome the reactions that come from the more primitive parts of our brains.
I am aware that many of the things that emerge from those more primitive parts of the human brain are necessary for survival. But when we are faced with imaginary or even potential threats, we have the God-given resources and opportunities to more fully express our humanity. And, as St. Irenaeus once said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God.” It is God who calls us to live our lives from divine values and principles so that we can build up the Church, advance God’s reign on earth, and embrace God’s vision of a creation restored in God’s Son.
That’s a worthy objective for the observance of a holy Lent.
I’ll see you in Church!