The God of Whiners

February 29, 2012 By Ellen Painter Dollar Leave a Comment

Last Thursday, my writer-blogger-OI-mom friend Rachel and I (we refer to ourselves as the “OI giantesses,” because at 5′ 1″ and 4′ 8″ respectively, we are indeed huge by the standards of OI, the genetic bone disorder we share) spent the day together; it was our first face-to-face meeting after about a year of online communication. True to our expectations, Rachel and I discovered that we could be ourselves with the other, warts and all.

One of the “warts” we kept referring to in e-mails after our visit was our tendency to whine, especially about the various indignities of being a writer in the digital era. We each expressed gratitude to the other for listening to (and joining in on) our whining about curmudgeonly commenters, low (or nonexistent) pay, and other frustrations of our work. “Thank you,” we said to each other, “for letting me whine.”

Like many people, I have a very low tolerance for whining. When called upon to stay up all night with a vomiting child, read the same story book over and over, supervise mind-numbing kindergarten homework, wipe bottoms, or wrestle overtired tots into bed, I do so willingly, perhaps even cheerfully. But when the whining starts? Especially when the kids whine about the same things day in and day out? Like how they always get the short end of the stick compared with their siblings, how much it hurts when I brush the tangles out of their hair, my highly unreasonable demand that they brush their teeth before school every single day, or my insistence on serving dinners other than mac and cheese, pizza, and chicken nuggets? When they whine about those things, and so many others, my fuse gets very short.

Our cultural tolerance for whining can also be quite low. We live in a culture where “pain is gain,” where rugged independence and dogged persistence in the face of adversity are valued. Whining is perceived as weak, ineffective, a way of avoiding hard work and self-improvement.

The bottom line is that most of us have very low tolerance for whining—our own as well as others’. We pepper our own whining with apologies. “I’m sorry to do so much whining,” Rachel and I kept saying to each other last Thursday.

With my day with Rachel fresh in my mind, I opened my springtime Divine Hours prayer book this morning to find this line from Psalm 55:

In the evening, in the morning, and at noonday, I will complain and lament, and he will hear my voice.

Yesterday, I finished reading Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, her biography of Louis Zamperini, a high school and Olympic track star who spent several horrific, dehumanizing years in Japanese POW camps during World War II. After the war, Zamperini sank into a quagmire of anger, alcoholism, violence, and revenge fantasies against a prison guard who singled him out for brutal punishment.

But after his wife dragged him to a Billy Graham meeting one weekend in Los Angeles, everything changed. Zamperini recalled that, when he was lost at sea for more than 40 days following his bomber’s crash into the Pacific and before being rescued by a Japanese ship and then sent on to his harrowing POW experience, he had told God that if God would save him, he would serve God forever.

God had saved him, he realized. Zamperini had survived a plane crash, being lost at sea, physical and psychological abuse, backbreaking labor, starvation, and a host of life-threatening illnesses and injuries. He returned from the Graham crusade that night, poured out all of his liquor, and never again had nightmares about the prison guard who had so brutalized him.

Much of Zamperini’s story is beyond belief. How does a man endure what he endured and not only survive, but eventually thrive in physical, psychological, and emotional health? But one part of the story that I could believe without doubt was that God was capable of  loving and transforming this broken, haunted man.

That God, of bountiful love and grace, of power able to overcome the most horrific human experiences, is familiar to me.

But a God willing to hear my voice when I complain—when I whine—morning, noon, and night? The idea of that God was something of a revelation to me this morning. My own experience as a parent was coloring my view of God. I thought that God, like me, could rise to the occasion when things are really bad for his children, just as I can be calm and soothing as the stomach bug rampages through my family. But I figured that, like me, God probably gets impatient with the constant and petty nature of human whining.

Maybe God does get impatient. But the psalmist says God continues to listen anyway. That is one remarkable God. Last Thursday, even as we kept apologizing to each other, Rachel and I went right on whining, finding solace in having our unsavory complaints both accepted and affirmed by the other. Perhaps, in that smallest of ways, we were embodying the love of God for each other. A God who never stops listening, even to whiners.

 

Filed Under: parenthood, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , Leave a Comment

“Biblical” Views on Abortion Are Younger Than I Am

February 27, 2012 By Ellen Painter Dollar 10 Comments

I have made no secret of the fact that I am a pro-choice Christian. I’ve paid a price for holding that position and being willing to talk about it. I lost a valued writing job. I’ve been called awful, hateful names by other Christians. I have also received grace and hospitality from Christians who are passionately pro-life, as when my colleague Karen Swallow Prior and I did a series of posts about our abortion positions over on Amy Julia Becker’s blog, and the commenters were almost universally respectful and accepting, even if they didn’t agree.

A cornerstone of my pro-choice position is my view of the human embryo. While I see any abortion as a tragedy, I do not equate abortion with murder. While I perceive the human embryo as a nascent human life that should be treated with respect, I do not see it as equivalent to a baby that exists separately from its mother.

In my new book, No Easy Choice, I explain this further:

Politically charged pro-life/pro-choice debates have made it difficult to contemplate embryonic life because these debates insist on absolutes. Either embryos are the same as babies, or they are merely bunches of cells subject to their parents’ choices. I think most people, when pressed, would say that neither is quite true. Embryos occupy an in-between place. They are liminal; they serve as a doorway or threshold between one state of being (individual sperm and eggs that only have the potential for life until they join with the other) and another (the definitive, transforming presence of a newborn child). The threshold is essential for connecting those two states of being; it cannot be lightly discarded any more than a house can be built without doors. But it’s also more a passage to something vital than a destination in itself.

Praise be, many of my writing colleagues in the blogosphere, including some who are definitively pro-life, have honored and accepted my position on abortion even if they don’t agree with it. So within the past few days, I received emails and Facebook messages from a whole slew of people pointing me to a blog post by Fred Clark, who blogs on Patheos as the “slactivist.” He wrote last week about how the evangelical insistence that life begins at conception and therefore all abortion is murder, which many evangelicals see both as Biblical and as an absolute requirement for calling oneself “evangelical,” is actually only about 30 years old. More than 30 years ago, some prominent evangelicals believed that a human fetus was not absolutely the same as a baby, and that therefore abortion under some circumstances was acceptable. Read Clark’s full blog post here.

So what’s the big deal? Things change. Christian positions on social and political issues change. Why is this change important?

Because the abortion debate is marked—no, marred—by insistence from both the pro-life and pro-choice sides that we embrace absolutes. When pro-lifers insist absolutely not only that life begins at conception, but that such a view has been clearly stated in the Bible since it was written thousands of years ago, they leave no room for nuance or conversation with pro-choice folk like me, who think abortion should be legal but also see it as both tragic and in need of limits. Likewise, pro-choice folk who insist that all reproductive choices must be honored in the name of individual and specifically women’s rights also contribute to the divisive, dysfunctional, and ineffective nature of modern abortion debates.

One of the people who sent me the Clark post asked, “In other words, is your position very similar to what most evangelicals held 30ish years ago?”

Yes, I guess it is.

Thirty or so years ago, none other than that stalwart evangelical publication, Christianity Today published editorials from prominent evangelicals arguing that abortion should be allowed under some circumstances because embryos and fetuses, while they should be treated with reverence, are not fully human in the way a baby is fully human. As Clark notes, such articles today would not be published at all, and if they slipped through the cracks, they would get authors and editors fired. My own experience bears that out.

It’s a shame that one’s position on abortion has become the litmus test (or rather, one of two litmus tests, along with one’s views on homosexuality) as to who is and is not an evangelical (and for some people, who is and is not a Christian), and to which voices evangelicals are and are not willing to listen.

P.S. The comments to Clark’s post are quite good. Please come visit me reasonable blog commenters! Anyway, I thought this comment was interesting:

The verses I’ve seen [to support the idea that the Bible says life begins at conception]…are these:

Jeremiah 1:5  “Before I formed thee in the womb I knew thee”

From Psalm 139:14  “I am fearfully and wonderfully made”

Isaiah 49:15 “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?”

Also, regarding the use of Psalms in arguments, would someone please explain why people are using the Bible’s internal hymnal for “proof”?  That’s like using a modern hymnal to prove that the place where we shall gather is at the river, or that softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me.

 

Filed Under: ethics Tagged With: , , , 10 Comments

Patheos Peeps: Adam McHugh on Dealing with Criticism

February 24, 2012 By Ellen Painter Dollar 2 Comments

Every Friday, I post a link to a blog post written by one of my fellow bloggers at Patheos, a web portal devoted to religion and spirituality. I encourage my blog readers to click through to read these posts, comment, and if you like what you read, follow these bloggers as well.

(OK, I’m cheating a little bit this week. Adam McHugh is actually not a Patheos blogger. Adam currently blogs on his own at Introverts in the Church. But he will be a Patheos Peep before the year is out. Patheos is publishing Adam’s next book, he will eventually join the Patheos blogging team, and he has written occasional posts for Patheos in the past.)

My book has been out for about a month, so I’m beginning to read reviews. To my relief and excitement, most are complimentary. But of course, not all of them are positive. This week, when a critic lifted a sentence from my book, presented it in isolation, and implied that I was saying something I was not saying (in fact, I was saying almost the opposite), my fingers were itching to dash off a response.

But I didn’t. I posted about the urge on Facebook, knowing many of my writer friends would sympathize. Then I kept my hands busy making a casserole. Adam sent me a link to a post he wrote recently on this very thing—a list of five things to do in response to criticism. I had already done #1, which is to Avoid the knee-jerk reaction. It’s excellent advice for writers and anyone whose work makes them vulnerable to public criticism.

Later that same day, I came across a post by Christina Katz (“The Prosperous Writer”) listing 10 Things Never to Do on Social Media. Number 3 on her list was:

Never walk away from a bully. Always stand up to a bully, even if only momentarily. If we don’t, soon the Internet will be crawling with bullies. On the Internet, a bully is a person who puts down others or treats others disrespectfully for their own glory.

For a minute, I was torn between her advice to confront online bullies, and Adam’s advice to avoid knee-jerk reactions. Many experienced folk in the writing/publishing world are with Adam on this. They advise not to engage with critics, particularly when they get personal or nasty. My “policy” is that I will gladly engage a critic if he/she presents an opposing viewpoint in a way that indicates that he/she is open to conversation; respects me as an equal, as knowledgeable, and as a fellow Christian (when I’m writing on a religious topic); and uses courteous language. But I won’t engage a critic if he/she is questioning my integrity, knowledge, faith, qualifications, etc.; willfully misinterpreting what I wrote for his/her own purposes; or resorting to name-calling or inflammatory language.

So what about those bullies? Do we engage or not?

I think it is unwise for the person being bullied to respond. As Adam says, such heat-of-the-moment “reactions do not help the conversation and usually only come across as immature and insecure.” Think about the classic schoolyard bully situation. Although the movies might occasionally give us a heartening scene where the bullied kid knocks out the bully with a hard right hook or a clever turn of phrase, in real life, bullies often take anything that their prey does and twist it for their own purposes. This happens in cyberspace too.

But I do think it’s important for other readers to stand up to bullies when we see them going after writers. Last month, I posted four ways to be a good neighbor in cyberspace, and #4 was: Stick up for your neighbors. Calling out bullies may not change their behavior, although I’ve seen a very few incidents where a nasty commenter has come back and owned up to being overly critical and mean-spirited after someone called them out. But even if standing up to the bullies doesn’t change them, it does improve the overall atmosphere online, and gives writers confidence to be bold and honest, knowing that others will support us when we are under attack. Again, this advice echoes experience with schoolyard bullies. Successful anti-bullying efforts often involve creating an atmosphere in which bullying is not socially acceptable, while standing up to bullies is.

Of course, not all criticism qualifies as bullying (thank goodness). But it all hurts on some level. Adam’s five recommendations are vital for writers if we are going to keep putting ourselves “out there,” knowing that some people will misinterpret or just not like what we have to say.

What do you think? Stand up to cyber-bullies? Or let our silence send a message that their contributions are not welcome, and that they don’t bother us (even if they really do)?

Filed Under: ethics, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , 2 Comments
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