Tag Archives: mutuality

Parker Palmer and the trouble with autonomy

Building community, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , ,

The psychological work of exercising healthy autonomy is challenging when it is seated in individualism and seeded with identity politics.

Part of a “heritage ride”

According to the Richmond Co Daily Journal, Jacob Mumford decided to hold a “Heritage Ride” after seeing news reports about calls to ban the Confederate flag. He said about the demonstration, “It don’t represent racism. It just represents my heritage, being raised in the South, Southern pride. That’s all it means to me.” He was trying to be someone, the newspaper was reporting it, the country was protecting it.

Mumford was reacting to the great cleansing that began after Dylan Roof murdered nine loving people in an historic Black church in Charleston. In 2015 the National Park Service ordered all Confederate flags and merchandise to be removed from all parks under the agency’s direction, including Fort Sumter and Gettysburg. By 2021 the massive Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond was removed, symbolizing the ongoing deconstruction of white supremacy intertwined with everything American.

The untwining is far from over and the pickups still parade. Alongside the Confederate flag a driver often has the yellow Gadsen flag, as in the picture above. It is the flag with “Don’t read on me” on it. “Don’t tread on me” has been an assertion of national autonomy for over 200 years, and now personal, pickup autonomy. I saw the same display in Lansdale the other day.

Christopher Gadsen designed his anti-British flag in the run-up to the Revolutionary War. The timber rattlesnake on it was something of a Colonial-era meme, evidently created by Benjamin Franklin. The snake is unique to the Eastern U.S. and came to symbolize a new country ready to bite anyone who stepped on it. The symbol stuck around. You can get a specialty license plate with the Gadsen flag on it in nine states. You can say your license plate is about “heritage,” but Gadsden was a slave owner and trader, who built Gadsden’s Wharf in Charleston, South Carolina. As many as 40% of enslaved Africans who were brought to the U.S. first arrived there. You can say it is about southern pride, but don’t leave out the white supremacy and dread people feel when the pickups parade. I felt some fear when I saw one on the Turnpike!

Around the Time the Philadelphia Union was using the flag in 2006, the “Tea Party,” anti-tax Republicans began using it. They used it to communicate the U.S. government had become the oppressor threatening the liberties (I would say the unhealthy sense of autonomy) of its own citizens. By the time it was prominently displayed at the January attack on the U.S. Capitol, white men were flying it on their pickups to communicate they would not be replaced, not be tread on – especially by Blacks and not by immigrants “flooding the borders.”

Fighting for freedom

In the United States, liberty is life. Like the slave-capitalism that dominates it, the powerful dole out freedom to their tribe. But even the lowliest feel a taste for “freedom,”  for individual rights, to be one’s unencumbered self able to make as much money as they can. Even Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, whose great wealth and power make them free, echoed this urge in the title their recent book Renegades: Born in the USA. As he was selling the book via NPR, Obama said,

So the truth is that either we tell each other stories that allow us to see each other as fellow travelers and humans, or we have conflict and clash, and whoever gets the most power wins. And I would argue that at its best, America’s been able – with a pretty major exception in the Civil War – to try to make progress and perfect the union without resort solely to violence, solely to power.

I keep wondering if the authors were riffing on Taylor Swift’s “Renegade” in which she sings, “You wouldn’t be the first renegade to need somebody.” They might have subtitled their book, “Meditations on our recovery from ‘Don’t tread on me.'”

I connect the search for freedom in all its perverse and noble forms as part of our drive to achieve the healthy autonomy we need as humans to become our true selves. It is the natural movement Paul describes as leaving the old self behind and taking on the new self restored in God’s image. We all need to have an experience of I AM in relation to God just like Jesus demonstrates His place in the community of the Trinity. The Gadsen flag states “I am an expression of power” the Jesus-follower insists “I am an expression of right relationship with Love.”

Nurturing good autonomy

How we do psychotherapy and relate in other ways requires many choices about how to handle everyone’s need for autonomy and our perverse lust for power.

I think “good autonomy” is when a person gets a sense of their true self operating freely. It is like the experience of getting the training wheels off the bike, feeling your own balance, moved by your own power, and even pedaling out of your parents sight and control. It is the freedom Paul writes about in Galatians: a life not defined by law, but confident in one’s reality as a person made in God’s image, the beloved of God whose life is eternal in Christ. I think of that autonomy as “I am-ness.”

There is a dangerous autonomy, however, lurking in the word. Nomos is Greek for “law”. Auto-nomos mean “makes its own laws.”  It would be great if Palestinians had this political right. It is not so great when individuals assume they are a law unto themselves and must be. One of my grandsons calls his brother the “dictator from the second grade” because he does think he should make all the rules. I think that is an example of what dangerous autonomy can do to community. When we, as therapists, parents or leaders protect someone’s autonomy to be themselves and make their own rules  as if their freedom should be inviolable, we do them a disservice. We may condemn them to be alone, going their own way according to their undisturbed thinking and feeling. We can hope God is disturbing them, which is usually the case, but the weaker among us could get the impression they are on their own and should be, even though they are connected to various communities and are part of creation.

Protecting a person’s personal freedom as a primary goal might be like giving them a bike so they can figure out how to ride it on their own. Personally, I was a bike-stealer as a child. I stole the neighbor’s bike and rode to kindergarten (which was illegal). I parked it in the rack right in front of the principal’s glass-paneled door. I stole my brother’s big bike when I was not tall enough to reach the pedals and crashed it into the curb. My father liked my gall but had to punish me anyway. My parents often left me alone to figure stuff out — and I did. But I also felt alone, which is worse than not figuring things out. And their neglect/appreciation for my independent spirit may have made me a little thief. It is in mutuality we thrive. Subject to a spirit of individualism in the U.S. and painfully alone, a lot of people can’t even give a full body hug because it feels like a violation or improper. What they need more than autonomy is to attach to God and others.

The best autonomy is mutual

The dialogue in the Bible about autonomy is all about having a relationship with God, first of all, then loving others. Jesus followers teach each other to accept every person and love them as they are right now. Such teaching includes freedom but also includes mutuality. My deepest freedom comes from right relationship. In love, my present limitations and boundaries are accepted and maybe even admired. In love, none of us are a law to another; we are all gifts who should be respected.

One of my psychotherapy clients wondered out loud if I knew a lot of thirtysomethings the other day (which I do). He doubted people could connect like I described healthy attachment. But I persist. Parker Palmer helps me persist. He is a gift from the Quaker homeland in Philadelphia. He added to the spirit of what I am trying to say in his well-known essay A Place Called Community. When he wrote his piece in 1977 I was in seminary and about to experiment in autonomy-defying intentional community – which was an irreplaceable education in love, truth and growth in the Spirit.

In his essay, Palmer says:

  1. If we promote autonomy in the individualist, psychotherapeutic and political sense we set up a society of dissociated individuals most suited to authoritarian government
  2. Mental and spiritual health is never just about oneself. It happens in our common suffering in the web of humanity. We build community to encourage health.
  3. Connection always breeds problems. Not connecting and leaving people alone in their autonomy creates even deeper problems.

When you fly the Gadsen flag or react to the flag as if it has power, you might be surrendering your healthy autonomy. Like Obama worries, we could get stuck in a perpetual fight for individual freedom. True renegades end up in friendship and mutual creativity, they appreciate one another’s true selves, and so undermine the endless power struggles of the world.

Who knows but that God made Circle of Hope for such a Trump time as this?

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Maybe we have some Esther in us. When plots against the Jews were uncovered in the Persian capital, one of the king’s favorite wives, Esther, was well-placed to do something about it. But there were great risks to face! She was one of the Jews being slandered; she was just one of many wives; she was not sure whether she would not be killed if she appeared unbidden before the king. But her uncle laid out the situation to her again: Terrible things were about to happen and she was in danger, as well as her people. He said, “Who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” So she told everyone to fast and pray and said, “I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish” (see Esther 4).

I will go to Trump and if I perish I perish

Now we will need to “Go to the Trump.” Maybe that has always been inevitable. My twenties began with the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency and ended with the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s We sat on our porch and talked very seriously about how we needed to be ready for the police state to rule us. We told each other we needed to be an alternative community to sustain ourselves in the coming time of troubles, as well as to hold out the light of Christ. There was plenty of trouble, but not the collapse of civilization we expected. And ever since, I have witnessed inspired people fighting hard for the poor, for rights, and for goodness when the government was doing things wrong. There are still a lot of inspired people doing the same thing. But there is also the fruit of this stream of power-mad, self-interested, pure-capitalists that resulted in Donald Trump.

In a perverse way, the president-elect is very good for the radical Christian “business,” since he causes the right kind of disgust and desperation with the world. The Bible writers think those feelings of conviction and repentance should be normative for anyone who has met Jesus. But generally, they are not normative for Christians in the United States. Yet here we are. Just like Esther was dragged out of her perfumed harem and into the necessity of the looming disaster, so are we are dragged out of our denial, or stupor, or relative comfort, or wherever and into the necessity of facing a fearsome future. “Who knows but that God made Circle of Hope for such a time as this?”

If you look at the goals we set last June after a few months of good thinking, they seem rather prophetic to me. We must have been ready then for what is now.

 

We said “This year we we are going to”

Help thirsty people meet Jesus:

This is the big thing. When they finally admit the government is a big shoving match between the elites, when 25% of the eligible voters elect the president who did not even get the majority of the votes people deigned to cast (if they were not felons or suppressed) then maybe, just maybe, people will realize they need the Savior they have. Our alternativity is the living proof people need that there is another way.

Strengthen our mutuality:

We really do not know what will happen to every despised minority (like radical Christians, too!). What if we have a war, a police state, a financial meltdown, a climate meltdown? We need to take care of each other.

Create jobs and strengthen our finances:

This is also an ambitious response to needing to take care of ourselves when the societal climate won’t. I am not expecting the financial bonanza Trump promises to reach us, do you? We need to find our own way and not be so dependent on the unstable and immoral government.

Open our eyes to the power of technology:

Didn’t the manipulation of the media just result in a predatory slanderer being elected? Didn’t Hillary’s dependence on her data sink her? Didn’t we all buy in for two years? Isn’t the leader of the Breitbart slander machine head of the transition? We need to start thinking more clearly.

Long term, we said we needed to address four big problems that are looming, We don’t know what is going to happen in the world, of course, but we are also not without hope or wisdom.

The Northeast megalopolis is losing contact with Jesus

We are here for a time like this. We were purposefully planted in the middle of the megalopolis to be the light in the darkness.

The “one percent” is effectively enslaving many people

We are here for a time like this. We need a compassionate, creative response to capitalism, especially now, since a man who can sell an empty brand name is president. Our mutuality web is not just for us, it is also for the people who are going to fall off the edge of the disasters first: the undocumented, the gentrified poor, the mentally ill, the broken families, veterans, felons, and anyone who is not considered lawful and orderly.

Large forces are threatening our children

We are here for a time like this. The internet is full of psychological land mines. The schools are run for profit. The scourge of data and legalism is everywhere. We need village parenting more than ever.

Advances in technology are undermining incarnation and blurring the image of God

We are here for a time like this. It always seems like an abstract thing to point out; we are having a hard time getting our minds around it —  but we must not underestimate what technology is doing. It is not only destroying the climate, it is undermining what it means to be human. It is creating a new humanity faster than we are helping Jesus to do. Yes, there are people who are fighting against every bad expression of our escalating powers, but each day increases the data cloud taking various shapes we have never encountered before. We need to be as wise as serpents and gentle as doves, unleash our best prophets and stay deeply connected to our place, our community and our Lord.

“Who knows but that God made Circle of Hope for such a time as this?”

I am not even sure what time it is, yet. But we are certainly awakened to the horrible possibilities that have been simmering for decades. Our situation is not new to God’s people, perhaps it just seems new to us. But we have been preparing ourselves and being prepared for a long time to be our own faithful response to this very circumstance that seems so surprising and difficult. May we have Esther’s courage in the face of it.