Author: Gideon Yutzy

What Humility Is and Isn’t (But Then I Could Be Wrong)

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Humility, much like life itself, is a treacherous maze.

On one hand, we don’t want to view ourselves with self-loathing. What kind of lame-o (fun American epithet) would go through their decades of existence on this crazy planet of ours and never come to terms with who they are. Not me, that’s for sure! No, seriously though, I want to stand in front of a mirror and say, “I like such and such thing about myself,” and for that to feel perfectly acceptable. Or with some quirk I have, to enjoy it and say, “I’m really glad I do/think this.” The problem is that we all tend to veer off into self-absorption, and nobody likes a prick, now do they?

Nothing is more attractive than humility, and nothing is more unattractive than pride. Someone who is humble is self-aware, which is worlds apart from self-absorbed. In fact, we are drawn to people who are self-aware. A self-aware person may realize they have a talent most people in the room don’t share, but they also understand the context of why that’s true. They know that every desirable trait comes with a trade-off. They are equally aware of what they have and what they don’t have. They know that if they have a special gifting, they probably lack something else, unless they’re flippin’ Leonardo da Vinci. That guy could do it all.

Humble people know any human feat comes with a lot of luck, with a lot of stars aligning. It awes me to no end to see someone demonstrate a near god-like knowledge or ability that I hadn’t even known they possess. It’s very un-American to do that. We Americans just plunk our cards onto the table. We’re often bombastic and averse to subtlety (unlike the ‘b’ in subtlety, it’s very subtle), whereas Europeans can be so annoyingly mysterious. A German, for instance, might apologize for not having better English, but then it will emerge that they hold a deeper understanding of the mechanics of the English language than we could ever hope to have, along with fluency in at least three other languages. But then we Americans gave the world Scrabble, and that’s not nothing. A gentleman by the name of Alfred Butts invented it, during the Great Depression when money was hard to come by. You can check Mr. Butts’ story out for yourself if you are so inclined.

Once when an old friend of mine was training to become a pilot, I was having dinner at his house and we were discussing it. His dad happened to be there, too, and he made a joke–at his son’s expense, really. He posed the question: “How do you know when there’s a pilot in the room?” Then looking at his son out of the corner of his eye, in a slightly non-self-aware manner, he delivered the punchline: “They’ll tell you.” He had a point. I still feel incriminated to this day, although I have never even once pretended to be a pilot. Rather, I know that when I speak to you about some topics, I’ll exhaust the extent of my knowledge or ability in fifteen seconds, rather than building up to it. Sorry about that! I promise to work on it.

I read a book by a Buddhist monk who said we stay humble by remembering that we’re all interconnected and we’re all equally mortal. Each passing day brings us that much nearer to the day of our death. All of us. And we all die alone. How’s that for a bit of uplift on a Monday? We struggle into the world alone, and we shall also struggle out alone. You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley/you’ve got to walk it by yourself. Thus our lives are bookended by suffering, by crushing, poignant suffering that is more than any mortal should have to bear, let alone billions of us. It should make us all more compassionate toward each other.

And you’d think it would. Make us more compassionate. Knowing we are all finite mortals who could easily keel over this very day at the drop of a hat, you’d think it would. It behooves us (which is a semi-archaic expression that can also be written behoves us) to be less judgmental, less competitive, and ultimately less proud.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have a little healthy swagger. Humility doesn’t have to cancel out swagger, and in fact swagger can be endearing, in small doses, though Elon Musk probably overdoes it. His main achievement was becoming the world’s most memorable man-child, a difficult feat given today’s crowded field of contenders. Yes, yes, electric car corporations and clean energy and all that, but let’s not forget that he, as the man who controls more money than any other individual in history, bought the votes needed to elect a squat ogre with a front-butt as president, the latter being an individual I don’t necessarily hate, I just see the role of volunteer parking attendant for a mid-sized town’s summer parade as a better fit for him than US president. That said, some pretty strange people have occupied the office in the past. Anyway, that’s sort of off topic. Back to legitimate swagger, you know who really deserves to swagger? People who can parallel park an electric car, or a chip-oil car, or any car really. I find it oddly impressive to watch them look into their rearview, doff their hair suavely, and then coolly navigate into spaces nobody else even attempts. That way they spend less time searching for parking spaces and walking to their appointments. Something like that, if you swagger about that, you’ve earned it. I respect good parallel-parkers with just the right amount of swagger, if you want to know the truth.

Humility also doesn’t cancel out dignity. Dignity is different from arrogance. Every time we meet another person, we set out our stall. We greet them, in subtle ways (at least if you’re European), announcing to them our vision of reality. That’s not pride, that’s dignity. That’s bearing the image of the Divine faithfully, to the best of our current understanding as to how it should be borne.

God, Grant Us the Courage to Be Countercultural–and Mainstream

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My theory is that 99.9% of us are mainstream when it comes to certain things. With Novocain injections, for instance, we’re probably more than happy to go mainstream, or in deciding which side of the road to drive on or which calendar to follow (I’m using the Gregorian one this year). And heretical as this may sound, I think part of *being a good Christian* is going mainstream when we’re meant to go mainstream. After all, Jesus practiced radical identification with the masses.

Jesus prayed that God would not take his followers “out of the world,” but that God would keep them from the evils of the world because, “They are not of the world.” Or, in the memorable phrase I grew up hearing, Christians are to be in the world, but not of the world. It’s a great phrase, but unfortunately it’s all too easy for me to reverse it and be of the world, but not in it. In other words, I chase the same shallow goals everyone chases–reputation, status, money, comfort–but I don’t enter the brokenness of people’s lives. I’m like the purity-obsessed Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan: I actively cross over to the other side of the road and avoid the beautiful yet broken and messy people I could encounter day by day.

As with so many things, we Christians tend to go for quick formulas (formulae, if I were feeling more pretentious) on this issue. If we stay separate from the world–i.e., we homeschool our kids, attend church every Sunday, have an abiding mistrust of the medical sytem–then surely we aren’t of the world. If only it were that simple.

But as Christians, the world is where it all happens. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has Jaques say that, “All the world is a stage.” There’s an excellent video from the Bible Project in which they teach that “All the world is a temple.” Every human face, every human interaction, every human invention–it’s all sacred. Why? Because God chose to scandalously and irrevocably unleash the divine image into inhabitants on this particular planet (and maybe several of the other billions of planets, but as of yet nobody can prove that). Ultimately, any split between the sacred and the secular is artificial. It may be useful and even necessary for a time, but it is nonetheless artificial. The whole experience of life on our planet is wildly remarkable. As Rabbi Heschel said, our top priority is to cultivate radical amazement.

None of this means that we disregard the ancient practices and sacraments that come down through the church, even the most ascetic ones. Ascetic shares its etymology with exercise. We strip away all the noise and distractions so that we can live in greater wonder and worship, yet we must always make sure we have the right motives in practicing asceticism and separation from mainstream society: we withdraw so we can return to participate with more zest, not to judge it with our holier-than-thou purity codes.

I take it as an axiom that world is used in two different ways in Scripture. In John’s epistles we’re told not to love the world, but in John’s Gospel we learn that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son to redeem it. Additionally, in Psalm 24, we find that the entire earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells us to go into all the world.

A final passage, Romans 12, instructs us not to conform ourselves to the world, which might contradict my earlier assertion that it’s all sacred. But I don’t think it has to be seen as contradictory. In fact, if you keep reading in Romans 12, we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind so that we can prove what is pleasing and good. Where else can we do this proving except among the thoroughfare of everyday life in the real world? It’s true that our base impulses are not all that sacred, but even those can lead us to good places if we allow our redemptive God to bring it to pass.

The best I can say it for now is that we are to reject not the world, but certain spirits and mindsets present in the world. I remember some friends taking us to the Philadelphia airport once, and because of a faulty battery, the car broke down before we got there. It was a highly religious area of the US, but as the time for our flight’s departure drew steadily nearer, hundreds of Levite cars streamed past us. (If you were driving one of them, don’t worry, I would almost certainly have done the same.) Finally, a man covered in tattoos and with questionable bumper stickers on his Prius stopped and charged our car battery.

I know it’s almost cliche to lift up irreligious folk with tattoos, but on that hot, still afternoon in Pennsylvania, he really did remind me of someone who was in the world but not of it, and it doesn’t hurt that we caught our flight because of his actions.

It’s Time to Bless Women in Their God-given Leadership Roles

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As the great Iain McGilchrist documents in his ponderous yet brilliant book The Master and His Emissary, we use the right side of our brain to perceive and experience. Religion is concerned with the transrational, meaning it embraces logic but also goes beyond it. Religion thrives in intuition, emotion, and experience.

The left brain, in the parlance of McGilchrist’s title, is the Emissary. It belongs to the realm of concept—those things that can be rationalised and categorised. The right brain, by contrast, belongs to percept: that which we enter into as sacred mystery. Left‑brained activities require black‑and‑white, binary thinking. We engage the left brain in the realm of machines and in any activity where the laws of physics are in motion. We are thankful for the left brain’s role in determining the laws of physics, whether a jet’s engine is big enough, for instance.

The problem arises, says McGilchrist, when we switch the roles of the Master (the right brain) and the Emissary (the left brain). When we try to approach mystery with logic, it leads to all sorts of chaos in our society, especially in religion. Humans are not machines. Churches are not machines.

Here is where I wish to make a connection between the brain’s hemispheres and leadership roles in the church. Too often, we elevate the Emissary—left‑brained thinking—in our vision of the ideal church leader. We exalt leaders who can verbally defend the faith, those who can articulate doctrinal traditions with precision. Yet doctrinal purity is subservient to the weightier matters of the right brain, such as mercy and care.

This is where my contention may become contentious. Despite our different understandings of the strengths of women and men, most societies and cultures have agreed that women, more often than men, are well suited for mercy and care. Does it not follow that women would make excellent pastors? This is not to say that no men exhibit pastoral qualities, or that all women do. It is only to say that women, by their very nature, are equally suited for pastoral leadership.

But (our left brain screams) doesn’t Scripture forbid women in church leadership? I have already written some of my thoughts about that and I invite you to read them. Here, I will simply make the plea that we stop using 1 Corinthians 14–“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak.”–as a proof text. Something else must be going on in that chapter, because earlier both men and women are exhorted to share “a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation.” It would be difficult to do that while remaining silent. This explanation might be helpful in understanding the context.

Sadly, in many circles Christians still hold a strong taboo around women in pastoral roles. Similar to heinous crimes like cannibalism or human sacrifice, the topic is avoided—or, if it is addressed at all, spoken of only in hushed whispers. And I get it: change cannot happen overnight. Sometimes centuries, not days, are needed for societal change to take place.

Yet hasn’t this discussion already dragged on for centuries? Someone may express resistance to same‑sex marriage on the grounds that the church has only been talking about it since “five minutes ago.” Whether or not that is true of same‑sex marriage, the discussion on women in leadership is as old as the hills. It has existed as long as Scripture itself. Consider just one chapter—Romans 16. Phoebe was a deacon. Priscilla was a co‑worker with St. Paul. Junia was an apostle among apostles.

The church has not reached a consensus prohibiting women in leadership roles. If anything, a pattern of suppression of female leaders has developed. Julian of Norwich, possibly the first woman to write in English, wrote authoritatively and prolifically about the Christian faith, yet the church hid her writings and even actively blocked their publication. Likewise, Junia’s name in Romans 16 has at times been deliberately mistranslated as a man’s name. More recently, a woman who founded an Anabaptist Bible college was asked by the all‑male board to step aside as president to make way for a new president—male, of course. I do not know all the details. Perhaps the decision was legitimate and appropriate. But given the church’s past treatment of women, the optics are egregious.

Furthermore, we deceive ourselves if we say that no female members—half of the church—should hold any leadership roles whatsoever. The undeniable reality is that women already lead. Leadership has many components, including organisation, mentoring, teaching, and articulating a vision for the future. Even in congregations most intent on reserving leadership for men, women lead. Why not formalise those roles, and even ordain the women who are already exercising them?

A critical reader may say that I, as someone who has traded a more cautious church for a less cautious one, am overly chipper with my newfound liberty. They may be right. I will even go one step further and say that I am probably coming off like the ex‑Mennonite who cannot stop gushing about the benefits of ayahuasca in curing her anxiety and judgmentalism. Let us grant that. Still, is it not better to envision a full‑orbed Christian faith—one that offers life‑giving opportunities for all Christians, men and women alike, to grow and be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ—than to cling to a stultifying belief that is becoming increasingly difficult to defend? That which is no longer prohibited can now be accepted, embraced, and even celebrated.

Let me end on a note of charity. I agree with my more cautious brothers and sisters that men and women are profoundly different. We are all better served by acknowledging and celebrating that reality. In homes and churches, at work and at school, men’s and women’s roles will—and should—look different.

But this should not keep us from experimenting with new roles for either sex. Let each congregation be guided by this question: how are both our men and our women being stretched so that more of God’s glory may flow through them? If a man has a calling and ability to deliver sermons, let him do so. If a woman has a calling and ability to bring in the flowers for the sanctuary, let her do so. But equally, if the Spirit wishes to reverse the roles, we should never allow our left brain to hinder God’s work.

Can Humans Flourish Without Therapy?

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Inevitably, whenever there is a conversation about therapy, somebody will proclaim that back in the day nobody knew what therapy was, and didn’t they get on just fine without it. Then, after pausing to bask in their fond nostalgia, they might add something like, my goodness, I bet everyone led happier lives without therapy, that in fact *in some cultures today* they still don’t have therapy, and aren’t they some of the happiest people out there and isn’t suicide pretty much nonexistent in Africa, et cetera.

You can tell from the way I’m setting this up that I take issue with this line of thinking. My reasons are numerous, but one of the primary ones is that therapy has improved my life. As the blind fellow Jesus healed in John 9 might have said, “I do not know who or what is sinful, one thing I do know, I was blind and now I see.” The advantage of therapy, provided you are lucky enough to find a good therapy program, is that it gives sight to your blindness. It brings resources for navigating this treacherous maze we call life, and at the end of the day resources are resources no matter their origin.

Notice I said, provided you find a good program. There is a growing number of people criticizing therapy today, and as far as I can tell they all get caught in the same trap: they assume all therapy is the same. But saying all therapy is bad is like saying all food is bad. Any humans dependent on nutrients for survival are going to need food. So also any humans whose lives got messed up–say, by school bullies or war or their parents’ abandonment or spiritual abuse or witnessing an armed bank robbery–need therapy if they wish to flourish. And how does the percentage of people who get messed up psychologically compare with the percentage of people who need nutrients? Hint, it’s the same number in both cases and it has 3 digits.

There are various ways to delineate approaches to therapy. One helpful way is to think of formal therapy versus informal therapy. In the past few years, I have been enrolled in a specific formal model of therapy known as Internal Family Systems (IFS). If you are at all into therapy, you have probably come across it because it’s trending, but if you haven’t, here is a quick summary. IFS envisions the human person as made up of many parts. As the title of Richard Schwartz’s book says, there are “No Bad Parts,” only good parts that are stuck and must be loved into change.

We get to know our myriad parts–whether firefighters, managers, protectors, or exiles–by communicating with them, and even thanking them for the role they have played. No matter how ‘off course’ the parts have been, so goes the theory, they don’t have bad intentions. If we shame our parts, they might go into exile, and we will have fallen that much further behind in the process of finding redemption for them. And let’s remember they can rear their heads again at any moment. Of course, we can always employ the services of a screaming exorcist, and he or she may even appear to be successful, but as often as not God will change our parts the same way God changes people: through love and patience, and free from violence and denunciation.

In my experience, it is a hopeful and redemptive approach to therapy. And it never promises a panacea, as is the criticism (sometimes valid) of so many other kinds of therapy. In fact, IFS is a direct rebuttal to the burgeoning number of quick fixes out there. It is premised on the assumption that communication with our parts will continue the rest of our lives. “Thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom” (Psalm 51:6). I don’t mean to proof-text, but I can’t help but think verses like this anticipate IFS. As it says in the Epistle to the Romans, “The good that I would, I do not,” and then later, “Present your members as slaves to righteousness.” Yet how can we present our members for righteousness if we are not acquainted with them?

The central idea is not to blame our bad parts but to listen to them, show compassion to them, and engage them so we can gain clarity about our condition. Schwartz identifies 8 C words to recenter us if we are caught in anxiety or shame or other dysfunctional states of mind. My graphic below shows each C-word on points of a star. When we are stuck in the shadowlands (the words in red), the C-words help us find the path back to our true self or, as we might say in the Christian faith, to our identity in Christ.

Like any healthy therapy, IFS does not purport to be the only show in town. But does it nonetheless make life more doable? You already know my answer is yes. That does not mean there are no other paths to self-knowledge and healing, perhaps even some paths that are less formal and thus more playful. Long ago when people still read books, we got self-knowledge and inner healing through literature. Now, for better or for worse, many learning institutes have replaced literature modules with psychology modules. In some sense, formal therapy (psychology) has superseded informal therapy (literature). There are many things to lament about our decreased literary appreciation and the insights into human nature that came with it, but that is no reason to reject models like IFS.

I offer one final way to distinguish among different types of therapy: narcissistic versus interpersonal. The public perception around therapy tends to change from one generation to the next. As Trevor Noah says, “Longer ago, you would have avoided telling a potential dating partner that you’re in therapy, but now it could very well be a selling point.” I am optimistic that at least some of the people in our generation go to therapy with the aim of becoming mature, productive members of society. Therapy, if it is to be effective, requires something from us. It is hard work. Therapy naysayers are correct that navel-gazing for its own sake gets us nowhere. But it is also true that exploring our past story in the right way really can help us find healing and flourishing in the present.

To sum up, we have all been broken and wounded. God can use any instrument to heal us, but the path to healing will never happen in a vacuum. In its most general definition of the word, therapy is nothing more or less than our path to redemption and healing. The human experience is not for wusses. Our path may be winding and may even include some shock therapy. But whatever the path, we ought not to shun God’s instrument of healing.

Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Ephesians 6:13, somehow at once slightly twee and profound (welcome to The Message), puts it well: “Be prepared. You’re up against far more than you can handle on your own. Take all the help you can get, every weapon God has issued, so that when it’s all over but the shouting you’ll still be on your feet.”

Thus Saith the Lord, Slow Thyself Down

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

I committed two highly avoidable (and highly costly, for a working family) blunders in the last six months.

However, my frustration did not reach its fever pitch until yesterday. I arrived late for my morning class because: a. I encountered snarls of traffic after dropping the girls off at school and b. I then still took the time to pick up some miscellaneous hardware at the local Screwfix. In my frenzy, I wretchedly parked on a double yellow line, a fact I was not fully cognizant of until I got out of class three hours later, whereupon I found a menacing yellow clamp on my front driver’s side tyre.

After paying the 60-euro fine, I had to wait nearly two hours for ‘yer man’ to come de-clamp me, by which time I was twenty minutes late for my afternoon class on another campus. My English language students were patiently waiting and greeted me with pleasant smiles. I gave them an impromptu lesson on the words clamp, de-clamp, and government overreach.

That was actually the final lapse of judgment in a series of three. I haven’t even told you about the first two:

  1. I hastily put some kind of inferior, off-road fuel into our brand-new lawnmower. Obviously, I was trying to save money, but I had to pay 60 euros to have the fuel lines drained. Just like the de-clamp: 60 euros. That must be my default stupid tax.
  2. Then, the other day in the final lap of the final mowing of the season, I was mowing too close to the conservatory window, which caused a stone to ricochet up and shatter a significant portion of the same.

Esther says it only goes to show I’m not really a fully-functional adult but only posing as one. Actually, what she said was, “This means you are spinning so many plates that a few of them have to shatter.” I said, “Thank you, dear wife, that’s a very charitable reading of the situation.”

But I also think I have absorbed the lie that I am infallible and infinite. The reality is that I am profoundly limited. My plan for the next few years is to earn and learn (finishing a degree in English and Religious Studies, yay!). Moreover, I am trying to pour my attention into my daughters before they cross the Rubicon into adolescence, not that I expect all communication to be cut off at that point, just that it might become more complicated. All these endeavors require serious energy and time and I don’t have much left over.

At any rate, last evening as I did the examen*, the Lord said, slow the ____ down! John Mark Comer, citing Dallas Willard, said that the only spiritual advice we really need to follow is, “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry.” I try to take that onboard, more because Willard said it than Comer. Somehow, he comes across as superficial, but I know that’s a harsh evaluation. At any rate, I did read Comer’s book on ruthlessly eliminating hurry–albeit on 1.45 speed!.

Several specific actions I could take to train me to slow down:

  1. Set the timer for one minute and do nothing.
  2. Ride out the impulse for checking my phone. Time how long the impulse lasts. Work on building the concentration muscle.
  3. Say out loud several things that could go wrong in any given situation. It sounds stressful, but I think it might help me close the loop between what my subconscious is trying to tell me and the realm of the fully conscious.

* No, I don’t have elite spiritual practices, the examen is just something I stumbled across through an odd sequence of events, i.e., reading the above-mentioned J.M. Comer, as well as his holiness, the Bishop of Waterford, recommending it. It really does work. Surprise, surprise, right? It’s not like it hasn’t been around for 5 centuries.

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The other morning I read a news headline out loud as we ate breakfast: “There were three executions in the US in the last week.”

My 10-year-old daughter’s instinctive response: “How are the bad guys ever going to learn if the government kills them?”

My 7-year-old daughter’s equally fast rejoinder: “Yeah, and don’t cops know the murders have a bad mental illness!”

I smiled paternally but could not help agreeing. The catalogue of explanations for their responses surely includes the following:

  1. They are speaking from the God-given sense of right and wrong.
  2. Their parents indoctrinated them;
  3. They have lived in western Europe for too long.

Sorry for all the lists in this post.