Category Archives: Love well

On Love as Medicine for Sick Souls

Last year was one of the more difficult periods of my life. The word “horror” comes to mind. Aside from a few years of teen angst and a few months living in the exurbs of Dallas, I’ve never really struggled with depression. Anxiety? Perfectionism? Sure, but not depression. So last winter, I was completely blindsided by an overwhelming sense of dread and hopelessness. It probably had something to do with being pregnant, but mostly I attribute it to living unwisely for a very long time.

During my doctoral program, I worked four jobs and commuted through L.A. traffic two or three times a week. I completed my dissertation in two semesters rather than five. And then a season of loss took its toll as well: I said goodbye to friends and family–home–when we moved from L.A. Said goodbye to a job I loved to be with Ellie and finish my dissertation. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to Laska, my sweet rescue dog, before she was shot and killed while staying at my parent’s. I almost said goodbye to Ellie when she contracted RSV.

Ultimately the piper demanded to be paid. The final straw was when winter came here to Holland, Michigan and I didn’t see the sun from November until May. There I was, great with child, staring at gray skies day after day, not knowing what was happening to me. Because of my pregnancy, I refused medication and took matters into my own hands. Although my doctorate is technically in leadership, my work focused also on spiritual formation and soul care. If I couldn’t help myself, well then, I had just paid several thousand dollars to learn something that couldn’t even make a difference in my own life.

Could I practice what I preached? Would it work? I asked myself, what I would say to someone if they came to me with the symptoms I had and I came up with a program of four steps to follow everyday: 1.) Scripture and prayer. My spiritual life needed to increase, not decrease, as is so often the temptation in times like this. 2.) Exercise. The body is important to our spiritual formation, and exercise benefits us not only physically but psychologically as well. 3.) Talk to people. Don’t isolate. 4.) Focus on others. Depression and anxiety become a microscope by which you analyze, over and over again, your own life and the problems you struggle with. Might turning this around and focusing on others, loving others well, get us out?

I made sure to do these steps every day. One, two, three, four, repeat. Of them all, I think number four had the most effect on my outlook, which really isn’t a surprise when you look at some of the research on clinical depression. Although it seems counterintuitive, high rates of depression correspond with high rates of self-absorption. In other words, depression is a vicious cycle because it makes us focus on our own problems, which in turn causes more depression.

See, I don’t think our problem is that we love ourselves too little–it’s that we love others too little. We are so quick to turn inward when things go wrong, and I believe that a great number of suffering people would benefit more by volunteering in a soup kitchen than sitting on a psychiatrist’s couch for an hour a week.

The way out is by loving others well. I’m not saying that medication is wrong or that this is the only solution–each case is different–but I am saying that loving others must be part of of any plan to get well and get whole. In the mind of Jesus, loving others flows out of our love for God. What is the greatest commandment? “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength.” The second is like it, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

That is why the second pillar of this blog is loving others–because it is crucial to our spiritual well-being. I don’t exactly know how to love others well, all the time, but that’s what I’ll be exploring here. I do know that we need one another, far more than we realize.

Let’s Talk About Sex (and Sadism)

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When my husband, Paul, tells me he’s going to spend Saturday morning at a meeting called Porn and Pancakes, I don’t even blink. I give him a kiss on the cheek and tell him to have

fun. Since before we were married, Paul’s worked as a therapist for men struggling with sexual addiction. Because of his job, I’ve heard more horror stories about the dark underbelly of the porn world than I care to think about or even count. But because of the violent nature of porn and way porn demeans women and causes a breakdown in relationships, I never thought that women would be drawn to the sexually violent, explicit material. Wouldn’t that, after all, be setting us back 50 years? Au contrare.

In the last few months, E.L. James’ first novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, has gone from an underground erotica novel to
mainstream literature, topping both the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists. Labelled “mommy porn”, Fifty Shades is the story of Anastasia Steele, a naive college student, and Christian Grey, a troubled young billionaire with a taste for BDSM. Fifty Shades, which began as fan fiction for the Twilight series, explores the relationship between the unlikely pair, complete with a plethora of NC-17 sexually violent sex scenes.

From radio to TV to online columns, people are raving about Fifty Shades, so in keeping with my commitment to stay on top of the popular literature in our time (a commitment that has introduced me to character greats like Harry Potter, Katniss Everdeen, and Lisbeth Salander), I read Fifty Shades. There is so much to be said about it. It’s poorly written with a terrible plot and poor character development. It’s hard evidence that the use of pornography and erotica is on the rise among women, that it’s not just part of some fringe culture (as I ~~naively~~ mistakenly thought), but mainstream. It is, indeed, a backsliding among a generation of women who take for granted their hard-won equality and fantasize about sexual subservience. It’s an illustration of how far our desires have fallen, how twisted and off-the-mark they have become.

But what concerns me most about the Fifty Shades phenomenon is how deceptive these fantasies are in how they twist the realities of violence against women. This week, The Atlantic published a story that documented the lives of six women from the Pakistani city of Karachi. Aeyesha, 18, was raped in her uncle’s house while she was trying to get bread for her family. Rehana, 37, says that since her husband sees her as an “animal with no rights”, broken ribs, broken teeth, and miscarriages are “routine”. Salma, 39, is often threatened with acid and cries in the shower when she sees her battered body, broken and bruised again and again by her husband.

These are only a few of the handful of stories emerging from Pakistan, the third most dangerous place in the world for women. in 2009, 8548 cases of domestic violence were reported in the four provinces of Pakistan. Four in five women face some form of domestic violence. But that’s Pakistan … surely things are not so grim in the Western world? Au contrare. In the U.S., the number of abused women falls to one in four, but domestic violence is still the leading cause of injury for women between the ages 15 and 44–more than car accidents, muggings, and rape combined. In America, a woman is beaten by her husband or partner every 15 seconds.

But Fifty Shades is all in good fun–it’s consenting sex, and after all, Anastasia is presented with a contract that if signed, will be her consent to be a Submissive. By signing the contract, she will knowingly be agreeing to stipulations such as, “The Dominant accepts the Submissive as his, to own, control, dominate, and discipline during the Term. The Dominant may use the Submissive’s body at any time during the Allotted Times or any agreed additional times in any many he deems fit, sexually or otherwise.”

The real harm in Fifty Shades–and other “literature” like it–is that it dulls our conscience to the hideous crime that domestic violence really is. Studies show that repeated exposure to violent pornographic material–(like Fifty Shades) is linked to more aggressive behavior. Feminist writers have rightfully long argued that pornography ”promotes a (cultural) climate in which acts of sexual hostility directed against women are not only tolerated but ideologically encouraged”.

(Un)Twisted Sisters

Marriage Matters: All the Single Ladies

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I never planned to get married at the early-spring age of 23. While all my friends were either pairing off or pining to do so, I was plotting how to live several years on each of the seven continents (yes, even chilly, dark, Antartica). Husbands and babies were the furthest thing from my mind, and at 23, I had room enough and time to be cavalier about my singleness. I knew my desire for adventure and my lack of desire for marriage were unusual, but I never felt insecure or ashamed.

All the Single Ladies According to the sprawling cover story of The Atlantic, had I remained single rather than choosing to marry, being a single female would no longer be that unusual. According to Kate Bolick, culture editor for Veranda magazine, more and more women are remaining single due to a shortage of “marriageable” men—men who earn more money and are more educated. The perfect storm of women’s ascent in society and the simultaneous decline in life prospects for men has led to a “crisis in gender” in which women must choose between deadbeats and players.

For Bolick, the economic crisis has split the dating pool into two camps: deadbeats who are unemployed, underemployed, or uneducated, and the playboys who eschew commitment because the demand for successful men outnumbers the supply. These changes come in conjunction with the tendency for people to marry later, marry less, and the ability to have a biological child without a physical partner.

Bolick argues that the world must come to grips about these changes in marriage, intimacy, and kinship in order to have less unhappy families. As an alternative to the nuclear family, she suggests the collaborative raising of children by a group of women who reside together—a variant of the social structure demonstrated by the Mosuo people in China.

Bolick makes some important critiques about the way society views single woman—as if they were adjuncts to society, incomplete in themselves. She urges others to not reduce women’s identity to just whom it is they do or do not marry, but to consider the depth and complexities of the network of relationships that emerge from our roles as daughters, friends, aunts, and cousins. Bolick makes her finest point when she resolves to accept her singleness. “If I stopped seeing my present life as provisional,” she writes, “perhaps I’d be a little more … happier.”

Still, a number of concerns surface in Bolick’s piece regarding the nature of marriage. First, Slate’s Jessica Grose offers an incisive critique that most of the twelve cover stories written by women have to do with nothing more than specific women’s issues. Second, Bolick states that due to the economy, single women must choose between deadbeats and players. Given that Bolick has more experience than I do in the dating game, I can take this at face value as her experience, but I have trouble equating men who have lost their jobs or have taken paycuts due to The Great Recession as “deadbeats.” Are marriageable men only those who make more than we do? Does that automatically make men “losers” if they don’t? Do we want gender parity, or to be able to marry up?

Second, she places the blame for the shifting state of marriage in America on the broad back of the women’s movement. Due to the women’s movement, we are putting off marriage, marrying less often, and have developed biological means to have children without a man. Although she doesn’t support her claim with evidence, a connection between the two can be reasoned. However, she takes this to nth degree when she proposes to raise children in families of women, and reduce the role of male to a sexual partner. This greatly diminishes the role and identity of men and minimizes the gratifying, mutually beneficial relationship that men and women were designed to have.

Bolick’s article is endearingly rambling—one feels as though they were along on the ride with her as she comes to grips with her singleness. Life experiences are, after all, very rarely as straightforward as a three-point essay. But her perceptions about marriage and men underscore the importance of Christians providing—by rhetoric and by example—a meaningful alternative to the prevailing views about marriage.

Our Own Worst Enemy

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When I think of female rivalry, that is, rivalry between women, I think of Cinderella and her step-sisters. I think of the rivalry between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. I think of the escapades of the women on Wisteria Lane in Desperate Housewives. What I’ve rarely considered in recent years is how female rivalry impacts my growth and development as a woman leader.

In 1990, Carolyn Heilbrun, a Jewish American, wrote a provocative book entitled Reinventing Womanhood. In this book, she claimed that the number one reason women failed to achieve in leadership positions was not because men kept barring their way to progress in achievement, but rather because of the failure of women to bond. For Heilbrun, a few women inevitably rose to positions of power and leadership, but because of the failure of women to bond, these women became not woman leaders, but rather honorary men.

Susan Shapiro Barash, in her book, Tripping the Prom Queen, takes the issue a little deeper. According to Barash, the world is still a patriarchal culture, and this fact sets the stage for female rivalry—because women feel that they have to constantly compete with one another for limited and scarce resources such as leadership positions.

Competition between females is nothing new, and it is strung throughout the biblical text, from Sarah and Hagar to Rachel and Leah. If Heilbrun and Barash are right, then the question becomes: are we our own worst enemy when it comes to striving to become better leaders? Until now, most of our attention has been focused on how men hold us back from leadership positions because men, in most cases are the gatekeepers. That is, they have the say on whether or not a woman is welcomed into a leadership position in the church. But have we looked long enough at what women do to each other? Have we been honest about how women in our churches and in our workplaces treat one another—either outright or subversively?

While I don’t completely agree with Heilbrun and Barash, and I think that their assessment of female rivalry is a little overblown, their research makes me pause to wonder what we can do to improve the relationships among woman so that women leaders feel more supported and encouraged by her female friends and counterparts.

And so I am curious, lady leaders, to hear your experiences. Have you felt supported and encouraged by other women as you seek leadership positions, or have you felt the sting of female rivalry when you achieved a great accomplishment?