THE FALLEN CLERIC

I could almost count the number of teachers who really inspired me on one hand.

• 5th grade – Mrs. Leep.  Made my rough transition to a new school district a little less bumpy. I knew she cared about me.
• 7th grade – Mr. Creech.  Gym teacher.  I hated gym, but he loved his job, loved his students, and treated us with respect.  Great sense of humor.
• 7th/8th grade – Mr. Abitz.  Incredibly gifted vocal music teacher who believed in me and invested in me as a person.
• 8th grade – Mr. Yoder.  English.  Inspiring energy, enthusiasm, and love both for his students and his job.
• 10th grade – Mrs. Hobart-Parks.  American Lit.  Passionate, enthusiastic, inspiring, amazing.
• 12th grade – Mr. Hardy.  Advanced Creative Writing.  Energy and enthusiasm off the scale.  In class, that is.  Very introverted outside the classroom, which constantly reminds me that I can be who I am and still leave an impact.
• Miss Bird, my high school vocal music teacher, goes into a special category.  Though I  never sensed a deep personal connection with her, she had a knack for creating intense feelings of community in her classes, and many of my closest friends today are friends I made in choir.  In her 1st hour Show Choir class in 1985, I became good friends with Christy Weidman.  This February Christy and I will celebrate our 22nd anniversary.  Thank you, Miss Bird. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving…
• College – Dr. Wrobel.  Testing and Assessment (Psychology).  Energy and humor that helped me do well in a class I dreaded taking.  Dr. Wrobel took a personal interest in me and helped me find my way.
• College – Dr. Frank.  Personality Theory.  When I found out I had MS in 1990, Dr. Frank said to me, "Here’s what I want you to do.  I want you to get up every morning and say to yourself these three things – 1. It’s a beautiful day.  2. I’m going to do everything I want to do today.  3. I’m in control of all my muscles.  You can still make your life what you want it to be."  Know why I remember all three of those lines today?  Because I chanted that mantra every day for a year.

Okay, not quite one hand.  But not quite two either.

These were my giants – teachers who towered far above the rest, even above some who were fantastic in their own rite, excellent people, and skilled communicators of their subject matter.  Still, these were my giants.  Most of us have a few giants.  Nearly all of us can recall teachers who deeply impacted our lives, and usually their impact had little or nothing to do with the subject they taught. 

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You could win a Starbuck’s gift card because of this post.  Read on.  We have done a thing a few times at my church called “Ask the Pastor,” where people from the congregation submit questions to me via email and on paper, and I dedicated a special service to attempting to answer those questions.  It’s important to me to know that I’m addressing the things people wonder about and need to hear.

So what would you like me to write about?  Now don’t get me wrong.  With or without your input, the blog will continue!  But what I have noticed is that some posts will get 30 or 40 readers in a day, and other posts will get 200 or 300 readers in a day.  I believe the post topic has a lot to do with that.  For example, yesterday’s post on suicide drew a large number of readers, and I think that’s because the topic is not only controversial, but also of immediate interest to people.

I write primarily in the areas of theology (things about God and spiritual matters), counseling (things about human thinking, feeling, problems, and relationships), and philosophical issues (fairly weighty yet non-religious questions about life).  I am looking for as many ideas as possible.  Ideas can be submitted to me at davethefallencleric@gmail.com.  I will accept submissions from now through 11:59 pm tomorrow, Thursday, October 29.  The person who submits the most ideas to me between now and that time will win a $10 Starbucks gift card.

Of course there is a catch or two.   (continue reading…)

DON’T STOP READING!!

No matter how much the word “meditation” makes you want to tune out, I encourage you to hang in there.  Hang in there, even though meditation is seen by many as some esoteric practice, meant only for a) monks, nuns, and the hard-core religious; b) kooky, or touchy-feely people, both of which probably watch way too much Oprah.

Meditation, in fact, can be a critical practice in  helping us to relieve much of our anxiety.  Although it should not be viewed only as an anti-anxiety tool, it certainly can play a signfiicant role there.  In this post I am going to attempt to explain the reason why meditation is needed, and I will do this primarily from the perspective of alleviating anxiety.

I have established in previous posts that the root of anxiety is our thinking.  Anxiety is what results when the basic fear response, common to all sentient beings, joins up with imagination (as far as we know, found only in humans).  In other words, without imagination, there can be no anxiety.  Anxiety is always fear of this or that possibility, and a possibility, by definition, is something that 1) has not yet happened, and therefore; 2) is imagined.  Since anxiety is the result of the fear response combining with imagination, then learning to focus on the present moment will alleviate anxiety.  Meditation (called by Christians “pure prayer,” or “silent prayer”) teaches this in a way so profoundly simple that it seems almost too good to be true — or too easy to be effective.  But it is both true and effective.

Have you ever been completely lost in the present moment?  I mean so absorbed in a moment that you completely forgot about yourself and your own existence?  Perhaps you were watching your children play, or maybe you were having sex that took you to a place beyond all thought, or completely immersed in something funny, or just having so much fun you were simply enjoying it.  There is never anxiety in those moments, because we are simply in the moment.  No conscious “thinking” is going on, we’re just riding that wave — whatever it may be — and loving it.  Though we will often think about these moments afterwards, the thinking was not necessary for enjoyment of these amazing moments.

Normally we think in order to solve problems.  We think in order to make plans.  We think in order to do our jobs.  We think in order to do well in school, and have good conversations, and raise our children prudently and skillfully.  We think in order to analyze our situations and make good decisions.  These are all healthy ways of thinking.  But when thinking runs amuck, you have anxiety.  (continue reading…)

In my last post I mentioned that the best way to overcome anxiety is not to face it head-on, but to undermine it — to subvert it.  This is just a way of saying that the old advice, “Try not to worry,” could not be more useless than it is.  When we try not to fall, we pay more attention to our balance, and thus we are less likely to slip up.  When we try not to look stupid, we pay more attention to our behavior and may be less likely to do something socially unacceptable.  But when we try not to worry, we pay more attention to what we are thinking, and this is the last thing we should be doing.

The kinds of things that work best for anxiety are things that keep you in the present moment.  Anxiety is nearly always about the future, so the more focused you can stay in the present moment, the better.  The follow four techniques came from my good friend Tim McVay, a practicing psychologist, who specializes in treating people with anxiety.  Tim shared these techniques with me when I called him in desperation a while back, and they are effective. (continue reading…)

Comedian Steven Wright describes chronic anxiety better than anyone else I’ve ever known.  I will paraphrase him loosely here:

You know that feeling when you’re sitting in a chair and you rock back on two legs and you go back too far and you start to fall, then at the last minute you catch yourself?  I feel like that all the time.

That’s it.  That’s what it feels like to live with anxiety.  It’s a feeling I wouldn’t wish on anyone I deem to be a basically valuable person my worst enemy.

I have worried for most of my life.  And I don’t mean worrying about normal stuff, like sliding into a ditch during a snowstorm, or about one of my kids when they are sick.  I mean making up stuff to worry about.  I mean watching the news (which, if you haven’t noticed, is always bad — and if it’s not, it’ll be spun that way anyway) and then taking it even further in my mind, spinning it into nightmares more horrible than any that would be spun on the AGBATT (All Glenn Beck All The Time) Channel.  Incidentally, this is how you get to have your own show on CNN — take a headline, run the story out to its ultimate dreadful conclusion, speak loudly and urgently, have experts on your show to agree with you or, hopefully, tell you that it’s probably much worse than you think, and combine it with flashy graphics and other high intensity entertainment pieces.  (If you’re unsure how to do any of this, from the fear-mongering to the flashy and entertaining graphics, simply visit most contemporary churches to learn how).

What was I talking about?  Oh yes, anxiety.  It’s amazing how our minds can take us from one thread to another to another, until eventually the stream of thoughts take on a life of their own and carry with them all the force of reality.  I am an expert at this.  I have seen things that would scare most people half to death.  I mean I’ve SEEN them.  In living color.  Playing on the screen of my mind.  Engulfing my emotions in wild flurries of helpless panic.  I have lived in this state for hours, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, at a time.  It doesn’t matter that they weren’t “real.”  My brain obviously didn’t know the difference, and generated the adrenalin and dread anyway.

Tons of people live with chronic anxiety and panic.  Some are reading this post, and I have a message for you.  You don’t have to live that way.  (continue reading…)