My daughter called me this week. She is at a mission thing for almost six months. The first half of this is training. The second half is a trip abroad to share the gospel.
I'm at work attempting to resolve some programming design issues with a colleague when the call comes. She never calls me. So naturally I think this could be bad: someone died, she decided to marry someone she's now known for a month, something.
It was none of these things though it involved a lot of tears on her part and befuddlement on mine. In essence, she called to confess to me her short comings towards me. The gist of her confession was this: She was sorry she hadn't lived her life honestly before me; that she hadn't shared the things that were important to her; that she should have shared how she saw God working in her life and just how important God was to her. This was important to confess because if she couldn't share all this with me how then could she share God in the country she was going to.
So did anyone else in the family get this phone call? Nope, just me. Why would that be? Because I am the only non-believer in the family? Yeah, I think so. I don't honestly know what she was thinking. The phone call lasted less than 10 minutes and I had work to do. I just wanted to say the right things and get back to work. This may sound a little cold but I was under a lot of stress at work and the last thing I really needed was this emotionally overwrought daughter confessing imaginary sins. And, too, what could I say? I suppose I could have responded with caustic remarks about her imaginary friend. I did tell her that if she imagined a lack of honesty in her life, it must be toward herself since I had no particular expectations. I know she is a committed Christian. I know she has an interest in long term missions. Though I am against such things, I wrote a sizable check to finance this trip. Why? I'll have to think about an answer to that, but for now we can say that I acknowledge that each person's journey is his or her own.
So here is my theory as to what was happening noting that for the purpose of this post that it doesn't actually matter whether I am right: The group she was with created this environment in which it was possible to believe that she was unworthy for various short comings but also one in which she could be redeemed. If it sounds a little cult like, it is because it is. The group isn't particularly dangerous; it's just that this is the way all religious groups work. Hell, it's the way that all groups operate in which membership and belonging are highly prized. Perhaps my daughter decided that my loss of faith was her fault like a child who thinks that its parents' divorce is its fault. Perhaps she imagined that if she said all these things and professed strongly that “My God is everything” that maybe I would become a Christian.
My befuddlement comes from this. I had been a Christian for 44 years before I changed my mind. I, I, raised my daughter to be a Christian. She sat as a preteen and teenager under my teaching of adults so she could get the deeper, more intellectual, components of Christian thought. Though my wife was very important to answering tough questions, I got the toughest. Why is it she would think these things? Doesn't she know I have thought her thoughts? Doesn't she know I've had her doubts? Doesn't she know I've prayed until my tears dried up? Doesn't she know I wanted to save the world? “Daddy, I've seen lives changed!” Yeah, kiddo, so have I ... and lived long enough to see through the illusion. She wants to be come from church and tell me what profound new thing she's learned. Well, that's fine. I want my children to be able to talk to me. Nevertheless, in the context of the confession one supposes that she wants to use each and every opportunity to convert me. Not only is that a nuisance, it is offensive. Am I prize to be won? Am I an object? How about treating me like a person who does not wish to be importuned? This desire of hers (however, temporary I may hope it to be) doesn't seem to be about connecting with her father, but rather to absolve guilt.
The first time I remember becoming aware of emotional manipulation I was a freshman in high school. I attended a Christian school. They actually took the better part of a week off from classes to have a team from some conservative college come and minister to us. (It might have been Bob Jones University or Pensacola Bible College; I don't quite recall but it would have been a school very much like these.) For the entire time, they had rooms set aside where people could go to pray and be ministered to by those team members who weren't singing, acting, or preaching. On the last day or perhaps the next to last day, I felt the call to go and get right with God. The pressure was intense. One of my fellow sympathetic students commented after we were dismissed that he could see my conflict. I rocked back and forth in my seat trying to decide whether to go or to stay seated. Eventually, I went to one of the rooms. As it happened, nobody came to minister to me. I was on my own. I cried out to God. I confessed sins I had confessed many years before though we are reassured that once forgiven, always forgiven. I confessed real sins those that I might possibly be guilty of though I had never thought of them before that very moment. Eventually, I was worn out. I had managed to catch my breath and feel like I had re-established an equilibrium. So I returned to the auditorium. Immediately, immediately(!), I felt the pressure return. I interpreted this as a sign I needed to go forward and share my experience. (They had a microphone set aside for people to do that.) Almost as soon as I decided to do that, the service was over. And, as quickly as it came, the pressure left.
This all was very odd to me. I'm glad I was mature enough to grasp what was occurring, though it took me a few years to articulate it. In a setting with my peers who were responding to the message, I felt intense pressure. I would leave and the feeling would leave. (Yes, it left the first time too; I just felt the need to follow through with the decision to call out to God.) I would enter and the pressure came again. Time to go? Pressure gone again. Now one would think that if God were talking to me, he would continue to do so as I walked out for some privacy. However even as I called out to God in one of the back rooms, I was met with cold, dead silence. You would think if I were “convicted,” God would give guidance as to what was expected of me. Nothing. Nada. Silence. Yet when I returned to the auditorium, the feeling returned too. As the day and even weeks progressed, there was no internal sense that there was anything real about the spiritualness of the experience. You would think that the touch of the hand of God would persist beyond the moment.
I suppose that there are those for whom the experience persists. Nevertheless, it did not for me. So what conclusion could I draw from this but that emotions are illusory. I mean, surely God could communicate to me outside the auditorium, couldn't he? Was I manipulated? I think so. Emotions do not seem to be an indication of a should or ought but rather are a barometer of one's response to one's environment. I would not suggest that one should ignore one's emotions, but rather that one should pay attention to them as a means of self assessment.
I imagine that all of us have witnessed people's feelings manipulated by an experience only to have them dissolve when removed from the experience. Movies are made of people who make decisions based on passionate feelings only to have disastrous consequences. Movies are also made of those who follow their brains only to have that backfire, too. I am not suggesting that movies are an indication of importance, but rather it is an indication of the human experience.
Since that time, years ago, I have distrusted environments that are designed or contrived to make you feel something. I don't like movies architected to make you feel a particular way. (Of late, I've grown sympathetic to movies that make me feel—if and only if I am convinced that people would really behave that way and that the movie isn't artificial in telling the story. Fiddler On The Roof moves me to tears sometimes. It feels authentic to me.) When I was a Christian, I could get involved in the music but I disliked services that seemed designed to work people up emotionally. It always seemed to me that if one didn't feel the emotion, then you weren't truly worshiping. Such a perspective always seem to favor a particular kind of person. Those of us who were born to respond to our environment as rationally as we can muster are defined into the class of the unspiritual. Though that doesn't bother me now, the implication of being a lesser person still makes me angry. Those that are supposed to understand people best completely fail to understand the range of personality types this world has.
These days, though I try not to be cocky, I feel somewhat immune to being emotionally manipulated into doing something I would not otherwise do. It is probable that I can be manipulated into doing something that doesn't inherently violate my integrity.
I'll have to think longer on what I may do or say with respect to my daughter. I think she was manipulated into feeling guilt about who she was. In turn, I think she was manipulating me. I don't think that this is necessarily a conscious thing that Christians (or any religionists) do, though for some it certainly calculated. It is however a natural tool in the human arsenal to get what we want.
Awareness of this tactic, I think, is the single most effective way to disarm the manipulator. If someone is manipulating you with emotions, take a cold hard look at the situation and then act according to your integrity.
No comments:
Post a Comment