Comfort food and Western medicine are killing us.

Posted on August 14, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I know a lady whose adult daughter has Crohn’s disease. She has done well with it for several years, but it has flared up again. She is recently divorced and has moved back in with her parents.

Her mom wondered if she should buy her a Blizzard from Dairy Queen after she found out the test results weren’t good. Uh. No. As another person said – what health condition would that be good for?

But it isn’t physical health she is trying to treat. She is hoping to soothe with food. We do this a lot. We soften the blows of life with ice cream and cake and brownies.

These are celebration foods. Perhaps what we are trying to do is “turn that frown upside down”. Perhaps by eating the same foods we eat at parties we are trying to trick our brains into thinking that everything is fine. We aren’t in the middle of a bad situation. We are at a party!

But junk food never fixes anything. Good food will fix quite a bit. Exercise will always help.

I’m not sure how we got to the point that we treat the symptom rather than addressing the cause. I’m not sure how we have become reactive rather than proactive. I’m not sure how we have become so passive about our health and our lives.

I know that I’m not playing that game anymore. Sometimes I think I want to go back to school to learn how to be a nutritionist, or a life coach, or anything that helps people prevent their own suffering. But then I think I can’t save the world. It seems like such a logical thing – eat well and exercise and you’ll do fine (barring accidents). Eat terribly and be a couch potato, and you’ll suffer. But that is the way of things. I don’t think we’ve always been this way, but we sure are now. Our medical institutions don’t help either. Coughing? Take a pill. Diabetes? Take a pill. There is no education on how to get well.

Doctors who made a pledge to “do no harm” aren’t doing any good either.

Where does the change start? I think it has to start with us. We have to take control of our own health and lives. We have to essentially homeschool ourselves on our health and wellbeing. The more we expect others to do for us, the more passive we are. And the more passive we are, the more we will fall behind.

Shame

Posted on August 1, 2013 by betsybeadhead | 3 Comments

Why is it that the person who has been attacked feels shame? The person who was abused by a parent wasn’t the person to blame. The person who was raped was the recipient, not the aggressor. The person who is the recipient of violence is most often female, but is sometimes male. Abuse isn’t exclusive. And the abuser or rapist isn’t always male. Physically, emotionally, sexually, abuse is abuse.

For the sake of simplicity I will say “she” for the person who is abused or raped and “he” for the abuser or rapist. I’m concerned I’m perpetuating a stereotype, so I want to be sure that it is understood that anybody can be attacked, and anybody can be the attacker. But our language has no appropriate third person singular, and saying “his or her” all the time is tedious, so I’m doing it this way.

I’m also making a point of not using the term “victim”. That is part of this. I believe that if she identifies herself as “victim” then she is perpetuating the violence that was done against her. More often though, the person who was attacked feels shame. They act as if they did something to deserve this. They feel shame so they don’t go to the police. They feel shame so they don’t go to the hospital or to a counselor.

Shame is another word for guilt. When a person feels shame, she feels as if she caused the problem. She feels that she brought it on herself. She feels responsible.

This is so totally backwards. The abuser, the rapist is the guilty party. The one he attacked is passive.

You do not cause someone to attack you. It has nothing to do with what you wear or what you said. Now, yes, I’ve recently written a post saying that women should dress modestly to protect themselves. I also think it is a good idea to get a handgun carry permit and take self-defense classes. Prevention, you know. But sometimes you can’t get out of the way of a problem, and there are a lot of damaged people out there who are ready to cause a problem with you.

One thing to notice is that the attacker is giving control of his emotions and actions to everyone else. The attacker blames other people for his losing control.

When Dad gets home from one of his many business trips, he has no right to beat his child for breaking something. His child is a child, and it was an accident. He has no right to yell at his child. His short temper is his fault, his failing.

Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

The same is true of anger.

But how is it that the person who is attacked feels shame, feels guilt? Do we teach that in our society? Is that normal? Is it something that is part of being attacked?

It certainly isn’t helpful. It renders the person who was attacked open to more attacks. It opens her up to abuse from not just the original abuser, but new ones. Bullies can spot weakness.

Again – that is not the fault of the person who is bullied. The bullies need to be responsible for their actions. It is not the “weak” kid’s fault that she gets her lunch money stolen from her – that is the fault of the bully. It is important to remember where the blame goes.

The odd part is that bullies themselves were often abused. Instead of feeling shame however, the bully learns that abusing others is normal. The bully patterns his actions on this warped lesson. The way to feel bigger is go make another feel smaller.

Stop bullying. Easy to say. Tell us how to do it.

Stop feeling shame for being abused. Stop thinking you are a victim. Again, easy to say. Hard to do.

I think there is something to teaching everyone that it is important to say no, to establish boundaries. That this is what you are willing to take, and this isn’t. Perhaps there is something to learning how to dialogue, versus debate. It helps if people can express their opinions without having to be “right” or “wrong” – but just be different.

I used to feel guilty for saying no, for telling someone that I wasn’t OK with what I was being asked to do. I’ve spent too much of my life feeling resentful that my life wasn’t my own. Even reading books about how to find my own voice, how to establish boundaries, I felt awkward. How dare I stand up for myself.

It was painful to read those books. It was like having to re-break a badly-healed leg. Emotionally, it was as if my family had broken my legs and because I’d not been allowed to get treatment, they’d healed badly. I was walking with an emotional limp. I just got used to it. It became my “normal”. Reading those books made me have to look at that wound again, and realize how it was affecting my life, and every relationship I had. I had to re-break those bones and let them heal again.

Emotional wounds hurt just as much as physical ones. And they are harder to spot. A broken leg – that sticks out. A broken spirit? That is much harder to spot. The damage runs deep there, and affects every part of your life.

But somewhere in the middle of reading those books, I was standing up for myself, and realizing that I wasn’t a victim, and I wasn’t to blame. By reading those books I was taking control of what had happened.

There is no shame in being abused. There is shame in being an abuser. You aren’t to blame for what happened to you. You are, however, responsible for what you do afterwards. You are responsible for your own actions, not the actions of others.

It isn’t stealing if you give it away.

Posted on May 10, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Perhaps you have read about the New Hampshire man who recently lost his life savings on a carnival game. For some reason he thinks that he was cheated. There is something seriously wrong going on here, and it isn’t with the carnival game.

Perhaps it was rigged. That is par for the course with carnival games. It is how they stay in business. But they didn’t have a gun to his head. He felt cheated by them, but he let it happen.

The man is 30 years old, and his life savings amounted to $2,600. That alone is kind of sad. I certainly understand it. I’ve been there. This is the American way. Don’t think about the future at all. Don’t save, don’t plan ahead, don’t think about the repercussions of your actions. This is why people who smoke for years get surprised that they get lung cancer.

There is something very dangerous in this way of thinking. We are asleep when we think like this. But let us continue with the facts of the story.

He was trying to win an Xbox Kinect. They cost anywhere from $200 to $300 based on the capacity of the model.

He was playing a game called Tubs of Fun. The object is to toss balls into a tub. The problem is that the balls kept popping out the further he got into the game. He kept playing, and spending more money.

This is the very definition of throwing good money after bad.

He lost $300 to start off with. He would have been better off just buying the console, but by then he was hooked. He said “You just get caught up in the whole ‘I’ve got to win my money back.’”

Then it gets even worse. He went home. He didn’t keep working on impulse and the excitement of the game. He had time to cool off. But he didn’t. He got the rest of his money ($2,300) and went back to the carnival and continued to play the game. He lost all of it.

He did however win a stuffed banana with dreadlocks.

He contacted the police and is considering a lawsuit. The company that put on the carnival has since pulled the game and is interviewing the contractor of the game.

It isn’t the game that is at fault.

I find it doubtful that you can sue anybody for taking what you hand them. He wasn’t robbed. He got caught up in the game. He had time to cool off and didn’t use it. Nobody forced him to play the game.

“For once in my life I happened to become that sucker,” he said. “It was foolish for putting up my life savings.”

It is a sad story. It isn’t unfortunate. There wasn’t bad luck involved. There were a series of bad decisions. It is sad because he lost a lot of money for no good reason. It is sad because he didn’t know when to stop. It is sad because he still thinks it is somebody else’s fault that he threw away his money.
We have to stop letting ourselves be victims of our own lack of attention. We have to start being intentional. We have to wake up. We have to think about the repercussions of our actions, and our lack of action.

On ministers, and spoon-fed faith.

Posted on April 14, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I’m wrestling with the idea of ministers. I’m wrestling with it from several directions. I have an issue with ordained ministers. I have an issue with people who aren’t ordained and call themselves ministers. Then I have an issue with the entire idea of ministers at all. So I’m going to try to work out where I’m coming from and where I’m going by writing about it.

I believe that each person has within them a unique perspective. I think that each person’s insight into what is Truth is valuable. I liken it to the story of the five blind men and the elephant. Each person in the story was touching a different part of the elephant and each person thought they had the whole thing. They thought that their particular understanding of what they were experiencing was truth. But each person was wrong because they only had a small part of it. It was only when they started comparing what they were experiencing did they start to understand that the elephant was far bigger than they had apprehended. This story is usually used to illustrate how each faith tradition should interact with each other and that no one faith has a lock on who God (YHWH, Allah, The Divine, the Creator…) is. But I expand this story. I use it to point out that each person’s understanding of God is valuable. Everybody needs to share.

With a top-down lead church, with a minister in charge, nobody gets to share. It is a passive experience. The people sit and listen to one person say what God is. Perhaps some people need that for a while. Perhaps they need a God with training wheels. But I’d rather them learn that they are strong enough to ride on their own.

I have a big problem with the entire idea of people being passive about their faith. I think it is dangerous. I think our souls are too important to be handed over to another person. I think we all need to be accountable to each other, and we need to be in community. I’m not about mavericks. But I think everybody needs to participate in the conversation as to who God is. When we entrust our spiritual health and our spiritual path to one person it is giving away our own power.

I believe that knowing Truth is like looking into the heart of a diamond. I believe that each person sees the heart of the diamond in a different way. What you see is valid for you, and what I see is valid for me. Together, when we compare notes, we gain a better understanding of what is there.

Then these pop-up strip-mall churches concern me. There is no training. Would you go to a doctor who gets his authority just because he says he is a doctor? He hasn’t been to medical school. As far as you know he hasn’t even read a medical book. He believed that he has a gift for healing so he says he is a doctor and starts accepting patients. He also has no oversight. There is no established authority over him that monitors what he does. There is no recourse when he does something wrong. So why not have the same training and oversight for a self-proclaimed minister? If you are going to say you are in charge of the spiritual health of others, then it is important that you aren’t going to mislead them.

There is a guy in California who styles himself Archbishop Carl Bean. He founded the Unity Fellowship of Christ Church in Los Angeles. Archbishop? Really? Is that all it takes? Get people to listen to your take on the Bible and then apparantly you can call yourself anything you want. Most of the links on his church’s website are asking for donations for his retirement fund. I find this highly suspicious. I had a coworker whose grandfather started the church that he goes to. The grandfather’s title is Bishop. Again, we have the same issue. Start a church, get a title. Something seems very wrong about this. I also know of a lady in Nashville who calls herself “Minister Lois Grady”. She uses this title on her book and her Facebook page. I know people who are ordained priests who don’t use their title on their Facebook page. They’ve had three years of graduate school and gone through enough paperwork to kill several trees and more committees than the President meets with to get that title. In every mainline church there are rules about who gets to be called Bishop or any other title. You can’t just declare yourself Bishop. You can’t just declare yourself a minister, either, which is the first step.

But then what does Jesus say about ministers? Let’s look at Matthew 23: 8-12. Jesus says “8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. 9 And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. 10 Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” (NRSV)

So it sounds like Jesus is against the idea of anybody calling themselves “Father” or “Rabbi” or “Teacher” – or any other title indicating authority.

None of the apostles were ordained. Neither was Saint Francis, who founded the order of the Franciscans. Neither was Mother Theresa.

Then there is the idea that every person who is a baptized Christian is a minister. We are all called to preach the Gospel, the good news that God loves us and has forgiven us of all our mistakes and faults. We are all commanded to love and show love. In the same way that Jesus loved, we are to love.

There are faiths where there are no ordained ministers. Quaker and Sikh are two that come to mind. But then there are establishing faiths that have a very strict system in place to ordain ministers, and that is still not a guarantee that they are any good. They can in fact be criminals in cassocks. Just because you have passed a criminal background check does not mean that you won’t ever break a law in the future. And when they do break laws, their crimes are covered up so they can continue to damage their congregants. So being ordained and part of a faith tradition that says there is oversight is no guarantee of safety or true teaching.

I’m not alone in seeing problems with the church. There are Facebook groups called “Christians for a Change”, “Christians tired of being misrepresented,” “Kissing fish: Christianity for people who don’t like Christianity,” and “The Christian Left.” There are hundreds of books talking about how it is time to strip away a lot of the “stuff”

I believe each person needs to take an active role in their faith. I believe that every person needs to wrestle with their faith in a similar manner as Jacob. I believe that each person needs to read every holy scripture from every faith tradition. I believe that people need to stop having their faith spoon-fed to them.

On “Apostolic Succession” and ordained leaders

Posted on December 30, 2012 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Originally posted on FB 11-21-12

The Episcopal church and the Catholic church have something called “apostolic succession”. This means that we can trace our roots back to the apostles. This means that when somebody gets confirmed or received into these churches, they have hands laid on them by somebody who had hands laid on them, by somebody who had hands laid on them, all the way back to Jesus. This is pretty overwhelming to think about. It really connects you with the “then” – it becomes the “now”.

I was telling a co-worker about this and he said they were apostolic at his church too. I felt like explaining that his little church that his grandfather started, this little church that has self-appointed ministers and no oversight, is not part of this story. But I didn’t, and I’m glad.

It is. All churches are. All Christians are.

The touch doesn’t matter – it is the message. And the only way you are going to hear the message of who Jesus is and what he did for you and what he continues to do for you is going to be from another Christian. Either it is by them talking to you personally, or from reading in a book. This stuff doesn’t spring up out of the ground. Yes, we are told that even if there is nobody to preach the Gospel, even the rocks will proclaim it, but I think there is no need for that. There are plenty of people around who can and will tell their story of who Jesus is and what he has done for them without having rocks start talking.

Each person heard the story from someone who heard the story from someone who heard the story who was there with Jesus (except for Paul, but he is a special case). So the whole idea of how special it is that these churches have apostolic succession is bunk. We all have apostolic succession.

This also ties into the idea of ordained ministers. Not every organized religion has leaders who are set apart and specially trained. The Sikhs are the first example that comes to my mind. Then there are also Quakers and the Baha’i. Some have leaders who are respected as leaders because they have through their lives shown especial piety and reverence, so they are trusted and looked to. However, the moment they start veering from the path, their fellow members of the congregation will call them on it.

Now – the only way they can call them on it is if they themselves know the path. The only way they can know the path is if they too practice piety and study. I’ve heard in the Eastern Orthodox church that each member is expected to read the Bible for themselves and to study and pray just as much as their Pope does. Their Pope also considers himself to be an equal with them – he is not infallible, he is not above question. In fact, the idea that he can be questioned and challenged is part of what keeps him forever accountable. That accountability is what keeps him humble and honest and not grabbing for power. That power isn’t ours to grab. That power is received by us to then be distributed by us. We are not called to hoard power.

I think the moment you give away your own power, your own religious learning and study, and you expect a religious leader to do it all for you, you have become lost. Yes, it is good to have people you trust, people who have studied. It is good for each member of the community to be accountable to each other member. But it is also good for each member of the community to build each other up with their own skills and knowledge. Each person has unique skills and experience. Each person’s viewpoint is helpful. Remember the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant? It is only through them talking together and sharing their perception of what they were dealing with that they were able to understand the whole.

I’m going to be bold here and say that I think that is also true of world religions. I think God has called to His creation time and time again. I think God has constantly tried to get us to hear and know that He loves us and wants us to work with Him to make this a better world. I think we short-change ourselves when we only hear one voice and one perspective. Look at the Gospels. Those are four different viewpoints of the same story. They could have been woven together and created into one story, but they weren’t. Sure, you can buy something called a Parallel Gospel and that will put them all together for you. But that is extra. If you buy a Bible with a New Testament, you are going to get four different yet the same stories all telling you who Jesus was. Some stress different parts. Some have the same parables repeated. Some have parts that only are in that one Gospel. Where’s the truth? I say the truth is in all of them, all together. I tell you that it is up to us to winnow through and separate the wheat from the chaff, but we have to go out into the field.