A theme that has been important to me
Apr 12, 2015 4:27:27 GMT -5
CherieKropp, SharonArnold, and 10 more like this
Post by Alan Vandermyden on Apr 12, 2015 4:27:27 GMT -5
A scriptural theme that repeatedly presented itself to me, beginning in the fall of ’83, I believe (as I began my 3rd of 18 years in the work), was that of God getting people “alone,” where He could deal with him or her as an individual. I think in those early years I saw and defined this in terms of the “alone” experience, through which people were drawn into fellowship.
I may have seen this, in those years, as something like a “principle” running through the scriptures, but it all became very real to me soon after Jayne and I moved to Honolulu (from Sacramento, California) in early 2003. As I posted a few weeks ago, in talking about God’s “timing,” it now looks like several of us were brought together there in Honolulu, within a few weeks of each other – a professing man had moved from the eastern part of the continental U.S., and the local workers, just a few days after we arrived, returned from conventions on Guam and Saipan and a visit to the Marshall Islands.
And things began to happen for us! We can’t “prove” any of this, but it happened, and we felt it, as, family by family, the professing people in Honolulu – many of whom I had known for years – began to act “leery” of speaking with us. And it often seemed to be in a sequence of us Jayne and I trying to be friendly with someone, this certain man (the one who had just moved there) “buddying up” to that family, and then the family beginning to act as if we had the plague or something.
To say it hurt – and hurt deeply – is to ridiculously understate the feeling. Life began to feel surreal, as if everything we had ever stood on had been pulled out from under us, our world had gone topsy-turvy. We cried, we raged, we begged for someone to just listen, only to be told that we “needed to forgive.” And we would ask, to no avail, what it was we were supposed to forgive. We were never told what we had “done wrong,” and of course being told we “needed to forgive” implies that someone else had “offended” us, but we were never able to “get at” that either.
But back to the “alone” experience: I began to deeply relate to some of these experiences in the scriptures - Joseph, Hannah, David, Elijah, to name a few. These people grew to be much more than “the forefathers” (or mothers!) to admire – they began to feel like brothers and sisters, who had experienced the same “aloneness” that I was experiencing. Though I hoped over and over for the experience to end, I felt too like I was being brought into community with these individuals, like something was happening that was intended to happen.
Because I was feeding on these experiences in the scriptures, they were of course the appropriate thing for me to share in meeting, but it became evident that they were also very inappropriate! I was aware that what I was sharing involved those in the meeting with us, and I attempted to share things in a rather general way, not wanting to point at anyone right there, but I was many times received in a deafening silence. After nearly seven years of this, while attempting to ready for Sunday morning meeting, I looked up at my wife and said, “This is weird. Here I have something that has been very helpful to me during the week, but now I’m scrambling to find something that will be accepted in meeting." She felt similarly, and we didn’t go to meeting that day. I never went again, except for a couple of meetings at the convention a few weeks after that.
I still love what a worker said years ago: “No experience is complete until we can thank God for it.” And for me that does not mean “Sit down and count your blessings.” It meant, in this experience and in a few others, that I would suddenly realize, down the road somewhere, that I was actually out of the experience and I was thankful – glad! – that it had come to me.
Now that I can look back on this painful time in our lives, and as I pass through other difficult encounters, I find this “individuation” to be a vital aspect of God’s dealing with humanity. Soren Kierkegaard - “the melancholy Dane” – is at times called a theologian, a philosopher, the “Father of the existentialists,” but none of these quite fit. And I love his writing! Soren insisted (he lived in the mid-nineteenth century) that God only deals with “the individual,” and will do whatever He can to help a person truly become “an individual.”
In modern culture, we of course speak frequently of being “individualistic,” but we also operate largely as part of “the public,” “the crowd,” or “the mass”- “public opinion says,” “the majority feels,” etc. These are all abstract and relatively recent ideas. They have a way of lumping us all together, of treating us as carbon copies of some “essential” human being.
But God only deals with the individual. Abraham was told “come out from your country and kindred.” Joseph was separated out, and when he was reunited with his brothers, could tell them, “You intended it for evil, but God meant it for good.” Elijah, after “proving” the prophets of Baal ineffectual, fled to the wilderness, feeling alone and wanting to die. It was there that God spoke telling him of others that had not “bowed the knee to Baal.”
And this brings me to the other side of being made an individual - God’s intent is to create community. Israel and the church are intended as “alternate community,” living by grace and gift, rather than by debt and owing (though they most often have not lived up to this!). I don’t believe this means that there will always be like-minded people in a person’s immediate proximity, but a person does find fellowship in the scriptures, and possibly in reading in others of similar experience. Kierkegaard found himself more and more alone, unable to find understanding within the Danish Lutheran church of his time.
My purpose in writing this is to define my own relationship to our experience in Honolulu. For me, it was a part of my being made “an individual,” something that can only occur through having EVERYTHING in which we have placed our confidence and trust – our security – taken from us. I cannot see the meetings as this “bad” thing over here, set alongside other, comparable, “good” things, but rather the good that God has drawn me into has “swallowed up” everything else.
But! The hurtful, oppressive ways of humans do matter! I am not intending this in any way to be dismissive of anyone else’s experience – abuse, shunning, etc. I see the God of the scripture as being extremely interested in the manner in which we treat one another. But we are all a part of it too, and I see God as drawing us out, in order that we can bear the influence of the eternal into society – the light, the leaven, the seed, the salt . . . This means a right relationship with God being first established, which is really one with a right relationship with our neighbor.
This is why I no longer speak that much of our hurtful experience, or of things I see as “wrong” in the fellowship. I do care about them, and in the appropriate time and place, I am most willing to talk about them. But I am no longer angry at those that were such a vital part of my learning and being made “an individual” before God.
Also, I do recognize that there are valid means of analyzing the dynamics of our situation and others. I began college about two years after this experience began, deciding to major in Ethnic Studies upon entering my junior year. Ethnic Studies brought home to me how we create "others" as part of creating our own identities, as groups and as individuals. And I was watching - feeling - it happen to me right then and there in the meetings!
And of course some of you can analyze these "meeting dynamics" through psychological, sociological, historic, and other means. I do not at all intend to negate these analysis in my description of how I now look on my own experience.
I may have seen this, in those years, as something like a “principle” running through the scriptures, but it all became very real to me soon after Jayne and I moved to Honolulu (from Sacramento, California) in early 2003. As I posted a few weeks ago, in talking about God’s “timing,” it now looks like several of us were brought together there in Honolulu, within a few weeks of each other – a professing man had moved from the eastern part of the continental U.S., and the local workers, just a few days after we arrived, returned from conventions on Guam and Saipan and a visit to the Marshall Islands.
And things began to happen for us! We can’t “prove” any of this, but it happened, and we felt it, as, family by family, the professing people in Honolulu – many of whom I had known for years – began to act “leery” of speaking with us. And it often seemed to be in a sequence of us Jayne and I trying to be friendly with someone, this certain man (the one who had just moved there) “buddying up” to that family, and then the family beginning to act as if we had the plague or something.
To say it hurt – and hurt deeply – is to ridiculously understate the feeling. Life began to feel surreal, as if everything we had ever stood on had been pulled out from under us, our world had gone topsy-turvy. We cried, we raged, we begged for someone to just listen, only to be told that we “needed to forgive.” And we would ask, to no avail, what it was we were supposed to forgive. We were never told what we had “done wrong,” and of course being told we “needed to forgive” implies that someone else had “offended” us, but we were never able to “get at” that either.
But back to the “alone” experience: I began to deeply relate to some of these experiences in the scriptures - Joseph, Hannah, David, Elijah, to name a few. These people grew to be much more than “the forefathers” (or mothers!) to admire – they began to feel like brothers and sisters, who had experienced the same “aloneness” that I was experiencing. Though I hoped over and over for the experience to end, I felt too like I was being brought into community with these individuals, like something was happening that was intended to happen.
Because I was feeding on these experiences in the scriptures, they were of course the appropriate thing for me to share in meeting, but it became evident that they were also very inappropriate! I was aware that what I was sharing involved those in the meeting with us, and I attempted to share things in a rather general way, not wanting to point at anyone right there, but I was many times received in a deafening silence. After nearly seven years of this, while attempting to ready for Sunday morning meeting, I looked up at my wife and said, “This is weird. Here I have something that has been very helpful to me during the week, but now I’m scrambling to find something that will be accepted in meeting." She felt similarly, and we didn’t go to meeting that day. I never went again, except for a couple of meetings at the convention a few weeks after that.
I still love what a worker said years ago: “No experience is complete until we can thank God for it.” And for me that does not mean “Sit down and count your blessings.” It meant, in this experience and in a few others, that I would suddenly realize, down the road somewhere, that I was actually out of the experience and I was thankful – glad! – that it had come to me.
Now that I can look back on this painful time in our lives, and as I pass through other difficult encounters, I find this “individuation” to be a vital aspect of God’s dealing with humanity. Soren Kierkegaard - “the melancholy Dane” – is at times called a theologian, a philosopher, the “Father of the existentialists,” but none of these quite fit. And I love his writing! Soren insisted (he lived in the mid-nineteenth century) that God only deals with “the individual,” and will do whatever He can to help a person truly become “an individual.”
In modern culture, we of course speak frequently of being “individualistic,” but we also operate largely as part of “the public,” “the crowd,” or “the mass”- “public opinion says,” “the majority feels,” etc. These are all abstract and relatively recent ideas. They have a way of lumping us all together, of treating us as carbon copies of some “essential” human being.
But God only deals with the individual. Abraham was told “come out from your country and kindred.” Joseph was separated out, and when he was reunited with his brothers, could tell them, “You intended it for evil, but God meant it for good.” Elijah, after “proving” the prophets of Baal ineffectual, fled to the wilderness, feeling alone and wanting to die. It was there that God spoke telling him of others that had not “bowed the knee to Baal.”
And this brings me to the other side of being made an individual - God’s intent is to create community. Israel and the church are intended as “alternate community,” living by grace and gift, rather than by debt and owing (though they most often have not lived up to this!). I don’t believe this means that there will always be like-minded people in a person’s immediate proximity, but a person does find fellowship in the scriptures, and possibly in reading in others of similar experience. Kierkegaard found himself more and more alone, unable to find understanding within the Danish Lutheran church of his time.
My purpose in writing this is to define my own relationship to our experience in Honolulu. For me, it was a part of my being made “an individual,” something that can only occur through having EVERYTHING in which we have placed our confidence and trust – our security – taken from us. I cannot see the meetings as this “bad” thing over here, set alongside other, comparable, “good” things, but rather the good that God has drawn me into has “swallowed up” everything else.
But! The hurtful, oppressive ways of humans do matter! I am not intending this in any way to be dismissive of anyone else’s experience – abuse, shunning, etc. I see the God of the scripture as being extremely interested in the manner in which we treat one another. But we are all a part of it too, and I see God as drawing us out, in order that we can bear the influence of the eternal into society – the light, the leaven, the seed, the salt . . . This means a right relationship with God being first established, which is really one with a right relationship with our neighbor.
This is why I no longer speak that much of our hurtful experience, or of things I see as “wrong” in the fellowship. I do care about them, and in the appropriate time and place, I am most willing to talk about them. But I am no longer angry at those that were such a vital part of my learning and being made “an individual” before God.
Also, I do recognize that there are valid means of analyzing the dynamics of our situation and others. I began college about two years after this experience began, deciding to major in Ethnic Studies upon entering my junior year. Ethnic Studies brought home to me how we create "others" as part of creating our own identities, as groups and as individuals. And I was watching - feeling - it happen to me right then and there in the meetings!
And of course some of you can analyze these "meeting dynamics" through psychological, sociological, historic, and other means. I do not at all intend to negate these analysis in my description of how I now look on my own experience.