Christianity and Co-Dependence

My mother stood up in church.  Or more accurately she remained standing.

On a Sunday during the late 1970s, my mother remained standing during the Eucharistic Prayer after the singing of the Sanctus.  The common practice was to kneel at that point and, of course, everyone did including yours truly.  When we went up to the communion rail, mom stood to receive communion while everyone else knelt.  I did not realize it at the time - as I squirmed in my self-conscious childhood embarrassment - that my mother was leading a revolution in our church.

The revolution came from a deeply entwined story that is both personal and theological.   Mom stood up as a statement of human dignity.  The Eucharist is a proclamation of how God has restored humanity to harmony with God and has restored our innate, created dignity.  So, it would seem, it is fitting to stand up in full celebration of our healed humanity, demonstrating with out bodies what God has done for us.  The custom of kneeling sends a different message, a message of the unworthy begging for God's attention and approval, which was the theology of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  "We are not worthy to come to this table, trusting in our own righteousness."  I am all for humility, but humility means different things depending on your race, gender or class.

For mom, this act of human dignity also represented a victory over all the voices that had taught her she was unworthy or defective because she was a woman.  As a woman who was raised in Texas in the 1940s and 1950s the messages were clear about what women were expected to be and where they fit in relation to men and to God.  This deep misogyny was not from God - although plenty of men and women used the word of God to endorse it - and rejecting it by standing in God's presence at the Eucharist was a triumphant and faithful act.

There was another wonderfully healing victory in this act as well.  My mother and father were both raised in alcoholic households and have done a wonderful job healing from the scars of their early lives.  In an alcoholic household, the addict uses shame, rage, blame and withdrawal of affection to undermine the self-esteem of other family members, thus insulating themselves from accountability by dis-empowering children and spouse. For mom, to stand up at Eucharist was also a victory over the voice of the addict who undermined her dignity, unlike God, who affirms and heals it.

Christianity is often accused of training believers to be subservient, submissive and overly detached from our basic self-interests.  (I am thinking here about  Friedrich Nietzsche who is worth a read!)  Indeed, the characteristics of the traditional Christian character match up fairly well with the characteristics of a co-dependent personality; the need to be needed, the self-abasement, the putting others before self to the point of self-harm, the doing for others what they could do for themselves, the overweening kindness, passive aggression and the lack of accountability.  I believe that God has restored, and is restoring, our basic human dignity and calling us to be co-creators in that process of redemption in ways that are both empowering and generative.  Part of that healing is learning how to enter into mutual relationships that are not based on neediness or manipulation, but rather on primary respect for the other as a human brother or sister - the belief that our neighbor has everything they need already and merely need to share what we have.

In our Baptism, we vow to "respect the dignity of every human being."  In an interesting way, we disrespect human beings when we relate to them on the level of neediness only, or incapacity.  To say that another human being is 'incapable,'  is first an incredible assumption and second an insult to their basic dignity.  We guard against making this assumption too easy in our laws which reflect our high regard for human autonomy.

Some might be afraid that a focus on mutuality and dignity will lead us to warring and rivalrous self-interests competing for scarce resources.  On this point I highly recommend the book Talking to Strangers by Danielle Allen, where she asks, "Why is self-interest necessarily competitive?"  Self-interest can and does overlap among large segments of the population.  I am not alone in finding affordable, high quality education in my self-interest.  What this fear points to, however, is that mutuality is harder work and requires a different set of skills for negotiating relationship than does relationship based on neediness and the need to be needed.

Professor John Bowlin at Princeton Theological Seminary recently challenged me to wonder about Jesus' self-interest.  More on this next time....