Kicking tables, clearing space

I try to maintain a pretty even keel, and sometimes I look pretty successful (at a Parents Association meeting last year when I was trying to listen while B cavorted around the conference room, another mom told me she admired how “zen” I was about it. She should have seen me trying to get Queen Mab out the door that morning). I’m naturally a pretty passionate person, though—I feel things deeply and my instinctive reaction is to yell about it or cry (about both good and bad things). But that’s exhausting, and I have a child whose emotions are just as difficult to regulate as mine. So I’ve put a lot of work into practicing calm and patience and peace, and on the whole, I’ve gotten better about it (hence the zen comment)—feeling my feelings without necessarily splattering them all over the place.[1]

But of course I can’t just will myself into it like “BE CALM, YOU!” (as much as my husband has tried to tell me to “just calm down!” Nice try, honey). I’ve had to be careful about avoiding things that set me off if I’m not mentally prepared to deal with it right at that moment, especially online, where everything in the world could theoretically pop up on the screen in front of me. So for example, I try to limit Facebook to staying in touch with people I care about and following my favorite bloggers. This certainly includes discussion about all kinds of hot topics, but if I find that I’m spending too much time agonizing over whether or not to reply to any particular person or page’s posts that I strongly disagree with, I unfollow them. Because either this is a person whose posts are mostly just going to make me angry and I had better protect any real-life relationship by not letting the things I dislike about them constantly appear on my screen, or because they and I just don’t have the kind of relationship to safely have the intensity of discussion that their posts are calling for. There’s no hard and fast rule for this, or percentages of cute-baby-picture : ill-researched-“satirical”-meme that I follow, just an effort to pay attention to how I feel. Other times, if a friend just tends to share a lot of frustrating posts from one particular page, I just hide the page and continue enjoying their cute babies/funny cats/interesting anecdotes.

Lately this approach has been wildly inadequate, because the questions and fears are too big and the conversations and arguments about national security against terrorism versus protecting the victims of that terrorism have been bleeding all over the place. It’s impossible to open Facebook without stumbling across thousands of comments from people I don’t know, claiming to share my faith while saying things about refugees that chill me to my very soul. My hands start shaking when I see calls for massive acts of violence, for reviving the old Japanese internment camps, callous suggestions that war orphans just go back where they came from.

And there I go into online-social-justice-warrior mode. It starts off feeling awesome and righteous, but I’m sure you can imagine how it ends up.

After someone I trust very much privately pointed out to me that maybe I was getting a little carried away, I took a few deep breaths and tried to figure out what to do with all this energy I have. Because I know that anger, especially against injustice, isn’t a bad thing in itself. I mean, look at the Old Testament prophets! And didn’t Jesus go around overturning tables?! If I didn't figure out something, I was going to end up looking for more tables to kick over.

A few minutes later the same person who had (metaphorically) taken me aside  suggested, “Let your sadness spur you on to good works -- being the hands and feet -- you know? invite the broken to YOUR table as a way of pointing to His.” At the same time Esther Emery shared this good word: “We…do well in the world not by multiplying and extending our outrage, but by multiplying and extending our relationships.” 

I started to wonder about that story of Jesus overturning tables. He was so angry, and then what? What did he do after he starting throwing furniture and kicking people out of the Temple? I realized that while I've heard that story so many times, I hadn't heard much about what comes after. So I checked. According to Matthew,

“Jesus went straight to the Temple and threw out everyone who had set up shop, buying and selling. He kicked over the tables of loan sharks and the stalls of dove merchants. He quoted this text:

My house was designated a house of prayer; 

You have made it a hangout for thieves.”

And the very next verse says, “Now there was room for the blind and crippled to get in. They came to Jesus and he healed them.”

His anger cleared out the clutter that was getting between him and these people who needed him, and then filled that empty space with healing and compassion, "multiplying and extending" relationships with other people. These healings were probably small things to everyone around him, affecting only the poor and marginalized who had little to no influence on society. I bet those loan sharks and merchants set up their tables again as soon as he was gone. The whole thing probably just seemed like an awkward blip in the middle of a long day, but they mattered to the individuals who met him, and he'd made a very clear point about who belongs in that sacred space. It's a story that has resonated for years, even if the immediate effects seemed negligible.

The still, small voice sometimes has to repeat itself a few times to be sure I get the message. I'm very glad, though, that it sometimes speaks to me through the internet, since that's where I usually am when I need to hear it the most.

I don't have the power to solve the world's problems. I can't protect anyone from terrorists and extremists--I can't even make anyone to understand what seems so clear to me! But if my outrage leads me away from mere anger and into relationships and small acts of love, it will be enough.

[1] For example, I try to take a “gentle parenting/attachment parenting” approach (because they have the most useful parenting tools for me for trying to parent my intensely passionate kid without letting my own intensely passionate self become a big jerk about it), but I’ve unfollowed all but a couple parenting Facebook pages because of a few too many comments or shared blog posts that said things like, “My precious angel has never once made me think of laying a hand on him aggressively and anyone who feels differently is a monster,” (to which I respond with all kinds of words I can’t write here in case someone shares this with one of my grandmas).