Thinking Through Relationships (Round 124)

A somewhat new friend of mine and I have been recently discussing psychology during our recent times together. I very much value his insights he brings from his work in neuroscience and psycholinguistics, even though our discussion, of course, necessarily has to be non-scholarly since I don’t know much at all about that field.

All of my regular readers are well aware of my forays over the past year into the world of dating, which has opened huge doors for me in the area of analyzing relationships and my interactions with others.

My conversations with this friend have really helped me to even further explore these ideas. We’ve discussed semantics as it applies to relationships and the role of religion in politics and the psychological basis for their linkage. Further, we’ve discussed how religion and politics are experienced differently in American and Canadian cultures and also how those two areas play out in the context of relationships with others.

It is synchronous that I am having these types of conversations at the same time as I’m reading Coming out of Shame by Gershen Kauffman and Lev Raphael, a book on making gay and lesbian relationships work that seems to me to read almost like a gay premarital counseling textbook. It’s been extremely helpful to me as I’ve been involved in my very inexperienced first explorations into the whole dynamic of relationships and how they actually work.

I’ve been learning many things from my reading, but here are a few of the most salient points I’ve taken away from the book:

1. Every relationship is unique, growing and developing in its own way, highly influenced by our upbringing, cultural pressures, peer pressure, and the expectations we have of one another.


2. Differences come about in relationships when there is an imbalance of power, and the best way to heal the differences is to rebalance the power while not shaming other individuals.


3. At the beginning of any relationship, you have to ask yourself if the other person is really a good match for you by examining, among other things, how responsive they are in meeting your needs and what kinds of ideological differences are present.


4. The two most important vehicles for the maintenance of any type of relationship are being aware of your own feelings and openness in communication.

Ironically, it seems like the biggest problem many of us have in our dealings with others is the expression of feeling and openness in communication.

Today, as my friend and I were again discussing power in relationships, he expressed the genuine sadness he felt for Americans who, he observed, seemed very much focused on relationships as transactions, almost in a businesslike way. He observed that Americans seem to be very concerned about not being in any type of social debt to one another. This may have some connection with the idea of having equal power in relationships, since being in debt to someone by necessity means they have the option to exercise power over you.

The most practical advice I think I’m actively learning is how to better stand up for myself in my dealings with others. This is a tricky lesson because, like many, I go out of my way to avoid confrontation, and this is a pattern I fall into again and again in my experience, hoping that the irritating/disruptive/offensive situation will go away on it’s own, or resigning myself to its ongoing existence.

All of this thinking calls me to be more thankful for the relationships I have with some of the new friends I’ve made over the past year who have allowed me to explore some of these dynamics with them in a supportive way.

Over the next few weeks I’ll probably want to spend more time thinking and digesting all of this relationship information and letting my awareness of these issues grow further in my consciousness as I seek to improve some of my relationships with other people.

Wish me luck!

Musical Expressions of Melancholia

I remember that I’ve written on this blog before about how I experience life as both simultaneously sad and beautiful. It seems that I’m especially drawn to musical expressions of this melancholia, and tonight, I’ve spent an hour listening to beautifully mournful and slow tunes.

Occasionally, I will listen to music that is static- music some label as “New Age”, although that seems to be such a catchall for anything that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else. Some is trash, but other electronic pieces are rich soundscapes, full of many subtle tone colors and gently shifting harmonies.

There must be some type of eternal experience in the listening of music that allows us to somehow transcend the confines of self and access something deeper and greater, perhaps either beyond us or deep within us.

A Professional Relationship

I told the music director at the church I work for that I was going to be taking some time off from choir. I gave him a little bit of warning, so I doubt he was surprised by this news.

This was a difficult decision for me to reach. I’ve sung in church choirs each Sunday (in season) since high school. So this will be the first time in probably 16 years that I haven’t done this. Even as I type this, I miss singing with the group, who is rehearsing even now.

So yes, it is sad for me, and I’ve had to spend probably about 45 minutes tonight wresting with this issue, asking myself the necessary questions: why is this sad? Why don’t I want to do this? Or do I want to do it? I know there’s a reason for this decision, but what is it?

While I think I’ve come close to having a direct and simple answer to this question, I don’t think I quite made it there until tonight, so I feel this moment is significant for me because I have more clarity.

The simple reason I’m not singing now is because I don’t have a home church.

As I look back on it, I’ve been in a holding pattern for about the past year or so. I took off from the airport, and I’ve been waiting to land on some runway. While I know that sometime I’m going to run out of fuel, I’ve been able to have the strength to keep flying around because of the blessings of people and situations in my life.

Like a passenger on a circling plane, I’ve been able to have many meaningful conversations with my seatmates, which all gives me at least enough energy to continue the trip. Along the way, I’ve been in conversations with several different airports. I’m referring symbolically to airports as people, churches, or communities – anywhere that feels for me to be a safe harbor and nurturing environment.

It could be that God is preparing me for a time where I will not have a home church – a local place that I feel spiritually grounded. A lot of musicians are in this kind of place. At the same time, my Anglican/Episcopal identity remains very strong. I’ve even talked to others about how I perhaps see myself as a “free agent Episcopalian.”

Any way one looks at it, I am not willing right now to offer those resources to any one church, since my relationship with the church needs to be, for now, almost exclusively professional.

It’s where I am.

Twentysomethings, Church, and Marriage

I happened to be spending a few minutes today thinking about how much attitudes of younger people have changed since a time of different values a long time ago after spending a few minutes reading a book on how to keep marriages together from a modern, but traditional, Episcopal perspective.

The author acknowledged things like young couples choosing to live together before marriage, the importance of marriage as a lifelong commitment, and the reality of divorce. His thoughts on the latter were especially important, saying that divorce is a funeral for a dead marriage. Divorce too early, and you are burying the dead, and divorce too late, and it’s like having an “open casket in the house.”

Recently, a friend of mine told me that monogamy is “for breeders, not for us”. And I’ve been thinking about the accumulated concepts we all carry around about marriage and commitment and whether these are even sensible goals to have at this point outside the context of a straight, child-bearing relationship. I think there might be something to this.

The priest is right; marriage is a lifelong commitment, just like taking monastic vows. I wonder if those vows are approached with the same seriousness? As a person who has (non-seriously) considered the monastic life, I wonder how anyone could even engage in marriage. I don’t know when I’d ever be ready for that.

With those kinds of thoughts, this priest author even wondered if we had exchanged traditional understandings for serial monogamy, and perhaps that’s our new acceptable standard. He also discussed how singleness was not at all a barrier to significant participation in society as it had been in the past. People seem to be getting married later also.

So, in a lot of ways, all of the traditional ideas about marriage are losing a lot of traction except perhaps with the most conservative thinkers. I’m not yet convinced this is a bad thing.

But all of this pondering made me think that young people don’t have much need for the church either. What does the church do for young people? It seems a lot of them seem to gravitate back to church after they get married and have children, perhaps remembering church as a good influence on them that they want to repeat for their kids . . .

What if we really are in a post-marriage, post-Christian age? What would that mean for us and how do we live as Christian, moral people in that framework? There are not simple black and white answers for those questions, and adult faith shouldn’t think that there are.

So tonight I come across a new study put forth by George Barna, an evangelical Christian sociologist who talks about various faith trends. The newest study talks about churchgoing habits of people age 20-29, who put their faith on the shelf during that time in their lives, even after having been active in their teenage years.

You can read the study on http://www.barna.org/

I’m not entirely sure what it means for me that I’ve continued to be active on such a strong level throughout my whole life. I’m 29 now, and there’s never been a point where my faith has not been a big part of my life, and it really is more than just habit. My church has very few people going their in their 20s, and we’re not really a big draw for young families since we’re not in the suburbs where that demographic tends to live.

I think it is sad that the church in general doesn’t reach this age group, and I don’t think we can rest on our laurels in thinking that they will come back once the babies start popping out. The thing is, do any of us really know what people in their 20s need in terms of spiritual development and personal growth?

The church does not do a good job in shepherding people through late adolescence and early adulthood, and I know I don’t help with that.

If you’ve read enough of what I’ve written, you know how I feel disconnected enough from God and church and all that for three people sometimes, so I hear where the twentysomethings are coming from.