Bird Taxonomy

You could smell the earth waking up last Saturday, in a riotous cacaphony of chirps and in the warm breath of the wind. I hadn't realized I had been Next to the meadow, I ran into Grady, who had traded in his watch for a pair of binoculars to go bird-watching.

And somehow, we got to talking about how easy it is to flatten people, and make them one-dimensional. When you first meet people, it's easy to be excited and see them as mysterious, full of promise, fascinating. But when the shininess wears off, it's the in-between time that's hard. You know them, enough so that you can move around each other in the kitchen in a careful dance, how to make passable small talk, how not to step on the other person's toes. Enough to close the folder and file away in your list of useful information. But in sorting and labeling people into manipulable categories, you lose something. You lose the color of a person, the look of vulnerability in their eyes, the sound of their joyous laughter, the shimmering beauty of seeing that person at his finest, the sweat of agony on their brow as they decide between the harder higher path, or the easy lowland one. I am troubled by my flattening of people. It becomes so easy to judge, to condemn or, even worse, dismiss (as in, whatever, he's just like that. ) Sometimes, with some people, you get past the flatlands, and they start to pop back into 3-D, and relationships grow deeper, and sweeter, and you learn to cherish their friendship. But how do you get there?

I've been talking and asking about how to choose between different positions on an issue, like women's leadership in the church, or eschatology, or the work of the Holy Spirit. Drew said that it's ultimately a leap of faith. I like that answer. Deciding to believe in God as revealed by Christianity is like choosing to get married to Adam. Or vice versa. You don't have all the information, and you can't really fully objectively research all the possible alternatives. You ultimately have to take the information you know, the place you're at, and commit. And so, whether or not some may accuse it of heresy or fundamentalism, I like biblical counseling. I like biblical counseling because it seems to be the only perspective that really looks at people and sees people - people with stories, contexts, hopes, struggles, joys, sorrows, people who make choices but also suffer. The Freudian psychoanalysts, the biological materialists, the Christian psychology integrationists, the pastoral counseling camp, and the nouthetic counselors - of all the detectives in the business of taking a magnifying glass to a person, I think it's really the biblical counseling people who get it right.

What troubles me about psychiatry is that it is in the business of quickly and efficiently categorizing people, so that you can assign them their appropriate medication and send them on their way. They develop, like bird-watchers, the ability to pick up on small details that help you to identify and categorize a person. There's an anecdote in the book I'm reading, Of Two Minds, about a psychiatrist who can glance at a patient as they walk through the door and have the disease diagnosed before they speak a word. But unlike bird-watching, the difference between manic-depression and schizophrenia aren't like the difference between a sparrow and a turkey vulture. The y lie on a spectrum of characteristics. But the pressure on psychiatry to act like medicine makes them treat the disorders as distinct diseases. "Understanding how psychiatrists see is also terribly important, because madness is both frighteningly palpably present, and yet elusive. There are no diagnostic tests in psychiatry… You cannot draw someone's blood, stick someone into a magnetic resonance imager, or take any medical reading that will tell you definitively whether that person is depressed or not… To understand psychiatric ways of seeing, we have to proceed knowing that what counts as "fact" is a tinted window onto a world you cannot step outside to see." (10)

I enjoyed the show and tell of the boxes we made for Jordan's art therapy teaching day last week. It captured a second dimension to each of you that I had forgotten - the inside to the outside. There is one more dimension to each of us, however, more than the dimension of who you see me as and who I see me as, and that's who God sees me as.

I need God. I need God desperately. My mentor, Sonya, suggested that the reason I might be struggling with my relationships, why I'm finding it difficult to love and be curious about other people, might have something to do with my relationship with God. I've been running on recycled fumes. Who i know myself to be will spill over into how I perceive others. I know the answer is in here somewhere, a clever turning of the metaphor of bird-watching, people-relating, and psychiatry, but I'm not sure yet what it is. Perhaps you have a suggestion? But I think this is what it would mean to see people rightly:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory)