I had never seen him before in my life. I was coming out of a restaurant in a small rural North Carolina town. I had been taken to lunch by the fellowship committee of the church I preached in. I was wearing a clerical collar. He asks me "Episcopalian?" No, I said. "I'm a Presbyterian, but we sometimes wear these too." I pointed to the collar.
He then proceeded to tell me that his brother had been an active member of a Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. He gave the name of the church, and I had heard of it. He said that his brother and the family had made all the arrangements to have their children baptized at that church. A couple of weeks before those baptisms were scheduled the minister announced that his wife was pregnant. The congregation was all full of warm affection for him and his wife.
Then on the day that the baptisms were scheduled; the children all dressed and the family there for the baptisms, during the announcements that came before the Baptisms the minister announced that he and his wife had had tests run on the baby and discovered it was a girl. They wanted a boy, and so had the baby aborted. The man telling me this story said his brother immediately grabbed his children, got up and left the Sanctuary and never returned.
I don't know why that man told me that story. I don't know of any reason he would not be telling me the truth. There were too "many rabbits" running around for me to know what to say and how to respond. But the question that has stayed utmost in my mind was why a minister would tell his congregation that kind of personal stuff? I realize I am very old school. When I learned preaching we were told to make ourselves the examples in a sermon about once a year. "Keep the "I" pronouns out of your sermons. Of course, the message is now to make the sermon personal, but this seems way too much personal stuff. The whole ethical debate about that minister's choice is another matter. It does not seem to me to be a matter for public proclamation during a morning worship service. Why did he have to tell them all of that? What do you think?
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The consensus of opinions is that, if this story is true, the minister fails the test of knowing the boundaries between what should be private and what is to be public, and the narrower boundaries of what is appropriate for worship.
I have a theory about these sort of things, but I never would have thought to see an example like this. My thought is that in the "information age," we have exceeded our biological scope for interaction in ways that are becoming increasingly pathological. When I say "biological scope," I mean that I believe that we have a naturally wired tendency (emphasis on tendency-- think bell curves) for handling social interaction. In the "prepared" ethologist sense, this includes veritable call-and-response reciprocity: when we express ourselves, we expect a response to what we've expressed. And I think that in the overwhelming cacophony of our world now (we have been sliding along this continuum for a while), we have crossed a boundary in terms of call-and-response deficits.
What made me think of this originally was the anonymity of the internet. Many people use it for confessional disclosures that they wouldn't make in social contexts. Because these are deeply intimate thoughts/feelings/etc., we are primed for reactions-- and normally we would hope to find supportive reactions such as forgiveness, love, or acknowledgment. But instead, we get nothing: silence... in what is otherwise a human forum. And this lack of reciprocity only increases the alienation we feel. (When I say "we feel" it, I mean in a generalized cultural sense, but for some people it is very acute and personal.)
On a broader social scale, I think there are a lot of things today that push people to feel like they as individuals are lost amid the masses: out-sourcing jobs to countries they've never heard of, believing their vote doesn't count (Bush v. Gore), no connection to the natural world (i.e., not experiencing the passing seasons in our air-conditioned homes), not understanding how new technologies or science are even possible, writing a blog that no one responds to... I could go on. I think this also feeds the resetting of the psychic register for overstimulation that contributes to many of the other technological obsessions we've developed: endless texting, online addiction, media junkies, reality tv, etc.
In many ways it comes back to the idea that we don't have stuff; our stuff has us.
For me, the whole meaning of the word "spirituality" is about connecting to something greater than yourself. I would see the minister's actions as a deeply (and pathologically) felt sense of alienation. To abort a baby for its sex? To tell your congregation as you prepare the rites of grace and acceptance from the spiritual source you worship? That's not officially something we study in my psychopathology course, but THAT is fucked up.
I thought it wise of the man who picked up his kids and left; I hope that I would have done the same.
J
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