I Get Defensive

Asking for help from Andy, Amos, and Aleksandr.

It’s remarkable the number of things I can get defensive over. Just this morning in church, my face started to flush all hot and bothered over a description of the Puritans. The Puritans. Do they need me to defend them? I don’t know that they do, though they have been (perhaps wrongly) mischaracterized over the centuries. But then, as the discussion continued, I felt defensive for all those people who have criticized the Puritans, and maybe had some good points? Either way, my hackles were raised for whoever wasn’t getting their proper due.

Then, I sat down to my Sunday afternoon leftovers, joined by my dear daughter who had some *things* to point out about my not-always-so-easy-to-be-around self, and I felt that familiar blood rise to my cheeks. Ugh. She was so right in what she was saying, and yet, so wrong. It was all the things I felt she had seen incorrectly, the sense of being so misunderstood, that I couldn’t stop focusing on. I felt annoyed and irritated—incidentally, the very things she was pointing out as a consistent problem of mine.

Cut to everything I heard or read in the area of politics this week and the constant finger-pointing back and forth about how the “other side” should hardly be the ones to point out our faults or failures because “they started it”, or are “worse than we are.” The rhetoric, even from unbiased sources who are simply reporting the information, is infuriating to listen to, mostly because it is like listening to my children, who lay claim to these very same arguments, and I am like, I DON’T CARE about what THEY DID (even though I do). YOU have to be willing to look at and deal with yourself. Start (and end) there.

But my goodness, is that ever hard. I feel how hard it is when I’m the one playing defense. I feel how hard it is when there is a criticism of any kind— about the Puritans or the grocery bill or the book I just read. There is something deeply humiliating about taking the hit, and not hitting back. There is something that feels like a small death to say— you might be right. Yes, there is something in me, or that I’ve done, or this thing I agree with, or that I like, or have given my life to that is wrong.

But. But. I’m feeling defensive for my defensiveness now. And I think there’s good reason for it. There is something else fighting for some air in this battle for a humble, honest view of myself, or whatever it is that is being critiqued. It is a sense of justice. We want an accurate view of things. We want fairness. Humility without justice is oppression or mistreatment on some level.

This reminds me of a helpful 2x2 diagram from thoughtful writer, Andy Crouch.

In his book, Strength and Weakness: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk, and True Flourishing, Crouch tackles the issue of humility (he uses the term vulnerability), and power (authority). Too much authority without vulnerability will bring about exploitation. Too much vulnerability without authority brings suffering. We need both authority and vulnerability to bring about God-intended human flourishing.

I think it works much the same way with justice and humility. That tension that I feel when there is all humility and no justice or truth, or vice versa, means that we are always crying out against the imbalance. Always feeling in exile from that garden of human flourishing where both justice and a humble (proper) view of ourselves prosper in equal measure.

But the tension is real and constant. And for me it produces a general feeling of devil’s advocacy: forever defending whatever is not getting enough light.

So many of us love that line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the line between good and evil running through the heart of every man. It is a beautiful, insightful, cutting line. Recently, I thought about it again as another church scandal was revealed, and then again on another evening when my 11-year-old puzzled over questions of human culpability and the sovereignty of God.

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

There we all are, made in the image of God, and deeply flawed. As a Christian, I can still find this hard and confusing to understand how we are given a new nature and new life in this earthly body while awaiting our final redemption in the life to come— when it so often looks like there is little if any new nature happening on this side of heaven. Call it a problem with feeling defensive for the state of things. We all mess up so much. How are we supposed to see Jesus in one another when evil seems to reign a little too heavy-handed?

I think it means that I genuinely struggle with the reality of this line that cuts down the center of each one of us. It is hard to see, hard to accept that we are each capable and even veering at times towards sainthood, and at others towards monstrous evil. It is hard to forgive it in others. It is hard to see it in ourselves.

I tend to talk to my kids about their need for humility at the worst times… like when they aren’t showing it. It is probably the most annoying thing in the world to be preached to about how not only are you wrong, but you are unwilling to see that you’re wrong. I know this is annoying because when it happens to me, I shut down faster than my local coffee shop (which is to say, almost thirty minutes before the posted closing time, when they sweep and clank their broom angrily against my chair with loud huffing and puffing).

It is probably some kind of evil mind trick, if not just plain manipulative to accuse someone of a lack of humility when they are not receiving your accusation (even if it’s true). I talk to my kids about humility at the worst times because I just can’t help it. I worry about it— worry about them lacking it, worry about my own lack of it. It is one of those qualities that is absolutely bedrock for a people to live together in community, and to have any kind of relationship with God and with each other. The inability to see ourselves rightly is a poison that brings death to every relationship. And I’ve been a part of some of those deaths.

I know looking at your own culpability is not the whole story. “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream,” wrote the Old Testament prophet, Amos. As we read those words, we can all hear MLK Jr. brazenly speaking them with renewed conviction to an obstinate American public.

I think about that Old Testament prophet, calling God’s people to repentance, and that prophet of the Civil Rights movement, calling people to national repentance, and that prophet of Soviet Russia, trying to get people to see… to see that we are each of us in need of such grace.

I wanted grace for the Puritans this morning. I wanted grace for their dissenters. I wanted grace for myself, and for my daughter who wants it from me. I wanted grace and I wanted justice. And as much as I can see that there is a line that runs through the depths of each of our hearts, I can also see that we are all wildly out of balance and ripped apart by this line. Only one Man can bring it all together, can make it all make sense, make it all whole and good again. Only Jesus can make that line go away.

Until that day, give us clearer eyes to see and softer ears to hear.

And Thy Kingdom Come.