Title: Under His Wings
Author:
Patsy Clairmont
Date: 1994
Publisher:
Guideposts
Length: 143
pages
Quote:
“[W]e move closer to the Savior and experience what it means to take shelter
under His wings.”
Yes. It’s
true. God is a Spirit, not bound to the gender, or even the number, much less
the shape, of a single body with literal parts. The Bible calls God a “He” and
a “Father,” but also credits Him with female reproductive parts (not male ones)
and, in case that didn’t make the point clear enough, bird body parts. Ancient metaphoric language portrays God with a
mighty hand, stretched-out arms...and wings.
In this
book, drawing on her experience as a mental patient, Clairmont discusses some
of the ways believers have interpreted Bible metaphors about seeking and being
offered shelter under God’s mother-hen wings. Being carried on God’s soaring-eagle wings would probably have been another book.
Well, the
author is known as a Christian comedian...what did you expect? But seriously,
this is a book about some of the ways Christians deal with problem emotions
like temptation, guilt, relationship problems, fear, and grief.
Clairmont’s
individual medical case history would have been more useful to me than just
another book of things Christians say to themselves and others, but obviously
much remains to be learned about the precise way her emotional issues about
being functionally homeless interacted with her “sweet tooth,” exercise
avoidance, and other factors to produce her agoraphobia, and the precise way
her doctors approached it.
But she has
a right to remain silent about those things, and can hardly be blamed for using
it...except that if asked she probably would have said “I wasn’t writing a case
history for serious students of psychology! I wanted to offer some helpful
advice for everybody!”
That was
the big mistake of the whole “psychological self-help” school of thought,
actually.
Clinical
psychologists, working with people who are mentally ill, who don’t have present-time real-world business
and family problems, offered to “help” fix the feelings of people who do have
present-time real-world business and family problems. This is not always
altogether bad. People who are in touch with external reality can have
emotional problems, too...but the clinical psychologists forgot to explain to
many churchgoing types that there are ways to tell whether the emotion is the
primary problem or is even related to the primary problem, or not. When the
emotion is not the primary problem,
then we don’t need to waste a lot of time “validating the person’s feelings” or
molesting the person’s “inner child” or otherwise playing psychoanalyst; that
can reasonably be construed as an insult.(We don’t need a “friend” who does this
to us, either.) We need to focus on the facts.
FIX FACTS FIRST: FEELINGS FOLLOW.
“Ooohhh!
This writer is saying I can’t just waffle on about the ‘feelings’ someone has
about losing their home in an earthquake—I need to share my own home with that person, if I want to believe I’ve
helped? That’s craaazy!”
Maybe...but
I’m not the one who needs the prescriptions for “sleep aids,” antidepressants,
or headache pills.
“But if I
do the chores and errands for the family with the disabled person, if I buy
things from the person with the floundering business, if I avoid the gossipper
instead of the person I’ve heard some vague unlikely gossip about, I not only
don’t get to play psychologist, and I not only may have to get up and move my
lazy body—but I might be encouraging dependency!”
That’s
better than encouraging selfishness...but if you can practice frugality and
bring your own expenses well below the other person’s, it’ll be a rare moocher
who’s brazen enough to exploit your generosity.
Maybe
somewhere Out There really lives the adult who’s become Christian-phobic and
floundered through dysfunctional relationships with skeevy characters because
any suggestion that she’s not perfect reactivates the panic she felt when she
broke a vase at age two, who develops a bleeding ulcer before telling his
father he’s not willing to care for the father at home, and all the other
1990s-style Christian versions of all the classic emotional problems Freud and
Jung identified in the 1890s; I’ve not met them but that doesn’t mean they
don’t exist. What I’ve met, many times, and what I’ve even been, are the
frazzled home nurse who needs an afternoon of respite care, the
undercapitalized entrepreneur who needs financial support for their work, the
person (quite different from the stereotype that comes to mind when most of us
think “homeless”) who’s working a long way from home or whose home was
destroyed by a natural disaster...and many more: the people who need for fellow
Christians to get up, shut up, and do something useful without one word about emotional feelings, much less any obnoxious,
condescending babble about their early childhood.
So I can
praise Under His Wings only with
faint...recommendations to a very specific, limited audience. Yes, Clairmont is
a comedian. Yes, her retellings of the stories of Moses, Hagar, Naomi, and
Samson, as read by people in psychotherapy, are funny. Nevertheless this is not just another book of funny stories. This is the one where Clairmont seriously
describes what she tells herself to talk herself through a panic attack (and a
little about how she changed her eating habits). If you have panic attacks and
want to read about someone who’s successfully lived with that form of
physical-mental illness for a long time, then Under His Wings is for you.
Great blog
ReplyDeletePlease read my post
ReplyDelete