Book Review: Under His Wings

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.