Man & God & men 052599

Man’s relationship with God, and man’s relationship
with man:my personal experience

by Ted Mollegen

for:
Jared Starr Men’s Group
Grace Episcopal Church
Newington, CT 06111
5/25/99

My topic tonight is man’s relationship with God, and man’s relationship with men: my personal experience.

And since this is a men’s group, I’m not talking about mankind in general, I’m talking about men: male adults.

Now, this is not a scientific or expert talk, it’s a witness talk. That means that I’m talking about what I've learned, based on my personal experience and my reflections on that experience.

Some cautions: we are all on different walks through life, so each thing I talk about may or may not apply to you. I do hope that you will find something useful – or at least interesting -- in what I say, but I can give no guarantees. And whether a given thought or experience fits you, is for you to decide, so, in effect, I’m giving you some homework to do.

My outline is this:

first, the initial orientation. I just did that.
then I’ll tell you a bit about where I’ve been and what I’m like, so you’ll have a better idea who it is who is witnessing to you
then I’ll witness about my personal relationship with God
then I’ll witness about my personal relationship with other men
then I’ll tell you about writing a personal mission statement – which is something that made me feel a lot better about the way that I’m living my life

We’ll then move into questions and/or group discussion.

About Myself

I was born in 1937, and I’ll have my 62^nd birthday in a couple of months. So I was a small child during WW II, I was a teen-ager in the 1950s, I was in my first or second year of college when Elvis Presley came along, and I was a tad too old to serve in Viet Nam. I majored in Electrical Engineering, and flunked out at the end of my third year in college. I worked for a year, and then got readmitted into college. That time, I made the dean’s list –so I can claim that I was only immature, not inherently stupid.!

Glenis and I married when I was 24, and we had our two daughters 8 and 11 years later, when I was respectively 32 and 35. We figured that we would wait a few years to let the marriage get on real solid basis before having children – but when the kids did come I remember wishing I had all the energy I’d had a few years earlier.

Now, what am I like? Well, for one thing, I’m the kind of guy who can’t drive a nail without reading a book about it first. I like to really, really know what I’m doing.

And I have kind of a bent sense of humor. When the girls were teenagers, I might go in where they and a couple of their friends were, and say, "HEY! Did you hear about the fire in the Army camp??! … It was in tents!" And the girls would go "Awwww, Dad!", which is the one of the fun forms of satisfaction you can get while being the parent of teenagers.

In the church I attended before this one, I was a chalice bearer, and the chalice bearer used also to read the prayers of the people. One day when we were vesting before the service, I said, "Today, I think I’m going to say: ‘And we also pray for our enemies -- especially… Bill,… Mary , Joe , Sue…’" Now I would never actually do that, but I definitely have the kind of mind that would think of it… and threaten to do it. My rector at the time, Glenis, was also my wife of about 30 years and she knew I wouldn’t do it, but a couple of the other people who were also getting ready looked at me with some concern.

One last story. About ten or twelve years ago, when I had a fair amount more hair than I do now, I was asked to speak at the weekly breakfast meeting of the Norwich Chamber of Commerce. When it came time for me to speak, I stepped up to the little podium they had set up on the head table. As I looked out toward the attendees, I noticed that there was a tall platform down at the opposite side of the room, and that from up about there [point about 45 degrees up] somebody was making a videotape of my talk.

About a week later, there came in the mail a friendly thank-you note, with a copy of the videotape. "How nice," I thought to myself. "I’ll just put this aside for a couple of months until my memories of giving the talk aren’t so fresh, and then I’ll look at the tape and critique my speaking style." A few months later, I ran across the videotape, and I put it in the VCR and sat down to watch. Sure enough, there I was, standing behind that little table-top podium, starting my talk. After a few moments, I dropped my head to look at my notes, and the camera got a good look from this angle [drop head and point]. Now when a guy shaves, his view of his hair in the mirror is like this [straight-on gesture]– which gives the maximum impression of hair – so I had no idea of what was going on up there [point to top]– or more to the point what wasn’t going on up there.

When I saw the top-down view on the TV, I laughed out loud.

Now I was in our TV room by myself, and when I’m by myself, I never, ever laugh out loud, and I had laughed out loud pretty strongly. Glenis was in the next room, and when she heard me laugh, she called out, "What’s going on in there?"

I yelled back, "Come in here – you’ve got to see this!"

Did you ever wish you could call back the words you’ve just said? No sooner had those words left my lips than I realized that my wife of then almost three decades didn’t need to look at videotape to know that I had a bald spot on top. I had to laugh again.

So in summary: I’m an engineer by inclination and education. I’m the kind of guy who would put aside a video of himself to critique himself after he had forgotten what giving the speech was like. I’m the type who would laugh at his bald spot, and invite his wife to laugh also, and then laugh again when he realized that she didn’t need a video to see the bald spot. In other words, I’m the kind of guy who can laugh at himself some of the time although I don’t always do it at every one of the frequent opportunities I make for myself.

God and me

Well, now, what about God, and my relationship with God?

First, I’m not the kind of person who has telephone conversations with God, or the prayer equivalent thereof.

Learning how to really pray has been a long slow process for me, and I still have a long way to go. I’m not bad at the transmitting part of the conversation – it’s the receiving part that’s hard for me. The prayer form that seems most natural to me is: "Hello, God. Ted here. I need x, y, and z. ... Soon! And please take care of persons A, B and C. Bye."

A prayer form that I’m working on now goes like this: "Hello, God. Ted here. What do you want to tell me?" Short silence. Mind wanders off to something else. Mind jumps back, with accompanying guilty feeling. Try again to listen to God. When no telephone conversation starts, try, "What would you like me to do?’ Repeat mind wandering off, then coming back. Get idea. Wonder: "Did I get that idea myself, or did Someone put it here in my mind?" Mull over the idea. Fall asleep.

But by continuing to try, I feel I’m making progress.

Along the way, I’ve learned that it doesn’t make sense to try to put on a good face, or to try to be something I’m not, when I’m trying to converse with God. After all, God doesn’t have any illusions about us. However, even knowing this, I’m still tempted to try to put on a good face or to think the right thoughts when praying.

One of my most heartfelt prayers is the one that seems the most ridiculous. I pray it when someone I know has died a premature death. The prayer is [looking up] "Are you sure you know what you’re doing?"

I know it’s preposterous for me to be questioning God’s competence, but that’s the way I sometimes feel. There’s a lot of questions I’m going to have for God when I get to heaven.

That reminds me of a story, by the way.

- There was a little old lady who was kind of nervous about flying, so she took her bible along to comfort herself with during the flight.
  She was contentedly reading away when the kind of a wise-guy type guy in the seat next to her said, "What are you reading about?"
  "Oh," she said, "I’m reading about Jonah and the whale."
  "You don’t believe that crap about Jonah being in the whale’s stomach, do you?" he said.
  "Of course I do. It’s in the bible."
  "Come on," he said, "How could he stay in there for three days without being digested?"
  "I don’t know", she said. [pause] "When I get to heaven, I’ll ask him."
  "Well, well. What are you going to do if he’s not there?"
  "Then you can ask him."

Jokes aside, I’ve learned a lot about the purpose of prayer. You know, the purpose isn’t to get God to be more generous or to be more Christian or to do what we want – it’s to be with God, really close with God. And this is most important when we hurt, or really, really want something that most probably isn’t going to happen.

I think the best analogy of the relationship between God and us is the relationship of parents to their children.

Let me tell you about an experience I had a few years ago.

I was sitting in a big armchair in the living room and I had just finished reading something or other, and the thought sort of drifted into my mind "I wonder what it’s like being God?"

Well I thought for a few moments about this, smiling at the audacity implicit in my question, and then a mental picture came to me. In my mind’s eye, instead of sitting in my armed chair in the living room, I was sitting on a golden throne, high above the clouds. Curious as to what was going on down on the earth below, I leaned forward to try to find a hole in the clouds to look through. (I told you I was an engineer by education.) Suddenly I found myself transported to a birthday party attended by a group of four- or five-year-olds. Somehow all of us adults had congregated in the kitchen, without realizing that the kids were in the living room with no adult supervision. Suddenly there came angry sounds of screeching and yowling from the kids. I was the first one to run into the living room. There was a bunch of yelling, crying, fighting kids. They were in their best party clothes, but their faces were red and distorted with hate and anger as they fought over the toys, even though there were enough toys for all. While a small part of me felt like wringing their little necks, or at least giving their little fannies a good whack, I gently inserted myself into the fray, and patiently and lovingly began calming them down. No matter how rotten they were being, and no matter how exasperated I felt at what they were doing, I still loved them. I realized that I loved them whether they deserved it or not. Suddenly, I was back in my armchair in the living room, feeling that I had gotten a taste of what being God was like.

Ever since I had this imaginary experience, I’ve had a lot more sympathy for God! And I’ve also gained a lot more confidence in God’s love for us. My first memories of Sunday school are of Old Testament stories, where God was trying to shape up an unruly bunch of Israelites. I felt that God would be mad at me if I wasn’t perfect, and I knew that I wasn’t anywhere near perfect. But as a parent, I’ve always loved my kids, even when they were being perfectly rotten. So, for the first time, I could see how God could love me.

I now can understand how God can love me, and that he does love me, even though he knows every possible rotten thing about me that there is.

More about God and me

Sometimes at the end of the day, I check my e-mail, and then play a few hands of computer solitaire, as a means of emotionally winding myself down before crawling into bed.

I’ve played enough hands so I can play semi-automatically, while partially thinking about something else. Lately, I’ve been imagining that I’m in a conversation with God, knowing that he can control which card is going to come up next. I’ve been trying to improve my spiritual discipline as I play, with what comes up in the cards representing the satisfactions and disappointments of life.

I’ve decided to say "Thank you," whenever an ace comes up – but I sometimes forget. Then I feel guilty, and wonder if God is punishing me if I then get a run of bad cards. But I know that God doesn’t really work that way, nor will he necessarily give me good cards just because I ask nicely or behave nicely.

One day I got a really bad run of cards after forgetting a couple of Thank You’s for aces, and I silently thought in frustration, "Oh, come on, Dad!"

I was quite a bit startled by my use of the familiar form "Dad’, even though I know that the original word "Abba" used by Jesus was more like "Dad" or "Daddy" than like "Father."

When I said "Dad," it felt warm, good, natural, and intimate – and then the next card that came up was one that I needed. While I wouldn’t place special significance on the fact that a good card had come up, I felt that I had reached a new degree of intimacy with God, and that this intimacy was good.

Being a southerner, I had always called my earthly father, "Daddy," so calling God "Dad" wasn’t using the same exact name that I had used for my earthly father. If you call your father Dad, you might consider calling God "Daddy," or "Pop."

Now to turn to me and men

Why are we men afraid to be intimate with men? I don’t know.

I don’t mean sexually intimate, although a very strong underlying taboo against homosexuality is probably one part of it, but there are other parts of this fear also.

One of the big factors is competitiveness. One day, when Glenis and I were walking down the street in New York, and when we turned a corner, we saw a large black man -- about 6’3 or 6’4’’ and maybe 250 pounds -- leaning against a telephone pole, and our intended path of travel was right by him. He had on a partially torn shirt, and dirty blue jeans. I tensed, feeling a potential threat, and guided Glenis to cross the street before we passed the man. As we finished crossing the street, Glenis said, "Did you see that poor man? I wonder if he needed help?" I was amazed at the difference in our reactions to this man, and thought back to what he looked like. Aside from his size, he hadn’t looked threatening. He looked defeated, and his posture was resigned, not aggressive. I thought about the parable of the Good Samaritan, and didn’t feel real good about myself. Even though I know that there could have been a safety problem, I know that I responded to the scene by thinking only of us and not of him. That doesn’t meet Jesus’ standard of "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

When Gary invited me to give this talk, and we were discussing what the talk should cover, he said, "Why is it that men are afraid to say that we love other men?"

That’s a very, very good question. I don’t know the whole answer, but part of it must be that we associate the word "love" with romantic feelings. (This should come as no surprise given all the images we get impressed upon us from television and popular music.) And we don’t have a different word to express the kind of love that simply means "You’re important to me." I don’t know how much you all have been around Glenis, but she says "I love you" to a lot of people. It doesn’t mean that she feels romantic toward them, just that she cares about them in the sense that their well-being is important to her. Even though we’ve been married 37 years, it still surprises me sometimes when she does that -- because I still associate the word with romantic attraction.

In the bible, by the way, love isn’t a feeling, it’s what you do. It’s measured by actions, not by feelings. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" isn’t about feelings. You may remember that when Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself," one of his listeners said "Master, who is my neighbor?" Jesus responded by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the Good Samaritan helped an injured man after others had passed by. There’s no record that the Good Samaritan felt attracted to the injured man, or felt an identification with him because the Samaritan remembered being injured himself, or anything like that. He just acted, showing that the injured man was important to him. While they may have been feelings involved, they weren’t mentioned in the parable.

Feelings are an interesting subject by the way. I’ve recently read a couple of books by a psychologist named Deborah Tannen. She has been studying how men communicate with men and how women communicate with women.

She says that when a man talks with a woman it’s really an inter-cultural conversation. For instance, when the wife comes home and says "I really had a miserable day. I had trouble with the car." The husband typically says something like "What’s wrong with the car? I’ll take care of it." -- when what she wants to hear is something that shows that he’s concerned with how she must have felt, and that he’s sorry that she had that unpleasant emotional experience.

She wants sympathy and understanding -- and he wants to diagnose and fix the car.

In studies of women talking to women, they share feelings a lot. What they want first is the sharing of feelings, not the solutions for problems. After the feelings have been dealt with, then they’ll get around to fixing the problem.

Have any of you been to Marriage Encounter? Among other things, it helps you communicate with each other about feelings, which most Guys just don’t feel comfortable doing. (I don’t want to give too much away, because Marriage Encounter works best when the experience is a surprise.)

I got interested in going when I saw that couples appeared more lovey-dovey when they came back, and in today’s hectic world, any marriage could use a little romantic recharge every once in a while. For me, it was a very educational experience, and I recommend it.

In one of Deborah Tannen’s books, there’s a description of a classic pattern of one type of argument where the wife is concerned with feelings, and the husband is concerned only with trying to fix the objective problem. I recognized the pattern, because Glenis and I have had that argument many times. I won’t say that we’ve never had it since I read the book, but we’ve certainly had it a lot less.

But let me go back to the homosexuality taboo. I don’t know whether it’s innate, or whether it’s something that we guys get taught – it may be both -- but there’s a very strong taboo, there. In the reports of those awful Littleton, Colorado high school shootings, it was reported that when groups of kids were picking on the ones who became the shooters, they called them "loser", and "queer." There was never any evidence at all that the two actually were gay – calling them that was simply a way of being really, really mean – but that illustrates the strength of the taboo. Kids that age can be really rotten to each other, and use of the gay taboo is one of the ways of doing it.

Personally, I believe in equal treatment of gay people, including the right to marry. You may or may not agree with that. But even though I believe that, I’m still a little uncomfortable when I’m around gay males, if there’s a possibility that one of them might make a romantic approach to me.

A few years ago, I had a very strange feeling. I suddenly suspected that an old friend, a man, was sexually attracted to me. At first, I wasn’t sure, but when I thought back over the past, it seemed more and more likely to me. I wasn’t sure how to respond if he did make a pass at me.

A few days later, I was in a conversation with another old friend, a woman of about my age, whom I had known for a long time, and whose opinion I respected. She had been really attractive when she was young, and while you wouldn’t expect to see her in Playboy today, she still is an attractive woman. I figured that she must have long ago learned how to gracefully but effectively head off unwanted passes, so I described the situation, and asked her how to handle it.

She looked at me as though this were something that every fourteen-year-old has learned (and she probably had learned it at about fourteen), but she answered the question. "If he indicates a romantic interest in you, tell him very clearly that you’re not interested, and that you’re already committed to someone. If he persists, say it much more strongly. Then, unless he has a mental problem, he will stop. A mental problem sounds unlikely from what else you’ve said about him."

This made so much sense that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it myself. Nonetheless, I now felt much better about being able to handle a potentially awkward situation as gracefully and effectively as possible.

Writing a personal mission statement

One last topic I’d like to cover is the topic of writing a personal mission statement.

I’ve been involved in various levels of the church and I always recommend that each level have a mission statement. In my view, the church has various organizational levels:

the national church
the province, which is a regional collection of dioceses, and is not one of the less important organizational layers, although it does have a role to play.
The diocese. Our diocese is the Diocese of Connecticut, which covers the same area as the State, and has 184 congregations.
The deanery, a group of ten or fifteen congregations in a given geographical part of the State. It is also one of the less important levels.
The congregation. Grace Church has a very clear mission statement, I think, and it’s good to see that you intentionally keep it on display.
The individual family
The individual person

About six years ago, as an experiment, I starting drafting a personal mission statement. I was sick in bed, and I was reading Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Usually when I’m reading something, that suggests an activity like that, I just skip over the activity and keep reading. But since I was sick in bed and wasn’t going to be going somewhere, I did the exercise. As I said, I think that writing a mission statement is something is very important for organizations, so I decided to do it for myself. The idea of doing this had been in the back of my mind for several years, but I hadn’t ever gotten around to it – partly because I felt that a written statement might somehow push me toward doing something that didn’t really make sense.

Finally I said to myself, "Come on! The statement will work for you, not you for it." And then, I got to work.

This happened partly because I got exposed to a mission statement model that I thought made sense. In this model, one lists the key persons in one’s life, and then lists one’s objectives with respect to each person or category of persons. Examples:

Wife: bring more joy into her life; tell her more often what I appreciate about her; collaborate with her (when applicable) in her professional life; better share the household burdens of our life together. Do recreational things together.
Children: provide a conceptual and emotional environment where our children can healthfully grow, both intellectually and emotionally. Provide what they need economically
-- but not more than is good for them.
Work associates: help provide a conceptual and collaborative environment in which my associates and I can be joyfully effective, and grow in our capabilities. No matter what their age, I think that all healthy people have a desire to grow in capability.
God: help make the world be more like God wants it to be. (When you hear Jesus talking about the Kingdom of God he’s talking about the condition of things being in accordance with God’s will. That's what we mean when we pray: "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.") Use leverage, by engaging others in getting the world to be more like God wants it to be. (The manager in me is showing in this thought.) Teach stewardship and evangelism, and teach organizing to work toward these objectives. I’m a tither of my time to the Church, and one of my objectives is to help the Episcopal Church double in size by the year 2020. This goal was developed by a national committee that I’m on, and while I feel a little like Don Quixote tilting at windmills some of the time, I also think I can help make a difference. We’re not going just for numbers, by the way -- we’re looking to help God make disciples.

So, I encourage each of you to try the discipline of creating and maintaining a personal mission statement. I find that the effort of creating and then about twice-or-three-times yearly updating my mission statement has been highly rewarding.

About three or four months after I wrote my first statement, I went back and looked at it. What was there needed a little tweaking, but I was surprised to see that there were several now-obvious gaps. I did some tweaking, and some gap-filling, and adjusted how I was living my life.

After two or three more reviews at roughly three or four-month intervals, I pretty much had all the gaps filled in, and subsequent reviews have mainly been limited to changes due to changes in circumstances. For instancce, both kids are out of the house now, and their needs are different.

All in all, my mission statement gives me the feeling that I am doing a much-improved job of making my life what I want it to be. I would extend Socrates’ famous saying about not living an unexamined life to read, "The unexamined and undirected life is not worth living." The statement is an exaggeration, of course, but it makes the point clearly. Put differently, having an examined set of priorities gives me the feeling now that – as regards living – I much better know what I am doing.

Interested persons may see my own mission statement on my personal web site at http://members.aol.com/tmollegen/atmmssn.htm . This public version omits some details re personal relationships, but will still tell you a lot about me, and may help you develop your own statement if you don’t already have one.

__________

That completes my prepared remarks. I’ve covered my relationship with God, my experiences and learnings and thoughts about relationships with other men, and I’ve recommended having a personal mission statement.

Are there any comments or questions?

* * * *

A. Theodore Mollegen, Jr.
5/25/99