Watching Presidents

Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump.

I have been privileged to live long enough to have watched them all in action and how society responded to their time in office.  And lately my work has had me immersed in reviewing newspapers from the era in which one of them served in office.  This has caused me to reflect on what I have observed over the decades as these men have come and gone

What I have learned:

Besides the political power they wield in lawmaking and policy making, either directly or through political appointments, they have immense empowering influence in society at large.  The people in society who share the president’s own personal moral and ethical standards feel more empowered and free to act upon those standards while he (or she, someday) is in office, whether or not those standards are legal.

A president who is unfaithful to his or her spouse creates a climate where those inclined to be similarly unfaithful, feel freer to do so.

Similarly, when we have had a president who is racist or bigoted, or who values civil rights, or who values power over honesty, or who values environmental protection, or who values accumulation of private wealth, or who values personal involvment in charitable work, or who values fiscal responsibility, or who demeans men or demeans women, or who is inclined to bully, or who values and respects thoughtful negotiation, etc. etc. we have seen increases of actions based upon those values within our society, as people who are inclined towards those values feel empowered to act upon them.

Therefore, I reject the idea that citizens should vote for a president simply based upon a candidate’s stated political policies alone, or how those policies will further his or her own personal wants or needs.  It is foolhardy to fail to consider any candidate’s personal moral and ethical standards and values because, inevitably, those moral or ethical standards will be magnified and fostered in your own community, schools, neighborhoods, in the media, and in the nation as a whole as people who hold similar values feel empowered to act upon them.

It is not just political platforms that we must be aware of.  The moral and ethical assumptions and values of the president wield immense influence upon the sense of empowerment of those in your own community who share them.

"And deny yourself of all ungodliness"

My friend, F. asked a question about the meaning of that phrase. It caused me to look more carefully at Moroni, chapter 10.  I think looking at the verses surrounding that verse in this chapter is helpful.  Thanks, F., for asking the question.

Verse

30—come unto Christ, (learn his word, watch and emulate his ways, seek his will and follow it with His kind of love) seek every good gift (all those gifts listed in verses 8-21 and more—given to various of his children—recognize them in each other. Recognize them in you.  Work together with those gifts)

31—arise from the dust (don’t believe that you are worthless nor only capable of insignificant, unworthy actions and situations)  and put on thy beautiful garments (rise to who God sees you as; his beloved and noble child, sent on an arduous journey) and strengthen thy stakes (strengthen your knowledge of and commitment to the most basic principles of the gospel, to which everything else is tied—love of God and of fellow men) and enlarge thy borders (catch a greater vision of the expansiveness, clarity  and inclusiveness of the gospel of Christ) forever (this is an eternal process, not a one and done) that the covenants of the Eternal Father which he hath made unto thee (do you know what those covenants are?  Pre-mortal? Abrahamic?  Baptismal? Temple?  Likely all four) may be fulfilled.

32—Yea, come unto Christ  (see above) and be perfected in Him (learning his word, watching and emulating his ways, and seeking his will, and following it with His kind of love for God and others is the process of becoming whole and perfect.  See also the paragraph that is Matthew 5:43-48) and deny yourself of all ungodliness (as you go through this process of learning good, you will also go through a process of learning what is not good…as you recognize those, repent—change what you love—to reflect that learning); and if you shall deny yourself of all ungodliness (repent, change what you love as you recognize things in your life that are not good and in accordance to his ever-loving will) and love God with all your might, mind and strength (sometimes it takes that amount of love  of God to get us out of sins we love to indulge in) then is His grace (grace: His ready, powerful, willingness to help us) sufficient for you (enough) that by his grace (that, due to His ready, powerful, willingness to help you and your willingness to receive that help) ye may be perfect in Christ (we are able to come to love the Father, all men and every good thing as He does and respond as He does); and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can nowise deny the power of God (and if you go through this process of welcoming God’s powerful help in your efforts to repent and to become more loving and willing to work with the Father as Christ is, you will become a person who personally has experienced and KNOWS the power of God.)

33 If  ye, by the grace of God (if, through receiving His ready, powerful help throughout in your life and in the life to come, I might add) you  are perfected in Him (continue this process of discipleship  of coming unto Christ,–loving as He does, knowing first hand His power and increasing in comprehension of His ways and embracing those)  then are ye sanctified (made holy—more like God in purpose and understanding) by the grace of God (sanctification, holiness, is not something we can do on our own, it requires that we open ourselves to God’s ready willingness to help and embrace working with Him and repenting and receiving his help) through the shedding of the blood of Christ (repentance that completely erases the sins we are trying to deny ourselves is only possible because of Christ’s atonement for us), which is the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins (Christ’s atonement is a covenant that the Father made with us before we came here.  He promised us a savior that would provide a way for our sins to be remitted) that ye become holy (sanctified, more like He is) without spot (cleansed from sin)

9 Weeks of Study: Daughters of God and Priesthood

" I entreat you to study prayerfully all the truths you can find about priesthood power."  

           ~Russell M. Nelson, October 2019 General Conference, Saturday evening session.

1. "Spiritual Treasures", Russell M. Nelson, Conference October 2019 

2. Doctrine and Covenants 25

3.”Connecting Daughters of God with His Priesthood Power”, Barbara Morgan Gardner, Ensign, March 2019

   

4. “The Keys and Authority of Priesthood”, Dallin H. Oakes, Conference, April 2014, 

     Exodus 47

     Doctrine and Covenants 84:1-21

5,  Doctrine and Covenants 84:20-51: “the oath and covenant of the priesthood”

    Jacob 1:9, Abraham 2:9-11, Romans 4:13-16, Doctrine and Covenants 84:63-88

6.  Doctrine and Covenants 121:26-46, 1st Nephi 11, Doctrine and Covenants 25 (quick review)

7. Doctrine and Covenants 107

8. “Helping Female Students Rise to Their Spiritual Privileges”, Barbara Morgan Gardner, Religious Educator 18, No. 3 (2018) pp. 117-139.  (Religious Educator is the Church Education System publication for religious instructors) 

9.  “Let Us Think Straight”, M. Russell Ballard, BYU Devotional  20 August 2013

Additional reading

“A Plea to My Sisters”, Russell M. Nelson, Conference, October 2015

“Men and Women and Priesthood Power”, M. Russell Ballard, Ensign, September 2014

“Women of Dedication, Faith, Determination and Action” M. Russell Ballard, BYU Women’s Conference, 2015

“Priesthood Power Available to All”, Linda K. Burton, BYU Women’s Conference, 2013 and Ensigh June 2014

“Why We are Organized into Quorums and Relief Society”, Julie B. Beck, BYU Devotional January 17, 2012

“Rise Up in Strength, Sisters in Zion”, Bonnie L. Oscarson, Conference, September 24, 2016 (Women's Session)

Doctrine and Covenants sections 2, 3, 20, 76, 95, 110 and 124

Alma 13

Preventative measures: avoiding burn out in a consecrated life.

From “How to Avoid Clergy Burnout”, by Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell

Anyone familiar with the schedule kept by the Rev. Howard-John Wesley, pastor of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, was not likely surprised by the news that he is stepping away to take a much-deserved sabbatical. Rev. Wesley was known to be on call to answer his parishioners’ needs 24 hours a day.

I’m grateful that Wesley, in announcing his sabbatical, also shared his reasons for it — feeling far from God, tired in his soul and needing to recuperate mentally and physically. I hope his message reaches beyond his church and denomination and spurs action for kindred clergy who find themselves having similar feelings.

In 2015, 52 church-appointed Methodist pastors agreed to be interviewed by me and my fellow researchers at the Duke Clergy Health Initiative, write down what they did every hour of every day for a week and score their activities for meaning and enjoyment.

In this study and others, including a survey that compared 1,726 clergy to thousands of other North Carolinians, we found above-average rates of depression, obesity and chronic diseases, all of which are substantiated by other researchers who studied clergy of other denominations. One reason for these poor health patterns is how clergy respond to the demands of ministry; their call is so sacred that they often stretch themselves too far.

We also found that, not only can clergy combat burnout, they can flourish in their vocation.

By comparing the behavior of flourishing clergy and those experiencing burnout, we were able to identify four strategies for clergy to flourish: caring for their physical and mental health, setting boundaries for their work and personal lives, nourishing friendships and mutual relationships, and working in alignment with God.

Taking care of one’s health is a particular challenge when a pastor’s schedule is at the mercy of parishioners’ needs. Flourishing clergy not only proactively made plans to attend to their physical, mental and spiritual well-being, but also made backup plans to adjust for their unpredictable schedules: If a meeting preempts plans to attend a morning exercise class, walk with a parishioner at lunch. Called away for a hospital visit? Then play basketball with the youth group in the evening. They also reported finding time to practice spiritual devotions and walk in nature.

We found that flourishing pastors reminded themselves often of where God was leading them, especially when they faced criticism. The work of clergy is quite visible, and parishioners sometimes feel free to disapprove of their pastor’s message and say so publicly, immediately after pastors have poured their hearts out from the pulpit.

After hearing criticism, pastors who experienced burnout in our study reported feeling distressed. Those who were flourishing recognized the criticism and worried only if it related to God’s larger goals for their work.

We all know that friendships and social support are important, but in our study those hourly activity logs that clergy completed during the research revealed that only flourishing clergy took the time to share the joy of their small successes with friends and family.

We’ve also found that parishioners play an important role in clergy well-being. The clergy who do best have parishioners who remember they are human.

If you’re a parishioner, you can ask your pastors about their family, their interests, their vacation plans. Suggest that your pastor have a guest preacher any time a month has five Sundays. Encourage your pastors to keep Sabbath and then remember what day of the week their Sabbath is, and don’t schedule any non-emergency work on that day.

Think about how you would like to receive constructive criticism and offer it the same way, perhaps over a cup of coffee that you buy and with an offer to help.

My heartfelt wishes for health to Rev. Wesley, then, and to those reading this: these lessons about clergy, I suspect, pertain to us all. We are more likely to flourish if we share our joy with others, have back-up plans for healthy activities, and align ourselves with a greater purpose.

(Rae Jean Proeschold-Bell is an associate professor at the Duke Global Health Institute and research director of Duke Divinity School’s Clergy Health Initiative. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

The post How Clergy Can Avoid Burnout appeared first on Urban Faith.

Thoughts this morning

Whenever truth is spoken with anger, it becomes less true.  Whenever truth is spoken with clarity and inclusion, it is magnified.

You have been freely given life, time, strength as well as power to act.  Choose in turn, to freely give what you have been given, and what you have created with those gifts.

The saying is, “Judge righteous judgement”.  The problem is this: each and every one of us is convinced that the judgments we make about others are the righteous judgments. So we judge and condemn with impunity.

Always assume that you don’t know the whole story.  Seek to find truth.  And also, remembering that you will be judged as you are judged, do not fail to include the truths about yourself and others that enable compassion and concern for, and a willingness to assist, each person involved.

I Believe, #5

I believe that "all are alike unto God" (2 Nephi 6:23). I believe that when Jesus tells his disciples to go into all nations (Matthew 28:19) He is telling us to serve and teach with love, equality, respect, concern and value for those of every nation.

Just as God loves the whole world and its inhabitants so much that He gave His Son, who in turn, gave his life for us so that we might become enlightened, made new, and change our hearts and minds to love and doing good, so we are called to love and give of ourselves to and be concerned for the inhabitants of the whole world.

Therefore, I am opposed to the political climate, in my country, of politicians seeking primarily to focus solely upon narrow, nationalistic prerogatives that further nationalistic tendencies, or political power simply for the sake of power, or the use of political office for personal objectives, paying attention to the rest of the world only as it serves those prerogatives.

Many say, "That's just the way politics is. Every country is that way."

But that does not have to be the way it is. And there have been times when our country has had excellent leaders who have not been that way. So, I am not required to accept the status quo. Serving our own communities is essential, but the global connections between us are undeniable.

Poverty, environmental damage, violent conflict, and deadly diseases in any place ultimately affects all of us and those we love.

John Donne wrote it well as he wrote about the tradition of ringing church bells when someone was dying:

"Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not...

"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

Embracing Vaaprastha and preparing for Sannyasa. Study of, and training in, enlightenment through increased devotion to spirituality, service and wisdom.

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"I was there to meet the guru Sri Nochur Venkataraman, known as Acharya (“Teacher”) to his disciples. Acharya is a quiet, humble man dedicated to helping people attain enlightenment; he has no interest in Western techies looking for fresh start-up ideas or burnouts trying to escape the religious traditions they were raised in. Satisfied that I was neither of those things, he agreed to talk with me.

"I told him my conundrum: Many people of achievement suffer as they age, because they lose their abilities, gained over many years of hard work. Is this suffering inescapable, like a cosmic joke on the proud? Or is there a loophole somewhere—a way around the suffering?

"Acharya answered elliptically, explaining an ancient Hindu teaching about the stages of life, or ashramas. The first is Brahmacharya, the period of youth and young adulthood dedicated to learning. The second is Grihastha, when a person builds a career, accumulates wealth, and creates a family. In this second stage, the philosophers find one of life’s most common traps: People become attached to earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime.

"The antidote to these worldly temptations is Vanaprastha, the third ashrama, whose name comes from two Sanskrit words meaning “retiring” and “into the forest.” This is the stage, usually starting around age 50, in which we purposefully focus less on professional ambition, and become more and more devoted to spirituality, service, and wisdom. This doesn’t mean that you need to stop working when you turn 50—something few people can afford to do—only that your life goals should adjust.

"Vanaprastha is a time for study and training for the last stage of life, Sannyasa, which should be totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment. In times past, some Hindu men would leave their family in old age, take holy vows, and spend the rest of their life at the feet of masters, praying and studying. Even if sitting in a cave at age 75 isn’t your ambition, the point should still be clear: As we age, we should resist the conventional lures of success in order to focus on more transcendentally important things.

"I told Acharya the story about the man on the plane. He listened carefully, and thought for a minute. “He failed to leave Grihastha,” he told me. “He was addicted to the rewards of the world.” He explained that the man’s self-worth was probably still anchored in the memories of professional successes many years earlier, his ongoing recognition purely derivative of long-lost skills. Any glory today was a mere shadow of past glories. Meanwhile, he’d completely skipped the spiritual development of Vanaprastha, and was now missing out on the bliss of Sannyasa.

"There is a message in this for those of us suffering from the Principle of Psychoprofessional Gravitation. Say you are a hard-charging, type-A lawyer, executive, entrepreneur, or—hypothetically, of course—president of a think tank. [see note below]  From early adulthood to middle age, your foot is on the gas, professionally. Living by your wits—by your fluid intelligence—you seek the material rewards of success, you attain a lot of them, and you are deeply attached to them. But the wisdom of Hindu philosophy—and indeed the wisdom of many philosophical traditions—suggests that you should be prepared to walk away from these rewards before you feel ready. Even if you’re at the height of your professional prestige, you probably need to scale back your career ambitions in order to scale up your metaphysical ones."

~ Arthur C Brooks, "Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think: Here's how to make the most of it.", Atlantic Monthly, July 2019

You can read it here.

nb: note: Not just the people who have such highly visible and lucrative successful careers. Happens to a high powered full time momma or tutor, a dedicated maintainer of a house or lifestyle, or a respected volunteer church or community leader as well.  

1st Timothy, chapter 1: Fables, longsuffering, warfare, hope, charity, and shipwrecks

So, reading through Timothy 1, I hear Paul speak of Jesus as “our hope”.  And he speaks of Timothy’s responsibility in Ephesus: to “charge” members who teach things that are not doctrine, but who instead teach “fables” and complicated genealogies which generally just serve to make people start digging for answers to questions that are based upon stories, or conjecture or tradition and who feel like they are accessing higher understanding. when, actually, they are being seriously sidetracked.

And he then, in verse 5, gives a way to be able to recognize this error.  Does what is being taught create a desire to be more full of charity, simply for the sake of the virtue of charity, without guile, and motivated by faith?  If so, it is good.  If not, it may well fall into the “fables” category.

And then later, in verse 12, Paul talks about the time in his life when he, himself, was involved in the kind of teaching he is warning against.  Like most who do that, he did it because he thought it was a good thing to do.  It felt energizing and right. And he talks of the great grace of God that came to him to change and enlighten and heal and forgive him.

And then this: “that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all longsuffering for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting”.

Some might think that this could be a message to those of us who are fable teachers that, when we realize what we’ve been doing, we need not fear wrath, but instead be grateful for God’s longsuffering with our erroneous assumptions and find hope in His forgiveness.

I am struck that it is also a message for those of us who recognize those fables or false beliefs taught by members of our faith, that we should also remember God’s longsuffering and knowledge of purveyors of “fables”, and refrain from abandoning charity towards those who teach such, and not lose hope due to our dismay, sorrow or pain over the results of the spread of those fables and the neglect of charity that it entices people to engage in.

So my question to myself is this: Is my truth-speaking, my “good warfare” (verse 18) response to “fable teaching” as full of longsuffering, charity, and grace as the Father’s is?  Is that charity, longsuffering and grace what enables us to connect with God in such a way that we do not lose hope?

Because, for sure, sometimes that fable preaching can feel like it creates a veritable “shipwreck” (verse 19) among us.