Richie had a nice sandbox under the deck of his house. Ours was splintering and had little maple trees making a go of it, but his had clean sand and smooth seats and loads of minature construction equipment to load up and dump. So whenever he'd invite me I'd hop the fence and dig in.
As it goes, he had his way of loading a Tonka truck and his idea about where to dump it and I had my own. So we'd argue and fuss and he'd remind me that this was his sandbox, after all, and his toys, so I'd better do things his way. I never wanted to do things his way. Within about five minutes he'd take his toys and disappear into his house, making sure I knew I wasn't invited inside.
His toys and his ideas meant more to him than our friendship. Likewise, my ideas meant more to me than respecting and honoring him. Suffice it to say that, to this day, we still haven't friended each other on facebook.
Isn't that sad? You might even say it's immature.
Richie and I were practicing a form of emotional cut-off. Emotional cut-off comes in a host of distasteful flavors such as giving someone the silent treatment or unfriending someone on facebook to remaining closed-off and unapproachable to others to running away or divorce or, at it's most severe, through physical violence such as committing suicide or murder. Each of these forms clearly vary in severity, but are rooted in the same emotional stance. Cut-off is one person's way of saying to another "I'm done with you!" It elevates the issue between two people so much that the issue becomes more important than the relationship itself.
Cut-off is defined many ways by many people. Dr. Murray Bowen, who pioneered the study of families systems as single emotional units back in the 1950's, sees cut-off as the most extreme form of emotional distance. Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman, a student of Bowen's who expanded family systems theory to observe natural systems, talks about it in terms of emotional distance. Roberta Gilbert, M.D. is a contemporary family systems thinker in D.C. who sees that how we handle cut-off is key to how we manage all our relationships.
With apologies for oversimplification of their profound thinking, I'd like to suggest that cut-off, be it a momentary storming out of a room or a permanent violent act, is rooted in prideful self-assurance. One person becomes absolutely convinced that their way of thinking is the only way of thinking and can make no room to open his or her mind.
Some dear friends who are members of a conservative evangelical church are currently feeling some painful, passive-aggressive emotional distancing. They've come to believe that gay people are also God's children who desire mercy and grace in their lives. So when they met a teen who'd been kicked out of his house when he came out to his parents, who was struggling to find a consistent place to eat and sleep, they invited him into their home, set up the guest room, and chose to love him in the same way Jesus showed love to the outcasts of his day.
This does not square well with Christians who have separated homosexuals from "neighbor" status (as in "love your neighbor") and reduced all gay people to being abhorrent and perverted aberrations of God's sexual plan.
The cognitive dissonance between their actions and the members' judgements proved too great for some to bear. To be fair, these judgments were not supported by the church's leadership. Relationships between them and other members started showing signs of strain. Anxiety spread like vibrations through a spider's web. Some proved that their thinking was too inflexible to embrace this act of generosity, love and mercy.
Now they have another decision to make. Do they work on the cut-off relationships or do they accept cut-off as a sign that it's time to nurture other relationships? Working to reconcile cut-off relationships is hard. Accepting cut-off galvanizes the rigidity that led to that emotional distance.
Theirs is a microcosm of those churches threatening schism (another form of cut-off) from the PC(USA). There are those who want to demonstrate love to the broken by removing institutionalized barriers set up to prevent homosexuals from ever being ordained. Then there are those who want to uphold the standard of considering homosexuality an abomination before God and believe that love includes discipline and repentance. Those who aren't going to get their way on this one are looking for another home.
Unfortunately, the leaders on both sides of this issue haven't demonstrated the emotional or spiritual maturity to manage cut-off. They've let the unthinkable become a real option. Some are planning to take their toys and go to another sandbox. Others are ready to kick them out with a resounding good riddance. Why is this unthinkable?
I can think of two reasons. First, it's reactive and not responsive. It's letting emotion drive the rationalizations of both sides rather than using reason to understand and manage emotion. In so doing, our eyes are no longer focused on the salvation that binds us into one body. Ours is a discipleship where faith seeks understanding, not where emotion seeks justification.
Second, this reactivity is driving those who've taken baptismal vows together, shared communion together, grieved together and prayed together to say "I want nothing to do with you anymore," and formally end their shared communion. I understand why people choose to manage anxiety through cut-off, but I certainly don't agree with it.
Cut-off does not heal with time. Cut-off only heals with mature interaction.
The denominations where churches are finding hermeneutical cover aren't necessarily going to share a communion table with the PC(USA) any time soon. Neither is the PC(USA) going to offer an olive branch to those who've made it easy to enact cut-off. These are in effect saying to each other that their version of Christianity is so distasteful that we can no longer work together. That's institutionalized, hyper-rationalized, emotionaly driven "I'm taking my stuff and never playing with you again" cut-off.
And even though this hurts - not only the people in the churches but moreso the mission of the church - we are showing time and again that we'd rather spend more energy alleviating anxiety through cut-off than managing anxiety through relationship.
This does not square with these words in II Corinthians 5:17-19: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself in Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation."
Why did this happen? Why are we pursuing a path of emotinal distancing instead of reconciliation? What is driving not only this split, but every other schism the church has sufferedn in the past? I'd like to share a line from Friedman's Generation to Generation. This ought to make you think. "Emotional distance is perplexing. If there is too much, it is not possible to have a relationship; if there is not enough separation, it is also not possible to have a relationship," (Guilford, p.42, 1985).
Maybe, just maybe, the reason we can't withstand the tension is that we were too close to begin with. Maybe our attempts to homogenize the faith within ever-narrowing boundaries as defined by position papers and A.I.'s and the church's courts indicate a lack of healthy relationship in the first place.
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