"We Are Not Helpless"

"Blame is a ready antidote for feeling helpless." -- Martha Nussbaum
"We are not helpless. We are men [and women]." -- from the movie 'FailSafe,' a line spoken by Henry Fonda playing the president of the United States.

Everything I've written in the blog until now has been leading up to this: we aren't helpless.

It's true as Jared Diamond writes that the single most important factor in a society's survival in the face of a crisis is its ability to respond by evaluating its traditions and customs, its way of doing 'business as usual.' It's also true, as Heifitz has written, that we are not faced with a technical problem but with an adaptive challenge, a challenge that will require that we learn and risk and share widely among us all the work of adapting. And it's true that only a transformation of 'the system' will work; tinkering and tweeking the present system won't do it.

In the midst of all of this, I say again: we are not helpless.

The late Dr. Edwin Friedman, who brought insights from family systems theory into congregational leadership, would agree. He held that to change a system, be it a family or a congregation or a nation, it's not necessary to work with the people in that system who hold the most power. It's more effective to work with the people who are most motivated to change. Think of a hanging mobile. The mobile exists in a state of balance, and to acheive this balance different pieces of the mobile are connected to lengths of string or to rods of different lengths. If you want to change how the mobile looks, you don't have to exert force on the largest or heaviest piece in the mobile; pushing just a little on even the smallest piece changes the arrangement of the entire mobile!

If we look at our 'System' here in the US, we would despair when we think about taking on the financial industry or the oil lobby or Washington itself, but that's not where our opportunity lies. The system, like a mobile, depends on each part being where it should be and functioning the way it always has functioned. Changing the 'input' of one part changes the entire system. Friedman, in his book Friedman's Fables, wrote about an aquarium in which the fish that was supposed to clean the scum off of the glass stopped eating the scum (Friedman used a more colorful word than 'scum'). All the rest of the fish began acting differently, some dramatically differently, because of the upset in the system when the one who was supposed to eat the scum stopped eating the scum. Shy and docile fish that used to hide all the time became quite social; gregarious fish became apathetic; the top-of-the-food-chain fish became confused and anxious and downright cowardly!

We are not helpless. Having said that, it's also good not to be careless about our input into the system, but that's for another day's posting.

Never the last word,

Pastor Lee