Dr. Christine Pohl
Making Room: Living into Community
Overview
Welcome to this episode of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast! Today on the podcast, we’re continuing the conversation with Dr. Christine Pohl, Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at Asbury Seminary where she taught for 29 years. Today we’re talking about community and her book Living into Community. We learn what a healthy community looks like and how we can really live in a healthy community. We unpack the essential practices that she focused on in her writing of promise keeping, truth telling, gratitude and hospitality, their deformations and how we can start cultivating healthy practices in our own lives so that we can be transformed people that others want in their own communities.
Let’s listen!
*The views expressed in this podcast don’t necessarily reflect the views of Asbury Seminary.
Dr. Christine Pohl
Professor Emeritus of Christian Ethics at Asbury Seminary
Dr. Christine Pohl retired in the summer of 2018 after having taught Christian Ethics at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., for twenty-nine years. Prior to graduate studies (PhD, Emory University) and teaching at Asbury Seminary, she was involved in congregational, parachurch, and refugee ministries. Major publications include: Living into Community: Cultivating Practices that Sustain Us (Eerdmans, 2012) and Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (Eerdmans, 1999); along with several other co-authored books and numerous scholarly and popular articles. She speaks regularly on recovering the practices of hospitality and community.
Heidi Wilcox
Host of the Thrive Podcast
Writer, podcaster, and social media manager, Heidi Wilcox shares stories of truth, justice, healing and hope. She is best known as the host of Spotlight, (especially her blooper reel) highlighting news, events, culturally relevant topics and stories of the ways alumni, current students and faculty are attempting something big for God. If you can’t find her, she’s probably cheering on her Kentucky Wildcats, enjoying a cup of coffee, reading or spending time with her husband, Wes.
Show Notes
Guest Links
- Connect with Dr. Pohl on Facebook
Transcript
Heidi Wilcox:
Hey everyone. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Thrive with Asbury Seminary Podcast. I’m your host, Heidi E. Wilcox, bringing you conversations with authors, thought leaders and people just like you, who are looking to connect where your passion meets the world’s deep need. Today on the podcast, we are continuing the series we started last time with Dr. Christine Pohl.
Heidi Wilcox:
Today we’re talking about community and her book “Living Into Community.” Dr. Pohl taught at Asbury seminary for 29 years. And she is the professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Asbury Seminary. Today on the podcast, as I said, we continue the conversation on community. We learn what a healthy community looks like, how we can really live in a healthy community.
Heidi Wilcox:
We unpack the essential practices that she focused on in her book of promise-keeping truth-telling, gratitude and hospitality, what those deformations are and how we can start cultivating those healthy practices in our own lives so that we can be transformed people that others want in their own communities. Let’s listen.
Heidi Wilcox:
I’m really excited to have you back on the podcast, Dr. Pohl, and to get to talk to you a little bit more about community and the different things, different elements that make up a community. Because I think we all kind of have an idea of what community is, but I’m not sure all of our ideas are a healthy community.
Heidi Wilcox:
I know I was definitely enlightened about not knowing just what a community is, but seeing some areas in my own life and the relationships with others that I’m like, “Yes, I have community, but it’s not always a vulnerable, authentic community because maybe I’m not willing or others aren’t willing to share the deeper things inside them.” So I’m really looking forward to going deeper with today’s conversation.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, good. Good.
Heidi Wilcox:
Well, the practices that you mentioned in your book, “Living Into Community” that make up a healthy community are promise-keeping, truthfulness, gratitude, and of course, hospitality. So can you give us a little bit of a picture of what a healthy community looks like? Whether that’s an example of healthy communities you’ve been a part of, or just kind of what an ideal community would look like.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I’ll give it a try. Let me start out by saying those are the four practices that I focused on. But there certainly are other really important practices like forgiveness or discernment or some version of keeping Sabbath or worship and prayer and so on. So I don’t want to suggest that these are the only four that are crucial for a healthy or a good community.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I do think they’re really central to shaping and maintaining a good community. So I think to try to address your question I think a healthy community is one that actually embodies these practices, that lives out the practices in the way in which people relate to one another. So the gospel of John says that Jesus was filled with grace and truth. It’s a wonderful picture. And that should be true of us as his followers and true of our communities.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And I think these four practices are particular expressions of grace and truth. And so then it helps to ask ourselves, well, what are the relational dynamics of grace and truth? What do grace and truth look like when they’re lived out in relationships, in a community? And in a community that is healthy, I mean, I think we could say that people would live with one another truthfully.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
There wouldn’t be a lot of pretense or posturing or pretending. People would make and keep promises. You’d see a culture of celebration and gratitude, community of welcome and hospitality. But I think I’m cautious with the notion of ideal communities because I don’t think there are any. Communities aren’t perfect, they never are. And there are always challenges that come from different directions, but sometimes we fail in a practice.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
We don’t tell the truth or even we find that one practice makes doing another one more challenging. So maybe you want to be hospitable and welcome one another, but you also need to speak truthfully, maybe a difficult truth. And sometimes those can feel a bit at odds with each other. And I think that’s when the healthy community also needs to be practicing confession and forgiveness, reconciliation and discernment. So there’s a lot of practices at work in a good community.
Heidi Wilcox:
Go ahead, yes.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I was just going to say when I was working on hospitality, which was my first kind of big project on a practice, that’s where I really saw that all the practices interact with each other and the deformations or the failures and practices affect other practices. So just for example, we would think that gratitude is really important in a good community, but sometimes it’s not functioning very well but you still want to do hospitality. But hospitality without gratitude is really grudging. And grudging hospitality is not good for anybody. So you can sort of see how a failure in one practice actually affects another one.
Heidi Wilcox:
For sure.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So I’ve really liked looking at the intersections of practices. I think actually that’s some of the most interesting and most complicated dimension of this work. But I would say that a healthy community, a good community is one that people want to be part of, which is funny, but I mean so that they’re not grudging about contributing or being there. They’re glad to be together. And those communities are, I think, generous and grace-filled.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, yes. For sure. I like what you said about grace and truth being part of it because it doesn’t have to be perfect but it just has to be real and genuine.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right, right. I think it’s a terrible mistake to imagine that communities can be perfect. I think there’s a lot of idealism about community. And almost inevitably people are going to be disappointed because we’re frail, we make mistakes, we fail each other. And so we have to be prepared for that too.
Heidi Wilcox:
So what do we do? And I guess first of all, I should ask, when you talk about community, are you talking about an intentional community? Maybe I’m thinking incorrectly, but with an intentional community, I think of maybe something like a monastery or something along those lines. Or are you addressing church communities, small groups, even just communities and neighborhoods? Is there a specific type of community or is it all community?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, to a certain extent because these are human practices I think they apply to all communities. Because the way that I’ve looked at them also has kind of a Christian dimension to it. I would say that I was thinking about communities at many different levels of complexity and number and that kind of thing. So this can apply to, I’m certainly thinking about church congregations, but also intentional communities. I think most of the time this applies to families in terms of how we relate to one another.
Heidi Wilcox:
Interesting.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, those are just-
Heidi Wilcox:
Say more about families because most of us have some type of family, whether we’re… So how does it relate to family?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I think families survive by the promises they’ve made to one another. So making and keeping promises, fidelity to one another is really crucial. Families are much happier places if people practice gratitude toward one another and so on. So the practices make as much sense in terms of small groupings, whether it’s a small group or a family, what you have with a family is a community that really needs to last over time in a way that some of the other ones aren’t quite as decades and decades of life together.
Heidi Wilcox:
And you hope that you like each other for [crosstalk 00:08:33].
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean it helps, doesn’t it?
Heidi Wilcox:
It really does. So we talked about this earlier, the grace and truth that goes into communities and that’s kind of a balance that you have to strike. What do you do when the balance gets off? You mentioned what if somebody isn’t always telling the truth or telling the truth in the way that you need to hear the truth or there’s some type of conflict or moral failure or deformation in the community, how do you maintain community when things go wrong?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think in terms of when things go wrong, and we’ll probably have to unpack the practices and the deformations a little bit more, but when things go wrong, part of the key dynamic is that oftentimes people sort of cut and run.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And so one of the crucial things about being able to move toward reconciliation and healing and rebuilding is being willing to stay at the table, staying connected, not cutting ties, not cutting conversation, but maintaining conversation and relationships as much as possible. And so avoiding gossip, avoiding assigning to the other people with whom you disagree or who’ve disappointed you, being careful not to continually assign bad motives to them, finding ways to rebuild what’s been broken.
Heidi Wilcox:
So let’s go back then and we can unpack each practice that you focus on in your book. And then we’ll talk about the deformations and then some ways that we can start cultivating the practices that we want to have in our lives so that we can be people who are transformed and that others want to be part of their communities. So the practices that you focused on are: promise-keeping, truth-telling, practicing gratitude and hospitality. So let’s start with promise-keeping and just unpack each one, one at a time.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
It’s funny, especially with making and keeping promises and telling the truth or speaking of living truthfully, mostly we don’t notice them unless something goes wrong. But making and keeping promises is crucial to any relationship as I was saying about families. But if you think about the marriage vows or the ordinary promises we make to do something, when we say, “I’ll pick up the kids,” we depend on each other. This is how we build trust.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Because promises set up expectations. They take away some of the unpredictability of life. And so we depend on each other to keep the promises we make. And that can be on small things like maybe picking up the kids, or it can be on really big ones like staying faithful in a marriage. But promising is related to faithfulness and fidelity. And we worship a God who is faithful and true, and God keeps promises, right?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
We worship a covenant keeping God. So it’s not surprising that we, as God’s people, should be taking seriously both promise making and promise-keeping. So when we do what we say we’ll do or stay with someone or something when we’ve made a commitment, but it’s become difficult, we’re doing something important for the relationship.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think it’s important to talk about this because being willing to make commitments, to make promises in this culture is difficult. Our culture really likes to keep our options open. And that actually means that we’re very hesitant about making promises. We don’t want to make promises in case something better comes along. And yet that’s a really hard way to live.
Heidi Wilcox:
Constantly living with that fear of missing out.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right. That’s right. And so then you sort of settle for much less rich relationships and so on just because you’re waiting in case something better comes along. So keeping promises is really crucial to maintaining any significant relationship.
Heidi Wilcox:
As you said, there’s a relationship between each of the practices. And so promise-keeping would then tie pretty well directly into truth-telling. Is that right?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yes. Actually, even in scripture, the two of them are so closely related. Sometimes it’s translated as faithfulness, which would be more like promise-keeping and sometimes it’s translated as truth. But yes, they’re very closely connected. And of course, the deformations like betrayal and deception are also very closely connected.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I think in terms of truth-telling… And when I was working on the project, I realized that truth-telling was not a big enough category for truthfulness. I mean, that’s a piece of it. But truthful living, I think oftentimes captures a little bit more of what we need to be attentive to, truth-telling is an important part of it. But when we talk about truth-telling, I think a lot of times people think of things they don’t want to say or the other person doesn’t want to hear or whatever, so it always seems kind of harsh.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And yet living truthfully is bigger. Again, it has to do with remembering that Jesus tells us that he is the truth. And we want to live in a way that reflects biblical value of the way that the Bible values truthful living. So it’s not just about saying hard things because lots of truth that could be spoken is affirming and encouraging truths, positive things we might say about one another or what we see in one another, but we’re not used to thinking about it that way. So that’s actually where truthfulness and gratitude intersect, right? Where you recognize what goodness a person brings into your life.
Heidi Wilcox:
So let’s move on, and I think you’re going there. Let’s move on and talk about gratitude now then.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Sure. And again, gratitude really involves living in response to the grace that we’ve received. It’s not just an occasional saying thanks or something, it’s really a posture for how we live. And I think it means sort of cultivating an awareness of, as one person put it, the giftedness of our existence, our whole existence. And so that means gratitude to God, practicing gratitude toward one another.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And then gratitude essentially is a posture for life or a way of life. And I think that involves paying attention. A lot of times we just kind of rush our way through things. We don’t notice the grace and gratitude around us. We don’t name the blessings that we have received or the ways that people have been God’s grace in our life.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So here again, it involves truthfulness because if you have sort of gratitude or affirmation without truthfulness, you end up with something like flattery, which is sort of a dishonest affirmation. But gratitude kind of spills from or into truthful affirmation and even celebration. Karl Barth said that if the essence of God is grace then the essence of human beings as God’s people is our gratitude. I love that.
Heidi Wilcox:
That’s good.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I love that quote. He also says that grace and gratitude fit together like the voice and an echo. And I think those are wonderful pictures of responding to the grace that we’ve received from God, but also from one another in a way that echoes back that grace.
Heidi Wilcox:
Would you say that hospitality then is one of the ways that that grace gets echoed back?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think so, yeah. Because once again, I mean, hospitality, I think for Christians is a response to the grace we’ve received, the welcome that we’ve received from God in Christ. So that if we’re aware of it, if we’re sensitive to the extraordinary welcome that we’ve received, then it’s going to spill out in gratitude and expressions of hospitality and so on. So we’re living in a way that replicates, that corresponds in response to God’s welcome.
Heidi Wilcox:
So now let’s talk about each of the deformations because from your book, what I learned was that we can, at least I can, be practicing some of the deformations and not even realize it. So I think it’s really helpful. Because as you said in your book, we have to be able to see it and name the deformation so that we can then, with God’s grace, change it and go on to transform lives. So with promise-keeping, the opposite or the deformation is betrayal. So can you talk to us about betrayal and what that would look like in a community?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Sure, sure. And you have big and little forms of betrayal, right? But big betrayals, think about something like clergy misconduct, which is a profound betrayal of the commitments one’s made, the care for others in your congregation and so on. But we can have betrayal in the form of not keeping promises, of gossip or maybe repeating things we’ve been told in confidence.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So it often looks like broken promises or a loss of trust. I think one of the things that struck me over the years is if you think about children for whom adults have failed in their lives, right? Who haven’t kept promises, and this has been a repeated experience. If you’ve worked with those kinds of kids, you realize how hard it is for them to trust after that, what damage that kind of betrayal does. So it takes all sorts of forms.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
One of the things that struck me when I was studying betrayal was something like the biblical passages that describe the incidents around Jesus’ crucifixion. And Judas is a classic sort of example of betrayal, right? He betrays a friend with a kiss and so on. But Peter denied Jesus three times. That’s also betrayal, right? But it seems like it really kind of snuck up on Peter.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
He didn’t realize that he was doing something that significant until all of a sudden after the third time and the cock crows, he realizes what he’s done. But it made me realize that a lot of betrayals are sort of small. I mean, maybe he thought he was going to stand in front of the Sanhedrin or the Pharisees or something or other and he would never deny Jesus there.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But he does it with a servant girl or kind of in corners and so on. And then he’s kind of caught by it. I think our forms of betrayal are a little bit more like Peter than Judas. But then I was thinking also you have the betrayal of Pilate who really betrays his office, his position by just thinking he can wash his hands of it and walk away. So I think there are all different kinds of betrayal that are incredibly destructive to relationships. It’s a hard one to come back from, it requires a lot of confession and forgiveness.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, definitely. So truth-telling, the opposite, it’s very closely tied to betrayal but a little bit different. The deformation is deception. So talk to us a little bit about that and what that might look like in our lives.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. Well that’s another one where you can have the really big lies, right? Where somebody-
Heidi Wilcox:
And those are easy to recognize. So I think I was just interested in the smaller ones.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right.
Heidi Wilcox:
But like you were saying, just kind of sneak up on us. And I was thinking for myself, I’m like, “Oh, sometimes I’m not always the person that I think I am.”
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. And actually we’ll talk about that in a minute, because that has to do with self deception. I mean, I think you see deception in… I mean, we’re really in the habit of putting what we’ll call spin on things, right? I mean, we ask how we can spin the situation so everything looks better and so on, but that’s a form of deception.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
We do lots of exaggerating, Photoshopping things, omitting relevant facts that are inconvenient or unbecoming, or we pretend to be something that we’re not. As I said, sometimes it’s flat out lying, but a lot of times it’s more subtle. I think oftentimes it’s wanting to look good. And so we stretch the truth just a little bit this time, and then it becomes easier to do it the next time.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think again, there are some cultural things that make it easier at this point to be willing to engage in little deceptions. One has to do with sort of the attitude of we’ll do whatever it takes to accomplish something. And if what it takes is a little bit of deception, “Oh, well it was for a good goal.” And it’s like people don’t realize that by doing that, they’re going to miss the goal. You can’t get to a good goal by bad means, by deception.
Heidi Wilcox:
Right.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And so that becomes, I think, a tendency. That’s what you see with cheating. So when someone cheats on an exam or something and says, “Well, I just had to get into that good school,” or something. And it’s like, really? At what price? And so, yeah.
Heidi Wilcox:
Right.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I think we also see problems with self-deception.
Heidi Wilcox:
How so?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think this is a vulnerability of religious people in particular, because we want to be good and we want to see ourselves as good, but we also want to do what we want.
Heidi Wilcox:
Right.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And so sometimes we sort of work to fool ourselves, to hide from ourselves what it is we’re doing. And sometimes we give it different names, we use euphemisms, or we just put it in another category so we don’t notice it or we just sort of overlooked it or whatever. But it’s the way that we work to sort of help ourselves think of ourselves as maybe better than we are.
Heidi Wilcox:
We all do that, and it’s not okay. My words kind of just pass it off as we all do that but I don’t mean that, because I need to fix that. But I was thinking of social media too, and its presence in our lives as part of the truth-telling or not truth-telling game.
Heidi Wilcox:
Because we can make our lives look so good, so easy and it doesn’t really reflect the truth. Because I think of couples that maybe I’m not sure I’ve known any, but I’ve known people who knew couples like this, that their lives on social media, perfect. And then six months later you find out, oh, they’re getting a divorce. And so these pictures aren’t telling us the true story that maybe they need help or people to come alongside them or counseling or something like that.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Absolutely. I mean, I think there’s that terrible tendency to hide our weaknesses and try again, to look better than we’re doing. I mean, there’s a way in which we want to model good lives, but deception isn’t going to help that very much.
Heidi Wilcox:
Right. It just leads to secret sins and not living a full life.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right, right.
Heidi Wilcox:
So moving on then to the deformation of gratitude, envy and grumbling.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Pretty common I think. I guess I’ll do grumbling first, which is a really common deformation of gratitude. I mean, it’s sort of being able always to see what’s missing, how things should have been. So I think oftentimes it’s kind of a generalized discontent or being able to be critical without being constructive. I think grumbling is sometimes tied to sort of a disappointed idealism, right?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
You set up impossible expectations and then you are going to be disappointed, nothing’s ever going to kind of live up to what you dreamed would be possible. So I think grumbling is highly contagious in communities. It is like a virus, once it gets started, it’s hard to stop it.
Heidi Wilcox:
It is.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And it can become a way of life and it is actually extremely miserable. I was struck when I read the Rule of Benedict that he talked about what he called justifiable grumbling. And I thought that was a helpful warning. What he was talking about there was sort of legitimate criticism and distinguishing between that and grumbling. So sometimes we could maybe accuse someone of grumbling or complaint when really what they’re trying to do is provide truthful critique. And so I think we have to be careful not to misinterpret that as grumbling.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, definitely. So what about envy then?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Envy.
Heidi Wilcox:
Envy is a big one, how do we recognize that in our lives?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. I don’t think I understood before I started studying it, just how serious envy was as a sin, especially in communities, just how destructive it was. Kierkegaard wrote that envy is a small town sin. And when I first read that, I thought, “Huh, what does that mean?” But what he meant and observed I think is that envy is rooted in comparison.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And we compare ourselves to people who are more or less like us or people who are nearby. And so it flourishes in close knit communities, but it’s when we compare ourselves to other people. It’s a sin that destroys community, it’s wanting what someone else has, which is more like coveting, wanting what someone else has. But envy has a nastier meaner element in it, which is also not wanting them to have it.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And so Thomas Aquinas and actually other people in the tradition said that envy is sorrow for another’s good. And when you think about that, that is really horrible, right? To be sad and sorrowful because somebody else is doing well in some area. Nobody wants to admit that and so we hide it, right? We hide it.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
This is where deception and envy travel together. It’s kind of a monster. This is where you start thinking about you can envy another person’s success, you can envy the recognition they get for something, you can envy their gifts, you can envy their happy family in a way that’s so desperate and unhappy that you don’t want them to have it because you don’t have it or whatever. And so it’s a plague in communities because we see into each other’s lives. But I think basically it’s tied to not seeing the gifts that we’ve been given. And when-
Heidi Wilcox:
I found that very interesting when you said that.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And wanting somebody else’s gifts rather than seeing what God has given us. And I think it also has to do with not recognizing how much we are loved by God. So it comes out of sort of, I think in some ways, an emptiness, a deep need. But it’s a very unhelpful deformation.
Heidi Wilcox:
Definitely. And so then moving on to hospitality, the deformation… I keep wanting to say opposite. I’m not sure that’s the correct language. The deformation is exclusion. Talk to us about that a little bit.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think exclusion is tied to having too small a vision for a good community, sort of trying to hold onto what we have and holding onto it in a way that’s so desperate that we can’t let other people in. So we become fearful of strangers or protective of our things or our lifestyle or whatever, and kind of assuming that we’re better off without those people, whoever they might be.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And sometimes we do it by maybe seeing them as not a good enough return on our investment or too much trouble, or maybe they’ll interfere with our way of life or they’re too risky or too different. But we set up boundaries, we don’t make room. I think sometimes it comes from a fear that welcoming some people might include their bringing their commitments with them and that could undermine our particular commitments. And that’s really where fidelity and hospitality sometimes are really crucial, and sometimes they are challenging to try to hold them together at the same time.
Heidi Wilcox:
You’ve talked about fidelity, can you go ahead and define that for us? Because it’s a word that we don’t use very much today. And I feel like it has a deeper meaning than what we think of, or at least when I think of when I think of promise-keeping and truth-telling. What is fidelity?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Fidelity in some ways is a combination of both of those practices just like integrity is. But fidelity has the element of faithfulness to something or someone. So I think of fidelity as a bigger category, but I think fidelity tends to, in some ways anyway, have us look backward back toward a commitment we’ve made and keeping that commitment. Promise-keeping actually tends to be oriented toward the future. So they have a lot of the same elements, but they also are slightly distinct.
Heidi Wilcox:
[crosstalk 00:29:56].
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So we hear a lot about faithfulness and fidelity in scripture, being faithful to the covenant and so on. That’s mostly backward looking, but we also have promises and vows and so on that we make toward the future.
Heidi Wilcox:
I like that fidelity looks back, mostly promises look forward. So it’s an all encompassing view of both the past, the present and the future.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s right. That’s right. And both looking backward and looking forward, both impact how we live now.
Heidi Wilcox:
I love that. So now that we’ve talked about the formations and the deformations of these specific practices within a community, I know I had some revelations as we were talking. And as I was reading your book, Living Into Community, especially regarding envy I didn’t quite realize the depth and nastiness of that particular deformation in truth-telling, especially around living truthfully and self-deceptions that I tell myself. I was hoping you would talk to us about some ways that we can start cultivating the formational practices. I’m hoping it’s simple because I need things to be simple for me to do them.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think we all do.
Heidi Wilcox:
So I’m hoping that we could just talk about each, go through the formations then and talk about some ways that we can cultivate promise-keeping, we’ll start with that one.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Sure. I would say at this point though, it’s really important not to sort of think of these practices as one more task we should be doing.
Heidi Wilcox:
Oh, that’s a good word.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think if it just becomes just a duty or just working harder, it’s going to make them very burdensome. They represent pieces of a way of life so that they have this goodness that’s inside of them. And I think that goodness comes from God’s grace. And so the practices apart from grace would be very burdensome. So I think paying attention to that and recognizing there are things that we can do to make these practices more vibrant in our lives but it’s God’s love and grace that makes them possible.
Heidi Wilcox:
For sure. I’m glad you said that. Because I can definitely just have tasks that I’m like, “Oh, I need to be kinder. So we’ll work on that and check it off.” And that’s not really the rhythm in my life.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
No, it’s not. It’s really we’re talking more about a way of life. We’re sort of breaking apart a way of life, but it’s a way of life lived in response to the grace that we’ve received. So in terms of particulars about how we might foster promise-keeping, one of the things we can do, especially if we’re in mentoring relationships or teaching or leadership roles is to help people learn to count the cost before they make promises.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Some people make promises very casually, but then don’t really recognize that you can’t possibly fulfill all the things you’ve promised. And you become kind of a habitual promise breaker. So helping people count the cost can be good. I think we can honor fidelity where we see it, where we see people being faithful over time, where they’ve kept their promises in difficult situations or over the longterm.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think that needs to be celebrated more than it often is because it’s not very dramatic. It doesn’t call attention to itself, but it’s that steady faithfulness. I think again, there are people who have a lot of commitments and sometimes they seem overwhelmed and burdened by them. And so I think sometimes we can help people by helping them to get kind of a right ordering of their commitments so that it’s not so overwhelming. Actually that could be an experience of freedom. Rather than feeling bound by promises, you can feel free by getting them kind of in the right order.
Heidi Wilcox:
Because you’re kind of talking about that, when is it appropriate to release someone or even ourselves from promises that we’ve made?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s interesting. That’s a very long conversation in the Christian tradition and in philosophy. Actually philosophers talk about conditions that defeat a promise. I always thought that was pretty funny, conditions that defeat a promise. But there are reasons that we don’t always keep our promises although it’s really important that we do almost all of the time.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But sometimes the conditions change so the promise is no longer relevant. If you’ve promised to stay with somebody for a week while they recover from surgery but actually they recover within a couple of days, I mean, it makes the promise not particularly relevant to the situation anymore. Sometimes a person can’t fulfill the promise they’ve made, and so it’s important to release them. I mean, maybe their circumstances have changed dramatically and they just can’t do what they thought they genuinely thought they could do and would do.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Sometimes a much more pressing need appears and it sort of makes you have to choose the pressing thing over the promise thing because there’s such a difference in sort of the magnitude of importance. And this is a conversation in the moral tradition, but I think that when we do break promises, it’s not like the promise just disappears.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
We still owe the person that we’ve made the promise to some recognition that it may have been costly to them. If you’re driving along and you come upon an accident and you’re the only one who can help the person, of course, you’re going to stop even though you promised to be at a meeting, right? And there’s a bunch of people waiting for you. Well, it’s not like the obligation to those people goes away just because you needed to do it. I mean, you still owe those people something for the fact that they waited an hour and a half for you without knowing what happened or whatever.
Heidi Wilcox:
Exactly.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So you still owe an apology or an effort to make it right in some way. It doesn’t just disappear, which is what sometimes people imagine, that the promise just goes away if you can’t do it or something. I don’t think it does. But, yeah.
Heidi Wilcox:
As we’re talking about promise-keeping, what is the relationship between perseverance and keeping your promise?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
That’s an interesting question. I think there are some promises that you’re kind of like you make the promise and you deliver on it in very close amount of time, right? So you promise that you’ll cook dinner tonight or pick up the kids tomorrow or whatever. It doesn’t require a lot of perseverance, you just need to do it and it’ll be done.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
On the other hand, keeping marriage vows over decades does sometimes require perseverance. Or ordination vows during a difficult period or whatever, requires that we hang in there during tough times, that we press on to be faithful to the promise and the people we’ve made the promise to. So it’s crucial for long-term commitments, especially when we encounter obstacles.
Heidi Wilcox:
When we encounter obstacles, is it ever okay to rescind our promise?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yes. I mean, I think there are times where we do have to reconsider when the circumstances or the obstacles have been enormous. Then I think that oftentimes requires truthful conversations. It can be very difficult, right? Because promises are important to relationships and it can be a huge fracturing of trust. But there are times when communities do have to rethink their promises. And I think again, then all of the other practices become important.
Heidi Wilcox:
So moving on to truth-telling, because it’s not just speaking the truth, it’s living truthful lives as we learned in today’s conversation. So what are some ways that we can start practicing a lifestyle of truth-telling?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I think we can start by recognizing its importance and pushing back against a culture that increasingly disregards the significance of truth. I think we need to talk about it, we need to recognize it and we need to practice it. I don’t think that bluntness is the same as truth and truthfulness. I think we can use kindness.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, we need to use kindness and care when we are speaking the truth and it certainly requires discernment. If you think about it, we can be truthful without necessarily saying everything we know. We can be truthful with children especially, and still not say everything about something, we use discernment.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I think it’s really important that fidelity, so sort of the promising piece, is fully present when we do difficult truth-telling. If the person can’t be sure that you actually care about them, that you love them, it becomes harder to hear the truth. And I think it’s easier to do difficult truthfulness in contexts where there’s been a lot of positive truths spoken as sort of part of everyday life so that you have sort of a fabric that holds the person as you’re dealing with difficult things.
Heidi Wilcox:
One of the examples that I remember from your book was about a couple in a church who was having difficulties in their relationship. So I believe it was, if I’m remembering right, the wife in the couple went to their pastor at the time, spoke with him about the situation, but didn’t want the pastor to tell her husband that she had talked to him.
Heidi Wilcox:
So it kind of created this awkward triangle as the pastor encouraged the couple to get counseling. They went forward and did that. And they’re married, they stayed together. But because the pastor knew of some of their issues, it created some difficulties down the road when the husband wanted to advance in the area of ministry and the church and take on more leadership responsibilities. I thought that example was especially relevant to our audience. I guess I’m just not sure how do you honor being truthful to the wife, being truthful to the husband, being truthful to the couple.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. It’s probably a promise he should not have made to the wife.
Heidi Wilcox:
Well talk about that. A promise is a decision [inaudible 00:40:28].
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, there are times when you shouldn’t agree to keep certain things in confidence. And that was probably something that he learned a little bit late in that situation. Because it really did. I mean, it caused enormous problems later on when the husband couldn’t understand why the church resisted his moving forward.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And the pastor was trying to be faithful to the promises that he made, and at that point he had made that promise. So I think again, sort of issues around confidentiality and truthfulness and so on are complicated and they can have long-term consequences that can be very helpful or destructive to a community and to relationships.
Heidi Wilcox:
How can we start telling the truth to ourselves? Because I think that’s the tricky part because we know ourselves the best, but maybe we don’t know ourselves completely. And I think it’s easy to do kind of more smoke and mirrors when we’re dealing with ourselves. So how can we start telling ourselves the truth?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I think it can help to have other people around us who help us see the truth about ourselves that might challenge us when we try to describe what we’re doing differently. I think there can be kind of a willful not seeing. So, I mean, I think it involves a prayer for kind of a clear vision, a willingness to…
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think part of it’s tied again, to wanting to be good, which is a good thing, but it can be it can be blinding in the sense that we can’t admit our frailties or we’re afraid to admit our sins. And I think we just have to recognize that God loves us and wants for us something better, something truer even if it’s hard to see it.
Heidi Wilcox:
Is it ever okay to lie?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Oh, dear.
Heidi Wilcox:
I know. You kind of talked about that in your book. So I’m-
Dr. Christine Pohl:
You’re asking an ethicist a question that has built many volumes.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, I know.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Mostly, no. It’s not okay to lie because we love the truth. I mean, we can look at how we worship a God who is truth, who loves the truth, who tells us to live the truth and speak the truth and so on. So there’s a huge emphasis on truth and truthfulness in scripture. But even in scripture, very occasionally people lie and don’t seem to get in trouble for it, right?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So you have the Hebrew midwives who lied to Pharaoh and Rahab who lies about the spies and so on. But truth is central to God’s character and ours, and it matters. And our tendency is not to do these big lies, but to do little ones that maybe we think make life a little bit easier by not having to have the disruption that comes sometimes with speaking more truthfully.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
It takes more work sometimes to figure out how to say hard truths in a helpful and kind way, and so we just opt for being untruthful. But I think we can choose silence sometimes over lying. And we can always choose discernment and kind of consider the word that might be fitly spoken for a particular situation.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So I think there probably are incredibly rare occasions where someone’s life is… I mean, these are always the classic examples where someone’s life is at stake and if you tell them, the person’s going to get killed or if you tell the person who’s pursuing them or something. And it may be necessary to lie, although there’s real differences in the tradition about this.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I think that, again, there still is reason for regret even in doing that kind of lying because you’re forced into a terrible choice in a terrible situation. It doesn’t make it go away that it was a lie. And there’s some undermining of the humanness, I think, of the people involved when we’re forced into that situation. So I mean, it’s a big conversation.
Heidi Wilcox:
It is probably much longer than we have today, but I appreciate you talking to us just a little bit about it. So moving on to gratitude, how can we cultivate the practice of gratitude in our lives?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I think sometimes when I talk about gratitude people sort of think of some kind of happy, clappy, always optimistic, sunny kind of approach to life. That’s not really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about knowing that the God we worship is a God of grace and responding with grace and gratitude to God and living that way in the world.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I think that a posture of gratitude and thanks is actually a way in which we are better able to encounter or to challenge evil and injustice and misery and so on. I mean, knowing that we’re held by a loving God who gives us strength and courage allows us to address some of the really difficult things. So I don’t see gratitude as sort of an alternative to justice or responsibility or something like that. I actually see it as an important component of working on those issues.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I think to practice it, often it means slowing down to notice what’s around us, especially to notice the good around us, which we often take for granted and learn to pay attention to what is good and to tell stories. And we tell stories of God’s faithfulness to remember the blessing. Even just simple practices, which lots of people do of expressing gratitude first thing in the morning to God and possibly to others around you.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And at the end of the day, kind of recounting the blessings of the day can be really helpful in terms of cultivating a life of gratitude. I think oftentimes practicing celebration is a form of gratitude. Celebration’s not just a nice extra if we have the time. Celebration is important practice that’s closely related to gratitude.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But celebration, as one person put it, is a way in which what we’re aiming for is kind of made present in our lives for that bit of time of the celebration. And so it becomes really important that we have those times and rejoice in them. And I think another friend who said that we can learn to catch people in the act of being a gift, which is, I think, a very beautiful way of thinking about some of the people in our lives who do express God’s grace to us in so many oftentimes small and unnoticed ways.
Heidi Wilcox:
Definitely. So hospitality, we had a whole episode last time about hospitality, but I want to stay true to our forms. So what are some ways that we can cultivate the practice of hospitality in our lives?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. I think for one thing, we want to distinguish it from entertaining, or trying to make an impression. Those are really unhelpful kind of misunderstandings of hospitality. I think hospitality is about really sharing ourselves, inviting people into our lives in a sense as we live them. We need to resist using hospitality as a means to another end.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Hospitality itself is just a good practice, a life giving practice. I think what can be really helpful is to think about times when you’ve really felt welcomed and identify the elements. What was is that made you know that the person was glad you were there? And I think oftentimes it’s because that person seemed genuine or that community seemed genuinely interested in you.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
They found you interesting and they didn’t treat you like you are an interruption into their important activities, you were valued. And so I think their being able to make a place for you in their lives is some of the ways in which hospitality is expressed so that you can turn your own experiences sort of around in that and say, “Okay, those are the ways that I could also communicate to someone that they were welcome.” And so just kind of working on that. So oftentimes people who have been strangers make the best hosts because they know what it feels like.
Heidi Wilcox:
Definitely. We’re still recording in the middle of a pandemic, so we’re doing it remotely. How has this pandemic informed your view of community? Has it changed it at all or just kind of reinforced what you already thought and knew about community?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
It has made me really grateful for Zoom. And I think I probably assumed that the most important kinds of community life had to be face to face, but I must say that Zoom and sort of various of digital or electronic communication or whatever. It’s actually turning out to be pretty important. I mean, it’s no substitute and I think people are realizing that. It can’t be the only thing. We are desperate for the physical connections that we took for granted for so long so often.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
But I think the kinds of connections that we’re having to make, the creativity that we’re having to come up with to sustain community, I’m not sure that it’s all that easy to create new communities right now, but there are ways in which we can sustain ones that we have by again, probably we see the importance of maintaining community, especially with the people who are the most vulnerable, who are the most likely to fall out of community.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So we have to work a little bit harder there. I think the pandemic, at least for some people, has tended to slow us down a little bit, to be more attentive to what’s right around us, to immediate family and finding good things to do or immediate communities and so on and valuing that.
Heidi Wilcox:
My hope is that when we come out of this, because I am hopeful that we do come out of this and that ends for everyone, but I hope it helps us all do community better because we’ve realized how much we need it. And that digital connection is great and we so need it right now, but that it’s no substitute for the real thing.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. Right. Absolutely.
Heidi Wilcox:
We’re probably talking to people who are leaders within communities, whether that’s a church community or a neighborhood, or who are going to be a leader in a community or who want to be. So all these practices, they probably require that we create some boundaries. So how can we create the boundaries that are necessary to maintain the practices for a healthy community, whether that’s small group, church or something like that?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, I think I’m not exactly sure what you mean by creating boundaries. I think we can maybe move more explicit about definitions and help people be clearer about what it is that they’re looking for and trying to build. I think it can actually be helpful to preach and teach directly on some of these practices because it’s not a language people are familiar with, or at least not very familiar with.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
By teaching or preaching on it, it helps folks pay more attention to them. One of the things that I discovered was that it was much easier for people to notice the failures and practices than to see them when they were working well. And that’s because they don’t usually call attention to themselves when they’re working well. So it really does help to talk about it, to define it to see how a particular practice might be worked out in life together.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And I think one of the reasons it’s important is because if we don’t use the language of promising or truthfulness, we’re going to tend to default to the language that’s more familiar in the culture. And oftentimes that’s psychological or therapeutic language. And so when things go wrong, we talk about somebody who’s dysfunctional or codependent or whatever.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And we miss the chance to notice that what’s really going on is also that people are failing in the promises or the commitments they’re making, or they’ve been dishonest or whatever. And actually using the language of practices or something like that, or virtues or whatever allows us to access the resources of the scriptures and the Christian tradition much more readily.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
So we can find wisdom for the difficulties that we face when we’re actually a little bit more tied into things like the practices. Again, I think that it can help leaders to reflect a little bit more on how all of these practices are in a sense responses to God’s character. And that it simply means that this is who we need to be as God’s people.
Heidi Wilcox:
I think that I was asking that question, I was thinking of the example that you gave from Keith Wasserman and Good Works when I was thinking about the boundaries. But I’m not sure boundaries was the right word, but that he had, I guess systems, if you will, or opportunities for truth-telling.
Heidi Wilcox:
I believe that once a week he had check-in opportunities where it was totally okay for people to tell the truth if things weren’t going well, or if they weren’t going well, but it wasn’t just a, I’m going to ask you the question and everything was fine. So I think that’s what I meant with the boundaries.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Right. So more like structures.
Heidi Wilcox:
Structures, yes. That’s a much better word. Thank you.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Because boundaries has lots of meetings. But anyway, yes. Actually Keith’s structure at Good Works, kind of an arrangement that he calls Clear is something that the staff, the community does every week and they go around and ask. Basically what they’re asking is if all relationships among the staff, and there’s about 20 or 25 of them sometimes, whether they’re all in good order.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And if they’re not, then he recognizes that if there are really disordered relationships among the staff, they’re going to have a hard time doing the kinds of work they need to do with people who are homeless. And so that needs to be addressed. So they don’t address it in the meeting, but they do make sure that the people who acknowledge that something is wrong then take the time they need to reconcile.
Heidi Wilcox:
I see. Are there other structures that we can put in place to help us as larger communities maintain these practices?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Yeah. I think that being more explicit about the promises we make and expect, a lot of communities function with sort of implicit promises or expectations. And I think it can be helpful, especially to newcomers, to have some of those expectations spelled out more clearly. Because especially as people come to faith from totally non-Christian backgrounds, they don’t know what the expectations are and they can end up being in trouble for things they didn’t know they were doing wrong.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And so I think another sort of structure is that regularly we can talk about what it is we’re committed to, what it means to be faithful in the world, what it looks like to be a Christian. So I think sometimes being more explicit, even though that can even feel a little bit burdensome can actually be pretty helpful.
Heidi Wilcox:
Yes, definitely. I feel like it’s always better to be upfront about what you want in anything. I know too, I found from my own experiences with even just among my friend group community, that the friends I appreciate the most are the ones who tell me the truth about my life that maybe I haven’t seen.
Heidi Wilcox:
But they’ve heard me ruminate about an issue for a long time and they’re like, “Heidi, what I think you really need to do based on what I hear you saying is maybe end this relationship with this particular group or find a way to do it better or well.” And being able to be vulnerable with those people and having them speak truth into my life has been very helpful.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Absolutely. And I think the Wesleyan tradition of the emphasis on small accountability groups and so on is really crucial. To have friends or a tiny community that really cares about you, that knows you and that cares enough to speak the truth into your life even though you might get aggravated with them or something can be enormously helpful in growing toward holiness and goodness.
Heidi Wilcox:
So as many people at the seminary are starting small groups or are in small groups or something like that, or people who aren’t at the seminary, are in small groups or accountability groups, what is one piece of advice that you would give to someone who is just starting out and wants to build that type of community? Maybe they don’t have it or they’re in a group and they want to be able to go deep with their group.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Gosh.
Heidi Wilcox:
That’s a big question, isn’t it?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
It is a big question. I guess I would say try to be what you’re looking for. So if you’re looking for a group that’s truthful and vulnerable, then you need to be that kind of person, and to go in with a recognition that all of us are going to make mistakes and fail each other in one way or another.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
And so to recognize that we’re not aiming to sort of create this ideal little group or something, but we’re aiming to kind of help each other along the way. I think being patient and persevering. I have a friend who talked about weaving a fabric of faithfulness which is just that slow threading of basically the threads that kind of hold us together, I think would be really crucial.
Heidi Wilcox:
I think for me when I’ve been in small groups before, I’m hesitant because I’m just joining the group. Sometimes at church, I don’t really know the other people in the group. And so I’m hesitant to go to tell them too much about me too quickly. So what is the balance between being vulnerable and then kind of self protection a little bit and to realize that you can build that trust?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think that’s where it does take time. I mean, we do fail each other. And sometimes when people are willing to be vulnerable or share more about themselves than the group is ready to handle responsibly, it can be incredibly painful. And so I think you do it bit by bit, and you do do some assessing of the maturity level of the group.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I mean, even if you think about friends, there are some friends that you can be more vulnerable and truthful with than others. And that’s especially true for people in leadership. There needs to be great wisdom about how much self-disclosure we offer. We want to live truthfully, but that doesn’t mean telling everyone everything. And so I don’t know that there’s any kind of formula for that. I think you just take small steps toward increased truthfulness and vulnerability. But sometimes it becomes clear that this is not the community that’s going to handle that well, or it is.
Heidi Wilcox:
That makes a lot of sense. This conversation has just been great, Dr. Pohl. Is there anything else that you want to say that I haven’t known to ask or that you want to make sure that we talk about?
Dr. Christine Pohl:
I think it’s the fact that, you mentioned perseverance that sort of slow building of trust, the patience that we need to build communities, the flexibility, and willingness to risk, the importance of being faithful and being responsible, being trustworthy. Because really, those are all crucial things to making a healthy and thriving community, I think.
Heidi Wilcox:
For sure. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Pohl. I’ve really enjoyed today’s conversation and I appreciate you stopping by remotely so that we could talk to you again. And I’ve just enjoyed the opportunity to get to know you a little bit better. So thank you.
Dr. Christine Pohl:
Well, thank you for the chance. It was really enjoyable.
Heidi Wilcox:
Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s conversation with Dr. Christine Pohl. Just really appreciate her time and the gift of having her for two episodes so that she can share the gift of her work with us. I know I gained some new insight into my own life and I hope you did as well. As always, you can follow us in all the places, on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @AsburySeminary. Until next time, have a great day y’all. And go do something that helps you thrive.