Changing People

Changing People

Louise and I left home about ten o:clock in the morning of that cold, gray day to visit Jay and Gertrude in Minneapolis. Jay had been our pastor for about six years during the sixties when war and social issues bitterly divided our country and our congregation.

This was a time when the ugliness of the war in Vietnam became visible to the American people as battle scenes entered their living rooms through television.They witnessed napalm burning the flesh of children, a general explaining that they had to destroy a town to save it. Our own young men, obeying the orders of their lieutenant, massacred an entire village at My Lai. College students were demonstrating in the streets as political leaders bowed to the urgings of the military, sending more and more troops into battle.

It was a time too when people we knew as Negroes began to assert their right to live in dignity, enduring beatings and cigarette burns as they sat at a Woolworth lunch counter, cringing from attack dogs and water hoses used by the lawful authorities to intimidate them. Angry mobs threatened little black children as they walked to school escorted by armed soldiers of the National Guard.

Jay knew right from wrong on these issues and determined that his ministry called him to tell the truth. Every Sunday he preached. He told his people how wrong, how evil their attitudes were. And every week they became more angry, some even rising to leave the sanctuary while he continued preaching. On one occasion he traveled to the hospital to call on a seriously ill parishioner who angrily ordered him out of the room as nurses worried over his dangerously rising blood pressure. Jay was a short, pudgy Swede whose light complexion accentuated his baldness. And his defining characteristic was his stubbornness. Our membership declined as more and more people left to hear a more comfortable message, one that confirmed them in their own strongly held political and social views.

Another phenomenem of that time was an interest in popular psychology. Books like "I'm OK, You're OK", "Born to Win", and "Games People Play" proliferated. We found that it was helpful to recognize little tapes in our heads, tapes programed earlier in life and triggered by moment to moment experiences so they played messages from our critical or nurturing parent, our child or adult mode. A basic teaching tool was the T Group. Ten or fifteen persons would gather without any directions about what they were supposed to be doing, or to whom they might look within the group for leadership. There they would struggle to find the purpose of their meeting, how to spend the time, arguing with each other, competing for a leadership role, attacking one another. This unstructured environment was designed to accomplish change as reading a book could never achieve.

This became Jay's passion and he left the church for days at a time to attend and eventually lead seminars. He used members of the church as his guinea pigs and we benefited from the learning he had acquired. But to the majority of our members this was an additional reason for his dismissal as our local church pastor. So Jay secured an appointment as an associate in a large church in Minneapolis where his personality and his intense interest in psychology again caused problems. Losing his position there he worked as a counselor in a hospital, then formed his own successful company.

Louise and I drove warily on icy roads to Minneapolis, viewing with apprehension the many trucks that had skidded off the highway the previous night. When we arrived I planned to accompany Jay to the camp he had rented from the church and then participate in the programmed activities. Louise would stay and visit with Gertrude.

The retreat began with supper Friday evening. There were about forty in attendance, mostly young professionals in their late thirties and early forties. We gathered in small groups after supper to play the psychological exercises assigned to us. But then a note of alarm swept through the room as we learned that a young man in one of the groups had stood up abruptly, cried and escaped out into the night. Concerned that he might injure himself we searched in the parking lots and surrounding fields but could not find him. We learned later that he had called from a nearby telephone, would not return but was apparently safe.

The next morning I chose to participate with a T group. There were ten of us. I was an outsider, as the others had obviously been together previously. As was the rule, we had no agenda, no agreed purpose. We met in a lodge, sitting on the floor, struggling with what we were going to do together.

Then it began. I witnessed the strangest transformation I have ever seen.

One of the participants, a man, with great poise and self confidence, a leader in the group, began to eye Irene suspiciously. Then he attacked her verbally, accusing her of having something wrong with her. And I could see what he had noticed. Irene was somewhat remarkable, seeming to talk off the top of her head in a whining voice. She was no more than forty years of age, visibly Italian with black hair, swarthy complexion, an attractive full figure. Then other members of the group joined in the attack questioning why she talked the way she did. Irene resisted, insisting she didn't know what they were talking about. But finally she broke down and began crying, sobbing. And then a different person emerged. As she sobbed we saw a warm, emotional person speaking from her heart with a rich, relaxed voice. She told us about how she had been raised, and as she talked a picture of her family life appeared: a home where the aroma of rich brown meat sauce bubbling on the stove filled the kitchen, where a tenor voice singing opera could be heard in every room, where her family quarreled loudly, reconciled generously, with nothing held back, trusting in the deep love they had for each other.

But then Irene fell in love and married a very reserved. blonde Scandinavian probate lawyer, who at this very time was outside the lodge cross country skiing, and who had absented himself all weekend from any contact with these strange people who voluntarily exposed themselves to each other, probed deeply into their unconscious selves to explore who they were and why they felt and acted the way that they did. Irene explained that from the first in their marriage she had been obliged to restrain her natural self, how their first quarrels had so threatened her husband that she feared for the continuance of their marriage.

So she had performed her own lobotomy, denying the person she was in order to be a wife to her husband. She no longer was God's creation, warm, passionate, loving, but had become a stick figure, withdrawn, cautious, careful not to offend.

And as I witnessed this strange occurrence I vowed that I would never again criticize my wife, never try to change her from the person she was, that I would accept her as she was and love her as she was, because that is who she was intended to be.If only I could have kept that noble resolution.