If we assume that any chronic condition that we are persistently trying to change will, perversely, be supported not to change by our serious efforts to bring about change, then it is logical to consider the possibility that one way out of this paradox is to be paradoxical.
—Edwin H. Friedman, Generation to Generation
I was sitting in my supervisor’s cramped office, once again regretting my decision to forgo my seminary classes in favor of a semester working as an intern chaplain at a large metropolitan medical center. Called Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), the program entailed forty hours a week of hands-on experience visiting patients, buttressed by weekly feedback sessions with my supervisor. I thought this plunge into the deep end of the pool would help me learn to swim as a pastor; often, however, I had no idea what to say to patients or, even worse, how to say it. Far more comfortable in libraries, I was clearly out of my depth dealing with the emotions that overflowed every hospital room. An even more anxious part of the experience, however, was the weekly encounter-style supervision meetings that I approached with dry-mouthed vulnerability.
Unexpectedly, my supervisor said, “Rich, I think you should try harder.” I was shocked. No one had ever accused me of not trying hard enough, in anything. I am conscientious to the core. I suffered his reproach in silence. Yet at our next weekly meeting, he said it again. “Rich, why aren’t you trying harder?” Now my anxiety really spiked! Even the one person in the hospital with whom I felt relatively safe thought I was failing! I replied in total sincerity, “But I am trying hard!” His only reply: “I think you should try harder.” After this same advice was given for a third week in a row, I finally boiled over: “I’ve been trying as hard as I can all semester, and I can’t try any harder! You know what? I give up!” He smiled kindly, his eyes twinkling, and said only one word. “Good.”
Chinese Handcuffs
Whether we are dealing with change in ourselves or seeking to promote change in others, trying harder is like struggling to escape from Chinese handcuffs: the harder you attempt to pull your fingers apart, the tighter the handcuffs become. Only by playing with the handcuffs do you discover that pushing both fingers together (the opposite of trying harder) releases them. My supervisor had correctly diagnosed that my try-harder anxiety to prove myself was impeding my relationships with both my patients and my colleagues. He employed Viktor Frankl’s technique of “paradoxical intention”: “The therapist encourages the client to maintain, with great vigor, the problem behavior at its presenting level or, if possible, at a level that is even more discomforting.”1 This method is also called symptom prescription. Clients are “prescribed” their own anxiety-provoking symptoms in exaggerated ways. An agoraphobic, for example, might be advised to methodically increase time spent in crowds. A compulsive hand washer might be told to wash his hands an extra twenty times a day. This seemingly silly paradoxical advice has a serious purpose. “The client’s emotional response to paradox (e.g., shock, surprise, confusion) may serve as a positive therapeutic experience.”2
As we discussed in the last chapter, our first response to challenges is often to double down and try harder within the existing system. Saul is a poster child for this: “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee” (Phil. 3:5 RSV). No wonder people who lived in simple faith in Jesus incensed Saul. How blasphemous to assume that such a weighty goal as righteousness before God could be secured with so little effort, especially compared with how hard he tried! Just as first-order solutions can exacerbate the problem, so Saul’s pursuit of righteousness through keeping the law was counterproductive (Gal. 2–3; Rom. 3–4). His encounter with Jesus on the Damascus Road is a classic second-order change. Talk about an outside intervention that brings shock, surprise, and confusion! Saul breaks out of his pharisaical quest for righteousness to become Paul, the apostle of justification by grace through faith.3
While Paul is a classic example, Scripture provides others. Consider King Solomon’s symptom prescription of offering to settle the rival mothers’ dispute by cutting the baby in half (1 Kings 3:16–28). Such a paradoxical approach generated shock, surprise, and confusion that quickly changed the system: each professing mother reveals how much she actually loves the child. It could be argued that the father in one of Jesus’ most famous parables practices symptom prescription by giving his prodigal son his inheritance in cash so he might experience the bitter dregs of his rebellious nature and come to his senses in a way he might never have done had he remained chafing in his father’s house (Luke 15:11–32).
Detouring around the Maginot Line
My try-harder nature was only temporarily assuaged during my hospital chaplaincy. A decade later I suffered recurring bouts of depression because the church I served was not growing numerically as I had hoped. Again, trying harder was not working. I felt impotent, especially when I watched speakers strut the latest fashion of “proven success” down the runways of church-growth conferences. I returned from every conference so depressed that my wife forbade me from attending them. As I was drowning in my unfulfilled expectations, God threw me a lifeline in the person of systems therapist Edwin Friedman.
First, I learned about seriousness and the liabilities of trying harder.4 Friedman writes in Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, “If we assume that any chronic condition that we are persistently trying to change will, perversely, be supported not to change by our serious efforts to bring about change, then it is logical to consider the possibility that one way out of this paradox is to be paradoxical.”5
Slowly I came to accept that my serious effort undermined everything; the harder I tried to change people, the less they changed. The alternative is playfulness, Friedman suggests. “If it is generally true that it is not possible to be playful with those for whom we feel too responsible, it is especially true when we feel a responsibility for their salvation! Few religious traditions make much of playfulness.”6
We can safely assume Jesus is serious about making disciples for the kingdom of God. How then can he engage in so much paradoxical playfulness? Why does he not try harder to tell it like it is? Jesus often leaves his listeners, and us, grappling with dissonance, struggling with the paradoxical tensions he creates; he makes us connect the dots on our own. As we will soon see, Jesus’ parables and stories often challenge fixed assumptions and hardened worldviews without head-on confrontation; they are open-ended, forcing us to construct our own endings.
For most of my “serious” life, I never questioned my assumption that change happened through marshalling evidence and logic. Then Friedman taught me the difference between content and process. Often the emotional or relational process is far more influential than persuasive content.7 How else, for example, do we explain the unusually high percentage of Americans who refuse to accept the reality of manmade climate change even though 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists present overwhelming evidence for it?8
Most of us have a built-in Maginot Line, similar to the impenetrable system of barriers and bunkers France built to protect itself from Germany after World War I. When someone challenges our worldview, klaxons sound and bunker walls are manned. The invasion of France in World War II began not with a futile frontal attack against the Maginot Line but with German panzer divisions racing in a sweeping detour around the line through undefended Belgium. France fell swiftly. To connect with others, sometimes we need to find a detour around their Maginot Line.
Analyzing communication dynamics, Friedman comments, “It is less the words than the emotional envelope in which they are delivered.”9 My serious, try-harder envelope was often left on the hall table, unopened. Jesus, by contrast, is a classic “non-anxious presence,” presenting his message but allowing listeners the emotional freedom to respond or not.10 In other words, Jesus does not take responsibility for people but makes them responsible for their own spiritual welfare. After he tells the rich young ruler to “sell everything you have and give to the poor” (Mark 10:21), Jesus watches him walk sadly away. (I would have chased after him, saying, “Wait! Let me explain that again!”) When a man promises to follow Jesus but asks him to “first let me go and bury my father” (Matt. 8:21), Jesus says it’s now or never. (I would have said, “Great! When might I expect you?”)
Playful Humor
In his groundbreaking work on therapeutic paradox, Viktor Frankl suggests that the value of paradoxical intention can be heightened through exaggerated or ludicrous humor. A man fearful that his colleagues might assume he could not handle pressure because he sweated profusely during meetings was told to “show his audience what perspiration is really like, to perspire in gushes of drenching torrents of sweat.”11
We often miss Jesus’ use of humor; humor seems so out of place in the supremely serious role of Savior of the world. I’ll never forget watching a video of Matthew’s gospel12 and for the first time in my life encountering a Jesus who delivered many of his lines while smiling, laughing (a lot!), and—an even bigger surprise—making other people laugh as well. Consider his observation, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matt. 19:24). This is paradoxical intention at its best, creating shock, surprise, and confusion (perhaps along with some grins) so that the disciples cry out, “Who then can be saved?” (v. 25).
In his masterful little book The Humor of Christ, Elton Trueblood concludes, “Of all the mistakes which we make in regard to the humor of Christ, perhaps the worst mistake is our failure, or our unwillingness, to recognize that Christ used deliberately preposterous statements to get his point across.”13 We are not used to thinking of Jesus as playfully preposterous. “The playful,” Trueblood continues, “when interpreted with humorless seriousness, becomes merely ridiculous.”14 Trueblood catalogs a host of examples of Jesus’ humor, such as the overscrupulous Pharisees who “strain out a gnat but swallow a camel” (Matt. 23:24). I never thought of Jesus as a teaser until I noticed him ask the crowd about the locust-eating, animal-skin-clad John the Baptist, “What did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes?” (Luke 7:25). Trueblood’s comment on this teasing Jesus underlines the intent of all his humor: “The teasing and ironical question was certain to be more effective than would have been a wholly serious and indicative approach.”15
I began asking myself about my audience. What do people expect me to say before I even say it? (They know the issues I am most serious about.) How can I shock or surprise them? What is the last thing they expect me to say? How can I be playful?
In a sermon on God’s destruction of Sodom, I began my playful detour around my congregation’s Maginot Line by describing in great detail how people were so looking forward to the Lord’s impending judgment, they built grandstands on the hills above that evil city. With football stadium fervor, they waved banners, stamped their feet, and chanted, “Go, God! Crush Sodom!” Abraham, however, was not in front of the stands cheerleading but standing apart from the raucous crowds, praying for Sodom. Why? Sodom included Lot, his nephew. For Abraham, Sodom could never be a monolithic “them,” those evil people. There is a little of “us” in Sodom. Realizing this prompts us to ask for God’s mercy, just like Abraham did, rather than cheer for God’s judgment. (One conservative central California farmer who did not take the detour said to me as I was shaking hands afterward, “While you were preaching, all I could think about was wishing God would push the whole city of San Francisco into the ocean!”)
I have learned from Jesus that playfulness is an emotional envelope in which to deliver difficult truths. Intentional playfulness frees me from trying too hard to make an impact or get others to change. It siphons off my responsibility that people “get” the message. This changes the whole emotional triangle involving the people, the message, and me. I become a non-anxious presence. People are free to listen without activating their defenses. And paradoxically, when I am less serious, even intentionally paradoxical, the possibility for impact increases. All this we see in the serious playfulness of Jesus.
Reflection Questions
1. The author’s effort to try harder, especially in areas where he was anxious to succeed, became a self-defeating downward spiral. Have you ever experienced this consequence of being overly serious?
2. How do you feel about passages where Jesus seems to speak so obscurely that people are left confused, or where he lets people walk away from him too easily?
3. Is it hard to imagine Jesus laughing, telling a joke, or playfully bantering with people? How could humor be an important dimension of Jesus’ character?
4. Reflect on the idea that it is difficult to be playful with people for whom we feel the most responsible, or with the ones we are the most serious about changing. Does this remind you of any relationships in your life—children, spouse, friends, colleagues? How are people resisting your efforts to guide, mentor, or influence them?