Posts tagged game

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The mystery date game.

“I don’t know who - or what - put the question.

I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.

…I don’t even remember answering.  

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the mystery date game.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Play this game of risk.

“We too often forget that Christian faith is a principle of questioning and struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and of peace.

One has to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after one has begun to believe, one’s faith itself must be tested and purified.


Christianity is not merely a set of foregone conclusions.


The Christian mind is a mind that risks intolerable purifications, and sometimes, indeed very often, the risk turns out to be too great to be tolerated.

Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe conventions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture.”  Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The shame of the game.


“Two distinct ways of feeling “bad” afflict every human being.  

How those afflictions work - and how they can be healed - find the clearest expression in the lives of alcoholics and addicts.  Neither experience is unique to the alcoholic, but each has a special place in the process of recovery from alcoholism.  In this area perhaps more than in any other, alcoholism and its healing contribute to our knowledge of the human condition.  

They do this first by revealing the importance of distinguishing between two often-confused phenomena.  

Most hurting people could profit from learning this distinction, but for alcoholics and addicts, learning and living it become a mater of life and death.  The distinction is between guilt and shame.


Both guilt and shame involve feeling “bad” - feeling bad about one’s actions (or omissions) in the case of guilt; feeling bad about one’s self in shame.  

What does it mean to feel bad?

The deepest meaning of the word bad is “unable to fit”: unable to fit into some external context in the case of guilt, unable to fit into one’s own being in the case of shame.  For there are, in human experience, two different ways of discovering that one does not “fit,” or feeling “bad.”  Each has to do with the boundaries of the human condition.


An image may help clarify the distinction and its point.

To be human is to be surrounded by boundaries: it is somewhat like standing in the middle of a football field during a game.  

As on a football field, there are two kinds of boundaries: side-lines and end-lines.  

The side-lines are containing boundaries: to cross them is to “go out of bounds,” to do something wrong.  The end-lines are goal-lines: the purpose of the game is to cross them.  One feels “bad” (guilty) when one crosses the side-line, the restraining boundary.  Feeling “bad” about the goal-line (shame) arises not from crossing it but from not crossing it, from failing to attain it.

Guilt, in this image, arises from the violation - transgression, stepping across - of some limiting boundary; shame occurs when a goal - an end is not reached, is fallen short of.  Guilt thus indicates an infraction, a breaking of the rules; shame, a literal “shortcoming,” a lack or defect of being.   


Distinguishing between guilt and shame is not difficult: it can be heard in the accent informing self-blame, in the dual emphasis that inheres in any description of feeling “bad.”

Guilt focuses on the thing done and thus reveals itself in self-reproaches that run: how could I have done that; what an injurious thing to have done; how I hurt so-and-so; what a moral lapse that act was!

Simultaneously, however, shame attends to self as do-er, inducing self-reproaches with a very different emphasis; how could I have done that; what an idiot I am; what a fool; how awful and worthless I am!

Those who would attempt to heal, to make whole, persons harboring such mixed feelings - the mixture revealed by the differing accents in “What have I done?” and What have I done?” - must be sensitive to both components.  Too often, therapists settle for the resolution of guilt when it is the confrontation with shame that is the hurting person’s deepest need.


What is this confrontation with shame and how it is achieved?  The encounter involves finding, in experiences of shame, truth about the reality of human existence.  It means learning, from experiences of falling short, wisdom concerning the meaning of being human.  

Shame, as its accenting reveals, focuses on the self: it is the perception of not just any lack or failure, but of the deficiency of the self as self, as human being.  Shame testifies not to wrong-doing but to flawed be-ing.

Perhaps surprisingly, despite the depth of self involved in shame’s feeling “bad,” the sense of shame itself is a good thing - something to be cherished and valued.  If this claim that shame is “good” seems strange, reflect for a moment on shame’s opposite: indeed, think about the opposite of both guilt and shame.

“Guiltless” is clearly a term of praise: to be guiltless, free from guilt, is to be innocent, blameless.  

“Shameless,” on the other hand, is an epithet of condemnation and opprobrium.  To be shameless is to be insensible to oneself, insensitive to one’s self.  One who lacks shame is impudent, brazen, without decency.


Shame, then, despite its negative side that points up failure and falling short, also entails something positive: insight into the reality of the human condition.  The experience of shame highlights the essential existential paradox that inheres in be-ing human: to be human is to be caught in the contradictory tension between the pull to unlimited, the more-than-human, and the drag of the merely limited, the less-than-human.”Ernest Kurtz, Shame & Guilt

The hands of guilt and the face of shame 

…without reproach, feel and look the same.  






The reality of redemption?

Awed of the flawed.



I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the shame of the game.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

The errors of the game.


“Baseball teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure.

We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball and, precisely because we have failed, we hold in high regard those who fail less often - those who hit safely in one of three chances and become star players.  I also find it fascinating that baseball, alone in sport, considers errors to be part of the game, part of its rigorous truth.Francis T. Vincent, Jr., Education and Baseball

“Spirituality teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure.  We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in life…errors are part of the game, part of its rigorous truth.


Discovering spirituality in the game of baseball is not so strange as it sounds.  

For literally thousands of years, sages and saints have explored the ordinary and everyday in the attempt to understand the extraordinary and divine.  The ritual of the Japanese tea ceremony - simply carrying and serving tea - is a profound spiritual exercise.  The posture of kneeling in prayer conveys acceptance and mindfulness.  Standing up in a crowded room and saying, “My name is John, and I’m an alcoholic,” calls forth the spiritual realities of humility, gratitude, tolerance, and forgiveness. Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection

I grew up playing baseball.  With an old ball torn at the seams.  

Now, I know “why”.  



It is a game of failure

…and subsequently of spirituality.






The beauty of baseball is certainly not in brevity, but in the normalcy of its nuances.  


I need to sacrifice.

I hope to be safe.

I have to get home.





…but I fail.



Field of ‘failure’ of field of ‘faith’?


I have a GIVENNESS NOW to the errors of the game.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Slowing the game down.


Kurt Warner has been acclaimed for his faith, as much as his quarterbacking in the National Football League.  Now that he has retired, many have speculated about his what his greatest attribute was.  I recently heard a former teammate remark that it was his ability “to slow the game down”. 

The pace of life often seems comparable to the breakneck speed of a  Monday Night Football game in high definition. 

I need, and want, to “slow the game down”.


Seems contradictory to the quarterback’s mantra.

But it isn’t, when I “read and react” in faith, rather than emotion.


When I wait…emotion is fleeting. 

When I wait… faith can be freeing.


Two minute warning.

And no time outs left.


I have a GIVENNESS NOW to slowing the game down.