Accepting Help
Ministerial Meandering
Accepting help
The atheist has fallen over the cliff and is clinging to the branches of a bush that seems likely to part company with the cliff side at any moment. “God!” he cries, “if you exist - help me!” He hears a gentle voice saying, “Trust me - let go.”
“You have to be joking!” he says.
“No - trust me, let go!”
“Are you really God?”
“Yes, I’ve got you - just let go.”
A short, if desperate, pause…
“Is there anybody else up there?”
This isn’t a new joke, but it makes a valid point - that we are not good at accepting help. We cannot bring ourselves to trust that the offer is either genuine or will produce the result we think we want. I’m as bad at this as anybody else - particularly in the kitchen. Even down to the washing up. No-one else does the job properly. And as for cooking, well - keep clear - this is my domain!
I wondered why it was that we find it so hard to accept help or advice. It occurred to me that it might be that our insecurity needs to be reassured that we have some value, some validity of our own. To admit the need for someone else’s help is to say - in however limited a way - ‘I’m incompetent, I’m helpless without assistance.’ It is an existential attack on our powerlessness, and so an assault on our existential being. It pushes us towards the non-being of emptiness and meaninglessness and its associated anxiety. For those of you finding that phrase a little familiar, I will confess that I am reading Paul Tillich’s ‘The Courage to Be’ at present, and so my thoughts are currently coloured by his philosophy.
But pulling myself back into the more accessible world of ‘now’, I find that where I am incapable of accepting help in one sphere, I am only too ready to accept it in another. And, strangely, from the same person.
For example, I will happily drive Sheila from my kitchen, but I will be delighted if she will deal with the tax returns (whatever they are!), and fill in endless administrative forms that have my eyeballs glazed over like a dead salmon.
I then considered how I might react if told to change my attitude. “What attitude?” would be my first indignant response. And then, slowly, I might remember the Benjamin Franklin quote that I shared with you on Transfiguration Sunday; ‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’
“Aaahh”, you say, “but that involves accepting help!” True - but it is accepting help so as not to have to accept help in the future. Look at how the disciples of Jesus were not only useless and flawed in their concept of what Jesus was about at the start of his ministry, but how they grew in competence and stature as they accepted his guidance and help.
There is also another corollary to this that is essential to its successful working. We need to come to the person who has offered help without preconceived ideas of what needs to be done. Consider the atheist hanging off the cliff; consider the couple on the roof of their house in the flood; each had a clear idea of what their helper or saviour had to do in order to save or help them. In neither case were they right. We have to give up our life to save it - we have to admit our helplessness to allow the power of God into our lives. Don’t waste time telling him what he has to do to help you. He knows - you don’t. So let go.
Philip+