The Care and Tending of Triggers

As spring came ringing in on a sweet Saturday, I and my 15 year old drove out into the countryside for a long and bruisingly fun afternoon of paintball.  I love paintball.

Physical, intense, team-based and tactical, I always come away muddy and banged up a bit, with the welts, bruises, and aches that let me know I've spent a good day at it.  It's wildly fun, a veritable hoot, and notable for the appeal to a broad cross section of culture.

It isn't without risk, of course, which is why folks wear the safety gear, and why they make you go through the various safety-checks on the front end.

Because, sure, it's plenty of fun.  But there's also risk involved, as there tends to be with anything--anything at all--that's worth doing.  The paintball marker "guns" fire marble-sized projectiles at several hundred feet per second, and though they burst when they hit you, they sting.  And if you're not wearing eye-protection and covering exposed flesh, they can do more than that.  They can draw blood, or do permanent eye damage.

Thus, the rules, laid out so that the event will be mutually enjoyable and involve no injury.  No firing at point-blank range.  Protective gear on at all times.  Here's how to call for assistance.  Here's how you lock down your marker so that it will not go off in safe-zones.

Keep your muzzle covered.  Keep the safety on.  And if you want to avoid accidentally hurting someone, keep your finger away from the trigger.  "The best way to insure your marker doesn't fire," said the eager young instructor, "is to NOT PUT YOUR FINGER ON THE TRIGGER."

After the day was done, as I felt the lingering ache in my quads from a day of crouching and crawling, I found myself reflecting on the idea of triggers.

"Triggers" are part of the lingo these days, the strangely calculated language of trauma, umbrage, and offense.  People have their "triggers," things that send them on wild and involuntary cascades of emotive response, overwhelmed by old unhealed hurts and wounds that lead them into bitter places.  We put up "warnings" that things might be "triggers," which seems--frankly--more like a way of advertising something guaranteed to get folks angry.

I have my own triggers, of course.  There are places I've been wounded or humiliated or helpless, or when a thing/relationship/person I loved was harmed.  In those "trigger" moments, there were people and patterns of behavior in place that can be mirrored in other life situations.  Someone can look or act in a way that reminds me of a person who done did me wrong, and...click.  Off I go.   Or an event can be going down in a way that reminds me of another time, when things went south.  Click.

When that memory-burned reaction is triggered, I can feel the urge to respond in ways that are neither gracious nor realistic, that have more to do with an old learned reflex than any real thing.

I can't change those things.  I have no control over when those outside events happen.  I just don't.

But that doesn't render me helpless.  Assuming that creates a spiritual danger.

If I believe the world must never, ever, set me off, and that it is the responsibility of other persons not to set me off, I have functionally declared: I am no longer a person.  My God-given personhood, I am saying, is subordinate to a set of reflexive emotive responses that have everything to do with context and nothing to do with me.  I am not free to choose how I react, and in the absence of that agency, I am not really a being with free will and the capacity to choose.

I become a switch, a binary thing, under the control of the Other.  I cease to be moral.

But I am that trigger.  It belongs to me, because it is me.  As such, I am responsible for how I respond when it is actuated.  More than responsible.  I have authority over it.  I have an ethical duty to deal with it appropriately relative to my whole-life commitments.  And I figure, if we're using a metaphor, we can extend it a wee bit.

I keep the safety on.  Meaning, sure, the trigger is there, but most of the time, I've locked it down with other parts of myself.  There are parts of me...those oriented towards radical compassion, that understand context, that can reason and see beyond the moment of that "click."  Those are my safety.  They are stronger than the trigger, and unless all systems are go and I give that trigger permission to work, it can't result in anything.   The trigger doesn't get to make the final decision about whether I let fly.  It is not my whole self.   Switching off that multi-switch safety requires intentionality, which requires thought, which generally de-triggers the trigger.  So to speak.

And I keep my own finger off the trigger, because more often than we'd like to admit, "triggered" responses involve our own finger, pressing down.  We assume attack is coming, at any moment, from any angle, and if we are always on, always looking for a potential assailant?  We're going to go off.  Our finger, on that trigger, because damned if we're going to get caught out again.  Trauma does that, turns on the fight or flight, and won't shut it off.  I work under the assumption: I could hurt someone if I'm not careful.

Knowing our triggers really, really helps, if we're not going to make the world a more pain-filled place.

Heart Religion

So the other day, I get e-mail notification of several comments on one of the videos my church puts up on our rather significantly un-viewed YouTube page.  So far, our videos are pretty much for our own consumption.  Just getting more than a dozen views is unusual, so getting three comments in a row was worth me paying some attention.

The video is of our closing praise music session a few weeks back, in which a group of our youth pitched out some Contemporary Christian music.  I'm not the biggest fan of CCM.  It's just a bit too simplistic for my tastes, but it's what my mostly young and mostly Asian congregation prefers/is used to, so I've learned to live with it.  More than live with it.  Sometimes I'm surprised at how much I've come to enjoy and be moved by it.

The commenter, who is apparently a young evangelical Christian woman living in Singapore, was pretty harsh.  Our youth praise team was "lousy."  Their praise was so embarrassingly bad, said our Singaporean sister, that she had to close her eyes, but even then, the music still was terrible.  It was a sign, she thought, that these kids did not have Jesus in their hearts.  Any "unbelievers" who showed up at the service would be so turned off by this flaccid display that they'd never come to Jesus.  This got my back up, for two different reasons.

The first was because it was yet another manifestation of web-based incivility.  It's really, really common for folks to cast aspersions and generally dish out verbal smackdowns to others in e-media.  It's easy.  It's impersonal.  It feels good.   Way I figure it, blog-rants and drive-by-insults make up about 35% of the text on the web, and take up nearly as much bandwidth as the emails from Mrs. General Tunde Babangi asking for help transferring $2.7 million (dollars) from her frozen account at the First National Bank of Icantbelieveyoullfallforthis.

But all that angrily typed bellowing is desperately, hopelessly negative.  Wrong, even, if what Jesus had to say about how we are to treat one another means diddly squat.   So for a Jesus person to do it, particularly to my youth, well, it got my knickers in a bit of a twist.  Pitching aspersions at a group of kids is...well...seriously uncool.  Yeah, they aren't professional.  Things could be better.  But they're trying, dagnabbit. 

I called her out on it, bringing the Bible to bear, and after briefly resisting, she offered up an apology.  That isn't always the result, so I appreciate her willingness to say "sorry" to a total stranger.

The other button that presses for me is the presumption that "real" worship requires emoting.  Yeah, I know, I'm Presbyterian, and of the partially unthawed variety.  We prefer our worships to be the kind of thing that you might encounter in the First Presbyterian Church of Vulcan.  Sermons are logical discourses that examine a fascinating exegetical quandry that only surfaces when you've delved into the Greek.  Footnotes are provided, and in many instances, actually read aloud.  Our music is classical, preferably Bach, because anything from the romantic classical era (Faure?  shudder!) might cause a breakdown in the order of the service.  And as our worship has been carefully planned to run between fifty-eight minutes and 12 seconds and sixty-two minutes and four seconds, any expression of passion might cause a disruption to this well-oiled machine.

That somewhat hyperbolic stereotype is one of the reasons we're not the church brand of choice these days.  People want FEEELING in church, because if you're FEEEELING it, it must be real.  There's some truth to that.  We shouldn't seem bored.  We shouldn't not care or be clinical about our worship.  I struggle with that sometimes myself.  Like this Sunday, when I had nothing going into the worship.  I was dead in the water.  Zero.  I was forcing myself to go through the motions.  But at some point, I realized that the scripture I'd selected and the sermon I prepared were speaking directly to me.  I felt it, and it made the difference.  To me, anyway.  I'm not sure all those closed eyes just meant folks were deep in contemplative prayer.

But emotional affect can be simulated.  It's often simulated, because it's expected.  Just because you're up there bawling like Swaggart or weeping like Tammy Faye or shouting "GAAAAAAAAHD" into the air in your best Shatnerian bellow doesn't mean you're more authentic.  It just means you're a good performer.   Similarly, just because you speak with total conviction about what you're sure is true doesn't mean that you have a clue what you're talking about.  Sarah Palin, anyone?

Really having Jesus "in your heart" goes far deeper than the ephemeral to and fro of our emotional states.  It's a change in our nature, a shift in our sense of purpose.  It engages the entirety of our being.

Compassion and Peace On the Planet of the Apes

One of the ways I tend to feel closest to God's presence in my admittedly rather feeble prayer life is by practicing self-emptying. Through stillness, song, or walking meditation, I try to still my endlessly nattering inner commentary. When that happens, which tends to be in little flickers here and there, I find myself feeling increasingly centered and deeply calm. I feel connected to that which transcends me, and to everything around me. Those moments are a delight.

The other day, after just such a moment, I found myself reflecting upon that state of being. In particular, I found my returning higher functions wondering if the silencing of my internal narrative represented a retrogression of sorts. When all I am is sensory inputs in the absence of any discernable thoughts, is that in some way analogous to the existence of "lower" forms of life? Creatures that exist in the absence of any language or symbolic forms of self expression must experience life in a similar way, being deeply and unreflectively in the moment.

Yet what struck me as peculiar about the act of meditation this week was that silencing my higher functions and seeking negation doesn't light up my...ah...more...um...animal self. I do not become more ferociously competitive, or hungrier, or so horny that me want to love you longtime. Those parts of me that are just a few genetic ticks away from having a bit part in Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes aren't released when I let my "self" grow still.

I just feel more connected, more at peace and at one with others...and more compassionate. When faced with conflict or deeply troubled, these forms of prayer are where I go, and I come out of them not just mentally more level, but physically calmer. My body is involved in the process, and it is significantly impacted. But it is only when I still those higher functions, what I would typify as my reason or symbolic awareness, that I reach that elusive peak state of oneness.

This is a common understanding of the mystic wings of all of the world's significant faith traditions, yet it flies in the face of a common assumption. That assumption is the good ol' Cartesian split between mind and body. The idea...and it is a modern one...is that it is reason that balances and controls the snarling red-in-tooth and claw beast that lurks in our animal nature. Reason must be good. Our emotional and physical responses? They must be controlled and limited by reason.

But reason and intellectual rigor are not the answer. This comes as a great disappointment to my fellow Presbyterians. Both mind and body must be stilled, if we are to be opened to the self-emptying of a Christ-centered existence.