What's Tony Thinking

Our Inner Lawyer

Mockingbird site editor, Todd Brewer, calls our attention to a recent essay by Heather Havrilesky entitled, “Retire Your Inner Lawyer: Relationships Don’t Thrive in a Courtroom.”

It’s a great piece, which I say even as I feel convicted by it. Havrilesky is writing about relationships with friends, family, spouse, adult children, neighbors — those kind of things in mind. Which is to say, there is a place for the courtroom, for presenting your best arguments and winning the case, but it’s not in those more intimate personal relationships you cherish and want to thrive.

Here’s Havrilesky:

“So here’s the hardest part: When trouble arises, you turn off your heart and your head takes over and you start to ARGUE. You have a point to make. You know exactly how this started, where it went wrong, who fucked up. You want to let this person know that you can see clearly what’s going on, and you know how to fix this shit.

“You can tell them exactly where they got it wrong. You can explain to them exactly what they haven’t figured out yet. YOU WILL HELP THEM IMPROVE. They just have to listen and accept that you can see the truth with clear eyes and they are in the dark.

“You just have to make your case and be heard. And then they will snap into the right place and start acting the way a person should act when they’ve fuuuuucked everything up. They will probably feel grateful to you once they see how stupid and wrong they were, right? They will understand and everything will be good again.”

Oh man, that hurts. I have so often been guilty of just this move. I see what’s going on (or think I do). Let me explain it to you. Because I want to help you, don’t you know? But that almost always seems to make things worse rather than better.

Havrilesky continues —

“What’s not so awesome is that people are more difficult than this, and your insistence on FIXING THINGS using your brain and your argumentation and your unmatched naming-and-blaming services is what makes YOU difficult. You might think I’m talking about myself. I am! But I’m also talking about almost every smart, sensitive adult I know. We all think that we’re incredibly helpful but we’re exhausting. We all think that we can set everyone straight and make things better, but mostly what we need is to sit down, shut the fuck up, and learn more about the world around us by opening our hearts as wide as they’ll go.” (emphasis added)

I love that line, “We all think that we’re incredibly helpful but we’re exhausting.”

This is to me why so many church services are exhausting, or at least I find them so. They are so often telling us how to fix things. “Have a better attitude.” “Be more like this, and not like that.” “Choose love over fear.” “Three ways to be more like Jesus.” It’s not that any of these things are in themselves wrong. But they aren’t the gospel, the good news of Christ’s forgiveness of sinners, of mercy for the fuck-ups. Instead, they become one more burden, one more “to do” or “should have done” or “will do immediately on leaving church,” (but then, strangely, your resolve slips).

To put it theologically, which is why you pay me the big bucks, what Havrilesky is talking about is relating to others through the prism of law not gospel. “Do this! Don’t do that!,” however much it may come wrapped in good cheer or clever motivational blather, it is still law. It is still all on us. Law has its place and value. But does law change human hearts, mend broken lives, give sight to the blind, or raise a dead relationship? Nope. Only the good news of what Christ has done on our behalf does that. In introducing the piece, MB editor, Todd Brewer, puts it this way, “The path to love isn’t paved with condemnation, however well-intentioned it might be.”

Todd, on a roll here, closes the piece with another gem. “All unsolicited advice is received as judgment.” But, gee, I was just trying to help!

But let’s give Havrilesky the last word, a word that probably does qualify as advice. But perhaps it is, at this point, “solicited advice” if we have read this far. When tempted to call on our inner lawyer in a personal relationship consider an alternative: “We need to invite each collision and let it move us. We need to learn new ideas, soak in new emotions, pick up new skills. We need to learn to say nothing at all, and ask better questions. We need to learn to say TELL ME MORE ABOUT WHAT YOU NEED.”

But even if we fail to fully heed or implement this good, solicited advice, there is still grace, still mercy. Which is why, for me, the declaration of forgiveness of sin is the most important part of worship. Sadly, this seems increasingly omitted altogether from contemporary worship services, as are prayers of confession.