Burnout, wk 1: It's not just you!

Subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | YouTube

Burnout is not a problem with fringe individuals; burnout is a societal problem. How did we get here? And how can we, together in community, address societal burnout, rather than demand individual heroic effort to overcome it? What does Jesus have to offer us in this? And how might BLC help us stay open to that?

SPEAKER NOTES

Burnout, wk 1: It’s not just you!

Opening

• Does anyone have a job with programming in place to protect against burnout?
• Increasingly it’s a thing, and that’s great!
• In my world, pastors and church leaders (paid and volunteer) are definitely prone to burnout — many of you will know this from personal experience
• In our early years, our church was part of a network of churches that would host an annual retreat in a beautiful place to try to help church leaders who were burning out
• You’d enjoy the serene setting, and there’d be older, more experienced church leaders to listen to you and pray for you
• And then workshops to resource people with things like financial management or keeping a weekly sabbath that can help protect against further burnout
• Really great that they did this every year!
• BUT, as the years went on, I noticed a familiar pattern in many volunteers and pastors:
• As the retreat weekend would approach (in November every year), they would be filled with anticipation for it, they’d attend it, come back with glowing reports on how it changed their lives, but then by about March they’d seem just as burnt out as ever,
• Only to restart that cycle as November came around again
• And I always tried to understand this. Was it that those people just lacked resilience to stick with what they gained from the retreat? Was the retreat’s program good at vibes and marketing, but not actually all that effective?
• Both of those seemed like pretty judgmental conclusions.
• In the years since, I’ve become compelled by a different conclusion: Burnout is not a problem with individuals. Burnout is a problem with our society.
• Those church leaders reporting amazing experiences were telling the truth! Their experience was amazing. The program was great.
• BUT the most perfect individualized program in the world could never address the burnout cycle I saw in these pastors and volunteers because NEARLY EVERYTHING about the rest of their lives in the modern world inflames burnout.
• Including, ironically, most of the rest of the way this network of churches interacted with them: all of the rest of the retreat and conference experiences offered throughout the year were about innovating your work, mastering your personal life, leading on the cutting edge, harnessing your best resources, learning the newest ideas…
• Innovate, master, cutting edge, more resources, more ideas —
• Is it any wonder the one week out of 52 in the year devoted to addressing burnout doesn’t seem to have staying power?
• This is my experience in the church leader context — I wonder if your contexts are similar?

Explaining burnout

• There’s a French Sociologist, Alain Ehrenberg, who relates what I’m talking about here to depression. Ehrenberg wrote a history of depression in the Modern world (the last 500 years) ::la fatigue::
• And suggested depression is an ailment of speed —
  • it is the feeling of not being able to keep up,
  • of not having it in you
• Burnout, we might say, is a kind of depressive state
• And, here’s what particularly grabbed me: Ehrenberg argues that mental ailments (like depression or burnout) are not oddities to Modern Life, they reveal something central to Modern Life
• To put it another way: Burnout is a core feature of our society, not a fringe byproduct
• If you’re ever feeling burnt out, you’re not the fringe person doing it wrong (and just need a book or therapy or a retreat and then you’ll be back to your senses like most of the population);
• If you’re feeling burnt out, you’re doing it right, because that’s part of the design of the Modern World - yikes!
• This is the shadow side of the wonderful things about the Modern World we live in today
• There is immense personal freedom in the Modern World,
  • We can define for ourselves who we are,
  • and access and learn about anything to fill out that sense of self,
  • and buy anything to express it,
• BUT there is also a weariness that comes with that freedom. Because it is up to me to maintain my self, to keep it current.
• There is no religious tradition or national identity that maintains the self for me — which is part of the freedom piece for many of us — who don’t want those things to tell us who we are — we’re suspect of institutional religion and we don’t feel patriotic, maybe institutions like those have been violent to us if we’re not white or if we’re lgbtq
• So this is progress
• BUT the tradeoff for the progress is we are kept in constant motion to define ourselves, for ourselves.
• And sometimes we just don’t have it in us.
• The original French title of Ehrenberg’s history of depression was The fatigue of being yourself
• So we are not just talking about work burnout! We are talking about every facet of being alive in our age and culture.
• Our kids and nieces and nephews, especially teenagers, feel “the fatigue of being theirselves” just as much as we do. ::la fatigue off::
• We have a love-hate relationship with this. We experience the weariness and the freedom simultaneously.
• We can see it in what we all reflexively say when someone asks “how’s it going?”
• “Busy”
• When we say that, we do mean “I’m tired. I’m weary.”
• BUT we also kind of mean “things are happening!”
• It’s hard, but we like it - I often myself saying “busy, but good” ::busyness=fullness::
• In the Modern World, “Busyness” is our conception of “a good, full life” —
  • a busy calendar,
  • with lots of meetings that make us feel important
  • and social engagements and vacations that make us feel like we’re taking care of ourselves,
  • utilizing all of the latest hacks and products that maximize our time
• We equate busyness with being good, being moral even — we would be bad people if we weren’t busy, on par with injustice or cruelty or prejudice.
• If we won the lottery, we dream of doing nothing as a reprieve from the busyness… but only for a little while… then we’d have to do something again, otherwise we’d be a bad person. We’d feel so guilty.
• What exactly do we need to be busy doing? That’s another part of the self that’s up to us to maintain;
• The concept of “busyness as fullness of life” doesn’t actually say much about the substance of our lives, it just says: keep moving! keep up!
• Whether it’s
  • Wall St. or the Streets of the West Side of Chicago,
  • Silicon Valley tech companies or Heartland American Megachurches,
  • Hollywood and NBA superstars or Social Media influencers,
• What we all constantly hear is: Stay busy. Keep up… Or else. ::busyness=fullness off::
• The story of busyness becoming a moral virtue is the story of something happening to time over the last 500 years
• We’re going to talk about this 500-year story throughout this fall, with help from several big thinkers who I want to cite as my sources now (we’ll drop links in discord) because none of these thoughts are my own ::time is speeding up::
• Charles Taylor and Hartmut Rosa: Two scholars who live at the intersection of philosophy and sociology
• Andrew Root: a theologian closer to my age, who has done a ton to bring the work of those two big names in intellectual circles to everyday congregations like us
• The 500-year story in brief is: Time is speeding up
• Not like the Earth is moving faster in its orbit around the Sun,
• But like our subjective experience of time has been in a constant state of acceleration for these five centuries (and especially the last 60 years)
• Time feels faster and faster, and so our experience of “the present” is getting shorter and shorter — because time is moving so quick it’s only here for a moment, and then it’s gone. “The present” hardly registers before it’s the past.
• Spiritual teachers and therapists alike tell us we need to “live in the present” and practice mindfulness, but how do we do that when “the present” feels like it’s decaying and becoming the past so fast?!
• Even though technological innovation has kept supposedly winning us more time by making transportation, communication, and production more efficient, that time seems to fill up all the more.
• We don’t feel we have more time; we feel like we’re trying to squeeze more things into less time.
• Scholars on European colonization (which drove much of this 500 year story) point to the spreading of white supremacy culture, which has a defining quality of urgency. When white supremacy rules, everything feels urgent.
• Hartmut Rosa says we feel time-sick
  • Alienated from the present
  • And therefore, alienated from our selves, from others, from the world, from God
• That feels true. ::time is speeding up off::

So what do we do?

What does BLC have to say to this? (In making this our theme all fall)

I can’t with integrity make my message an oversimplified “the 5 steps to slowing down and avoiding burnout”

• “Slowing down” is going to be part of what we talk about, but “Just slow down” is not enough of a message for our reality, because
• (1) that falls into that trap of thinking burnout is a fringe individual problem — that you’re just doing it wrong, and need more practical resources or will power or therapy or magic “faith” to make the right “slower” choices,
• and (2) I think there’s no opting out of culture… we will be talking about some intentionally countercultural slowness for sure, but that’s only possible to a degree unless you’re going the Amish route of complete separatism.
• And, especially when it comes to workplace burnout, a lot of us are in jobs where we don’t feel like we have the option to “just slow down” — so I don’t want to condescend that reality and make it sound easy.

This series is also NOT “prove that you’re not victim to this like all those other sheeple”…

• It will feel tempting to some of us to distance ourselves from this, but I encourage you not to. We’re not going to pretend the solution is easy, and we’re not going to pretend we’re not affected.
• I’m not up here because I’ve mastered this. I am up here because it’s my job as a minister to try to lead conversations about these kind of important things — that if we don’t pay attention to, they will eat us alive.

What are we doing this fall as we try to address societal burnout?

(1) We are asking: How can we, in community, encourage alternative visions of fullness and a good life that aren’t busyness?

• What does Jesus teach us about this?

(2) We are asking: How can we, in community, keep an alternative sacred time to run parallel to the speed of modern life?

• Sacred time (a term from theologian Andrew Root) can’t be so easily sped up because it is filled up and weighed down by design
• With intentional practices, with purpose, with our humanity, our stories, our delights, our sorrows, our vulnerabilities
• With all that substance grounding it, we actually have to live in sacred time, present and aware.
• And when we do, we might realize we’re not alone.
• God is with us! The God Jesus shows us — who is not up in the sky, or separate from us in some timeless throne room — but who is our fellow experiencer — sharing in our joys, in solidarity with us in our sufferings.
• Sacred time is time that counteracts burnout by opening us to the divine
• We aren’t always open to that, because the default of modern life is so secular and flat
• But from time to time, we feel the call that there is more than we can see… that maybe we’re not alone, maybe an inexhaustible love is at the center of all things, that maybe there is help on offer to me that I cannot give myself
• Sacred time helps us into that openness
• Where we can feel the presence of the Living God, saying to us, as Jesus did:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

The God Jesus shows humanity is not a burden-adder, as so many of us may have been taught (because that’s what comes so naturally to us in the Modern world); Jesus’ God is a burden-reliever.

We have, here, a sort of paradoxical, inverse relationship —

• ::heavy burden = light time::
• ::light burden = heavy time::

In the burdened, heavy yoke of modern life, time has to be hollowed out of substance in the name of keeping it light and fast: We gotta keep things cheap, dispensable, optional! Because time is money! We can’t get sentimental or too attached to any specific thing — life is moving too fast… we gotta keep up!

Conversely, in sacred time, our experience of time is that it is sturdy, weighed down on the ground, not always getting away from us, not burning us out — because God isn’t burdening us with the fatigue of being ourselves. Jesus said:

Give up your life and find it. It is those who try to find it who will lose it.

Modern life’s “heavy burden but light time” can leave us feeling inhuman, alone, and like there’s no time to integrate what happens to us into a coherent story, so our commitments and values erode —

Which is of course one of the biggest symptoms of burnout we’re all so familiar with.

• We realize we never directly decided whether to be or not be in that relationship — it just sort of happened
• We can’t quite remember when we stopped regularly seeing that friend or that group or that community — it just sort of happened
• Commitments sound amazing when we talk about them, or when they’re further out on our calendar, but gradually as calendar events get closer, we find that we feel we don’t have it in us to show up.
• We had so much passion for anti-racism after George Floyd’s murder, but it has just sort of eroded away

This is societal burnout in action — our commitments and values eroding NOT because we’re bad people, but because our time is so light and thin, and our burdens are heavy, punishing waves.

Conversely, sacred time’s “light burden but heavy time” cultivates the opposite: a release of pressure in the presence of the Spirit of the God who loves us and gives us an identity as “Child of God” —

We don’t have to single-handedly achieve the good life, for our selves, by our selves!

Without so much pressure to keep up and move fast, our commitments and values stay firm and keep their shape — they’re not so easily eroded, because we have time to integrate them into a coherent story of our ups and downs, sorrows and joys, hopes and dreams — a story being listened to by God, and supported by God.

Mostly by stumbling into it, I have now been a part of one community or another keeping sacred time for me for over twenty years. And THAT, I believe, is the reason I can say today that I don’t feel burnt out, that I feel like my life is a coherent story with firm values and commitments, listened to and supported by God. That didn’t instantaneously become true of me 20 years ago, and it waxes and wanes of course, and my life still has plans erode all the time, but to be able to say, overall, “I don’t feel burnt out” — What a gift sacred time has given me, right?!

Practicum Sundays

Sacred time is something people keep together, as a community.

• It’s not something you or I can do on our own.
• Again, this is different from the majority of individualistic self-help approaches to burnout, which convince us that I, individually, am bad at this (that’s why my commitments and values are eroding), and then develops for me a plan that it is on me and me alone to actualize.
• To be sure, many of those plans work great for a lot of individuals, so I don’t want to call them worthless,
• BUT I am convinced that leaving the solution to societal burnout up to individual heroic efforts will not solve our problem.

So what I’m asking of us during this fall is not heroic individual effort, but participation in some communal experiments in a different time-keeping.

It will involve your effort, but it is not dependent on your effort alone.

Several of our Sundays this fall are not going to be messages, they are going to be “practicums” in keeping sacred time.

In some ways, we do this already — in music and worship every Sunday,

• Congregational singing is a heavy time - we can’t speed songs up endlessly or they’d sound terrible!
• Congregational singing is a light burden - if you miss a beat or lyric it doesn’t ruin anything!

This fall we’re going to have even more “light burden but heavy time” experiences to participate in — not just music.

Even though these will not be self-help workshops directly addressing our personal burnout, I believe they will address our burnout. Not in an input-output mechanistic way; rather, if we are open to it, in a way that is spiritual, unseen but nonetheless profound, as God meets us.

Some of these practicum Sundays, by design, will feel a bit alien to the rest of accelerated modern life. They’re heavy — on purpose; so they won’t be able to go fast.

We should notice that. We should absolutely be mindful of how uncomfortable that is — how we feel drawn to check our phones constantly, or maybe antsy like we’re falling behind on our todo list.

AND we should NOT let that discomfort rule us. Instead, maybe it’s some exposure therapy that can heal us of our time-sickness?

I’ll preview these practicum Sundays in a moment, but before I do,

• Let me pray for us in this place… ::heavy-light off::