The untimely passing of Pastor Zachary Tims last Friday serves as yet another reminder of just how unforgiving spiritual devotees can be of anything less than perfection among their spiritual leaders, and just how devastating the toll of that attitude can be.
While the details are still unclear, Pastor Tims was found dead in a New York hotel room last Friday. He was 42 years old. The police found substances in the room they believe were narcotics. Two years ago, Pastor Tims and his wife of fifteen years, Riva, divorced after Tims admitted a year long affair with an exotic dancer in Paris, France.
While the specifics change, the story remains the same. Ted Haggard fell from grace due to drug use and sexual activity with a male prostitute, Jimmy Swaggert due to patronizing a female prostitute, Jim Bakker due to financial issues and an affair with his secretary, Eddie Long due to sexual advances toward young men in his ministry, and the list goes on an on. Lest we think this phenomenon is unique to Christianity, American Zen teacher Dennis Ghenpo Merzel was recently involved in a scandal involving an ongoing affair with a co-worker and many other Asian teachers have been involved in notorious sexual improprieties – often claiming that such improprieties are perfectly acceptable for the enlightened (themselves)!
These are complicated issues not easily resolved in a single blog posting. It does seem to me that, regardless of spiritual tradition, there are several common problems in these falls from grace:
1. Unrealistic expectations placed upon spiritual leaders. No matter how accomplished or adept the spiritual leader and no matter the tradition from which they arise, they are still human beings with very human needs. Often times, devotees place the leader on a pedestal and attribute to them God-like qualities. What doesn’t change is the need to sleep, the need to eat, the need to relax, the need to spend time with family and loved ones. When spiritual leaders are ineffective at setting appropriate boundaries with their followers it is no wonder that they struggle to set appropriate interpersonal and sexual boundaries in other areas of their life.
2. Guru devotion, applied to both Gurus and Pastors. There are Buddhist and other traditions that actually encourage Guru devotion, the practice of seeing the Guru as the Buddha. Christians do a similar thing, often addressing their clergy as, “Man of God.” While such devotion may be appropriate and even helpful in Eastern settings (though I have my doubts), in Western settings it not only creates unhealthy, subordinate interpersonal relationships between student and teacher or parishioner and Pastor, it also feeds the ego of the Pastor and causes spiritual struggles down the line. Ego is always the enemy of Spirit. Add to this the practice in some traditions of making sure the spiritual leader is driven around in a limousine, stays in the best hotels, and eats at the finest restaurants, and you have an unparalleled recipe for disaster. After all, if I “deserve” all these fine things, then don’t I deserve whatever (or whomever) else I want as well?
3. A loss of humanity. In all this super-human treatment and unrealistic expectations of and around our spiritual leaders, the essence of who they really are (as opposed to what they do for us) is lost. They can no longer afford to be human beings with human needs, rather they need to be machines who respond in the expected way when their devotees push their buttons. The pain resulting from this loss of humanity is enormous, even when it happens on a small scale. I remember the first time I heard a parishioner say to me, in what clearly was a threat, “I pay your salary.” What caused her to make that threat? I had asserted that, as a part time employee of their church, I was free to do ministry during my free time in another context. I learned that I was not a human being to that community, I was a commodity to be controlled, used, and most definitely not shared. Fortunately, I could walk away – but had my family’s financial stability and health insurance been provided by that church it would not have been as easy to walk away. We dehumanize our spiritual leaders.
4. Repression and denial of normal human sexual needs. Even in spiritual communities that do have a healthy sexual ethic (not a given by any means), we often place unrealistic expectations – chief among them celibacy – upon spiritual leaders. We say that celibacy is a gift that only some have, and then we make it mandatory for our spiritual leaders. The same kind of toxins are predominant in communities without a healthy sexual ethic. Whether the issue is sexual orientation, sexual guilt, sexual pleasure, or invasive questions about the sexual practices of even married couples, we often expect our spiritual leaders to both be experts in the area of “moral” human sexual behavior and, at the same time, have no sexual needs of their own. If the spouses of spiritual leaders also lack a healthy sexual ethic and so the couple has problems developing a healthy sexual relationship, the likelihood of a spiritual leader acting out sexually to satisfy what is a natural human need is very high.
We simply have to take our spiritual leaders down from the pedestals we have built for them and placed them upon. No more limos or five star hotels unless the leaders pay for them with their own funds, no more guru-like devotion, and no more unrealistic expectations. As I often point out to people, if you imagine your spiritual leader hanging a picture in their home and accidentally hitting their thumb with the hammer and believe that they shout, “Thank you, LORD,” after doing so, you are sadly mistaken.
What may be most shocking of all is that your spiritual leader uses the toilet every day, more than once a day. They also pass gas on occasion, burp after eating spicy or gassy foods, blow their noses, and occasionally get the stomach flu or diarrhea. They also make mistakes on a daily basis.
Perhaps if we could come to recognize the humanity of our spiritual leaders we wouldn’t ever have to see another Zachary Tims destroy himself. I am sure the pain he felt was enormous – so great that he could no longer see himself as the slice of divinity he was and continues to be, even after his transition from this life. An even greater benefit from recognizing the humanity of our spiritual leaders would be the ability to recognize our own divinity and so take responsibility for our own spirituality. We can still learn from spiritual teachers, but when a spiritual teacher says or does something that doesn’t make sense we can just walk away.
We would all benefit from that tiny slice of common sense.
Bishop Craig 