A study of the clinical "we" by E. B. White

Elwyn Brooks White. 1939. A study of the clinical "we". In Quo Vadimus? or The Case for the Bicycle. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, pp.136-138.

A recent article on grammar, which I read in a magazine, has led me to the preparation of a paper on the clinical "we." The clinical "we" is a bedside form in use among practical nurses, who find, in the sound of the plural, a little of the faded romance which still attaches to life. It is also used universally by baby nurses, who think of themselves in groups of four.

Unlike the editorial "we," which is a literary device used to protect writers from the fumes of their own work, the clinical "we" is simply a spoken form, and is rarely written. A baby nurse employs the "we" in the belief that no single person could have as much special knowledge as she has, and that therefore when she speaks it must be three other people too. Thus, when I once asked a baby nurse if she wouldn't please put a hat on my son before she took him out in a sandstorm which happened to be raging at the moment, her reply was: "We never put hats on him after June first." "You and who else don't?" I remember answering. It was my first clash with the clinical "we."

Since then I have studied it, not only in baby nurses but in dentists' assistants, ward witches, and the developers of X-ray plates. It is common to all of them, but hospital nurses use it to denote the patient, not the nurse. I know of one hospital case in which the sudden use of the clinical "we," in the presence of an elderly gentleman convalescing from an operation, threw him into a paroxysm which proved a serious setback to his recovery. It was early in the morning, and a pretty little Southern nurse, coming into his room, sang out: "We didn't change our pajamas this morning, did we?"

"No, let's do it right now!" replied the aged patient somewhat bitterly. The wry joke so excited him that he had to be given a sedative, and later a talking to.

It is probably apparent from the above examples that the clinical "we" can seldom be taken lying down, but almost always provokes a rejoinder. In hospitals the "we" is merely an unattractive figure of speech in a world of strange and unattractive details, but in the home it is intolerable. To live under the same roof with a user of the "we" is a fairly good test of a man's character. During the winter of 1931 I employed twenty-two baby nurses, one after another, before I found one who could make a sentence beginning with the word "I." I used to call them "we-uns." Every morning I would go upstairs to the nursery. "Morning, Nurse," I would say, "how you feeling?"

"We are just fine, sir," would be the courteous but silly reply.

"Canst make a sentence beginning with the word 'I'?" I would ask.

"We never make sentences that-a-way, sir," she would blush. So I would fire her and get another. Finally a little Irish girl named McGheogheoghan (pronounced McVeigh) came along, and one morning I went up and asked her how she was feeling.

"I feel terrible," she answered.

That nurse is still with us, and grows, I am happy to say, more singular every day.

How Stephen Olford influenced Jim and Elisabeth Elliot

In January 1948, 20-year-old Jim Elliot (1927-1956) and 21-year-old Elisabeth Howard (1926-2015), both students at Wheaton College, sat in a week of chapel meetings led by a 29-year-old Stephen Olford (1918-2004). On Friday, January 16, he preached on journaling and quiet time. Here's what each one had to say about the experience.

Jim

January 17, 1948

What is written in these pages I suppose will someday be read by others than myself. For this reason I cannot hope to be absolutely honest in what is herein recorded, for the hypocrisy of this shamming heart will ever be putting on a front and dares not to have written what is actually found in its abysmal depths. 

Yet, I pray, Lord, that You will make these notations to be as nearly true to fact as is possible so that I may know my own heart and be able to definitely pray regarding my gross, though often unviewed, inconsistencies. 

I do this at the suggestion of Stephen Olford... whose chapel message of yesterday morning convicted me that my quiet time with God is not what it should be. These remarks are to be written from fresh, daily thoughts given from God in meditation on His Word. 

- Jim Elliot, (Elisabeth Elliot, ed.), The Journals of Jim Elliot.

Elisabeth

A young British preacher named Stephen Olford spoke in our college chapel for a week. Two things he said stayed with me: He quoted from the Song of Solomon, “I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor awake love until it please.” He interpreted this to mean that no one, man or woman, should be agitated about the choice of a mate, but should be “asleep” as it were, in the will of God, until it should please Him to “awake” him. The other thing he urged was that we should keep a spiritual journal. I determined to follow his advice on both counts.

I bought a small, brown looseleaf notebook, almost exactly the size of my small, brown leather-bound Bible, given to me by my parents for Christmas in 1940. These I kept together at all times. 

- Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity.

Jim and Elisabeth began a romance that year that eventually ended in marriage in 1953. Jim was eventually speared to death along with four other missionaries in Ecuador as they tried to reach the Waodani tribe in 1956. 

It is my contention that the reason we know about Jim and Elisabeth today is not only because of Jim's martyrdom, but also because Elisabeth wrote so many books about their lives, such as Through Gates of Splendor, The Savage My Kinsman, and Passion and Purity, along with her edited version of The Journals of Jim Elliot. She would not have been able to do so to the level of detail and emotional depth that she did without the evidence from these journals, which they started after hearing Stephen Olford's message. 

And I'm sure that the writing and processing each of them did as they kept the journals helped them make the life decisions they did. So in a way, we know about Jim and Elisabeth Elliot today because Stephen Olford encouraged them to journal.

Journaling as confession

Between last night and this morning, I read Maria Boulding's introduction to Augustine's Confessions. I was impressed by one section called "What is Confession?", where she outlines three "layers of meaning" to the Latin words confessio (a noun) and confiteri (a verb), denoting three types of activity that Augustine engaged in as he wrote. 

First, he confessed his sin. Second, he confessed God's glory. Third, he asks God to give him words, and then he uses words and ideas he has learned in Scripture and uttered in prayer to speak back to God and for his readers.

This last type of confession "is a creative process", Boulding says. Just as the Holy Spirit "prays in us" when we don't have words (see Romans 8:6), so we co-create ourselves along with God as we make his creative word part of our spoken and written thoughts.

"Words... are essentially signs; and they reach their fullest meaning as servants of self-transcendence."

This has important implications for journaling as a spiritual exercise, which I have been learning to practice for the past two years I've been part of a men's group called Intercept.

Journaling lets us capture and process our floating thoughts, and rein and run with our angry, driving ones. In a sense it is a conversation between ourselves and God, through which we create meaning out of the sense impressions running past our ears and eyes and tongues and fingertips. Through which we turn ideas over and under until they fit into the shape of our life, and in very special cases, fill and expand and reshape that life.

Confessing didn't calm every one of Augustine's storms, but the process made him a more interesting person, and the writing of it brought that process to us so we could join the chorus, from whatever little cell we might be in.

(All quotes are from Maria Boulding, Introduction in Augustine, The Confessions, 2nd edition. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, pp.24-25.)

Becoming Free Indeed book review

 I just finished reading/listening to Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar Vuolo. It's a short book, only 5 hours and 49 minutes in the audio version. I read 50-60% of it in around three hours on a Wednesday night, and then finished the rest of it on Audible while driving around for work on Thursday and Friday.

I wish it were longer, because I really like where she was going. Mrs. Vuolo is the sixth daughter of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, who was raised in Bill Gothard's ATI homeschooling program and was on several reality TV shows about her family from the time she was ten years old until 2021. She is married to Jeremy Vuolo, a former professional soccer player who now is a college pastor for John MacArthur's church near Los Angeles.

The book talks about her theological development, both thanking her parents for her upbringing and critiquing Gothard's teachings for their self-imposed rules and weird biblical interpretations, which led to an overactive and anxious conscience. Now with two little girls of her own, she talks about her hopes and dreams for raising them out of the limelight and in a loving and non-legalistic environment. 

I connected very well with the book -- even though I thought the hype around her family was silly, she comes across as a real person trying to overcome her anxieties and be realer than she was before under Gothard's system. I've struggled with the same things.

Another strength of her book was how she gives actual quotes transcribed from Gothard's seminar videos to strengthen her critique, citing the specific video and timestamp. This is the first time I've seen someone do this, and it is quite effective. She says that when she and her now-husband were courting long-distance, they watched Gothard's Advanced Seminar and Basic Seminar and Jim Sammons's Financial Freedom Seminar, and would often pause the video and discuss the content -- often Jeremy would point out errors, and she started to learn a more reasonable way of interpreting the Bible.

The audio is read by the author, and I think she has a very pleasing voice -- I'm fascinated by the younger generation's use of vocal fry at moments of vulnerability, slang phrases like "came in clutch". Because her 29-year-old voice still sounds so youthful, and because her parents are still famous, I wonder if maybe she doesn't get respected as an adult in some circles, despite being a pastor's wife, a mother of two, and a thrice-published author.

A lot of taboids and news agencies have written about the book and tried to drum up controversy about who among her relatives support her and who doesn't. I wish she had a little more privacy for those types of things.

It might look like she's pounding a dead horse, since Gothard is now 88 and has been deposed from his organization since 2014. However, there are still some families who still attend IBLP conferences, and still others who remember Gothard's teachings with some measure of nostalgia and fondness, who could benefit from hearing how the teachings affected her, especially with the direct evidence she gives by quoting the videos themselves.

I should show my own bias here in that I was in the same ATI program during my high school years, and attended Journey to the Heart, which she also mentions. One of my sisters also met either her or some of her sisters at another Journey to the Heart or other IBLP event. So maybe the story is especially interesting to me in that I have lived a similar story. I appreciate how she talks about her theological development as a "detangling" of faith from fear and biblical teaching from man-made rules, rather than simply deconstructing belief into something nihilistic or self-centered. I'm glad she's found a solid place to stand on now, and I agree with her denunciations of some of Gothard's teachings.

I do worry that the memoir may come off a bit premature, as it swings a big about-face from the 2014 pro-Gothard memoir Growing Up Duggar that she wrote with her sisters. And she may yet change her mind on other things. But as a time capsule of her fresh experiences over the past ten years, it's good to have the record as long as we see it as simply that and not necessarily the final statement of her life.

Where Bill Gothard followed and didn't follow Stephen Olford

Bill Gothard said in one of his Christian living seminars that when he was young, a mentor invited him over and had him listen to a tape recording of the sermon "Social Relationships" by Stephen Olford, an African-born English evangelist, recorded at Moody Bible Institute in 1955 or 1956 (and re-presented by Olford many times since). The message profoundly influenced Gothard, and he incorporated much of Olford's message into his Basic and Advanced Seminars. Chief among these ideas were:

• distinguishing different levels of friendship
• yielding one's sex life to the Holy Spirit for sublimation into creative and spiritual power
• avoiding "defrauding" others, that is, stirring up desires in them that can't be righteously satisfied

An area where Gothard did not follow Olford, however, was in the area of music appreciation. In a 1958 book entitled Christianity and You, Olford set out several tests for whether a particular amusement was permissible for a Christian: Do these pleasures positively encourage, endanger, or enrich my Christian life? (p.46) He also quotes with approval (pp.44-45) a section from Arthur Porritt's 1920 book The Strategy for Life: A Book for Boys and Young Men, which I have set out in full below, with my emphasis in bold:

Music is an amusement, but it is much more than an amusement. It is an educational and spiritualizing art which, in one form or another, a young man should cultivate in his own highest interests. A wit has said that music is the most expensive form of noise, and another humorist has observed that classical music is that form of music which is so much better than it sounds. However economical of his leisure a young man may be, time should be found to master the elements of music, to learn to sing, or play a musical instrument, and to hear good music rendered. Ears and tastes differ, and in music one man's joy is another's anathema. A devotee of Sullivan may squirm under Bach, and a votary of Beethoven's sonatas may yawn even over the honeyed sweetness of Handel's Messiah. Avoid affectation and follow your bent is the best advice as to music that I can offer a young man. Do not praise Debussy if you really prefer Balfe, nor pretend to be ecstatic over Tschaikovsky's "1812" if "There's a long long trail a-winding" is more to your fancy. Be honest in your tastes, but cultivate them. Your joy in jazz-tunes may end in appreciation of the "Moonlight Sonata." (Porritt 1920, pp.137-138)

 Olford and Porritt's moderate stance towards jazz contrasts with Gothard's hard line against rock & roll in the 1960s, which was more along the lines of Anne Shaw Faulkner's 1921 article "Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" 

Popular music as a carrier of sexual license or rebellion or communism was a common theme among mid-20th century evangelists such as David Noebel and Bob Larson, so Gothard was not alone here. And the more you read their literature and listen to their talks, the closer it gets to racism or at least ethnocentrism, since jazz and rock had their roots in African-American music traditions. 

This really shows that different styles of music can symbolize different things to different cultural groups, over and above the individual tastes that Porritt noted. 

We get a taste of this culture clash in the two following stories, the first one by Wisconsin Baptist musician Alan Ives in a talk called "The difference between good and bad music", whose teaching is promoted by Illinois Baptist pastor Sheron Mark Davis. (Davis's teaching was in turn promoted by Gothard.)

In Africa, the heathen are able to play "poly rhythms." Poly, of course, means many. They have all these drums and other percussion instruments, rhythm instruments, that all make different sounds, and they can hear them. They can make one rhythm with their feet, another with their torso, some more with their arms, and some more with their fingers and wrists, some more in their heads; and they can dance six or seven different rhythms at one time. It is an amazing thing; however, it is all sensual; it's all for the body; and it's all created by their ability to hear and put into their bodies those dance rhythms that were created specifically to make their bodies move in ways that are not polite. They make the body move to draw attention to parts of the body in a way that is improper.

That is all that is happening in the rock scene today. They are catching up to some of these African rhythms. And, of course, the Satan worshipers have just turned the amplifiers up to the fullest degree, and many of them do not know, musically, what they are doing anymore. They are just making a lot of noise. Some of them are not even really playing chords; there is not even any harmony or melody there, just a lot of noise. There is nothing for the spirit, nothing for the soul; it is all for the body. Now we have Rap music. What happened to the melody? It is gone. What you don't know is that they have been doing this type of thing in Africa for thousands of years, and there are recordings of that. They will go on sometimes for hours. You talk about dance marathons! They dance until they drop over and are possessed by devils, and then they get back up and they dance again.

...Now let's say we add just a little bit of sensual rhythm to a song. We make it just one degree away from truly spiritual, holy music. It will appeal to a lot of Christians. Then we have some other music that really is boogie, but we call it Southern gospel; and that will appeal to a lot of Christians. They excuse it by saying it is just "down home" music. No, it isn't. It's boogie woogie, but some Christians still think it is O.K. Then there is the Contemporary Christian Music, which sounds like it is being sung in a nightclub. Of course it is big business today, and it is farther still away from painting a proper picture of our Lord.

...A pastor once told me, "You know, those black folks really have it; why don't you stick some of those rhythms into your music. With your voice and your talent..." I thought, "Get thee behind me." I didn't say that, but I just shook my head. The evangelist that was there said, "Brother Ives, don't change your music."

Contrast Ives's story above about misgivings toward "sensual rhythm" infecting white people's music with the following account by African-American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston's in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me".

[W]hen I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. 

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips. 

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Whereas Ives worried about giving in to the body with danceable rhythms, Hurston worried that her white friend didn't feel what she felt. This is a culture clash rather than a spiritual problem.

After this long discursus, I just want to say that the music wars didn't have to be this way. Even in the thick of it there were reasonable people like Olford and Porritt and even Hurston, whom Gothard could have drawn from -- and he did draw from Olford in the matter of social relationships. I just wish he'd done the same with music.

Note: This post is a result of an ongoing interest in the sources that influenced Bill Gothard (and who influenced them), in order to map out the history of the spread of ideas through Evangelicalism in the 20th century, and ultimately to my family and the social and religious groups I grew up in. Which led me to transcribe Olford's talk on "Social Relationships" -- downloadable here.

The self beneath the rawness

I remember a church-kitchen conversation with Jim Schmitt around 2006, in which he told me he hoped that there was something deeper and wholly good in him, that is, in his new nature, beneath the sinfulness that kept coming up. I thought again about that comment when I listened to the audiobook for Platonic by Marisa Franco this month. 

Franco says the following about authenticity (pp.168-169):

...I used to think authenticity was about rawness, boldly sharing whatever is on your mind. But now I see that it's about listening, listening to yourself, not being afraid to experience what's going on inside you, to acknowledge what you truly think and feel and fear and love, without covering it up with defenses. It's not just about having the bravery to admit your opinions to others, but in having the bravery to admit them within. It's only in this listening that we can sense which friends feel most safe for our authenticity and share our truest internal world. Because when we do this internal work, we don't ask others to do it for us. We don't dominate, control, bash, deflect, ignore, ghost, discriminate, or otherwise mistreat because we need them to relieve us from whatever discomfort is warbling inside. And with what's left, we can love others more deeply, cherish them in their truest form, and find friendship.

She gives the following among her takeaways (p.169):

• Authenticity is a state of presence we access when we aren't hijacked by threat. It's who we are underneath our defense mechanisms.
• Authenticity nurtures friendship because humans are social beings, which means when we're authentic, we unleash our nature of empathy and compassion.
• To be more authentic in threatening situations, restrain from indulging in what comes reflexively, because it is likely a defense mechanism. Be mindful and aware of the triggers that propel you to self-protect without indulging them. Pause and breathe. Shift your attention from defensiveness to openness. Access your higher self.
• To stave off social anxiety that impedes authenticity, focus on the person in front of you instead of yourself.

So the first response is not always the most authentic one, and the raw self is not always the true self. This is going to take some work!

This idea of the self beneath the rawness reminds me in turn of Elijah's experience in the cave (1 Kings 19:11-12). The Lord told Elijah he was going to pass by the mountain, but the Lord was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire that came first, one after the other, but only in the gentle whisper that came at the end. Were those other things meant to test Elijah and see if he would jump? Or to prepare him to be in awe when the real thing came, which was different from all that came before?

Now the human "true self" and the divine presence are not the same. But each one takes time and preparation to see.

Jim Schmitt passed on from this life on May 24, 2017. Now he knows both his true self and the divine presence, and, unlike Marisa Franco and I, he no longer has to speculate.

The rule of three

 Long ago in another life, I remember Bill Gothard musing in one of his seminars that somehow the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit must correspond to the body, soul, and spirit. Jesus the Son had a body, and the Holy Spirit is a Spirit, obviously, and so I guess the Father must be like the soul. And then the soul itself is composed of three faculties, namely, the mind, will, and emotions. 

If I were to pile onto this jumble of correspondences, I would have to add:

• Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
• Peter, James, and John
• Faith, Hope, and Love (1 Corinthians 13:13)
• The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Peter Abelard and the Book of Common Prayer)
• The Lust of the Flesh, the Lust of the Eyes, and the Pride of Life (1 John 2:16)
• Chastity, Poverty, and Obedience (Francis of Assisi)
• Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (Robespierre)
• Life, Liberty, and Property (John Locke)
• Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Thomas Jefferson)
• Sit, Walk, Stand (Watchman Nee)
• Heart, Soul, and Strength (Deuteronomy 6:5)
• Heart, Soul, and Mind (Matthew 22:37)

Wait, does mind equal strength?

Someone had to go and ruin it, though, by making it four.

• Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength (Mark 12:30)

And the other typist couldn't even keep the order straight!

• Heart, Soul, Strength, and Mind (Luke 10:27)

All I can say is that the human mind really, really likes the Rule of Three. Having been designed by the One who self-revealed as the Trinity, we can't say that it's our fault that we think this way, but we can't read that much into it either, beyond the fact that it's a recognizable pattern. Sometimes a pattern is just there because it's beautiful and memorable, not because each part corresponds to every other part in another instantiation of the pattern.