How to Deal with Bullies: Psalm 10

How do we deal with a bully? In this episode, I talk about compassion while bringing in my own story along with the work of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, the late Archbishop Desmund Tutu of South Africa, and Ariel Burger. For further reading check out The Book of Joy edited by Douglas Abrams and Witness: What I Learned from Elie Wiesel's Classroom by Ariel Burger. Thank you for tuning in!!

For more information about me and my work, please visit www.brianneturczynski.com or www.lovingtheimperfect.com

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Loving the Imperfect Podcast. I’m Brianne Turczynski, a wife, a mother, a teacher, a filmmaker, a journalist, a published author, and now your host. This week's episode will teach us about compassion as we read Psalm 10.

And today it is Thursday as I'm publishing this. But the other day we had such a blessing. We had a 70-degree day in Michigan in February. And that was so amazing. We saw an ant, a little ant just crawling around the deck. 

And I heard the red-winged blackbirds the other day and they're returning, and the geese are returning. And it's such a joyful feeling when all these creatures come back and join us again.

And so, we don't feel so alone. So, anyways. Psalm 10. This is, it says Anonymous, but it says it's probably David:  

Why, Lord, do you stand far off?  Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?  In his arrogance, the wicked man hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises.  He boasts about the cravings of his heart.  He blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.

In his pride, the wicked man does not seek him.  In all his thoughts, there is no room for God.

His ways are always prosperous.  Your laws are rejected by him.  He sneers at all his enemies. He says to himself, nothing will ever shake me. He swears no one will ever do me harm.  His mouth is full of lies and threats. Trouble and evil are under his tongue.  He lies in wait near villages.  From ambush he murders the innocent.

His eyes watch in secret for his victims. Like a lion in cover, he lies in wait. He lies in wait to catch the helpless. He catches the helpless and drags them off in his net.  His victims are crushed. They collapse. They fall under his strength. 

He says to himself, God will never notice.  He covers his face and never sees.  Arise, Lord. Lift your hand, O God. Do not forget the helpless. Why does the wicked man revile God?  Why does he say to himself, He won't call me to account?  But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted.  You consider their grief and take it in hand.

The victims commit themselves to you. You are the helper of the fatherless. Break the arm of the wicked man. Call the evildoer to account for his wickedness.  The Lord is king forever and ever. The nations will perish from his land. You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted. You encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed so that mere earthly mortals will never again strike terror.

  So that was Psalm 10. It was a long one. So how do we deal with bullies? The Dalai Lama teaches us to look with the eyes of compassion.  In The Book of Joy, which is like a dialogue between the Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, it's very good, the Dalai Lama recounts a story of his friend. It was during the Chinese takeover of Tibet and many monks were taken prisoner at this time. The Dalai Lama had to escape under the cover of night to not be a victim of imprisonment. One friend of his was taken and endured 18 years of hard labor. When he was freed, the Dalai Lama and he reunited, the Dalai Lama's friend explained the hardships of being in this prison, and he said basically, that they didn't have any shoes, even on the coldest of days. And that it was so cold that when you spit, it landed as ice.

And they were always hungry. And that one day, this person was so hungry, the Dalai Lama's friend was so hungry, that he tried to eat the body of one of the other prisoners that had died, but the flesh of that person was so frozen, and it was too hard to bite. And that throughout the whole time prisoners were tortured.

And this prison combined Soviet-style torture, Japanese-style torture, and Chinese-style torture all in one. And when the Dalai Lama's friend was finally freed, only 20 people had survived out of 130.

So He said that they had faced some real danger, that he had faced some real danger in that prison, and the Dalai Lama thought, well, of course, he's talking about dangers to his life, physical danger, and the Dalai Lama's friend said, “no, I was in danger of losing my compassion for my Chinese guards”.

One of the archbishops’ famous quotes is we grow in kindness when our kindness is tested.  In his life, Desmond Tutu fought for the introduction of female priests. He fought for gay rights in Africa, which is still a major issue to this day. He made frequent statements that the treatment of the Palestinians is like apartheid.

He and Nelson Mandela worked together to end apartheid and work toward reconciliation, which led Mandela to award him the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was a group that investigated human rights abuses during and after apartheid. In 1984, he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

So, these are our teachers. Two examples, anyways.  

  A few years ago, I worked with a person who was an adult bully.  She used interrogating language with me.  So, if I asked her a question, she would ask me a question back in an interrogating, belittling way. So, I approached her about how she made me feel in a respectful way, because I wanted us to be able to work together in peace. 

She was my manager, kind of. But this backfired because she wasn't seeing me with compassion or listening to me with compassion. So, we never resolved the conflict. There was always this sort of thorn between us. You know, greeting her in different parts of the building there was this awkwardness, that sort of thorny space between us she didn't like that I approached her. But I thought that would be better than talking about her behind her back to other coworkers. and my kindness during this experience with this person was tested. My kindness was tested every day. And I was intentionally aware of that.  And it was very frustrating because she was all smiles. She was all smiles to the neighbors, but behind closed doors, she was abusing her “children”, right? 

The people that were under her, she was abusing us. But she was all smiles to everyone else, and everyone thought she was wonderful. So that's what makes it even more frustrating, and I know some of you listening have had these experiences. And that's why I tell you these stories because we're all so alike. 

You know, the human race. We all have all these things in common. So, I did feel like God was far off.  As the psalmist writes. Why, Lord, do you stand far off?

I did feel like God had disappeared. God was just the sort of, you know, indifferent witness to my hardships every day dealing with this very difficult person. So, it was hard not to lose compassion for her. This is why I'm speaking in this way to protect her identity. 

But it was also the reason I approached her to her face in the first place because of my compassion and the way that I live. Because it would have been against my character to go behind her back and tell every single other person I worked with how horrible she was. And yes, there was venting to certain trusted people.

I did vent because you want to make sure that you're not blowing things out of proportion. You ask your community, your people, the people closest to you that are trusted, and that's okay to seek counsel with people. But sometimes peace backfires on us.

 If wouldn’t it be nice if those of us in leadership roles, could practice compassion or practiced compassion? Wouldn't it be nice if compassion was a trait we looked for in future potential hires?  If we made compassion a priority for employment, imagine the world we would create and all the way that energy of love might trickle around the world to the ground of the earth itself. 

And so, the dictionary defines it as sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortune of others.

But I think compassion goes way beyond that. It's a sort of profound understanding of empathy and a profound understanding of what people are going through and how hard it is to be a human. And that's why I just think that humans are so precious that way because we're, it's so hard to be a human. It's so hard to live in this world.  And that's why God loves us so much because God knows that it's so hard to live. So that's why, I think God has an unending amount of compassion for you because God knows what made you the way you are. I think that we're all born good, but I think the world weighs down on us and people can beat us up and make us mean and make us want to fight. And make us want to do violence to each other.

And if you don't have good teachers throughout your life and good mentors, then yeah, you can do a lot of damage, but see God's been with you and has seen you and knows you deeply and God is there to give you unending mercy. And so, I just think that that's so beautiful when I think about it.

 So, in his book Witness, Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom, Ariel Berger talks about the stars and how the light we see from the stars is not their current light. We get a delayed view of the light and that in the very space between this moment and the next, the light has changed. He uses this example in reference to people. I used to tell my students, that we need to give each other room and space to change, and not condemn people for what they did yesterday, but we must love them in this moment right now because this moment is all we have. This kind of talk is much needed in schools where kids bully each other for wearing the wrong shoes living in poverty or because they are non-binary.

We need more love language from teachers and administrators. It's a lesson we all need to learn to love each other in the moment and not dwell on what happened. Between you and that person yesterday, or a second ago, and to encourage people when they seem like they're changing, if they do something nice for you, it's good to encourage them, to say thank you, not to hold grudges but to welcome people into a space of peace with us here and now and we too need to think of ourselves as being accepted in this way. 

So, you know, it's like this, the past couple of psalms I've read, they say quite violent things sometimes, David, especially, we should know that this is a psalm of David just because it says.  like the other one said, break the jaws of the wicked or something. And this one is telling us to or telling God to break the arms of the wicked. 

In that past Psalm, when it says break the jaw, I don't think he means physically breaking the jaw. I think he's asking God to take the evil words out of this person's mouth. This person has been saying all sorts of bad things about me. Can you please just, um, make them stop talking?  And when he says, break the arms, I think that he means, take their strength away. 

Take their strength away for a minute.  And bring them down to a weakness. The weakness that I feel. And really in our weaknesses, we do feel more compassionate. And so in this Psalm, David, and I'm going to just go ahead and say that David wrote it because I can almost guarantee you that he did, even though it says anonymous, he says in his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak.

So he's asking God to humble his enemies and in your compassion when you are compassionate towards somebody who is being terrible to you that will humble them. That does a great deal of good work. It teaches somebody a lot. When the way that they’re acting toward you is contrary to the way that you're acting to them.

Believe me, it does teach lessons. It does do its good work. It’s good heavenly work. And in that, you are a beautiful, holy rascal who's sort of making good trouble happen in the minds and the hearts of your bullies and your enemies. 

That's what Jesus teaches us. If you look at the story of Jesus, he didn't use violence against his aggressors. That doesn't mean that we can't get angry either. Anger is a tool for us to alert our bodies that something's off. But always act with compassion. 

And I'll try to do the same thing as we move forward.  

Every Thursday, I'm going to be uploading new episodes, and they are going to cover every seventh Psalm. So, today was Psalm 10. Next week will be Psalm 17, and the week after that, I believe is Psalm, 24. And I do want to publish a couple of bonus episodes in the next couple of weeks.  I'd like to do an episode explaining why I'm doing this. And I would also, if it doesn't tie into the psalm somehow, I’m thinking about doing an episode on Celtic spirituality because St. Patrick's Day is coming up. So, I'm going to throw in a little John O’Donohue his stuff is very beautiful. So, find yourself a good teacher, and thank you for joining me.