The other fatal flaw I had applied specifically to mission work in Eastern Europe. That is, I had put in so much work and gone through so much sacrifice (living out of a suitcase at times, or living on $10/week for food), and I had done about everything I could to prepare myself and was so sure of God's call to this work, that I wasn't going to take "no" for an answer. To tell me it couldn't be done would have fallen on deaf ears and my response would have been akin to Jesus' response to Peter's objection of the possibility of Jesus dying and resurrecting, namely, "Get thee behind me, Satan!" (Matt. 16:23).
I don't know that I felt this about anything else in my life, which would put me at great risk of being a megalomaniac. But I suppose that this one area of my life - regarding missions to Eastern Europe (and specifically the USSR) - could have elements of that condition. It's not like I thought I could just barge through the border guards with a bus load of Bibles or something, though. I wasn't that far gone! Still, I wasn't going to give up, I wasn't going to let discouragements get the better of me.
So this is my other Greek tragedy-style character flaw. I may think of others, but if I do I'll let you know. For now, though, these are enough. Of course, there are other elements of Greek tragedies too, but I'm not sure I'm ready yet to discuss them - it seems premature.
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After writing the above I thought more about it and in the past 4 years there have been a couple times when I've really had to scramble to get competent medical care, which shows tenacity and resourcefulness in situations where there's a lot at stake and I had no one to help me, but I think the ministry drive was not just quantitatively different (i.e., more tenacity and resourcefulness) from these situations, but qualitatively so as well (i.e., something different altogether). Nevertheless, the comparison with these health situations might provide a little insight into the ministry aspiration and my character.
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I should be able to get through this next article fairly quickly too. It is:
Allen, Natalie J., & Meyer, John P. (1990). Organizational socialization tactics: a longitudinal analysis of links to newcomers' commitment and role orientation. Academy of Management Journal, 33(40), 847-858.
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"In Jones's study, commitment and role orientation were negatively correlated (r=-.28, p<.01) and the socialization measures correlated in opposite directions with commitment and role orientation. An organization trying to design a socialization strategy that maximizes both commitment and innovation may find these results somewhat disconcerting. Newcomers who develop a strong commitment to the organization may not be sufficiently committed." (p. 850)
Allen and Meyer go on to provide limits to this finding, including that a causal relationship was not proven between commitment and role orientation, for example. Vis a vis my relationship with the Vienna mission, I just want to say that I think commitment would be hands down the preferable of these two value orientation. It's not that innovation would not have been important at all, but that if one or the other had to be sacrificed it would have had to have been innovation. However, if a person exhibited absolutely no innovation in his/her work I expect that would have been problematic, but an extremely high level of commitment (in my opinion) was demanded, whereas a relatively low level of innovation would have been reasonably acceptable. Some positions (such as formal leadership positions) probably would have required more innovation than others, however. Innovation would also have only been acceptable within rather narrow parameters.
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These next quotes come in the section of the article in which the authors discuss the significance of the findings of their study.
"Thus, it is not clear whether the link between investiture and commitment, for example, is due to something inherent in investiture or simple to the fact that investiture bears out the expectation of business school graduates. In future research, it would be useful to determine whether employees expecting divestiture (e.g., military recruits) become more committed when their expectations are confirmed or when, contrary to expectations, they experience investiture." (p. 856)
To refresh our memories, investiture is when the organization confirms a new recruit's identity, and divestiture is when it disconfirms it (i.e., via debasement). I don't remember ever getting any indication that debasement (divestiture) was something I should expect in beginning my full-time missionary work, nor that this was something new missionaries should usually expect. On the other hand, it seems a lot more plausible to expect a general orientation period to both the context/culture of the ministry and the ministry itself and working with the other missionaries in the field. These are not the same thing: divestiture is something purposeful and planned specifically to make you have troubles adjusting (via disconfirmation), whereas the "general orientation" is not and would probably involve more of an effort to ease the newcomer's transition to the work rather than making it more difficult (as in divestiture). In contrast to this, however, in the Vienna mission - at least in my situation for sure (and this was explicitly defined for me by the director of H.R. in the Vienna mission (to which I was on loan, not my sending mission) - divestiture was clearly used as a means of socialization, although "culture shock" from adjusting to living in Austria was given as the reason for any adjustment problems that might have stemmed from divestiture. In this manner, it was clear that the mission intended to deny any use of divestiture as a socialization tactic, using culture shock as a diversionary explanation for any possible divestiture-related fall-out. For new workers who in fact did have problems adjusting to life in Vienna there could have been enough truth in such a bait-and-switch tactic that it might have seemed a plausible explanation even to the new missionary him/herself. But even, as in my case, where I don't think I had such problems with the surrounding culture (and can give evidence to this), the mission did all it could to make it difficult for me to prove anything other than its own explanation of what I might have been experiencing, for example, it demanded the insertion of certain information in one of my prayer letters.
I don't know if my experiences in Vienna would have ended out otherwise than they did if I'd known beforehand that divestiture tactics were to be expected for work with that particular mission or with missions to Eastern Europe and/or "closed countries" in general. I think, though, that if the mission's use of divestiture was its usual way of welcoming newcomers and those newcomers didn't have sufficient background to recognize certain experiences as being intentional, and/or to question the morality of a specific socialization tactic, and/or to disagree with the apparent goals of the socialization tactic, and/or to be concerned about what organizational values might be undergirding the use of the tactic, then the individual probably would have just abdicated (intentionally or otherwise) personal responsibility for determining right or wrong regarding their early experiences with the mission. Once they'd done this they had taken the first step in giving the mission the authority it wanted in their lives. I think this is another helpful way to look at socialization in the Vienna mission.
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That's all for this text. The next one is...
Oberg, Kalervo. (1960). Culture shock: adjustment to new cultural environments. Practical Anthropology, 7, 177-182.
Here is the abstract, which I'm quoting just to set the stage:
"Culture shock tends to be an occupational disease of people who have been suddenly transplanted abroad. Like most ailments, it has its own symptoms, cause, and cure. Many missionaries have suffered from it. Some never recovered, and left their field. Some live in a constant state of such shock. Many recovery beautifully. As will be clear from the implications of Dr. Oberg's article, the state of culture shock in which a Christian lives will have great bearing on his temperament and witness." (p. 177).
Think of this as a taste of things to come... I have another file dedicated just to culture shock, which we'll get to later.
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"Some of the symptoms of culture shock are: excessive washing of the hands; excessive concern over drinking water, food, dishes, and bedding; fear of physical contact with attendants or servants; the absent-minded, far-away stare (sometimes called 'the tropical stare'); a feeling of helplessness and a desire for dependence on long-term residents of one's own nationality; fits of anger over delays and other minor frustrations; delay and outright refusal to learn the language of the host language of the host country; excessive fear of being cheated, robbed, or injured; great concern over minor pains and irruptions of the skin; and finally, that terrible longing to be back home, to be able to have a good cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie, to walk into the corner drugstore, to visit one's relatives, and, in general, to talk to people who really make sense." (p. 178)
Granted Austria isn't exactly "the tropics" (which I assume means living in a tribal jungle setting or the like), but I don't think I exhibited any of these things in Vienna. However, I did get angry with the mission, although it was an internal anger that they probably didn't ever guess at, and if I wanted to talk to people who made sense I'd talk with the Austrians, not the missionaries (whom I had trouble figuring out). This was also largely the case when I lived in Siberia, when I all but avoided Westerners. And I didn't have any longing to be back home; in contrast, it was the mission who wanted me back home.
Regarding helplessness and a desire for dependence, this can not possibly be the case because I was the one who found a German conversation class (I don't know that anyone else at the mission ever took any classes at the Volkhochschule) and got along fine in my Austrian church, for example. So helplessness and a desire for dependence is about as opposite as you can get to how I felt, even early on. But we'll get to this later.
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"Although not common, there are individuals who cannot live in foreign countries." (p. 178)
I'm not one of them. I submit that living in Siberia is a lot different from living in the USA then living in Austria would have been, and I did reasonably well there for 6 1/2 years without the benefit of any missionaries or mission organizations to make my life miserable.
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Next, the author goes through the four stages of culture shock / adjustment to a new culture.
"During the first few weeks most individuals are fascinated by the new. They stay in hotels and associate with nationals who speak the foreign language and are polite and gracious to foreigners. This honeymoon stage may last from a few days or weeks to six months depending on circumstances..." (p. 178)
It should be remembered that I had already spend about 2 1/2 months in Vienna just a couple years earlier and, by the time I moved to Vienna had already spent some 8 months in Europe (1981, 1983), both with a group and also on my own, in a variety of contexts.
In arriving in Vienna to work with the mission there in 1987 I think the mission intended to monopolize my time, but I went out of my way to look for opportunities to have contacts with the Austrians and I was treated just like anyone else in these contexts (i.e., not given any special treatment because of being a foreigner). It's possible I did have a bit of an idealized view of Austrian culture, but I can think of aspects of my thinking about the country that be moderating influences; in other words, I could have idealized the culture a bit, but not all that much.
In his introduction to the second stage, the author calls the first stage a "Cook's tour type of mentality", and I didn't have a tourist view of the culture and I did not limit my relations to the culture to purely touristic ones.
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"But this Cook's tour type of mentality does not last if the foreign visitor remains abroad and has seriously to cope with real conditions of life. It is then that the second stage begins, characterized by a hostile and aggressive attitude towards the host country. This hostility evidently grows out of the genuine difficulty which the visitor experiences in the process of adjustment. There is maid trouble, school trouble, language trouble, house, trouble, transportation trouble, shopping trouble, and the fact that people in the host country are largely indifferent to all these troubles... You become aggressive, you band together with your fellow countrymen and criticize the host country, its ways, and it's people.... You take refuge in the colony of your countrymen and your countrymen and its cocktail circuit which often becomes the fountain-head of emotionally charged labels known as stereotypes." (p. 178)
Do I need to say that I didn't do this either? To say that I banded together with my "fellow countrymen" is exactly the complete opposite of what I did and experienced. It was all I could do to try to extricate myself from the stranglehold of the mission and its confined, like an ingrown toenail. Even when I lived in Russia I disparaged the expatriate community for this kind of insulation. Believe me, this is one subject I could rant on and on about. Oh, I hate thee insulation, let me count the ways.
That's not to say that I never had any cross-cultural problems, but I can't think of any in Austria (except the mission culture) and the ones in Siberia were political, I believe, and were directly related to my having been invited there by, unbeknownst to me beforehand, the Komsomols (young Communist league) under very suspicious circumstances following 6 months of very suspicious contacts with Soviet citizens and representatives in the USA. So these were special instances of problems in highly politicized and narrow bands of experiences.
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"This second stage of culture shock is in a sense a crisis in the disease. If you overcome it, you stay; if not, you leave before you reach the stage of a nervous breakdown." (p. 179)
Since I've already shown (if not in a lot of detail yet - you'll have to wait for the chronological posts) that my only problem was with the mission and its "culture", then it seems that any evidence of culture shock and/or "nervous breakdown" would most likely be culture shock vis a vis that culture, not vis a vis the Austrian culture. And I hope my readers are astute enough to recognize by now that there was a strong possibility that any problems I might have had with the mission culture was intentionally engineered.
It's possible that these could have served to strengthen the constitution of the individual in preparation for work in inhospitable (to missionaries at least) countries. But I think that it is more likely that, as I've discussed many times already, these mission-induced stressors were intended to instill a mission-defined proper attitude in the new missionary. And if you didn't respond properly to these stressors you could develop a mission-induced breakdown. It just depended on what the individual missionary's breaking point was.
I think the response options to these stressors might have been as followed:
1. The individual gives in some time sufficiently before the nervous breakdown point to avert any serious service-affecting consequences.
2. The individuals doesn't give in in time and the escalation of mission response to this persistent failure to give in to the stressors results in mission-mandated intervention by health professionals.
3. Appropriate response to health professional intervention will probably lead to reinstatement with the mission.
4. Lack of appropriate response to health professional intervention will most likely lead to dismissal from the mission on health grounds.
5. If after reinstatement with the mission (after health intervention) the individual continues to exhibit signs of noncooperation, the individual could either be seen as potential risk (although without intention of harming the mission) or as a real risk (with probably intention of harming the mission) and steps would be taken, according to the situation, to minimize the potential risk.
I think I went through stage 5 as a "potential risk" - not a "real risk." If at any point I'd been viewed as real risk I probably would have undergone even harsher treatment and I doubt I would have been allowed to serve out my 2 year commitment.
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"If the visitor succeeds in getting some knowledge of the language and begins to get around by himself, he is beginning to open the way into the new cultural environment. The visitor still has difficulties but he takes a 'this is my cross and I have to bear it' attitude. Usually in this stage the visitor takes a superior attitude to people of the host country." (p. 179)
If anything, I might have started at this stage when I landed at the Flughafen Wien (Viennese airport). But I didn't have a superior attitude to Austrians, which is why I was able to begin to make acquaintances with Austrians, including a woman from my Austrian church and my landlady.
Vis a vis the mission culture, however, I never reached this stage.
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"[In] the fourth stage your adjustment is about as complete as it can be. The visitor now accepts the customs of the country as just another way of living. You operate within the new milieu without a feeling of anxiety although there are moments of strain... With complete adjustment you not only accept the foods, drinks, habits, and customs, but actually begin to enjoy them." (p. 179)
... Or maybe I arrived in Vienna at this stage of acculturation... but not vis a vis the mission. My adjustment to the Vienna mission culture never came close to this, especially regarding the deeper aspects of the culture, like values and attitudes.
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I'm going to end here, but I should be able to finish up this article next time. This topic is really important in relation to what happens to me in Vienna vis a vis my relationship with the mission.
