Mixed Messages of Hope

The Springs Rescue Mission transients I met had a choice. Those who were addicted could join the recovery program and get a heavy dose of Jesus plus medicine. Others could join the Hope program, maybe enticed by the opportunity to sleep in the same bed every night and get better meals during the day, maybe motivated by faith in Christ.

While staying in the Colorado Springs shelter, I sat in one Hope class in an SRM “multi-purpose room” and saw that the name reflects the goals of students as well as how the space is used. The text was Core Purpose 2.0, Fifth edition, authored by Victoria Jeffs. The class emphasized “mindfulness,” a key component of Buddhism’s eight-fold path for gaining wisdom and killing suffering.

One slide asked, “Did you know that when you practice Mindfulness, the structure and function of your brain changes?” The textbook leads weary readers down The First Path, which says, “I have hurt enough. I need to move on. I need to forgive them because I need relief.” Students are supposed to ask and answer the question: “Do you recognize that forgiveness is important to your Quality of Life?”

Students also receive instruction in The Second Path, also called The Road Less Traveled, with its emphasis on others who “have hurt enough. They need to move on. They need relief.…This path opens the door for clarity and restoration.” A slide and book page state, “Did you know that when you practice self-love and compassion that your brain deactivates your threat system and soothes itself?.…You get excited to help others, you will feel safe, you won’t feel the need to prove your words, you will be less lonely.”

Some of the students said that did not work for them, but the textbook and slides instructed the skeptical to “Practice Being Kind to Yourself” and “Say these things to yourself: I have a GROWTH mindset. I am courageous. I am created to overcome! I am worth loving. I LOVE ME!” Instructed to “live your values,” one student agreed and said she had lived her values by following the “I LOVE ME” concept into loving meth, which made her feel good.

The textbook in the all-purpose room emphasized the importance of students choosing their own purposes through understanding a pyramid of progress — it’s sometimes known as the Maslow triangle, although the text did not note is as such — with physiological needs at the bottom, safety and security on top of that, then love and belonging. At the top came self-esteem and self-actualization.

Bible-based classes I’ve been in elsewhere, though, suggest that we should esteem ourselves less and Christ more. They suggest that when we self-actualize, our nature pushes us to sin, so we need to pray that God will actualize us. It’s not an easy process, and students pushed back against a section in the textbook on “Editing a Memory” that instructed them to “write a sentence about anything. Now erase some of the words and replace them with different words. You have just edited the sentence. This is how you intentionally edit a memory.”

The textbook under a “Relief at Last!” heading declared, “The way your brain is wired, once you insert a different ending into a painful memory, your brain believes it happened and you are left with RELIEF. This is memory editing at its finest.” One student asked, “So we’re supposed to brainwash ourselves?”

No, but I saw two aspects of SRM. One program I observed was thoroughly Christian, another program secular with “faith-based” talk mixed in. Paul and Marilyn Vyzourek founded SRM in 1995 with both Christian and general goals: “We want to see lives transformed for eternity and filled with hope as our community works together to fight homelessness, poverty, and addiction.” Those goals are not in conflict, but emphasizing both eternity and immediacy, particularly in a secular city, takes the thoughtful planning that SRM is now engaged in, as I’ll show next week.