When 'just being helpful' isn't

i get knocked down but I get up again

So there I am, minding my own business, scrolling through Facebook while eating lunch, when an image of a tweet appears in my timeline. It was written on September 17, 2022, by Karolyn Sharp (@etcandsoforth) and reads:

Was at a training once where the facilitator said “Unsolicited advice is criticism. Always.”

Half the room audibly gasped/objected.

The other half shouted a chorus of yes/thank you/amen.

She offered no quarter to the “just being helpful” brigade. It was glorious.

I’m fairly sure I just got similar reactions from Hold My Chalice readers right now.

The reason I know that is because sometimes I get unsolicited advice in my inbox, particularly from folks who think I’m being too harsh, or too judgmental, or exaggerating, or focusing too much on one thing and not another, or not doing things the way they want, or fear my approach is putting off people - and that advice is always couched in the flavor of kindness that is actually not terribly kind at all but is in fact patronizing.

A couple of caveats here: solicited advice and criticism is always welcome, because I invite it. Calling me back in when I’ve made a misstep due to my privilege is celebrated (once I go through the learning process).

Also, I’m not just talking about my writing here. I get unsolicited advice from all quarters, because as a minister I am a public figure of sorts. And because of the ministry I choose to do and the platforms upon which I choose to do my ministry, I’m a little bit known in Unitarian Universalist circles; yes, I’m UU Famous.

But I can affirm to you: I am not alone in getting unsolicited advice.

In fact, I suspect that every religious professional has experienced it.

I suspect that nearly every lay leader has experienced it too. (The number of board presidents who leave not just the board but the congregation after a term is significantly higher than you might think.)

And I am not sure where we get the nerve to offer it. Now I could at this point go on one of my familiar rants against corporatism, misogyny, racism, abelism, classism, and homophobia, but ranting about it all makes the problem bigger than us again - too big to tackle alone, so we often don’t tackle it at all.

No, I want to talk about the personal. What makes any of us think we know better and should force our criticism and advice on others? What makes us think the person who did the thing in a way we don’t like was sitting on tenterhooks just waiting for someone to tell them how they did it wrong? What makes us the arbiter of correctness?

Sometime in the last week, I read something from former Secretary of Labor/political commentator Robert Reich, who said that his editor at the Washington Post would send back columns that weren’t sufficiently critical of, say, excellent economic news - everything, even reporting good news, had to have a critical slant.

It’s all over our society, this idea that we can criticize anything and everything, and the person who wrote it/said it/accomplished it should be grateful for the criticism.

Please. No.

First of all, how about we keep being counter-cultural and choose to build up people instead of cut them down?

And how about - like I wrote about a few weeks ago - we let the experts be experts? The experts won’t always get it right, but they largely know what they messed up. And just maybe… the thing you want to be critical of is a positive choice they made, and it’s just unfamiliarity or taste that makes you unhappy.

And lastly: often when someone makes an error, they already know it. It’s the word they didn’t want to use, or the person they didn’t see, or the decision they made without the right information or the right people in the room. The moment is pretty much a gut punch (at least it is for me), and like CJ when she blows an answer on Haiti (The West Wing, S03E01, “Manchester, Part One), I kick myself for probably a lot longer than is necessary. I don’t need anyone else to kick me too.

That’s probably true for most of us.

It’s a truism that you can get 99 good reviews and one bad one, and it’s the bad one that sticks with you.

Don’t be the one bad review.