I stared into an owls eye once, and glimpsed finity: the owl was simply being an owl while I was preoccupied with chasing that epic photo that would amaze everyone. I saw my reflection and realized the owl had the better of it. The owl simply was, and I was trying to be something I was not. It's only when I feel stupid that I know where I need to grow.
In this world of "I" we constantly battle the fact that "each is big with a pride grown of its smallness, hardened by its own insularity, and embittered by eternal danger" - we move through each day shielding ourselves from the danger of knowing finity. Infinity we're ok with, because we're too small to truly comprehend it and so are comfortable in our ignorance. But our finiteness: now that is all too easy to comprehend (if we would allow ourselves to contemplate it). So we lie to ourselves because we fear to be ourselves. This last week I was front and center before 250 people over three days, and the most disturbing thing was seeing how people interacted with me based on their perceptions of my supposed importance. I would say some things as offhand remarks, and then hear my phrases repeated in other conversations, as if what I had said was important when in reality I was thoughtlessly giving exposure to a freewheeling mind. In my professional world I can (if I choose to) be known by various appellations of achievement (as measured by my peers) ... titles, descriptors of job positions and past accomplishments, all claims to authority. While these can be useful to get around the egos of others, or open doors to opportunities, doing so leaves me deeply uncomfortable because I am in fact trading on perceptions. As a Christian, perceptions of and by people are no less an issue. Thus my current sabbatical from being an active member of a church is helping me to re-evaluate my unexamined perceptions. My sense of finiteness is growing. The current age of Christianity does not encourage this. Instead it emphasizes the infinite potential of Christian faith (which is correct) but at the expense of remembering personal finity. Church today seems to be all about creating a zone of spiritual comfort, an encouragement to be more than I am, and contains little about spiritual inadequacy. Yet its only when I comprehend my size that I can understand infinity, it's only when I give myself freedom to fail that I can learn what it means to proceed. I suspect that one reason we live in time is that we are incapable of living outside time. We need time to fail, to learn our finity. Yet the post-modern and relativist world we inhabit is hell-bent on (de-)(re-)constructing our references in order to hide our finity from sight. And the church seems to have no clue as to how to respond. My faith in all things thrives on fellowship, and that is not a uniquely Christian statement. In both the secular and the spiritual, fellowship is the fuel that gives us the security and freedom to fail, and brings forward the necessary awareness of finity. And that's why loneliness is one of the greatest diseases today. In the workplace we've replaced fellowship with ambition, where our only real support is the ladder we're trying to climb. In the church its become the reverse; diluted theology proclaimed with repetitious simplicity - spiritual homeopathy at its worst. And so the divide grows ever greater between those who live with a faith-in-self versus a faith-in-God, where one community is walking off a cliff while the other hides in a cave, each unable to talk to or even really understand the other. Of course there are individual exceptions. But how do we turn it inside out, how to change perceptions of normality where supposedly "anything is possible" into the understanding of "something is actual". This is not anti-ambition, or a call to become miserable self-deprecating worms. It's a reflection that my finite capacity is optimally expended in a reality. Ideals are targets to be aimed for, ambitions are goals to be chased for, but living is a reality to be worked for. Knowledge is information in context; finity is the information, infinity the context, and that's a knowledge that defines reality; in my work place, my private space, and my Christian faith.
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"Thank you Trump: you've triggered my rethinking anger (and yes, in case you get the wrong idea, I do think you suffer from 'Malignant narcissism')."
I've been living with a background level of anger - we all do. It varies with stress and circumstance, but it's there. Right now my background level is quite high, catalyzed by multiple factors such as the irrational dogmatism and sense of superiority from Trump and his follower's, my own inability to get on top of life's tasks to just once get ahead of the curve, regrets over lost opportunities in both my public and private spheres of life, and not least the incredible intransigence and stupidity of some institutionalized religion. Anger can arise out of empathy, but often doesn't; if one empathizes with the injustice meted out to others, anger can be a natural (and constructive) response. Among those that share the value system being trampled on, its defensibly even a morally legitimate response. So maybe some of my background anger is righteous - rooted in empathy for injustice. I think much of it is not. I suspect that for many the reality is that the anger comes from having personal ideals thwarted, or as CGKC puts it, "The answer to the question, 'What is Wrong?' is, or should be, 'I am wrong.' Until a man can give that answer his idealism is only a hobby." Christians say that only righteous anger is acceptable - the problem is perhaps that too many think they are righteous when they're not. I sometimes define humility as "be no more than you are, no less than you are, and that presumes you know what you are", and in my experience many Christians have a poor sense of what they are. Here I feel a need to also take a dig at all those who would deny the professed faith of others without effectively questioning their own faith first (and that also goes for the faiths of atheism, relativism, humanism, and all the other 'isms): "It is assumed that the skeptic [of other positions] has no bias; whereas [s]he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism." (GKC again). A difficulty with claimed righteous anger, at least among Christians (and in that term I exclude the cultural Christians of the alt-right), is that for the most part it (a) is empty of empathy, and (b) has no self-examination, which together make it merely self-righteous anger. If you want a contemporary secular example, Trump's tweets are the epitome. In my experience most often anger is sparked by feeling personally injured, when MY interests are being frustrated, and then anger tramples all over empathy - empathy is not just suppressed, it's tied up, locked away, and all memory of it erased while the hormones rage. Road rage, anger at what I cannot affect, anger at self-failing, anger that cries "Arrrgh, for goodness sake why can't ... ... ?" (and it's interesting that when I say "for goodness sake" most secular people actually say "for god's sake" - I often wonder which god they're invoking, usually themselves I suspect). A recent experience: I occasionally dip my toe into on-line forums: I tried that this week (this time it was work avoidance, which also makes me angry at myself), but with the forum's comments I can never last long, because I get too angry at the unquestioned self-righteousness. I don't mind people thinking they're right (of course I think I'm right if I hold to a position ... I'd be stupid not to). But I get angry when people will not listen to the possibility they may be wrong. I'm not totally innocent of this, but maybe it's the scientist in me that I have to keep on asking myself, even with my Christianity, "could I be wrong?" And when I get angry it can be satisfying in the short term; anger bolsters our sense of (self-)righteousness, and makes a good (temporary) defense mechanism when we're not right ("attack is the best form of defense"). Where is the empathy in society today? Anger seems to fill so much of contemporary society - especially the more insidious kind of background irritation, that state of being continuously irked, frustrated, outraged, and a general feeling of grievances (real and imagined). Mix this with a touch of stress and the pot is always ready to boil over. This incipient and real anger can provide a helpful course correction to group injustices, a check and balance to imposed power, but it is often deeply destructive to our individual and collective capacity for empathy. My deepest concern as we see the rise of nationalism, isolationist agendas, impositions of power, and an ever-deeper polarization, is that the first victim is respect for human dignity: "When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights." (GKC again). In some ways I love that the current crisis of nations (the most visible being the Trump-led impositions and Brexit's protectionism) is peppered with the word "rights". Not because rights are being elevated (in reality they're being trampled on in anger), but because it allows me to ask, "whose rights, by whose authority, and what damage is being left in its trail?" The wonderfully amusing philosopher Terry Pratchett wrote "Sometimes I dream that we could deal with the big crimes, that we could make a law for countries and not just for people." Big crimes are being committed by nations, but the nations are made of angry people who left their empathy outside the door. And so I want to ask the church: "Jesus was driven by, if nothing else, empathy. Where is Christian empathy for the victims of the injustices of the powerful? It's not in the 'Christian' alt-right, its certainly not in 'Christian'-based governments, its not particularly visible in institutionalized religion. Do we need a renewed Christian empathy that stirs a righteous anger? Or will history simply record that in this age Christians engaged through ineffective passive-aggression, and how they feared to tread into the sphere of secular power?" One possible answer is that the church's role is spiritual; that the individual is the focus of ministry. That position is, of course, true; but does this mean that this is the limit of attention? Jesus was not hesitant to speak out on the cultural power-brokers who dehumanized individuals, even as he left the military might of Roman rule untouched (much to the frustration of some of his followers). In Christian empathy we are called to engage with the secular individual - our actions should turn their attention to Jesus and his (defensible) absolute about the human condition. In this, we cannot avoid speaking about the nature of the idealism currently underpinning geo-political developments - for they are rooted in a re-framing of moral relativism, they dehumanize the individual, and commodify us a objects - often claiming a label of 'Christian' in the process. To engage an individual requires engaging their context, to engage the context requires engaging the culture, and to engage the culture requires the church to engage the philosophy of the age that in no uncertain terms is driving the actions of injustice. I experienced the Church engage Apartheid, and it was a time of powerful anger based in deep seated empathy (for the most part). It seems we've now passed the mantle to the idealists of the morally relativist progressive left, for they are doing more than the church in this time. |
Why?
Probably the best therapy is to express yourself. Why do you think psychiatrists make you lie on the couch and talk, while all they do is murmur "hmmm", "uhuh", or "go on"? Archives
May 2017
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