Last week I shared the first of two lessons I learned while studying at SAU. Those lessons very much inform the way I think and feel about the recent tragedies in America. But they’ve also led to my adoption of what some might call a “do-nothing” philosophy. But it’s subtler than that.
The first of the two lessons I learned at SAU can be found here. It gives a little overview of what I learned about narrative, power, and race relations while researching and writing my senior thesis, “Realities of Faith, Articles of Civilization.” That lesson was mostly intellectual in nature, and one with which I struggled for a good many months (this one’s a spiritual lesson, and I learned it much more quickly). I’m an INTP on the Meyers-Briggs scale, which made internalizing the idea of the impossibility of true knowledge a bit difficult. But it was an important lesson to learn — everything must be taken with a grain of salt. Everything.
Had I been attending any other university, that kind of realization might have sent me into a tailspin of cynical depression and selfishness. But I was at Spring Arbor University, and if you’re really paying attention, that sort of thing just won’t happen to you.
The capstone course at SAU is CORE 400: Christian in the Contemporary World. I took the class with Dr. Robert Moore-Jumonville (husband of my mentor, Dr. Kimberly Moore-Jumonville). It was a good class, and Dr. Mojo (as he’s colloquially called) instructed, lectured, and led discussion with an amazing energy and openness. Throughout the course, we read a number of books, watched a handful of movies, and wrote on a variety of topics. Everything we did encouraged us to develop and/or interrogate our worldview; our personal philosophy we utilize in moving and living in the world.
Writing in that class proved an entirely cathartic exercise, prompting me to pull together the disparate threads of my experience, my knowledge, and my faith, weaving them into something whole, something workable, a sort of ecclesiology of the self. This is what I learned:
Reality, as we perceive it, is an incomprehensible nightmare, from which our minds and hearts must retreat into the hinterlands of our souls lest they be subsumed into the machinery of modernity. We ignore travesties the world over, or at best cherry-pick the ones we care about; our lives are so far removed from that kind of suffering, we become numb to it unless something in it speaks to our racial, cultural, or religious identity. We denigrate those who hold views contrary to our own and lecture them on the error of their perspective. How often do we stop and think about what motivates this behavior, what truly lies behind our opinions and daily operations within the world? Some might say a righteous indignation, or perhaps a commitment to justice or sovereignty. But these, and all the other possible explanations, are merely symptoms of some deeper motivation, some passion or hurt or despair that erects a wall of perspective and philosophy around our self-knowledge. So while this retreat preserves our selves, it does so at the cost of our relationship to ourselves.
Had we the self-knowledge we lack, what then would we know? The truth of human experience, I’d wager. An understanding that, when stripped of cultural detritus and the impositions of socialization, we all love, we all dream, we all experience loss. Kierkegaard said we’d have an awareness of our despair, implying we’re all just despairing anyway, unaware of it, allowing it to dictate our lives and relationships.
This is what keeps us from relational understanding of one another, let alone our selves, why calls of “Black Lives Matter” are met with the response “All Lives Matter,” why so many people have flocked to the toxic demagoguery of Donald Trump, and why we don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. We despair, are despairing, will despair. It’s an existential symptom, indicating a deeper spiritual illness. We despair because we live apart from everything and everyone, self included. We are not meant to despair, to live this way. Christ taught us this, and in the millennia since his condescension, we haven’t always done the best job of following his guidelines.
And so addressing these symptoms with calls for stricter gun laws or awareness of police brutality is just that, a treatment of the symptoms. While staving off symptoms works in the short term, it rarely works in the long term, especially since our true illness will never burn itself out from fever (and following that metaphor through to its logical conclusion has darkly apocalyptic connotations). If we are right with God, if we live as Christ taught, everything else will follow. Free of the impositions of an unrealized, despairing self, we can thrive, abiding in the love and will of God with one another, as has always been the plan. Getting to that point, though, is the trick. It requires a shift away from how we’ve been socialized to operate and think and feel. And that’s a trans-generational project.
What can we do in the mean time? Pursue God. Live right. Let your life be an expression of God’s love and will, and pour that love into everyone you meet and everything you do, because that love is more powerful than the hate spewed by any politician or political movement, more powerful than gun lobbies and terrorists, more powerful than ignorance or arrogance — after all, it’s the same love that built the universe.
