We stand and pick at our problems, instead of walking away. We try to master them, personally and socially, by quarrelling with them, instead of looking for better things to be doing. We hunch next to our troubles and poke at them, and we bicker with each other over the right ways of poking. Or else we shun our problems, and hate them, and hate people we associate with them, and think that turning our backs on the things we revile is a detached, maybe even ‘spiritual’, sort of otherness that will fix everything, or at least keep us feeling safe. Even then, we’re still very much engaged with those problems.
The Bible, if we’re talking spiritual, never promised an orderly world, manageable by contracts, or principles, or agreements. And it also never counselled anything like serene disengagement.
So maybe there’s a third way?
If thinking we’re rational, if seeing reality through the lens of, say, technological advance, and imagining this as general social advance — if this has actually made us a bunch of arguing nihilists, in disagreement about what is meaningful, and grasping at every solution our egos can generate, our world of inner meaning has not been fed. We’re in trouble. Rationality by itself doesn’t work for our happiness. And neither does the opposite, the renunciation of what is logical and reasonable. Either way, we’re left screaming over solution doctrines, some of them hyper-rational, and some of them bizarrely counter-rational. These are things like Traditional Values, or political correctness, or paranormal UFO’s, or enlightened ancients or New Age fundamentalism. We yelled like this in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when we were chauvinistic about abstract virtue in science and rationality and at the same time fascinated by the irrational, the subconscious, and the violent. And we’re doing it now. That means that our community as humans has not been served by our urge to sort out our problems each as we think best. We think episodically, as I see it, and myopically. And it makes us bonkers.
What if there’s a way that isn’t the small mind of rationality or the non-mind of irrationality? What would that look like?
It would look transformational, I suppose. It would be neither fight nor flight. It would be, somehow, a sharing, of the One Spirit that was given us all to drink (1 Cor. 12:13). And it would manifest in us as a compassionate sort of knowing. That’s all.
This is a tall order, yes … but actually, it has been done. There are people who have managed it.
Think of the folks you may have met who have walked privately and sincerely into the depths of prayer. I don’t mean people who merely say their prayers. I mean people you perceive to have stepped outside the mental fortresses of their own construction, possibly walked away even from religion, in the sense of repetition and formulas, and become receptive and comfortable in the presence of mystery.
Think of the people you know who have sought direction in the mirror of creation, the way it is, and not tried to understand it by socially-fabricated ideas or ideals.
And think of people you’ve met who are engaged most fully in the problems of the world, and at the same time seem the least afraid of the suffering that brings them.
There are lots of them, people like this. They are the transformed. They are the privileged, who see things the rest of us don’t see, or only glimpse.
And how did they get like this? And stay that way?
As near as I can tell, they just go ahead and live in God, and through God, and with God. That invites something healing, and entirely new. They seem to understand some paschal mystery that gives transcendent meaning to all of our collective suffering, and no need to disengage from it or rage against it. They simply do things differently.
I have little doubt that it is IN the suffering that they learn about it, as a matter of fact. And that’s where they practice. Suffering, if you think about your personal history, has probably been the only thing ever strong enough to make you surrender control, whether you call that reasonableness or enlightened rebellion against reasonableness, and do some actual growing. That’s certainly how it’s been for me.
Life does not have to be managed, or repaired necessarily, or even understood, for us to be okay. There are people who seem to know this. The key is probably that they don’t try to do it for themselves.