Well-meaning meanness

When stress solutions don’t work

It’s an anxious time.

The reason it’s anxious is that we’re not sure where our foundations lie.

We’re pulled in every direction, and our lives are in such harried smithereens that we’re reduced to yelling.

We’re so shattered with it, and so confused, that we gobble stress-memes daily. Most of them, if you look closely, are little admonishments to change our worldview. They’re silver bullets, and we wish, wish, wish that one of them will soothe. They get faddish; every few months there’s a new turn of phrase, or a newly ‘discovered’ piece of vocabulary from Marcus Aurelius, or the Kabbalah, or something, that promises deliverance from our fear.

If you look even closer, these memes, which always talk about some freeing sort of transcendence, are really about shunning. This feels immediately reasonable to us, too. If we cannot hold a certain amount of anxiety, we’ll look for some place to flee it. To flee is to revile whatever the source of the anxiety is. Scapegoating like that is seductive.

Why? Because it gives us an identity, a little fort, in which we feel safer. We inveigh against business culture, or liberals, or MAGA people, or whatever. And having done that, we know that we, at least, are secure, and right. Enlightenment consists of being elsewhere. And while we can’t control the enemy, we can at least keep him in sight.

But we’re still terrified. In most of us that expresses as anger. This remains true even if we dress up our fleeing as righteousness, as goodness, or even as love. It’s a common meme that tells us we can ameliorate the stress of living among a bunch of bastards by embracing love. But they’re still bastards. What we mean is that we’re okay because we’re better than them, those bastards.

Building our identity on our fears is the normal way, in other words. We may become politically correct, or talk about old fashioned values, be invested in climate change, or build megachurches … and all the time be basically oppositional and angry.

Is there reasonable anger? Sure. There is a place for that … as long as it isn’t an addiction. But anger, which is to say, fear, is a damnable place to start looking for freedom. Stress-busting solutions built on anger are really stockades, of our own construction. They just can’t be transformative, or freeing.

What if we look instead for a Companion in this splintered and frightening world? What if we step out of being right, and simply walk in that companionship?

The Bible, unfortunately a source for a lot of memes, says ‘Do not be afraid’ more than 360 times. That’s not memeage. That’s not sloganeering. That’s not just another good idea. It’s organic reality, and it’s a better way to do things. It’s how we’re called to be. It’s not oppositional, and it’s not divisive. It’s welcoming. What a paradox! Welcome, not isolation, is how freedom works.

You know you’re getting it right when you start to be generous. It’s hard to be offended if you’re able to exist in that Companion space. It’s hard to be afraid, or really angry. Gospel people, observes Richard Rohr, are pretty indestructible. He might as well add, they don’t pay much attention to memes.