These are thoughts inspired by a wonderful sermon I heard by Luke Powery of Duke Divinity School. I appreciated everything about his sermon, but I was left thinking that there were still some unaswered questions. Listen to the sermon first, if you like: Calvin College Symposium on Worship--Luke Powery Sermon, Saturday.
Succinctly put, my internal response to Powery's sermon was, "There's a deeper aspect to this that I'm not quite hearing." Powery masterfully demonstates how anxiety is an enemy to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The more anxiety, the less room for faith, hope, and love. The less room for God, and the less room for love of neighbor. He also talks about the "contagious" aspect of anxiety, how anxiety can spread from person to person if you aren't careful. In addition, he menions the addictive side of anxiety--how anxiety can become so all-consuming and central to one's life that it actually becomes idolatrous--that it displaces God at the center, and people actually go out of their way to maintain their high level of anxiety. Why? Because they've become so accustomed to it, they don't know how to live without it.
To me, that's not terribly shocking. Most of us, when doing significant psychological and spiritual work that entails a major change of life, both interiorly and exteriorly experience the jarring cognative dissonance of adjusting to a "new normal". Sometimes this "new normal" is so foreign it feels wrong for a while, or in some cases, people feel a loss of identity--they are so used to thinking of x dysfunctional or broken aspect of themselves as being a part of who they really are, they don't know what to do when that aspect disappears, changes, or becomes healed. There is a period of time in which you have to fumble around until you adjust to the "new you" who is actually just a "more healed you". In any case, I think I've seen lots of people "worship at the altar of anxiety" as Powery says, sometimes in more or less superficial ways. He says this can ruin your relationship with God because it really is idolatry and you can't serve two masters. I have seen it take over personalities and compromise one's sense of identity because x person cannot imagine not living without being the one in control of the cosmos (and I've seen that in myself). His is the more serious point, though--he's describing one who has really lost the battle of idolatry and is in some serious need of rescuing.
Powery goes on to contrast the picture of the anxious soul with the picture of the Providing God. God is the one who has given himself to us in eucharistic gift and eucharistic sacrifice--he has given us himself, he has guarded us against the tyranny of the devil. So why don't we believe him? Why do we have such little faith in the presence of such a great God? Why do we end up having "theological amnesia", as Powery puts it? That, by the way, is a great way of describing what happens to someone who is truly consumed by anxiety--the anxiety is just so overwhelming it swallows up the knowledge of God and annhilates it in the anxious soul. We just don't and can't remember anymore who God said he is and what he is like when we're drowning in anxiety.
But why the drowning aspect? It is one thing to be embroiled in conflict with anxiety, and quite another thing to be overwhelmed to the point of drowing in it. (This isn't an altogether inaccurate description of what some composes some forms of depression.) Yet another, perhaps, to give up and just fall down and worship the false god.
I am sure there are any number of explanations and some of them are probably just fairly cut-and-dry theological accounts of both idolatry and pride. When we are at the center of our own cosmos and self-reliance is our default mode, frankly, anxiety is just realism. Fearfulness and anxiety are normal responses to a chaotic and unfriendly world . . . if human beings are the ones with the most chance of having control over the world. It takes a lot of work to root out this idea and replace it with a lived doctrine of creation, where God is the God of order and the origin of all things--such that he is in control by virtue of being the Creator, and by virtue of the world being ontologically dependent on him for existence. (I will explain that more in another post sometime.)
But there's also a side to this that is both about formation and development, and is also relational, and for that I speak out of my own experience of reflecting on God's provision for several years. I've known for a very long time that I've had issues with God's provision. When I was younger--say in my early college years--I used to have this invisible roller-coaster ride with God that it took me a long time to see properly, and then begin to understand. It would go something like this: I would find myself drifting away from God (in the emotional sense) and becoming angry with him. I would avoid prayer and Scripture reading until it made me miserable. At some point, perhaps a few weeks later, I would inevitably find myself at Psalm 104, weeping, with little understanding as to why. And the cycle would repeat itself, and did repeat itself about twice a year for two years or so as I slowly began to realize that I didn't really believe in God's provision.
In my heart, what I really believed is that I was left on my own to cope with all the craziness of life. While most of the time I had enough optimism and naivety and natural resilence to find this exciting and adventuresome . . . deep down inside, my soul was suffering because God never made it to cruise about the cosmos on it's own. We are made for God, and we are made to live with God, from the deepest and most inward and invisible parts of our hearts to the most external and visible parts of our lives. Every moment is suppose to be caught up in both dependence on and partnership with God, and while I didn't understand either very well, I was especially clueless about the former.
At some point after college, I went to a parish retreat that was a real step forward in healing in this area. Unbeknownst to me, there was a real blockage in my ability to understand God's love for me and his provision because "deep down inside" I thought he was unwilling to help me and resented my dependence on him. I had picked that up from some unfortunate family dynamics, which brings me to my point about development and formation. From an early age, we all learn what "love" is from our families of origins--and sometimes those families of origins have either broken or wicked definitions of love, which we absorb in childhood without the ability to reflect on what we absorb. We carry that into adulthood and oftentimes we project these definitions onto God--and sometimes even, we hate God because we imagine he is like the earthly people who failed to love us in the ways that we needed to be loved, or failed to provide for us in the ways that we needed to be provided for. Oftentimes, we don't even know this is going on, and we certainly don't understand the maelstorm of anxiety and anger that rises from needs being unmet and for generally being maladjusted to the world around us.
The answer to this I think is both theological and experiential--like most healing. Central to this is genuine reconciliation with the True God, which involves renouncing all the idols and all the lies that consume our imagination about our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who love us very much. That task really is theological, because it is only the study of theology that can correct our ideas about him. But this is also relational--for obvious reasons. If you've been "friends" with someone who you thought was a jerk for years, and the friendship was equal parts tolerance and affection, only to find out after ages and ages that the person wasn't the jerk you thought he was and was in reality a great deal better and nice than you had imagined . . . well, that would change the nature of your relationship with that person. It would open up things because you'd be able to trust that person more.
One could sum up my supplementum to Powery in this way. There is an element to combating anxiety that is the cognitive side of faith: we are all in need of theological therapy at one point or another, and "believing the right thing" can make a difference. But we also need a deeper change of heart, a deeper reconciliation with God, and a deeper experience of God's provision: it is these things that result in true healing for those who are drowning in anxiety, and this is a costly transformation that is the work of years in relationship with the Lord. And we don't talk enough about the spiritual work that takes years to accomplish.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Iron Man and the Quandary of Self-Love
"You're tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut."
Tony Stark (Iron Man) to Bruce Banner (Hulk)
Rewatching The Avengers the other day, this snippet of a conversation caught my eye. When I first encountered Tony Stark and the Iron Man movies, I wasn't a terribly huge fan of Stark's "text-book narcissism" as Black Widow put it in her report to Nick Fury. But he's starting to grow on me. One of the reasons he's starting to grow on me is because his very narcissism presents a challenge and a question to the audience: what exactly is the difference between narcissism and proper self-love? And given a good definition, how do we actually go about recognizing that difference in the field, per se?
One of the challenges of Tony Stark's case is that he is an exceptionally skilled individual who believes that he is an exceptionally skilled individual. That's not the problem, and it certainly isn't the part that makes him vulnerable to the charge of narcissism. In recognizing his own genius and achievement, he's just being honest. Being honest--at least in good moral psychology, Christian and pagan--is one of the things that leads you to self-knowledge. In acknowledging that, Stark is just being a realist.
The real reason people say Stark is a narcissist is because he is a) thoroughly devoted to self-pleasure and feeding his own interests without proper courtesy and attention to others and b) because "the rules don't apply to him." But that isn't the thing I'm most interested in. The thing I am interested in is the way in which Stark's advice to Banner was actually hitting on something good. The following conversation gets at the heart of things a bit more. When Tony Stark suggests that Banner will be "suiting up" with the rest of the Avengers, Banner replies:
"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."
"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart. This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a terrible privilege."
Banner responds: "But you can control it."
"Because I learned how."
"It's different."
Stark says, "Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you."
Banner replies: "So you're saying that the Hulk, the other guy, saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?"
Stark: "I guess we'll find out."
With a wry smile from the resident Hulk, "You may not enjoy that."
Tony Stark: "You just might."
"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."
"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart. This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a terrible privilege."
Banner responds: "But you can control it."
"Because I learned how."
"It's different."
Stark says, "Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you."
Banner replies: "So you're saying that the Hulk, the other guy, saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?"
Stark: "I guess we'll find out."
With a wry smile from the resident Hulk, "You may not enjoy that."
Tony Stark: "You just might."
It may be true that Stark's enjoyment of the Hulk's destructive tendencies isn't terribly wise or constructive. But the movie goes on to prove his perspective to be the right one. Whatever burden the Hulk side of Banner might be, he's also a terribly effective asset equal to the task of taking on Loki single-handedly and dealing some serious damage to the Leviathans.
What struck me, however, was more the enjoyment side of Stark's remarks. Stark's not just egging Banner on to higher heights of self-esteem--he wants Banner to let go and enjoy himself. He wants him to enjoy the destructive power of the Hulk, and see the power and hope for a more constructive use of the Hulk, even if it seems unlikely that the Hulk be fully trained to saddle.
Aside from the exaggerations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's some very good advice there. We spend a lot of time not enjoying ourselves. We spend a lot of time berating, criticizing, and finding fault with ourselves. We spend a lot of time in self-hatred and we don't spend a lot of time in appreciation and delight and even in glorying in ourselves. But proper self-love is difficult to think about well. How do I love and really celebrate and enjoy and even glory in the part of me that is good and wonderful and fearfully made by God without being a narcissist? How do I love myself because God has loved me and wonderfully made me and destined me for glory rather than loving myself simply out of a false sense of ownership? How do I balance the call for self-denial and proper abandonment of one's self and the call to the celebrate one's own goodness?
We are all faced with the quandary of reconciling loves--love for self, love for God, love for other created things, and we only succeed in reconciling loves when we know, understand and have been converted to the true purposes for which we love. When I love myself and God for my own sake, I may not do wrong, but I haven't done much good either. Self love, when it is the beginning of loves, is not a bad beginning. It, however, is a terrible end for love--love of self and God for one's own sake must mature into something else or it will turn into narcissism. (Narcissism is real life is much less attractive than narcissism enacted by Robert Downey, Jr.)
When the world becomes contracted such that I--myself--am the only reason and purpose for which I love, my world becomes a false and ugly alternate reality. Self-love is meant to be a natural tutor and example which shows us how it is we might love others. The instinct for self-love does not have to be taught, though the maturation of it does, and self-love matures as the love of self is submitted to the love of God and the love of others. It requires having our ideas about love submitted, transformed, and joined to the will, wisdom, and love of God. And it requires a lot of obedience and renunciation and suffering--in many ways, we seem to lose much of ourselves before we find ourselves again, secure in God.
But during and after all of this transformation, when our loves change and are matured into ripeness--when we begin to see ourselves in God's light, purpose, and love, a wonderful thing happens. We are freed, as Teresa of Avila told us so many years ago, to love ourselves for God's sake. Having learned already to love God for his own sake, having seen God at the center of the cosmos and not ourselves, we begin to see ourselves again. We perhaps catch a glimpse of ourselves out of the corner of our eyes and find that we are wonderfully and beautifully made. And we begin to find out why God was so interested in the first place--we see what he sees, we find beautiful what he finds beautiful, and we find those things in ourselves.
As Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac taught me, the first and most precious gift that God gives to us is ourselves. We are meant to accept our lives as occassions for joy and goodness and to understand that there is more to the Creation than what is broken and damaged and harmful. For some of us skeptics, joy and delight and acceptance of what is good in ourselves is most difficult because we think the most honest or the most rigorous or the most intellectual thing to do is to identify what is wrong rather than what is right. But no matter what darkness exists in the human soul, it cannot overcome the brightness of creation, for the beauty of Creation is upheld by the hand of God, redeemed in the Resurrection of the Son, and preserved and guarded until the end by the work of the Spirit.
But we are called to a holy joy in ourselves. We are called to take the same joy in ourselves that God does. It isn't the only joy we have, and it isn't the most important joy we have. But it is the very first gift God gives us and we are meant to come full circle in loving ourselves for his sake.
But we are called to a holy joy in ourselves. We are called to take the same joy in ourselves that God does. It isn't the only joy we have, and it isn't the most important joy we have. But it is the very first gift God gives us and we are meant to come full circle in loving ourselves for his sake.
Monday, February 4, 2013
Dreamform Two: Gold Leaf Scrolls and Red Writing
(Note: These dreams are in no particular chronological order. I had this dream sometime in January, 2013.)
In my dream, I found myself ushered through rooms lit by torches clustered at the intersections of rounded arches. The torchlight was warm and bright, and had the effect of coloring the walls reddish-gold. The upper sections of the walls may have been plaster or stone, though the lower sections were definitely of a more textured and less reflective material, stone or wood. The almost oval archways connecting various rooms were neither very high nor very wide, though I did not feel that the spaces were crabbed together in anyway. Some of the archways slunk away into darkness, but I found myself in long, rectangular rooms filled with tables, light, and with robed men hard at work. I had the impression of being underground, being very secure, and being in a place not my own. The setting was familiar to me, yet I have never been in any place like it. It was simple and beautiful, and reminds me most of Neogothic Anglican-style cathedrals and churches (say built in the late 19th, early 20th century).
I did not stop to talk with anyone, and although I felt led to a very particular place in the bowels of this place, I did not see who was leading me. After ducking through a few different rooms, and winding around tables and people, I found myself in another workroom, with a large, well-lit table in the center of the room.
At some point, someone handed me a set of very large, honest-to-goodness scrolls. The only time I have seen actual scrolls in waking life (in person, anyway) was ceremonial Torah scrolls in a Conservative Jewish synagogue on one of the High Holy Days. Those were lavishly decorated.
These were too. First of all, they were enormous--probably they were two-and-a-half feet tall, and there were two sets of them. The rollers were made of gold, or a material that looked like gold, and were stylized, though not elaborately so. I unfurled--or someone else did--both sets of scrolls and laid them down the whole length of the table--maybe 10 feet or so? I don't know: waking or sleeping I am a terrible measurer of distance or length or quanitity of any kind, really. In any case, I am fairly certain I could have easily laid down on the table and not come to the end of it--and I'm about 5 and a half feet tall. When both scrolls were unrolled the full length of the table, I am not sure that they were opened all the way. Now that I think of it, I think they were not, but what I could see was this.
The paper itself was covered over entirely in gold. Rich, sparkling, deep gold. And written on the gold, in the reddest, most perfect letters you can imagine, in a language entirely unfamiliar to me, in an alphabet entirely unfamiliar to me. The letters were whole and perfect--perhaps a little raised from the text, either done by a typeset or the best calligrapher in the world. The language looked a little like the Cree language, which I have only seen once while visiting The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I had absolutely no hope of ever reading it. Yet, I knew absolutely that the scrolls were mine. The person who was showing them to me was showing them to me precisely because they were mine, and indeed, the Someone showing them to me, was really showing them to me becuase the scrolls were me. And at some point after that, I woke up.
As a student theologian, I am well aware that human beings are made in the image of God. (Hey, that's what I wrote my graduate thesis on!) And as made in the imagine of God, human beings are the parodox of parodoxes: we are finite pictures of the Infinite One. As such, human being really are a living mystery. You think particle physics is hard to fathom? The human person more. You contemplate the workings of a cell and think it profound? The human person more. And not the human person reduced to biology or chemistry or math or physics. No, the human person who is biological, chemical, physical, and also much more than that--God-breathed, God-touched, God-crafted, and God-imaging. Calvin said that the universe was the "mirror of God's work" (and I'm totally going to steal that for a book title someday), but the human person more. No matter how deep how wide how unfathomable any part or even the whole of Creation is, in some mysterious sense, the human person--your neighbor, your enemy, your friend, your loved one--more, because while God has touched all of his creation and left traces of his presence there, he has left something more with human beings, His Very Image.
But that's all well and good and not even all that difficult to say. What is much more difficult is figuring out what that really means in the sometimes not so bright light of every-day life. C. S. Lewis brings this to life brilliantly in the "Weight of Glory" when he talks of the hidden and potential glory alive in every human being. He was inviting us to regard our neighbor as a holy and dreadfully important subject, worthy of considering, love, and something close to reverence . . . because the destiny which God has in mind for us is so great. This dream was more about the noetic side of the equation, whereas Lewis' sermon was more about the ontic. "Noetic" is philosopher-speak for "pertaining to knowledge or knowing." So when I say the dream was noetic or epistemological, I mean that God was trying to show me something about how I am to know myself in light of the mystery of the human being made in the image of God.
The thing he was communicating was this: "You [and potentially anyone and everyone human] are priceless and beautiful. Your soul is priceless and beautiful. You can't even see your soul--meaning the invisible aspect of human life--all the time, but it really is there and it really is beautiful. And you have no idea what's in there. You have no idea what you are or who you are because what you are and you who are is absolutely too wonderful, too deep, too fantastically complicated for you to know. You aren't going to know everything there is to know about yourself precisely because you are made in My image. It is too much for you. It is beyond you. You don't speak the language, and you certainly can't read it. But I know. And I will tell you. I will tell you what the writing says--what I have written--and I will tell you over time and I will tell you what you need to know. But don't worry about it too much, because the thing is in my hand and there's nothing you can do about it apart from what I am doing and what I am saying to you. So don't worry. I will be there and I will speak."
This was all very comforting to me. Partly, it was comforting to me because I am indebted to the Spanish Mystics for a lot of their teaching on the spiritual life, and Christian discipline and virtue, and they, especially Teresa of Avila, have much to say about self-knowledge as a virtue. One of my undergraduate professors said that only Christianity made self-knowledge a virtue. I haven't researched that much myself, but it would be interesting to see the ways in which that is true. In any case, Christianity certainly takes self-knowledge very seriously--you see it especially in Augustine and Calvin. For you Reformed peeps out there, perhaps you remember how The Institutes tie together knowledge of God and knowledge of self? For such diverse Christians as John Calvin and Teresa of Avila, these two things are intertwined and inseperable. And for both, self-knowledge is both a duty and a gift. Self-knowledge is revelation from God just as knowledge of God is revelation from God. The word "revelation" speaks for itself here: God reveals himself and is revealed to human beings--in Christianity, you can't come to the knowledge of God by yourself, it has to be a gift from God. If you think you've come to the knowledge of God by yourself, what you've actually come to (as Calvin nicely puts it) is the knowledge of an idol--something you've made up in your own mind that may resemble God in some ways, but won't in other ways. And it won't be him, and you won't have drawn closer to him with that knowledge, so the project is pretty much moot at that point.
But things that are both gifts and duties are tricky to keep in proper balance and proper dependence on God. If you are prone to having an overactive sense of responsibility as I am, it is easy to confuse the boundaries between responding to God's initiative and gifting in gratitude and obedience and taking on burdens to do things it is impossible for human beings to do in their own power. For me, I tend to get so wrapped up in my quest for knowledge that I forget that knowledge is revelation, knowledge of God and self especially so. I am much more inclined to view self-knowledge as a project for me to complete, and a project that I am responsible to complete. And in my worse moments, to judge other people for not knowing themselves--for doing so poorly on this project, or for failing in their duties to self-knowledge.
In this particular case, I woke from this dream with a sense of relief. Lately, I had had the feeling (though I wasn't quite aware of it) that I was epically failing in knowing myself. There were parts of myself I just didn't understand and frankly that I had not the time, energy, skill or wisdom to address. They weren't necessarily problematic parts of myself--just parts of myself that I either hadn't seen in a why or were new to me. I didn't know what they meant or what I was going to do about it, and while I had decided to accept those parts of myself, I didn't understand them and that made me a bit nervous. I kept wondering, am I doing the right thing here by just accepting myself and moving forward?
The answer I recieved was "yes" and helps free a facet of my personality that I do know isn't the most helpful: getting stuck locking things down with enough certainty to get Descartes to at least grudgingly nod his head at me. Oftentimes, that's a waste of time or an impossible enterprise, but it often doesn't look that way to me: it seems more like a moral responsibility to pursue that kind of certainty--and what more important place to start than the knowledge of who I am as a person?
Now, and particularly with the help of a dream, I can see what a rabbit-hole that is. If all our theology is right and humans are these gloriously complex, weighty, and deep creatures . . . my intellectual and moral enterprise didn't stand a chance. I actually can't achieve what I'm hoping to achieve. In my humanity, I'm actually not capable of fully understanding my humanity. But God already understands it, and he's going to help me see and know and understand in the ways that are proper to do so. Through this dream, I was freed from my over-active sense of responsibility, which was telling me I had to know myself perfectly, on my own, with little or no help from God. That's generally a bad combination of assumptions, and this was no exception.
Well, that's it. Except for two more things. I was thinking that I know why the scrolls were gold and the writing was read. Gold is a useful symbol because it is precious metal that is beautiful and does not rust. That's why it symbolizes things that are supposed to last forever: like human beings, like love, like our most important promises. Red is the color of blood and can symbolize life, which is the function it served here.
In my dream, I found myself ushered through rooms lit by torches clustered at the intersections of rounded arches. The torchlight was warm and bright, and had the effect of coloring the walls reddish-gold. The upper sections of the walls may have been plaster or stone, though the lower sections were definitely of a more textured and less reflective material, stone or wood. The almost oval archways connecting various rooms were neither very high nor very wide, though I did not feel that the spaces were crabbed together in anyway. Some of the archways slunk away into darkness, but I found myself in long, rectangular rooms filled with tables, light, and with robed men hard at work. I had the impression of being underground, being very secure, and being in a place not my own. The setting was familiar to me, yet I have never been in any place like it. It was simple and beautiful, and reminds me most of Neogothic Anglican-style cathedrals and churches (say built in the late 19th, early 20th century).
I did not stop to talk with anyone, and although I felt led to a very particular place in the bowels of this place, I did not see who was leading me. After ducking through a few different rooms, and winding around tables and people, I found myself in another workroom, with a large, well-lit table in the center of the room.
At some point, someone handed me a set of very large, honest-to-goodness scrolls. The only time I have seen actual scrolls in waking life (in person, anyway) was ceremonial Torah scrolls in a Conservative Jewish synagogue on one of the High Holy Days. Those were lavishly decorated.
These were too. First of all, they were enormous--probably they were two-and-a-half feet tall, and there were two sets of them. The rollers were made of gold, or a material that looked like gold, and were stylized, though not elaborately so. I unfurled--or someone else did--both sets of scrolls and laid them down the whole length of the table--maybe 10 feet or so? I don't know: waking or sleeping I am a terrible measurer of distance or length or quanitity of any kind, really. In any case, I am fairly certain I could have easily laid down on the table and not come to the end of it--and I'm about 5 and a half feet tall. When both scrolls were unrolled the full length of the table, I am not sure that they were opened all the way. Now that I think of it, I think they were not, but what I could see was this.
The paper itself was covered over entirely in gold. Rich, sparkling, deep gold. And written on the gold, in the reddest, most perfect letters you can imagine, in a language entirely unfamiliar to me, in an alphabet entirely unfamiliar to me. The letters were whole and perfect--perhaps a little raised from the text, either done by a typeset or the best calligrapher in the world. The language looked a little like the Cree language, which I have only seen once while visiting The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I had absolutely no hope of ever reading it. Yet, I knew absolutely that the scrolls were mine. The person who was showing them to me was showing them to me precisely because they were mine, and indeed, the Someone showing them to me, was really showing them to me becuase the scrolls were me. And at some point after that, I woke up.
As a student theologian, I am well aware that human beings are made in the image of God. (Hey, that's what I wrote my graduate thesis on!) And as made in the imagine of God, human beings are the parodox of parodoxes: we are finite pictures of the Infinite One. As such, human being really are a living mystery. You think particle physics is hard to fathom? The human person more. You contemplate the workings of a cell and think it profound? The human person more. And not the human person reduced to biology or chemistry or math or physics. No, the human person who is biological, chemical, physical, and also much more than that--God-breathed, God-touched, God-crafted, and God-imaging. Calvin said that the universe was the "mirror of God's work" (and I'm totally going to steal that for a book title someday), but the human person more. No matter how deep how wide how unfathomable any part or even the whole of Creation is, in some mysterious sense, the human person--your neighbor, your enemy, your friend, your loved one--more, because while God has touched all of his creation and left traces of his presence there, he has left something more with human beings, His Very Image.
But that's all well and good and not even all that difficult to say. What is much more difficult is figuring out what that really means in the sometimes not so bright light of every-day life. C. S. Lewis brings this to life brilliantly in the "Weight of Glory" when he talks of the hidden and potential glory alive in every human being. He was inviting us to regard our neighbor as a holy and dreadfully important subject, worthy of considering, love, and something close to reverence . . . because the destiny which God has in mind for us is so great. This dream was more about the noetic side of the equation, whereas Lewis' sermon was more about the ontic. "Noetic" is philosopher-speak for "pertaining to knowledge or knowing." So when I say the dream was noetic or epistemological, I mean that God was trying to show me something about how I am to know myself in light of the mystery of the human being made in the image of God.
The thing he was communicating was this: "You [and potentially anyone and everyone human] are priceless and beautiful. Your soul is priceless and beautiful. You can't even see your soul--meaning the invisible aspect of human life--all the time, but it really is there and it really is beautiful. And you have no idea what's in there. You have no idea what you are or who you are because what you are and you who are is absolutely too wonderful, too deep, too fantastically complicated for you to know. You aren't going to know everything there is to know about yourself precisely because you are made in My image. It is too much for you. It is beyond you. You don't speak the language, and you certainly can't read it. But I know. And I will tell you. I will tell you what the writing says--what I have written--and I will tell you over time and I will tell you what you need to know. But don't worry about it too much, because the thing is in my hand and there's nothing you can do about it apart from what I am doing and what I am saying to you. So don't worry. I will be there and I will speak."
This was all very comforting to me. Partly, it was comforting to me because I am indebted to the Spanish Mystics for a lot of their teaching on the spiritual life, and Christian discipline and virtue, and they, especially Teresa of Avila, have much to say about self-knowledge as a virtue. One of my undergraduate professors said that only Christianity made self-knowledge a virtue. I haven't researched that much myself, but it would be interesting to see the ways in which that is true. In any case, Christianity certainly takes self-knowledge very seriously--you see it especially in Augustine and Calvin. For you Reformed peeps out there, perhaps you remember how The Institutes tie together knowledge of God and knowledge of self? For such diverse Christians as John Calvin and Teresa of Avila, these two things are intertwined and inseperable. And for both, self-knowledge is both a duty and a gift. Self-knowledge is revelation from God just as knowledge of God is revelation from God. The word "revelation" speaks for itself here: God reveals himself and is revealed to human beings--in Christianity, you can't come to the knowledge of God by yourself, it has to be a gift from God. If you think you've come to the knowledge of God by yourself, what you've actually come to (as Calvin nicely puts it) is the knowledge of an idol--something you've made up in your own mind that may resemble God in some ways, but won't in other ways. And it won't be him, and you won't have drawn closer to him with that knowledge, so the project is pretty much moot at that point.
But things that are both gifts and duties are tricky to keep in proper balance and proper dependence on God. If you are prone to having an overactive sense of responsibility as I am, it is easy to confuse the boundaries between responding to God's initiative and gifting in gratitude and obedience and taking on burdens to do things it is impossible for human beings to do in their own power. For me, I tend to get so wrapped up in my quest for knowledge that I forget that knowledge is revelation, knowledge of God and self especially so. I am much more inclined to view self-knowledge as a project for me to complete, and a project that I am responsible to complete. And in my worse moments, to judge other people for not knowing themselves--for doing so poorly on this project, or for failing in their duties to self-knowledge.
In this particular case, I woke from this dream with a sense of relief. Lately, I had had the feeling (though I wasn't quite aware of it) that I was epically failing in knowing myself. There were parts of myself I just didn't understand and frankly that I had not the time, energy, skill or wisdom to address. They weren't necessarily problematic parts of myself--just parts of myself that I either hadn't seen in a why or were new to me. I didn't know what they meant or what I was going to do about it, and while I had decided to accept those parts of myself, I didn't understand them and that made me a bit nervous. I kept wondering, am I doing the right thing here by just accepting myself and moving forward?
The answer I recieved was "yes" and helps free a facet of my personality that I do know isn't the most helpful: getting stuck locking things down with enough certainty to get Descartes to at least grudgingly nod his head at me. Oftentimes, that's a waste of time or an impossible enterprise, but it often doesn't look that way to me: it seems more like a moral responsibility to pursue that kind of certainty--and what more important place to start than the knowledge of who I am as a person?
Now, and particularly with the help of a dream, I can see what a rabbit-hole that is. If all our theology is right and humans are these gloriously complex, weighty, and deep creatures . . . my intellectual and moral enterprise didn't stand a chance. I actually can't achieve what I'm hoping to achieve. In my humanity, I'm actually not capable of fully understanding my humanity. But God already understands it, and he's going to help me see and know and understand in the ways that are proper to do so. Through this dream, I was freed from my over-active sense of responsibility, which was telling me I had to know myself perfectly, on my own, with little or no help from God. That's generally a bad combination of assumptions, and this was no exception.
Well, that's it. Except for two more things. I was thinking that I know why the scrolls were gold and the writing was read. Gold is a useful symbol because it is precious metal that is beautiful and does not rust. That's why it symbolizes things that are supposed to last forever: like human beings, like love, like our most important promises. Red is the color of blood and can symbolize life, which is the function it served here.
Enneagram Side Quest: Type Conflagration, Types 5 and 9
(Disclaimer: I make no pretensions to objectivity in the following post. I speak only from my personal experience and although I have a few working hypotheses about why certain patterns have recurred, they are only hypothesis, not conclusion. Part of my motivation for writing this post is that I want to write a future post about the difference between INFJ 9s and INTP 9s and how most descriptions of the Enneagram describe how INFJ 9s function and are less applicable to INTP 9s (and conceivably, other types of 9s). I should also say that I have had friends who are INFJ 9s and INTP 9s in about equal proportion and at similar levels of intimacy: we were friends, but not necessarily confidants. As for 5s . . . alas, I must say that the 5 I know best is myself, and my information is on the one hand, based on a much smaller sample size, and on the other hand, far more intimate and detailed!)
Not Type Misidentification, Type Conflagration! Fire, explosions, what is otherwise known as the chemical process of combustion! The following post is my own personal musing on why 5s and 9s might not get along so well, especially when both types are in average or unhealthy levels. This has to do with the fact that while both types are superficially similar, they are moved by alien and often times opposed forces. I should say that this musing comes out of my own experience as a 5 having oftentimes explosive relationships with 9s (in which my 5-self did all the combustion internally and it didn't quite register for a 9 even after being confronted. I used to work so hard to make a 9 mad! And then feel gratified that I managed to get a response at all. More recently, I have made my peace with 9s, but I did spend a great deal of time puzzling through the relationship anti-chemistry before coming to peace with the most peace-loving of the Enneagram numbers.
The main issues are of engagement, intellectual curiosity, contentment, and intensity. 9s, I think, are particularly attractive to me because of their intellectual curiosity. They are curious about everything, oftentimes to no practical end--simply because they happen to find most things at least somewhat interesting. Other types can be intellectually engaged, but they aren't necessarily curious about everything, and while 1s are often very intellectual, they are also intellectual for practical reasons. They want to do something about it, and oftentimes their search for knowledge is grounded in a quest for justice or some other ideal. 4w5 can also be intellectual, but oftentimes their curiosity is limited to the one field in which they are engaged. 7s and 6s can also be intellectually engaged, but I'm not sure that 6s are really open-minded and curious (because they are so caught up in their quest for inner guidance) unless they are terrifically healthy, and the intellectual power of 7s is often invested in a million different places. 9s at least give the initial impression of being as intellectually engaged as 5s, and perhaps for their sheer open-mindedness they are very likely to be open to having an intellectual conversation about anything. This is obviously a hook for a 5, who is most likely used to having thoughts or being directed toward conversations that are almost exclusively intellectually oriented.
9s are also fairly undemanding emotionally, and project acceptance and peaceful relaxation, and affection most of the time which to the 5 is something like finding a batch of chocolate chip cookies waiting on your kitchen table that you didn't expect. 5s spend most of their life being so intensely involved in whatever they are thinking about that relaxation is just foreign. At least one Enneagram book I've read claims that the 5 personality forms out of contact with overbearing and demanding emotional environments, so the facts that 9s are chill and oftentimes want closeness without having impossible emotional demands is also a breath of fresh air to 9s. 5s are like, "I didn't even know people came in this variety. You mean I don't have to work hard all the time and have people still scold me for not being what they want me to be? Imagine that!" I doubt that 5s are all that good at self-acceptance because we have such a hard time just getting to know that our feelings and our bodies exist and are important, let alone getting around to accepting them as good and necessary parts of being human. In those ways, 9s have a lot of qualities that 5s lack and need to see in order for them to become more human and more present.
But then the other shoe drops and the full picture of the 9 starts to fill out and it turns out that the less easily seen side of the 9 is not one easily fathomed by the 5 (who of course works very hard to fathom everything in her path). Part of the accepting, contented nature of the 9 has to do with the fact that they don't want much of anything from other people much of the time (including things they should want) and this is because they aren't engaged enough to have normal give-and-take relationship sorts of expectations unless they are out of the average levels of development and into the healthy levels of development. And disengagement is just not something a 5 can wrap their minds around. 5s are engaged in everything, intensely, all the time! There is never enough knowledge of the world, and that intellectual curiosity and focus is just as often directed toward people as toward things. The disengagement of the 9 is utterly foreign and sometimes utterly anathema to the average 5, and is often the source of upset.
Another point of deeper division is intellectual engagement. 9s can be idealists without solid interest in theory or "scientific method". If the 9 has a strong 1wing or is of the NFJ variety, the 9 can be more interested in ideals or fancy than discovering through hard and sometimes harsh thinking whether something is true, which is oftentimes something the 5 is devoted to. A healthy 5 is most interested in accuracy, a non-attached, discipline vision of the world. Average or unhealthy 5s pursue this and pursue certainty in accuracy--but with unhealthy attachments to both, getting wrapped up in theories more than in reality. But a 5 is going to be interested in either proving her claims or at least advancing her claims or knowledge. She wants to make progress and be able to check something off the list of knowing. Knowing isn't just interesting or abstract--it is a disciplined way of life to which one must be thoroughly converted! (Ahem, sorry, got carried away there.) 9s don't found their identity on the pursuit of knowledge and therefore aren't invested in it in the sometimes mad way 5s are. This can be a source of frustration to both, for obvious reasons.
The final point concerns affection. 9s, I think, are naturally inclined to have some degree of affection toward everyone. They are warm-hearted and open-hearted. 5s are not. If 5s have affection, they have deep affection toward people they have come to love slowly and deeply over time. It requires a concerted effort for them to be open-hearted and they are either private (or secretive) or they are deeply invested in a relationship. I defy you to find a 5 superficially invested in someone he or she claims to have affection or friendship for. 5s do not bother with superficial investments or attachments. On the other side of things, 9s have a terrible time coming to know themselves and know the ways in which they are distinct from other people. Therefore, they have a difficult time being genuinely and deeply engaged in another person or in multiple persons. But they don't have a problem being superficially engaged (most of the time) and oftentimes with people with whom they would claim to have a great deal of affection or even love for. That's enough to drive a 5 absolutely mad . . . and alas, the poor 9 still doesn't know what's going on, partially because they aren't necessarily present and clued in enough to even notice. And remember, 5s at their best and at their worst are extraordinarily attentive and perceptive--so they are cataloging the 9s out-of-touchness and either making up a paranoid tale about it or throwing in the towel because they are deeply opposed to making their needs known--actually asking for something or trying to get someone's attention who's unlikely to be good at giving it seems like madness.
So what's a 9 and a 5 to do? It might be dramatic to say that unhealthy 9s and unhealthy 5s are poison for each other, but perhaps not. Average 9s and 5s inclined toward wisdom might have the grace and sense to be aware of opposite inclinations and take care with one another. I imagine with enough shared interests and having just the right personality chemistry cocktail might enough to overcome certain fricative issues, but both types I think are liable to feel misunderstood, and 5s are rejection prone and thus more likely to believe 9s to be ultimately indifferent to them. Healthy 9s and 5s will have less issues since the 9s is able to be more present and engaged and less engaged in wishful thinking. 5s will be less paranoid and rejection-prone and probably more capable of being warm and accepting toward a 9.
Not Type Misidentification, Type Conflagration! Fire, explosions, what is otherwise known as the chemical process of combustion! The following post is my own personal musing on why 5s and 9s might not get along so well, especially when both types are in average or unhealthy levels. This has to do with the fact that while both types are superficially similar, they are moved by alien and often times opposed forces. I should say that this musing comes out of my own experience as a 5 having oftentimes explosive relationships with 9s (in which my 5-self did all the combustion internally and it didn't quite register for a 9 even after being confronted. I used to work so hard to make a 9 mad! And then feel gratified that I managed to get a response at all. More recently, I have made my peace with 9s, but I did spend a great deal of time puzzling through the relationship anti-chemistry before coming to peace with the most peace-loving of the Enneagram numbers.
The main issues are of engagement, intellectual curiosity, contentment, and intensity. 9s, I think, are particularly attractive to me because of their intellectual curiosity. They are curious about everything, oftentimes to no practical end--simply because they happen to find most things at least somewhat interesting. Other types can be intellectually engaged, but they aren't necessarily curious about everything, and while 1s are often very intellectual, they are also intellectual for practical reasons. They want to do something about it, and oftentimes their search for knowledge is grounded in a quest for justice or some other ideal. 4w5 can also be intellectual, but oftentimes their curiosity is limited to the one field in which they are engaged. 7s and 6s can also be intellectually engaged, but I'm not sure that 6s are really open-minded and curious (because they are so caught up in their quest for inner guidance) unless they are terrifically healthy, and the intellectual power of 7s is often invested in a million different places. 9s at least give the initial impression of being as intellectually engaged as 5s, and perhaps for their sheer open-mindedness they are very likely to be open to having an intellectual conversation about anything. This is obviously a hook for a 5, who is most likely used to having thoughts or being directed toward conversations that are almost exclusively intellectually oriented.
9s are also fairly undemanding emotionally, and project acceptance and peaceful relaxation, and affection most of the time which to the 5 is something like finding a batch of chocolate chip cookies waiting on your kitchen table that you didn't expect. 5s spend most of their life being so intensely involved in whatever they are thinking about that relaxation is just foreign. At least one Enneagram book I've read claims that the 5 personality forms out of contact with overbearing and demanding emotional environments, so the facts that 9s are chill and oftentimes want closeness without having impossible emotional demands is also a breath of fresh air to 9s. 5s are like, "I didn't even know people came in this variety. You mean I don't have to work hard all the time and have people still scold me for not being what they want me to be? Imagine that!" I doubt that 5s are all that good at self-acceptance because we have such a hard time just getting to know that our feelings and our bodies exist and are important, let alone getting around to accepting them as good and necessary parts of being human. In those ways, 9s have a lot of qualities that 5s lack and need to see in order for them to become more human and more present.
But then the other shoe drops and the full picture of the 9 starts to fill out and it turns out that the less easily seen side of the 9 is not one easily fathomed by the 5 (who of course works very hard to fathom everything in her path). Part of the accepting, contented nature of the 9 has to do with the fact that they don't want much of anything from other people much of the time (including things they should want) and this is because they aren't engaged enough to have normal give-and-take relationship sorts of expectations unless they are out of the average levels of development and into the healthy levels of development. And disengagement is just not something a 5 can wrap their minds around. 5s are engaged in everything, intensely, all the time! There is never enough knowledge of the world, and that intellectual curiosity and focus is just as often directed toward people as toward things. The disengagement of the 9 is utterly foreign and sometimes utterly anathema to the average 5, and is often the source of upset.
Another point of deeper division is intellectual engagement. 9s can be idealists without solid interest in theory or "scientific method". If the 9 has a strong 1wing or is of the NFJ variety, the 9 can be more interested in ideals or fancy than discovering through hard and sometimes harsh thinking whether something is true, which is oftentimes something the 5 is devoted to. A healthy 5 is most interested in accuracy, a non-attached, discipline vision of the world. Average or unhealthy 5s pursue this and pursue certainty in accuracy--but with unhealthy attachments to both, getting wrapped up in theories more than in reality. But a 5 is going to be interested in either proving her claims or at least advancing her claims or knowledge. She wants to make progress and be able to check something off the list of knowing. Knowing isn't just interesting or abstract--it is a disciplined way of life to which one must be thoroughly converted! (Ahem, sorry, got carried away there.) 9s don't found their identity on the pursuit of knowledge and therefore aren't invested in it in the sometimes mad way 5s are. This can be a source of frustration to both, for obvious reasons.
The final point concerns affection. 9s, I think, are naturally inclined to have some degree of affection toward everyone. They are warm-hearted and open-hearted. 5s are not. If 5s have affection, they have deep affection toward people they have come to love slowly and deeply over time. It requires a concerted effort for them to be open-hearted and they are either private (or secretive) or they are deeply invested in a relationship. I defy you to find a 5 superficially invested in someone he or she claims to have affection or friendship for. 5s do not bother with superficial investments or attachments. On the other side of things, 9s have a terrible time coming to know themselves and know the ways in which they are distinct from other people. Therefore, they have a difficult time being genuinely and deeply engaged in another person or in multiple persons. But they don't have a problem being superficially engaged (most of the time) and oftentimes with people with whom they would claim to have a great deal of affection or even love for. That's enough to drive a 5 absolutely mad . . . and alas, the poor 9 still doesn't know what's going on, partially because they aren't necessarily present and clued in enough to even notice. And remember, 5s at their best and at their worst are extraordinarily attentive and perceptive--so they are cataloging the 9s out-of-touchness and either making up a paranoid tale about it or throwing in the towel because they are deeply opposed to making their needs known--actually asking for something or trying to get someone's attention who's unlikely to be good at giving it seems like madness.
So what's a 9 and a 5 to do? It might be dramatic to say that unhealthy 9s and unhealthy 5s are poison for each other, but perhaps not. Average 9s and 5s inclined toward wisdom might have the grace and sense to be aware of opposite inclinations and take care with one another. I imagine with enough shared interests and having just the right personality chemistry cocktail might enough to overcome certain fricative issues, but both types I think are liable to feel misunderstood, and 5s are rejection prone and thus more likely to believe 9s to be ultimately indifferent to them. Healthy 9s and 5s will have less issues since the 9s is able to be more present and engaged and less engaged in wishful thinking. 5s will be less paranoid and rejection-prone and probably more capable of being warm and accepting toward a 9.
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