On Sublimation and other things

   I recently renamed this blog, "Sublimation, et alia" and the title deserves a short word of explanation.  "El alia" is the Latin for "and other things" as you might or might not have guessed.  "Sublimation" is a word that generally means one of three things to people: either it means nothing (of course), it means a special sort of reaction in chemistry (a phase change--solid to gas without going to liquid first), or it means something in psychology, related originally to Freudian thought.  (The usage in psychology being derived from the term in chemistry.)  When I say sublimation, what I mean is something similar to the Freudian term, which probably has its own history in study of aesthetics.  I mean this: sublimation is the act of taking some raw bit of human experience and making it beautiful or beneficial to others by means of reflection and some attempt at word craft or conceptual art.  If you do not believe in or have not been exposed to "conceptual" art--or the art of making thought beautiful, pleasing, and useful, I will ask you to consider reading Boethius' definition of eternity, or to make a study of some work of Thomas Aquinas or Plato.  There are people (commonly called philosophers, although there are certainly other kinds of people who do this work too) who do know how to make thinking beautiful.  I imagine that is why Aristotle thought thinking itself was the highest pleasure of the mind.

"Hollow Men", Part 2

There are reasons why such hollowness exists, of course.  One reason is ignorance, the second and more significant one is sloth.
   Being a "swiss cheese" person is more of a remnant of paganism or life before or  without Christ than it is a "spiritual problem" per se.  Without Christ as the founder of life, wisdom, and virtue, how would you know what real virtue, strength, grace looks like?  It's impossible.  So people do the best they can and get some things right, others wrong, and don't even know that others exist.  It's a problem in that failures of character and life without God always lead to death, but it isn't the same kind of tricky spiritual morass that sloth is.
   I think the chief cause of hollowness is sloth (a second cause might be anxiety).  Christians are superficial hollow men and women because it is much easier to live that way, to invest in appearance or not invest in a real life with God, and a thoughtful, obedient life, than it is to really love God and love your neighbor.  But as the epistles of John say, we are fooling ourselves if we imagine that we love God, but we have not spent ourselves in learning how to deeply love our neighbor.  But deeply loving our neighbor requires depth and transformation and honesty and perseverance and courage and the acquisition of real wisdom.  It requires plodding down a particular path that is difficult to walk down, and in walking along we often feel as though we fumble about taking steps backwards as often as we go forward.  As many a spiritual master has said, spiritual change is the slowest kind of change.   But if we're not on that path on spiritual life and change, we aren't on a path worth walking down.  And things that don't change, die.
  I was reading a book by Gabriel Bunge called Despondency which was about Sloth or acedia.  Reading that book helped me see anew how much the real spiritual danger for most Christians isn't really unbelief, it's sloth.  The new Christian and the Christian owning their faith for the first time might genuinely have long and hard struggles with really deciding and believing that God exists.  I imagine for a few people, that may be their continual struggle.  There might be periods in one's life where believing or not believing is the question that occupies one's attentions.  But I would take bets on sloth being the vice that attacks the Christian more solidly attached to the pew bench.  Sloth is the great minimizer, the one that says, Does it really matter that I pray today?  Or read my bible?  Or try to listen carefully to the sermon?  Or really focus on the liturgy?  Or treat my husband with respect when he's annoying? Or do that thing that ought to be good for me?  It won't really hurt, it won't really matter.  How could it really make a difference that I did this or that or a thousand different things?  What difference does it make if I care?  If I put effort into this?  Someone else will do it, or at least, my contribution will not be missed, since it couldn't possibly be that important.
  And how could this little sin matter all that much to my prayer life?  How could it hurt anyone?  No one will notice, no one will care.  And if they do, they are probably just being anxious and making a big deal out of it.  I could do something here, I could do the smart thing and invest in x thing .. . but that takes work and I'm not good at this work and I don't really want to do it anyway . . . .  What Jesus said here is hard, so I will just ignore it for now--it can't be that important.  If it were that important, I would be good at it--it certainly wouldn't be as difficult as it seems to be.  What difference does it make whether I am honest with my friends, or obey what Jesus says, or invest in my life with Christ, or refrain from doing what I know to be wrong, and try hard to do what I know to be right?  Maybe I will try tomorrow . . . and it probably doesn't matter too much anyway.
   For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote on sloth as a simulacrum of despair--it was something that looked like despair and could be confused with it.  If I were writing such a paper again, I think I would write on the simulacra of sloth and various virtues like humility or modesty or submissiveness or being easily pleased.  I would write on our endless human capacity for self-deception--how we think we are doing something good, in this case, we could fool ourselves into thinking we are appropriately appreciating our own smallness when really we are failing to walk in love as Christ loved us.
  Gabriel Bunge didn't say that sloth is full of shit (possibly because he's an Orthodox monk-priest), but he did describe it as the "noonday demon" and a liar.  He did describe our contest with sloth as a battle that has to be fought.  He did describe this incredibly important struggle as one waged in every-day life.  I wonder if that is part of what separates real people from hollow men--real people know that every day character is the only sort of character you get--no exceptions, what you sow, you reap.  If you spend 8 years telling the truth to your friends the way my friend did (that I mentioned in the last post), you end up with some real solidity at the end.  If you spend 8 years telling little lies to yourself and your friends to excuse your behavior and to avoid confronting yourself, you end up with a void.  If you are incredibly unlucky, no one will get in your face enough to stop you and you will persist in wasting years of your life on your own personal bridge to nowhere.  If you allow yourself to be convicted and to change, you have a chance to become a real human being.
  I wish it were possible to convince every single person I know that everything they do actually matters.  I do not know whether it is difficult for most people to see that the decisions they make are rarely if ever morally neutral.  I could also wish that everyone spent an hour or two playing a particular Star Wars game for PC--Knights of the Old Republic.  In that game (and others, I imagine), one has an option of making various kinds of decisions throughout the game at different juncture points (sometimes that decision can be to do nothing), most of which either contribute to "light side points" or "dark side points."  In real life, sloth gets you dark side points because it is indifference and callousness to goodness.  When there was good to be done, you passed your turn.
   God never meant for anyone of his children to be hollow, without real substance and lacking real inward strength born of walking with God.  He never meant for us to wander around, doing "good" for all the wrong reasons, wasting our time seeking after prestige or honor or trying to earn acceptance or approval or even love.  God has no use for such dead works and intends for us to receive much more from him than that.  He has love without measure, and he has Jesus Christ, the wisdom and power of God who was born to make us free for something very solid and very real and very strong.

"Hollow Men" Part 1

  I've only just started to notice a particular phenomenon, or rather, just started to put together pieces of what this phenomenon might mean.  And that's about the way in which the "inside" of a person matches their "outside".  I imagine everyone has had the experience of meeting someone and thinking, "Oh, I like this person a lot," only to realize in fairly short order that this was not the case.  Or the opposite, being nervous about not liking someone, only to find that someone was more likable than what was previously imaginable.  That's always nice. I'm thinking of a related, but not identical sort of perception-illusion.
  There's a scene in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy when 8 year old Almanzo Wilder's massive milk-fed pumpkin is being judged at the county fair.  The author describes the way the pumpkins are judged, and how  in this case a long sliver of pumpkin is taken, and held up to the light, and tasted before the final decision is made.  Almanzo's pumpkin is paler than the rest, but the same color from rind to core, and he ends up winning the contest.
  Some people are like that pumpkin--they are "the same color" all the way through.  What you see is what you get and the person they present to the outer world and the inner person "match up" with a great deal of congruity.  I have heard persons much wiser than me express a great deal of admiration for this quality.  It seems to be that this kind of humility and integrity has to at least be the beginning of something awesome--at the least it is the beginning of real honesty, real humility, real character.  To be who you are all the time without changing to please or otherwise accommodate others.
  I find another kind of person every once in a while, though, and I like discovering this sort of person much better than even discovering someone really is who they say they are.  I like discovering the kind of person who is, for whatever reason, much better than the person they superficially present to the outside world.  I have particularly noticed this quality in two people of my acquaintance.  One, in a boss of mine, and another in one of my closest friends.  Although I have known her for years, I just started noticing this about her.
  It took a few meetings with this boss of mine to have it dawn on me--ever-so-incrementally--that I was in the presence of someone of significant holiness.  It was not significant in that it was particularly conspicuous, in any case, this person's inner character was not very obvious to me at all.  Now this person is someone who is "likable" by nature, but "likable" isn't necessarily a very deep quality, and "likable" and "virtuous" certainly aren't synonymous.  Some people spend so much of their energy trying to be "likable" they never end up with much virtue.  But as I got to know this particular gentlemen I realized that he combined humility (personal and intellectual), genuine caring and kindness and affection, self-awareness and self-acknowledgement of his own limitations, vulnerability, and some real courage and steadfastness in how he did his daily work and in his dealings with me.  After getting to know him, I realized I had presumed that he was just another "nice" person who was mostly surface with no remarkable inner strength or character.  He's one of the least outwardly impressive most inwardly impressive persons I have met--which is probably one of the reasons he doesn't immediately strike one as being "impressive"--because he doesn't consider himself that way and isn't spending a significant chunk of his emotional resources presenting the image of his choosing to the public for admiration.
   This second friend of mine--we've been close for years--has always been the loyal, steadfast, hard-working, honest type of person.  I think maybe now it has begun to seriously pay off in terms of inner strength and inner resources, and wealth in terms of relationships.  I imagine it has been paying off for her for some time, perhaps now is when I've started to notice.  The last time I got off the phone with her, I remember marveling to myself, "She is just the most damn honest person I ever met.  She always tells me the truth about herself, and she always tells me what she really thinks in response to what I tell her about my life."  We certainly don't always agree on everything (I, too, am fairly devoted to honesty, and two very honest people can never hope to agree on everything!), but I always respect what she says, and I really admire the effort into telling me the truth all the time.  She just has buckets and wells full of integrity and truthfulness and has the strength to really grapple and deal with the truth in her life: the truth about God, about herself, about her life, and her relationships with other people.  It's just so damn impressive.  I wonder if people can see that about her from the outside.  I am sure her truthfulness comes across to some degree.  I wonder if her strength does.
   But then there are the "hollow men".  I think when T. S. Eliot wrote the poem, he was envisioning human beings in general as these death-courting hollow men.  But I'm not sure--it was the title of the poem that came to mind rather than the poem itself.  There are different kinds of hollow men and women, I am sure.  There are the people who for whatever reason are so desperate to be liked or to be seen in a particular way that they invest any time and resources they have on themselves on their appearance.  They acquire whatever virtues are needed to fit in, to be liked, to be cherished or admired by whatever group they want to participate in, and they don't bother to acquire any other sort of character, integrity, or inner strength or resources.  I think of these folks as being hollow like a globe is hollow--it looks solid on the outside, but when you get to know someone there's virtually nothing on the inside, no knowledge, no strength, nothing to give.  Some people are hollow like swiss cheese is hollow--they aren't necessarily concerned with appearance or likability, but they don't necessarily care to invest in their character or inner life either--so they end up with a mish-mash of virtues and strengths and vices, and whole parts of life unexplored and ill-understood.
  Swiss cheese people aren't so bad--most of us probably spend most of our lives transitioning from swiss cheese to something far better.  Globe people are harder, I think--because they haven't learned how to act honestly yet, and they are still acting out of mercenary motives rather than having learned to love the right things for their own sake.  I think "globe people" are particularly frustrating to find (and to be) in Christian communities because it is so easy to do the right thing for the wrong reason.  "I will go along with this Christian value because I want to fit in, not because I care about it myself."  And some Christian communities encourage such fakery--they would have have pretend good little Christian people than real repentant sinners because faux-goodness is easier to deal with in the moment than honest sinfulness or weakness.
    I've made friends with some of these "hollow men" before.  I remember being so surprised after penetrating to a certain depth of life (it didn't take that long) to see that the person sitting before me had nothing to say or to offer and that this really was the end of them as a person, either by virtue of lack of reflection, or investment, or both.  It is interesting to meet people who "sell themselves" as people of great affection or kindness or love, but who in truth have invested more in appearing a certain way than they have in living it out.  Jesus is probably the only human who ever lived who was "solid to the core," but it's so disappointing to find someone who seems beautifully kind or thoughtful or whatever, only to find out that their kindness is mostly for display only and lacks real rootedness in a life seeking the character of Christ.
  It's hard to find out people that you have affection for or even Christian communities that you love deeply are in fact "hollow" as I have said.  I do not think anything keeps a community of people from taking on these characteristics just as individuals do.  Part of the hollowness I have described is dishonesty, and deception (active or otherwise) is a sin I have always found difficult to forgive.  Question: "If you were not serious about our friendship, why couldn't have you just been honest about it?  Why did you have to pretend like you were interested?" Possible answer: "I was afraid of being alone."  Another possible answer: "Because I wanted to be your friend, I just don't know how."
     Expectation is a hard thing to relinquish.  To accept the present "hollowness" of any given person or place may garner a personal apparent loss.  I lost my friend (or some part of my friend), I lost my community (or some part of my community), I lost x because that person cannot give me the kindness, love, or whatever thing that was once offered or advertised, and now I must let the thing go and seek elsewhere for that which I am searching.  Sometimes the loss is too drastic for a relationship to be recovered and sadly results in a parting of ways.  Forgiveness is always a part of what must take place, even if it is no remedy to hollowness. Grief remains, I think--because men were not meant to be hollow.

The "War of Art" and the War of Life in Contrariety

Today I happened to be reminded of a book I ran across in high school: Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. The premise of the book goes something like this: Art--the creative process--is the battle of waging war against all the factors that militate against you in order to quench your creative potential and output. You have to fight yourself and the powers that be--the everyday distractions and the karmic energies that all seem to conspire against you to keep you from writing. He describes how the daily battle against all these forces must be waged in order to safeguard one's muse--one's openness and ability to act creatively. It is a fascinating read that is helpful for any writer or artist and does contain some of the most heartfelt and apt profanity I have ever read. And when I was 16 and read that book I was quite the moral crusader against cursing. I still thought it was apt.

However, my musings as of late have steered my thoughts in quite another direction: what a tricky, evil little monster discouragement about one's voice can be. I remember reading (also in high school) an article by Carol Gilligan called "In a Different Voice" that was about how young women's process of moral decision-making tends to be different than men's and tends to be overlooked or dismissed. The use of "voice" in this manner has certainly been abused, trivialized, and made cliched and deathly boring in a multitude of ways . . . and yet "abuse does not negate proper-use". I was forced to begin to rethink my dismissal of this concept (or at least, the phrasing of this concept) some months ago when I began to have a rather peculiar experience in prayer.

A moment of explanation: inner healing has been one of the most important ways Jesus has shown me that he is real and has power over absolutely everything and that he knows me and knows what he is doing with me. He has healed me from stuff that I never expected to be healed from and didn't even think was broken. One of the ways in which He sometimes shows me what He's up to (He doesn't always and that's His prerogative) is by giving me a very particular physical sensation that localizes what is wrong and what he is doing about it. For example, a few years ago I heard a sermon on the parable of the sower and was challenged to discover what things in my life were falling on good soil and what was falling on rocky soil or being choked out by thorns, etc. In the weeks that followed, when I prayed I had the recurring sensation that there were these huge boulders in my soul that Jesus wanted to take out and deal with. That should have been my first clue to go to counseling! But alas, 21 year-olds are often proud and stubborn and naive about their ability to handle everything and I was no different. Jesus certainly dealt with that rocky soil and those "stones" are now gone. But it wasn't pretty because I tried to do too much by myself.

In this case, the sense I had was of vocal constriction. When I prayed sometimes, my vocal cords felt tense and tight and when I was praying about certain things the feeling worsened. And I knew instantly what it meant: I knew that it meant that I was having trouble speaking--that I was compromised in my ability to speak the truth about myself of all things. In short, I knew Jesus was revealing to me that I was having trouble with my voice--and as a singer, that meant something doubly significant to me: it struck home as a metaphor dramatically for me because I have spent years working to make something beautiful come out of my mouth when I open it. The meaning here was inescapably obvious to me: I was having trouble with voice, I was having trouble with myself and that this was a problem Jesus wanted to address.

Address it he did: The first thing Jesus had to tell me was that he actually liked what I will call "the prophetic personality". The truth is, there is no such thing as a prophetic personality and that all Christians are called to embrace the call and sacrifice of a prophetic to one degree or another when we do everything we can to proclaim Christ's good news to the world and are hated and rejected for the sake of His name and His word. (It goes without saying--though I will say it anyway--that when we are hated and rejected because we do hateful things, that certainly has nothing to do with prophetic suffering.) However, it is also true that Jesus makes us all different and He makes some of us much more comfortable with external conflict, external resistance, going against the grain, going against the status quo, resisting the system and ignoring the crowd. There are many different definitions of what it means to be a "contrarian". I am a purist on the subject. Some people think being a contrarian means simply "doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing". I have always thought the true art of contrariety consists in refusing to be moved by the crowd--meaning, if the crowd is right, you engage with it, if it is wrong, you resist it. Contrariety is about being full engaged and being fully alive and not resting on your laurels and waiting for someone else to tell you what to do or how to think. It is about embracing one's responsibility to find the whole truth not just the part of it that we are partial to or comfortable with.

Yet, the contrarian lifestyle has its drawbacks. People really resist being made uncomfortable and they will do everything in their power to create space for themselves to be wooed back into dogmatic slumber. And they will call you names and if you are a Christian they will tell you that you aren't meek enough or humble enough or gentle enough (and if you are a woman) submissive enough . . . just to get you off their back and to get themselves back to their comfty-cozy nap they were taking when they were undisturbed by your rabble-rousing after the truth. What's worse is that they will undoubtedly be at least partially correct--if you are a true contrarian (or any sort of human being at all) you will have your virtues and your vices and your weaknesses and some of them will be that you aren't extraordinarily gifted with meekness and gentleness. Regardless as to whether you are passionately devoted to loving your neighbor, it may not look like the kind of love that someone who is invested in their own comfort wants to receive. We are so picky, after all. Its not good enough that love be love--it has to look the way I want it to for me to acknowledge it or receive it or heavens help us--appreciate it. We are very fragile creatures.

C. S. Lewis once said something about the lot of us not being strong enough for heaven--how the joy in heaven with God is much too powerful for us to bear. That is why we must be changed into God's own image and participate in His own life--so that in Him we do have enough strength to bear all the goodness of God. Without becoming partakers of His divine life, we wouldn't have a chance. Instead of being the bush that burns but is not consumed by the fire (which is the destiny of Israel in the Exodus story and our destiny in Christ), we would be consumed. This is why we are so often threatened by the virtues of those who are different from us. We are not strong enough to bear them yet. Moreover, if someone--like a prophet--has the power and Spirit of Christ in them, they don't just have virtue, they have supernatural virtue, they have "spiritual superpowers". Spiritual superpowers are hard to bear--which is exactly why the people who hated Jesus when they saw him make the lame walk or the blind see or wipe away the tears of the grieving--that's exactly why they hated him as much as they did. Jesus had all the power of God to do good in the world, to do supernatural good--and it was too much for their feeble flesh to bear. They had a choice: they could either let the fire invade and consume all their dross and stubble and be saved only by the power of God working in them or they could resist and close themselves off to it and save their lives only to lose them. We are confronted with these choices nearly every moment of our lives and are oftentimes tragically oblivious to this.

All to say, there is something about trying to be the kind of contrarian that Jesus himself was. Some of us don't have a choice. Some of us are like Paul--we are a fiery, driven, dangerous mess of wrong until Jesus gets a hold of us and turns us in the right direction. Then we are on our way to being a fiery, driven mess of the Holy Spirit dangerous only to the powers and principalities of this world and this age, though that transformation is the work of a lifetime. Jesus takes us each on different journeys to become like Him. Who can say what that will be until you walk down the path after Him? And we ought to stay close behind: there are twists and turns that we cannot possibly anticipate from the beginning.

In the beginning of this post I mentioned that discouragement from one's voice is a "tricky, evil little monster". Until sometime after college, I was a happy little contrarian, oblivious to the world of self-doubt and discouragement until something happened that sent me spiraling downward into Cartesian-grade skepticism about who I was as a person and what I had to offer to the church, to the world, to my friends and family, and to God. Looking back, it is a real shame that I got bamboozled into that kind of radical skepticism about myself. Not only was it a real waste of time, its just a shame to doubt God like that. But the kicker for me is for much of that time I was questioning and doubting some of my best qualities and refusing to engage with them because I was scared it would be fruitless or that I would hurt someone. Some of my friends and family members tried to talk me out of it, but I was committed to my Cartesian methodology.

One of my favorite things that the Lord ever said to me about this that helped shake me out of it was (and this is for the philosophers out there), "You are a figment of my imagination. If I had not loved this idea, I would not have have reified it." (Reify=to make an idea concrete or real.) Granted, God does not love my sin. But he does love and delight in all my feistiness and in every gift that he breathed into existence in me, from the smallest bit to the largest. And He will save and redeem every aspect of my personality that he made and turn it to His use and for the glory of His name. So he will do with all of us. This is also the reason we must seek to love the good in our neighbor without qualification, no matter how tempting it may be to be threatened by it or indifferent to it.

We have to fight for this perspective, I think. A friend of mine has a thing about "magnanimity"--"great-souledness": the call of us all to love and serve our neighbor so they can be the greatest and best creature under God that they can be. I have a thing about absolute freedom: to learn how to so embrace the freedom of Christ that we fear nothing and are set free to be and to do absolutely everything Christ has for us. But this is war, peeps. Spiritual warfare, in fact--of a more intense variety than even The War of Art. The last thing that those spiritual powers that fight against God want is for God's creatures to rise up in the full power of Christ knowing who they are and how they can be Christ for the world with everything they have. So they will take advantage--if that means getting you lost in fear or self-doubt or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, the enemy takes every advantage.

Now the question is, do I have my voice back? The answer to that: Jesus is working on it. Every once in a while, I feel something in my throat that reminds me of ways I need to learn how to speak again. And I say to myself: "I can't do that, how on earth is Jesus going to do that?" He manages--even through my cowardice and sloth and weakness, he miraculously manages to lead me to a better way of doing things, to being stronger and whole and not so ruled by fear. "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." There are many "yokes of slavery". Galatians 5:1 was talking about the slavery of the law. Fear is another yoke, and so is thinking that change is up to me or that one can set oneself free. We don't fight the spiritual battle with our own power and we don't have to know or understand how God is going to change and heal and save us. We just have to trust that He can because of what He has already done and ask so that we may receive.