(I tried to copy and paste something from Facebook but it didn't work. It is a satirical page by a Unitarian-Universalist mocking responsive readings in worship because they make people say someone else's words, which the author believes is insincere because it's just "repeating someone else's thoughts," and is not "formulating your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way" which is supposedly much better. This post below is my response to that.)
This meme occasionally makes the rounds on Facebook. After ignoring it for a while, watching many of my friends "like" it, I decided it deserved a response. The sentiment expressed here is that "formulating your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way" is obviously and necessarily a good thing for which we should all strive.
Is it? Is it even possible?
Were we to take the meme seriously, we would have to assume that our Unitarian Universalist friends certainly refrain from other kinds of "repeating someone else's thoughts," like sharing "store-bought greeting cards." Would they also not sing hymns, or recite poems, or quote from literature at all? Would they write books based on "their own research" rather than use footnotes indicating a shameful, small-minded dependence on the prior thoughts of others? And would they patronizingly mock the rest of us as unevolved slugs for doing such unenlightened things?
But could they even use a language at all? Should we compromise our ability to take charge of our own thoughts and formulate them in our own way by utilizing a language system as archaic, confused, irrational, and frankly colonialist as English? Should we not each be responsible for developing our own personal, individual language, unsullied by the corruption of tradition and community, but utterly unique to our precious individualism? Indeed, why should I defile my unique and special personal thoughts merely to accommodate the pathetic and constricting needs of anyone else to understand me at all?
It is a central part of the ideology of Modernity that "formulating your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way" is something to strive for, an indication of freedom, creativity, and maturity. In reality, it's nonsense designed to devalue tradition and community and keep us under the Empire's Big Lie that we are separate and independent individuals... which means that we are in eternal competition with each other, with no unison refuge from the din of arbitrary and irrelevant self-expression. As long as we are all convinced we are independent individuals we will keep yelling into the void and the owners may keep swindling us.
Oh, and it's also impossible. Each of us lives in a web of interconnection and conditioning. No human has ever had an original thought. No one has ever formulated their own thoughts and opinions in a unique way. Everyone exists in a matrix of experience, education, socialization, memory, fear, and culture; we are all conditioned by ego-centric, exclusive subjectivity. All perception is interpretation based on prior experience, which was also interpreted. Further, we are also radically social and integrated beings, dependent on other people and creation itself for our very lives. If you imagine you are an independent agent able to formulate your own thoughts and opinions in your own unique way, you are a deluded narcissist. It is the very definition of a lack of self-awareness. It is to be unconscious.
At the end of the book of Judges, the author notes, "In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21:25 NASB). The text does not view this situation as a good thing. Rather it is chaos, a nation divided against itself, easy prey for the next expansionist empire. And this is Empire's MO: divide and conquer, keep the people from uniting, keep feeding them the ideology of their own sacred individuality.
In the Bible, the solution is a common king. That is, a center, a focus, a guiding, unifying principle, that is not one's one supposedly sovereign ego. That common King was supposed to be YHWH, the Liberator, the Creator, the One, Someone both beyond and within all, uniting all in all. Unfortunately, the people preferred to have a human king "like the other nations."
Bob Dylan sang about how we each have to "serve somebody; it may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody." The Apostle Paul says much the same thing in terms of flesh or Spirit. My point is that we may be enslaved to our own egos, with their small-minded, self-centered, biased and limited perspective, or we may follow and serve our Essence, Jesus Christ, in Whom we are connected to and integrated with all people and all of life. To be enslaved to Jesus Christ is to be liberated from ego, alienation, and separation, and united to the whole creation. We come to see and therefore act from the most universal and inclusive perspective.
From this perspective we all, all creation, sing together. Different voices, different parts, different instruments, one song.
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