"Formulating Your Own Thoughts and Opinions in Your Own Unique Way."

(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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Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

We celebrate here in temporality with a view to the eternal birth, which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity, so that this same birth has now been accomplished in time within human nature.  What does it avail me if this birth takes place unceasingly and yet does not take place within myself?  It is quite fitting, however, that it should take place within me.

-- Meister Eckhart

The Nativity of the Lord has mainly to do with Presence.  What we have been waiting for has really been here all along.  We were not in Advent waiting for anything for God to do, as if God were taking God's sweet time about it.  We were waiting for our souls to relax, focus, adjust, adapt, and emerge into the Truth.  We were waiting rather for our own baggage and blinders to drop away to we could see what was always here.   We were waiting until we lost our fears, desires, expectations, needs, fantasies, habits, and conventional ways of thinking.  We were waiting for the fog to burn off.  We were waiting for our imaginations to let go of both our obsession with what has gone before and our infatuation with what will come next.

Our waiting was purposeful, intentional, not inert or inactive.  It was a preparatory waiting: at once a self-emptying and a refurnishing.  I compare it to prospective parents making room for a new child; a two-fold movement of creating space by moving unnecessary things out, and moving necessary things in.  Nesting.  We wait by letting go and taking on.

Ego and Empire dominate us by manipulation of two pervasive ideas that are not actually real: past and future.  Beginning with the alienation that is a consequence of our mortality, we invent stories that invest meaning by telling us "how we got here" and "where we are going," in time. 

But now that time of waiting, preparation, divesting and furnishing is over, for Christ is born in Bethlehem!  The Creator is Present, "with us," Emmanu-el.  One great hymn describes the Creator's action in time this way: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in him tonight."  Past and future are completely reframed for us.  Now our attention is not on what we imagine to be ahead of or behind us, but on something that has arrived; it is here and now, "above," "beneath," within, among us.  

This is not escapism into either the dreamy pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by or imploded "navel gazing," but an engagement with the Good, True, and Beautiful that is always Present, always "near," always "at hand," which Jesus Christ proclaims and embodies.  He is the eternal Presence, the divine Shekinah.  He is the Real that is always closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

One major problem in the Church is that we waste far too much time and energy looking back and/or looking ahead, and offer too little attention to looking "above," "beneath," or within/among at what is happening here and now.  We habitually and reflexively focus on what is not here.  Now is the time to open our consciousness to what is present with us.

Jesus says to seek first the Creator's Kingdom and justice (Matthew 6:33), which is within and among us (Luke 17:21), and "at hand" (Mark 1:15).

Thomas Merton affirms this presence when he notes that, "in the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at your disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.  This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us."  Maybe that little room, which he calls "the virgin point," pointe vierge, is what we have been preparing in Advent; a ready space.

We fritter away our time and energy on trying to "adapt" to the latest dopey and illusory big shiny, entertaining thing going on in the world out there, when everything we desire and need has always been right here, with and within us, in the spark of truth and clarity, at the center of our being.  Christ is born in astonishing and scandalous simplicity and poverty, revealing the glory of God shining from that bright point, in and throughout our world.  God, is present in the stable of Bethlehem, on the cross of Calvary, and in the shared bread that is his Body... which makes us, the Church, his Body, Christ-in-the-world.

Nothing could be more irrelevant or beside the point than allowing ourselves to be distracted by the imagined "historicity" of its details.  The Nativity is about birth, "which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity," now being "accomplished in time within human nature."  Within all human nature.  Within the nature of every human.  "Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today."  That's the point.  

Today.  Not tomorrow.  Not yesterday.  Today.  "Now is the opportune time; today is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2b).  Nothing less than this is happening in the Incarnation.  A vertical bolt of pure light from beyond, welling up within us.  Jarring us into the realization of God, the Creator, with and within us, now.

And now... what?  If the Creator is born in us today, how do we live as the Creator's agents, messengers, witnesses, and people?  For we are Christ-in-the-world.

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The Virgin Birth of Christ Is True, Whether it Happened or Not.

(Slightly improved version of a previous post.)

A couple of Decembers ago, in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof interviewed William Lane Craig about the Virgin Birth.  Craig is a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University.  His entire response was to say that it really happened, and to point out the historical sources: Matthew and Luke.

I rolled my eyes and fumed in frustration.  Claiming that the Virgin Birth “really happened” neutralizes it into the absolute irrelevance of a distant historical event which means nothing to us today.  It is an artifact.  Nothing more.  It is merely asserted to have happened by smug, self-righteous, credulous Christians.  As if deciding that it happened is all that matters.

The “did it really happen” argument is pointless because there is no way to answer it.  Even if proof could be available one way or the other (which it can't!), it misses the meaning of the stories.  Indeed, I wonder if the real point of Modern historical arguments isn’t to neutralize and deflate the truth so it can be domesticated and shelved.  For deeper and higher truths may only be communicated by means of myth, story, image, symbol, ritual, metaphor, and poetry.  These are exactly the kinds of discourse that Modernity has ruled out of hand as lies, superstition, fiction, and fairy-tales. 

To reduce a story to mere history is to kill it.  It is to render it a dead past event, something to be dissected and disposed of.  The demythologizing project of Modernity was always intended to undercut truth, so that the Empire's self-serving propaganda may be inserted in its place.  And the most effective way to do that is to evaluate a story based on its “historicity,” as determined by Modernity's arbitrary criteria.  Thus the “did it really happen” question is taken for the only measure of truth… and it just so happens that it is unanswerable.  In this way the Modern Age systematically replaced truth with its own fake news.  In the end it’s all reduced to entertainment in the service of commerce.  For Modernity, what is "real" is merely what sells. 

Once we have hit the impasse of, “yes, it did happen,” vs. “no, it couldn’t have happened,” we have nowhere else to go.  If we are arguing about whether Mary "really" bore a child without having sex, we have failed to listen to the story itself.   

The Virgin Birth story is not about history or gynecology.  One person who understood the story well was 19th century anti-slavery activist, Sojourner Truth.  When challenged by male religious professionals who attempted to silence her, she pointed to the story of the Virgin Birth.  Christ comes into the world by God and a woman, she said; a man had nothing to do with him.  Therefore, one meaning of the story is that God’s entry into the world is an explicit contradiction of a world order that privileges maleness.  It is an inherently anti-patriarchy narrative. 

And that’s just one political meaning of the story.  There are meanings that go even deeper into human identity and destiny.  Meister Eckhart talked about how it shows God being born in each of us.  Karl Barth noted that it tells us that humans do not have the power to bring God into the world.  And then there is the whole question of the Incarnation, and its meaning in terms of the relation of Creator to creation.  “God became human so that humans might become God,” is the way the early Christians talked about it.

And so on.  All of which is lost if we focus exclusively on the tiny, distracting, pointless, and unanswerable question of whether it "actually happened" or not.  

Caving in and allowing the Modern world to define truth for us is what is killing faith and the planet.  I used to think that Christianity was courageous for allowing historical analysis to be applied to its core documents and history.  Maybe.  Certainly we may have gained a lot of helpful knowledge about the context of the Scriptures.  Certainly we have liberated the gospel from some forms of self-serving institutional oppression.  But at the same time we have lost way too much in this exchange.  And too often what we were left with was even worse, if more subtle, forms of institutional oppression.  

Fortunately, we did not lose the stories themselves.  In spite of Modernist attempts to extract and dissect, slice and resect, delete and excise parts of the Scriptures, the texts remain.  And the faith remains.  Because in the end reality wins.  Truth is.  Propaganda, fake news, advertising, and “history” all collapse for lack of any purchase in reality.  But the Word of the Lord endures forever.  (It is not by accident that the attitude of some scholars to the text is identical to the way the petrochemical industry comes at the planet:  Extract, waste, consume, and profit.)

The late Phyllis Tickle related how she once talked about the Virgin Birth story at a conference.  One of the young hotel emplyees overheard her, and approached her later to observe that the Virgin Birth story is “too beautiful not to be true, whether it happened or not.”

Exactly.

 

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