Of Darkness and Clarity

Progressive Christians love complexity and uncertainty.

It's a significant part of the discourse, as integrated into the prog faithy schtick as Kramer's abrupt arrival through Jerry's front door or a Dangerfieldian tug at one's collar.  

The world is complex! The world is uncertain! Therefore, faith is complex and uncertain!  One must, if one is a progressive, embrace the Holy Dark, that place where we cannot see and where our path is unclear.

This, one is led to believe, is a marker of authenticity, a sign of progressive faith's connection to the Unknown and the Unknowable.  "Look at how bravely we acknowledge that we know nothing, and accept that our faith centers on simply sitting with our uncertainty!  Embrace the darkness!"

There is, of course, a truth to that.  We contingent, mortal beings cannot know the wholeness of the Divine intent.  The Numinous is infinitely beyond us, because, like, yo, that's what makes it Numinous, brah.

But true as that might be, there's a practical flip side to that truth.

If you're a church hawking uncertainty and complexity?  No-one, by which I mean pretty much functionally no-one, wants what you're selling. 

Why would they?  They have it already.  I mean, seriously.  It's the old "selling-refrigerators-to-the-Inuit" absurdity.  

Our blighted saeculum provides complexity and uncertainty by the heaping bucketload, every single day.   We are stuffed like foie gras geese with meaninglessness, directionlessness, and the irreconcilable cognitive dissonances of culture.  Truth and meaning are torn from our grasp by the shrieking winds of political disinformation and mammonist hucksterism, and human beings feel utterly lost in the yawning chaos of it all. 

We can feel it tearing at us, taking us apart, bit by bit.  Our sense of ourselves trembles, and the yearning is for something...anything...that can hold us together.

A theology that says, "Well, sure, yeah, we have no idea what we're doing, really, I mean, who even knows, lol, whatevs?"

Sure, you're "being authentic."  You're "authentically" offering cups of water to the drowning. 

That is not what the Gospel is, nor is that what souls seek when they realize how very lost they are.

Faith embraces the cloud and the Holy Dark.  Sure.  Fine.  But it is also and more vitally the pillar of fire by night.  It is the light that shines in the darkness, that the darkness cannot overcome.

Mysticism, Liberalism, and Post Modernity

Yesterday, as I walked to get dinner on a clear and beautiful Fall evening, I found myself inexplicably musing on a tension that exists between my own strain of flagrant and unrepentant liberalism and the liberalism of post-modernity.

I'm unquestionably a liberal, by any meaningful definition of that term.   I think the first response that any sentient being needs to have to an encounter with the new or the different needs to be openness, consideration, and forbearance.   That leads me to be open to gays and lesbians, open to people of other faiths, and open to individuals of varying political philosophies.  It doesn't extend to tolerance of intolerance, violence, and hatred, of course, but otherwise, we cool.

Underlying that worldview is a rather fundamentally mystic view of the nature of existence.  I believe that all things are interconnected, that I and you and everything are woven together in ways that we understand only through a glass dimly.  That sense of interconnectedness is itself undergirded and founded on my Christian faith, as I see my Creator's work all around me, and the potential grace of the Nazarene and the light of the Spirit in every human being I encounter.

Here, though, if I am honest, I think my foundation for liberalism diverges from that of secular post-modernity.

As I grasp that worldview, the underlying assumption is that all meaning is socially-mediated or derived from particular individual contexts.  There is no "truth," at least not with a capital "T", beyond those truths that we fabricate for ourselves.  What is good is what we individually say is good, and it is not possible to make any assertion of the good that extends beyond individual preference.

Within the context of that radically individualistic and particularistic worldview, tolerance of other perspectives arises from the assertion that if no perspective is normative for all, then no perspective is invalid.   We must accept all perspectives, because our own is just ours.

While both can yield acceptance of the stranger, one is an ethos of separation and difference, another, the ethos of interconnectness and union.

This, I think, may be one of the more significant distinctives between being a progressive person of faith and a secular progressive.  

"There Are No Bad People...

...only bad choices."

This particular line of thought just keeps surfacing for me this week. It's popped up in the blogosphere, in a series of random conversations with an old blog jousting buddy about abortion. It's come out of the mouth of the swim instructor at my kid's pool, in desperate response to the total entropic randomness of a moist horde of summer-addled tweeners.

Whenever it's surfaced, I find myself struggling. On the one hand, it's very non-judgmental. It's a happy warm fuzzy thing to say, particularly to someone who has completely messed up their life through a series of cascading errors. The meth and the string of armed robberies and those four kids you fathered with three different women were just bad choices on your part. You're still a good person. It permits people to say to themselves, gosh and golly, if I'm a good person, then I should act like a good person.

I'd like to believe that, and on some levels, I do believe that. Leaving space and grace for redemption is kinda important for all of us.

On the other hand, I think that the choices we make define us. We have no meaningful existence as ethical or moral entities outside of the decisions we make, particularly the decisions that impact other beings. If I choose to deck you with an unexpected uppercut because I truly believe you deserve it for being such a pinhead, my belief that you are a pinhead does not abrogate the very actual harm that I have caused you. If I lend you money at an exorbitant interest rate using your car title as collateral because I believe that making a profit in any way possible is my right as a businessperson, that belief does not mean that what I am doing is acceptable to anyone other than me. If I hack off your arm with a machete because I genuinely believe that your tribe is subhuman and needs to be put in its place, that subjective perspective does not in any way diminish the objective anguish that my actions have caused.

Those opinions and beliefs may form my rationale, and may be part of the ethos that formed me, but they do not mitigate against the specific and actual harm that I have caused another being.

As a person of faith, I see the ethical function of faith as being the thing that shatters our individual and cultural subjectivity, and brings us into an ecstatic awareness of the Other. That is the heart of a morality founded in compassion, which is the core ethical thrust of all Christian teaching.

Ultimately, the purpose of an ethic founded in love and compassion is to move us away from the claustrophobic moral onanism of the subjective, and to engage us more deeply in the actuality of being that exists beyond our limited selves and self perception.