Our Selves and Our God
What kind of selves do we need to be to live in harmony with others?
I came across this question in a recent interview with Yale theologian Miroslav Volf. The context for the question was the endlessly discussed and analyzed “polarization” that defines our cultural moment. But the question extends far beyond the culture wars or the toxicity of social media or the relentless politicizing of everyday life. It’s the kind of question we should always be asking, I think. And yet so few of us give even a passing thought to the “kinds of selves” we are becoming through the habits and disciplines (or not) that we are daily cultivating.
The Christian season of Lent is drawing to a close. It is a season for examination, for repentance, for recalibration and reorienting. We are in the holiest week of the Christian year, which is probably as good a time as any to give some thought to the question asked of Volf. Here’s how he responded:
Some eight years ago—I’m not sure exactly where to draw the line—I sensed that the political fronts were hardening. They have since become almost completely mutually closed. Any movement toward the middle, towards reconciling, is experienced as a defection and weakening of one’s side.
I have felt it before, in the former Yugoslavia. When I wrote the book [Exclusion and Embrace] advocating “embrace,” it fell on deaf ears—for Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. The book was written and published as the war was going and had barely ended and my compatriots felt that I was taking away their enemy; they were invested in having one. The time for reconcilers comes when fronts have gotten a little bit more porous than in situations like the one I’ve just described, which is to say that the time for reconcilers is ‘ordinary time’, rather than making interventions in the actual situation of conflict.
As to the kinds of selves we need to be, whether in conflict or before or after it, I think it’s being people who resist themselves becoming closed by the boundaries of the combatants in the fight, people who are able to see beyond the seen to the unseen, as it were, who hope for the unhoped for and who have the moral ground on which they stand, whose “will to embrace” has not been undermined by violence.
I really resonated with that last paragraph. Being people who resist themselves being closed by the boundaries of the combatants in the fight. God, how desperately we need more of these selves in our world.
The “fight” could be some explosive social issue or a global conflict or a marriage or a church controversy or an estranged child or… well, any of the fights that we humans are just so very good at getting ourselves into. Are we seeking to be people who resist being closed off by the boundaries of the combatants? People who see beyond the zero-sum games offered up to us by the media or the cacophony of online voices? People who don’t reflexively (often self-righteously and performatively) take sides or treat “the fight” as another opportunity to engage in a kind of personal branding exercise? At times this seems almost impossible. But it is something that I aspire to (or at least want to aspire to!).
Holy Week is also a good week to be reminded that the ultimate question is not, “What kinds of selves do we need to be?”, vitally important as this is (and I hope the preceding has made it clear just how important I think it is!). But in the end, the defining question of all reality is “Who is God and what has God done for the sake of each one of us who can never fully become the selves we aspire to be?” This latter question does not eliminate the former one. But it does put it in its place.
And “its place” is at the foot of a cross and at the mouth of an empty tomb.
——
About the Art:
L’uomo e la Croce (The Man and the Cross)
Rufino Tamayo
1975
Oil on canvas
130 x 97 in.
Vatican Museum
Vatican City, Italy
Rumblings 
Thanks for this, Ryan. While I share the frustration with the unnecessary and damaging political division in which we live, I’d also want to emphasize that the “self-becoming” has meaning only in relation to the community we choose, or in which we find ourselves, doesn’t it? It seems to me that in the individualistic theology of a “personal saviour” and a “born again for all eternity,” we may have drawn an unnecessary border in what was meant to be a “united under Christ” church. And that border has a distinct and growing presence in secular culture as well; the placing of individual rights and freedoms over (and often against) co-operative, social imperatives, for instance.
Hard to prescribe an effective antidote when you misdiagnose the ailment.
Volf, isn’t describing this political moment accurately. This isn’t a left/right struggle at all. Those terms have been rendered imbecilic by the Orwellian use of language and the authoritarian objectives of globalist interests.
This political moment is better described as elitism vs populism. Elitists are terminally Machiavellian in their dispositions. Left, right, centrist, gay, straight, sometimes early, sometimes late, none of it matters. All that matters is their ever increasing wealth and power and control. Lesser ambitions like ethics, morals and the politics that foster them are only means to an end for the elitist. They are not ends in of themselves. They are nothing more than fashion. Wear what looks good and attracts positive responses from those you mean to control.
What can’t be tolerated and must always be attacked ruthlessly, is the idea that the great unwashed masses can actually rule themselves, create order and live in harmony with one another and generally get along with their neighbour. If the masses ever did, “clean up their act”, my, my, that would be a very sorry day indeed for the grossly outnumbered elitist tribe. Populism cannot be tolerated.
Populists on the other hand emerge from either the political left or the political right and share in common an intuitive understanding that they are being lied to, taken advantage of and pitted one, against the other, in order to serve the intersts of the elite. Populists aren’t really political by nature. They have neither the time nor the inclination, like those from the liesure class do but they know when they’ve had enough and they become especially angry mama and papa bears when you go after their kids.
And so it goes. One side powerful, few, determined, ruthless and exclusively self interested against the many who mostly just want a fair deal for themselves and their neighbours but don’t have the power or the means to get us there…or do they?
A classic good vs. evil story…
It seems like, a #of letters/characters allowed issue, is at play and I’ll have to continue tomorrow. (Meals to be made, guitars to be played lol)
Tomorrow I’ll respond briefly (haha) to Volf’s even worse description of the left/right divide (his terms, not mine) that he presently sees unfolding in America.
After that, I will try to engage with his/your issue(s) about the kind of selves we need to be.
Thanks, as always, for a thought provoking post.
Perhaps I am mistaken but I honestly believe that advocating for poltical well being can be, Christ like and convicting, in the same way physical healing was, in Biblical times.
In our ancestors time physical well being was paramount. For the many, almost exclusively so. Today, for the many, physical well being can often be, and is, taken for granted. Most have enough food, most have enough clothes and shelter. Most people aren’t suffering from dibilitating physical health issues.
In many ways, what ails the many, is better described as an emotional or spiritual illness.
Yes, a relationship with Jesus Christ, mediated by the Holy Spirit, is the only answer and should always be our encouragement and rebuke, among believers, but how do we reach unbelievers? Through prayer and fasting? That will always work, but isn’t. Clearly there isn’t enough prayer and fasting. Through our churches? They have fallen into disrepute and in many cases deservedly so. What do we do? Go where people are looking for healing. Many people are looking on line for knowledge and to government for solutions. We go then, where the people are. We bring Christ to the vurtual and political squares.
However imperfect my efforts are and have been, I tell you one thing I know. Progressivism is an inversion of the Christian faith. It’s spiritual heart is the heart of the serpent in the Garden, whispering, “God doesn’t want you to have this knowledge, because once you have it you’ll be like God.”
The great lie.
No, once you have it you’ll be like your real father, you’ll be just like, Satan. You’ll take what you learn, as you learn it, and make it about your self interest, not about God’s interest. You’ll find community among similarly self interested people and make the projects of life about your collective pride and greed. You’ll attach religious zeal and symbol to your, “progressivism”…or whatever other lable suits your purpose but in the end, those who control and direct the movement are always serving the same master. Satan.
There are still many, many people who are participating in this movement who aren’t motivated by abject wickedness, not yet, at any rate. They can still be saved but not now. They are not the priority. We on the other side aren’t strong enough to bring them to salvations door. We must put on the, “armour of the Lord” and prepare ourselves for a battle that has already begun. Time is running out.
So we speak to the political traditionalists. Those who know that the truth was made known to us already and need not be, “discovered” and redifined and that our present moments always honor the past truth, the present need and the future well being. Yes, all of us in this group are sinners, many are unbelievers, some are wolves in sheeps clothing but at the heart of this group, is the heart of Christ. The Spirit is here, it needs reviving….however foolishly, I am honestly trying to help revive it…
So I intended to speak about Volf, ha ha….it doesn’t matter much now…all I will say is that for him to say that the problem for the, “left” is it’s candidate and apparently nothing else, is about as malevolently ignorant a political statement as I’ve heard in a while.
The best way to help the, “left”, as your latest post exemplifies (not your intended argument, I know but true none the less) is to, wherever possible, leave them alone. Their true adherents will turn on themselves and devour one another, (demons always do) and the gullable among them just might be scared enough, frustrated enough, or offended enough to come to their senses.
I agree, George, we become our best selves in community. I don’t read Volf as advocating an individualistic theology or politics, though. I think he is simply pointing out that we must all choose what kinds of selves we wish to pursue becoming (and the communities that will shape us… although, as you allude to, we sometimes “find ourselves” in communities, rather than choosing them). As important as individualism is to avoid, there is an irreducible sense in which Jesus summons us as individuals (“Who do you say that I am?”). I think we are responsible to decide, not as isolated individuals immune from other sources of formation, but as individuals nonetheless, how we will inhabit this deeply polarized cultural moment.
I would say we become our “best selves”, only through communion with God, then by expressing that best self back to the Lord through prayer, fast and worship. After that, through communion with like minded others. (“Who are my mother, my brothers and my sisters?”)
We are to witness to the unbeliever and pray for them but aside from that, rebuke all that is unholy and not from, God. First for our own safety and hopefully for the safety of others.