Our Dear Little Death Culture, 7

How are we going to transform our dear little death culture, Gentle Reader?  The answer is every bit as challenging as it is simplistic:  by changing ourselves.  We are our culture and our culture is us.  If there is anything wrong with our general values and shared presumptions we need only look in the mirror.  That's right.  Basic Gandhi.  We need to become the change that we desire to see in the world.

Tall order, eh?  Makes you feel kind of small and ineffectual.  Like the legendary little Dutch boy plugging with his finger the hole in the dyke.  I am not going to suggest that we all start attending church.  I'm a Christian.  I do not attend church.  I mentioned in a recent email to a friend that Anglicans (my ex-denomination) seem to believe in this fatuous nonsense about the basic goodness in human nature.  Rather we are quite basically flawed and what good or potential thereof we might possess is usually diluted or corrupted by fear, self-interest and laziness.

Our problem, in other words, is in our failure to love.

We don't love ourselves.  But we often adore ourselves which is something quite different, because self-worship always means that we are adoring a lie.  When we love we are seeking the highest good of the other, even if this other be ourselves.  When we love we are seeking to touch and bring to life that which is most essential and most authentic in the other, even if this other be ourselves.  This is to say that self-love, healthy self-love, involves truth, a willingness and desire to not believe the lies that we tend to manufacture about ourselves.  If this love is genuine then we will become apt pupils ready to learn our true identity from any person and any experience for they are going to be the mirrors that will reflect back to us our true identity.

Ditto for loving others.  And we cannot just stop at our immediate family or friends.  If we really want to become the change we desire to see in the world then this calls us to love everyone, even those who hate us, even the stranger on the bus or in the grocery lineup.  This doesn't give us license to cross any boundaries mind you or to get creepy, but to open ourselves to the revelation of God, of the highest good in that person.  And to love that highest good.  Even if we cannot see it.  Even if there is only evidence to the contrary.  That's right, to have faith, to believe into being this image of God in one another.

I don't care, Gentle Reader, if you might happen to be an atheist.  You could still envision the Highest Good, whatever that might be, and then connect the dots.

This is no guarantee that anything in our death culture, based as it is on fear, laziness and self-interest, is going to change significantly just because we have decided that we are going to change into people who love.  But you know something?  There is plenty to suggest, and convincingly, that nothing at all is going to change if we ourselves don't change.  Otherwise, as everything we love and value gets flushed down the cosmic toilet as we sit on the ground like terrified children paralyzed by fear and weep and howl in grief, loss and outrage and we have no one to blame but ourselves for our loss because we were too lazy, selfish and fearful to take on the challenge of seeing our hearts change and blossom into life.  Because we refused to light that strategic candle while cursing the darkness. 

Because we have refused to love!