Tradition Meets Psychology and Says "Hello"

Creatures of the animal kingdom might think the airport experience something akin to an organized stampede. Everyone is heading to different places in the same direction, odors are myriad and unaccounted for, and the ultimate goal, particularly during the Christmas migration, is to hastily return to the safe and familiar. The family, however loving, represents all that hectic hullabaloo your independent self needed to leave behind for the sake of sanity. And the food, however delicious, whispers (at each savory bite) little reminders that you’re soon to regret the decision to have just one more piece of pie.

In short, Christmas break is a sham. Perhaps the elves secretly planned to exact revenge on our consumer culture for overworking them. Santa is no philanthropist; he is mercenary with an agenda, and happens to know how to chew a cookie while faking a smile. Perhaps, to be more realistic, popular culture has infiltrated, and technological advances manifested themselves to such a degree that we can no longer identify exactly what it means to relax and enjoy time off. Whatever the case, I’m tired.

But if there is anything to take away from Christmas aside from a few extra pounds it is the importance of tradition itself. Formality, though excruciating at times, reminds us of the important things. Our grandmother’s excessive exaggerations of any and all of our embarrassing moments, our parents over protectiveness, and our sibling rivalries reawake the fundamentals we were raised to believe—whatever those believes were.

The historical church swings with a similar stroke. We recite the Lord’s prayer and Orthodox creeds with monotone repetition for their effect. The proverbial Jesus died and rose again for my sins creates ambiance for the soul; it is the paint on the wall by which every piece of furniture is color-coordinated. Remember in the old testament (I can’t recall off hand where) when it says something about surrounding yourself with the law? I keep saying this, and will continue to, but we need to start including psychology in the theological discussion. Self imposed classical conditioning is not nonsense, it’s common sense--even scriptural in its appropriate application. Enacting a stimulus/response relationship by, say, treating a prayer with an attitude of obeisance results in believing that practice and its object sacred. That’s the real reason we bow our heads. Putting scripture around your house puts scripture in your heart. This is not theological, this is psychological. And the suggestion, i think, opens up interesting possibilities.

Under these new protocols, we bypass all the debate concerning—to continue the example—inerrancy and inspiration, while still treating scripture and our Lord with fear and love. In other words, let’s do what we already do, and practice beliefs which we have not come to understand (whether we know it or not), and try adding epistemic humility to the soup. “Ah love, let us be true to one another,” our individual systematic theology is shoddy at best. What you and I actually know, what beliefs we can actually formulate are so few that it takes a certain level of audacity to maintain our multitudinous positions. Our modern hierarchical protocols have proven altogether intangible to anyone who is not a theologian in a specific field.

If you ask me about the inerrancy of scripture I will say, “This is what my parents told me most of my life, this is what some other people have told me the past few years, and this is a subject with which I have no affiliation save authorities.” As you might well notice, i don't have a 'position.' If my best friend’s life depended on me answering the question, I will always go with the Orthodox position. (And of course I would; this is a post about tradition) But I couldn’t tell you why the church is right or wrong; I merely bank on it. I guess based on authority. And here is the terrifying fact: such is the nature of 99 percent of our cumulative knowledge.We guess based on what we're told.

Obviously, I’m talking about the difference between believing with action and knowing with reasons. The trouble is the relationship between an idea and a psyche. The majority of our parents and their parents joined under a system of beliefs because they found psychological security in epistemic certainty. But we, the children of post-modernism, know better. We are meek skeptics, more like a self-conscious girl than the modern know it all brute. But we too have our shortcomings, and they mirror that girl: we are hesitant and indecisive; we don’t know what to believe, and wallow and whine.

The solution, to our horror, is not certainty, or even the accumulation of knowledge. The first is impossible and the second so limited it isn’t worth the effort. The solution, rather, is what our church fathers said years ago, “Credo ut intelligum.” I believe in order to understand. I repeat that psychology needs to be included here. How does one believe in naked propositions without battling within the confines of attitude, feeling, stimulus, memory, and desire? He doesn’t.

There is more to be said here, especially of our psychological relationship to Orthodoxy, but I’ve jabbered on long enough. Maybe i'll continue in another post.

The K.H.

"That you are here--that life exists, and identity"

No fluid segway exists for saying what I came on here to say, so let me blurt it out and connect things later. I am both afraid of any internal propensity within myself toward elitism, and, in contrast, partially believe myself a flag-bearer for the everyday man. The confession is honest, the appellation relatively accurate, and the mental dichotomy confusing. I reprimand myself every time I lord over someone, and combat over-lorders with a near excessive vigor.

I like common sense as much as I like cheeseburgers. I like the common experience; I like habit more than interlude or interruption. Normal seems altogether abnormal compared with abnormalities. Jay Leno’s chin looks funny, but a chin on every face looks like a miracle. God did not make all men for metaphysics; He made all men, to one degree or another, learners. What greater act exists for the teacher than the cultivation of minds made in the image of God? A teacher peddles things greater and more terrible than himself. Ideas rule the world.

And by the way—to interject—degrees of intelligence make no difference in the kingdom of Heaven. I am half tempted to wish mediocrity on all of us. Littleness treated confidently completes us. Children and their admirers flood the rivers of paradise. I think naivety works to a child’s psychological advantage, and that, perhaps, our Lord was talking about a faith easier to maintain due to smaller ability. I can hear Jesus adding a new verse to Matthew 5 now, “Blessed are the numbskulls, for they shall inherit the truth”! If we lack the capacity for volumes of knowledge, we avoid self-satisfaction. Humility rules when we are satisfied in the negative. After all, it is what we are not that makes us who we are. A triangle with 4 sides is no triangle. We’ve forgotten to read our Augustine, leaving behind the principle that it is none other than the image of God in us which causes us to sin. A blind man cannot sin with his eyes, only with the instruments available to him.

But this is only half of the truth. Easy is the marriage of humility to littleness, but hard is the marriage of self-confidence to littleness. Satan’s fall reflects the feminine self-consciousness as much as the masculine arrogance. He lacks the property of Deity like Susie lacks straight teeth. Both are tragic misunderstandings of beauty and the phelix culpa, and stem from a poor view on identity. They get things mixed upside down. Before we know it, Satan will be trying on a two piece, and Susie wielding a triton.

Our reasons for sinning always seems silly years later, when the experience is no longer fresh, and the memory abstracts. But its consequences rarely go unnoticed. An assault on our identity leaves an impression. Paul warns most severely against sexual sins for a reason: they destroy the both the physical and metaphysical man. And that, I think, is the great sin of elitism. Its primary failure reeks not of insecurity—though that is true— but of self-centered indifference to the identity of a consciousness external to itself. What of our axioms? What matters more than loving others? The Mona Lisa pales in comparison to Mona Lisa; quoted lines of Tennyson’s Ulysses are not the words of Ulysses. Paul at the coffee shop has a fairyland somewhere in his rib cage. Our friends, our lovers, our parents have a history rich with adventure and tragedy and love. To hell with metaphysics if it comes at the cost of a love which consists in knowing someone. I’d rather talk about whatever they want, like what they like, see what they see. The real trick seems a dance between the actualized, authentic self and the other dancers.

the K.H.