Phronema

I am trying to put my finger on what it is exactly… – I don’t even know how to express what I want to say. I’ll try to explain. The other day I went for a long strenuous walk. As I climbed the hill at the end of the park, breathing heavily, I stopped to catch my breath and looked back at the forest of naked trees all of various shades of brown. The air was crisp and cold, the sky blue and it was easy to feel a sense of oneness with all of nature and all of life. Behind me the sound of traffic and I thought of all the millions of people, some busy, some passing time idly (Keynsham seems to be full of elderly people who wander round the shops, not shopping – just passing the time, something to do.), some in pain, suffering, many dying and I thought, ‘What are they accomplishing?’ Being an individual is fine. Being ‘free’ is fine. We only come together and unite when we recognise short term goals that are of mutual benefit. What a waste! What a world we could build if only we could find a common vision and unite to realise it. No doubt our individualism confers advantages. The last thing we want is to become a static society like bees or termites, marvellously suited to their particular niche but unable to adapt to changing circumstances. Our individuality may result in a sort of semi-ordered chaos but this in turn provokes a wonderful (literally) creativity. I can see all this and in the case of bees and termites the sacrifice of individuals for the common good is of little cosmic, or ontological significance. (I hope I am not being too chauvinist here. All living creatures, however small, are breathtakingly marvellous.) But each human being is, as the OT puts it, created in the image and likeness of God. Each human being bridges the temporal/eternal divide – if they are divided. It cannot therefore be a matter of indifference that many fail to meet their potential, that many suffer and die needlessly and that many prey on and exploit others not recognising in them the transcendental dimension of their existence, nor their own, for that matter, not recognising that in each person divine and human meet. This is what bothers me. What about all those (seemingly) wasted lives. What role does God have in all this?

To refine matters a bit – the problem does not lie with all those who recognise that life has a spiritual dimension, who are striving for union with God, or for enlightenment, however they understand Ultimate Reality. Nor does it lie with all those utterly selfish individuals who do not recognise the rights and feelings of others but strive only to augment their own power and wealth. These have made their decision and within the parameters of their personal worldview live authentically. My problem lies with (probably) the vast majority who lie somewhere between these two extremes. It lies with those who are reactive rather than proactive, who drift, often at random, drawn more by their feelings than driven by conscious striving. It lies with those who, because they lack the mental or moral ability, or because they are in a social, economic, or political situation from which they cannot escape, are forced to live a passive existence, never to realise their creative potential. It lies too with those who have been damaged by abuse of one kind or another, those who, B. D. Perry says, are ‘incubated in terror’. I realise I am making a gross exaggeration here and that one can never judge another by appearances. One of the most humbling moments of my life was when I was hitching through the rain forest in Quintana Ro in Mexico and we came across a clearing where some chicleros lived. These people were the poorest of the poor. Yet they invited us into their hut and brought out a box of little alphabet biscuits, all they had to eat. They insisted we each take a handful. To refuse would have been an insult to their pride and their hospitality. So we each took a little, watched by the wide-eyed children with their swollen bellies and knowing that each little biscuit we ate was one less for them. So you cannot judge. Here were people who, in spite of their poverty achieved a level of dignity and humanity, and a generosity that I doubt I would have had were I in their situation.

But what about all these people who for one reason or another live inauthentic lives? This really is the waste, a sinful waste of human potential. And we cannot blame anyone for it, including God, but ourselves. I will never forget how children changed during their first Autumn term in one school I taught in. All would arrive at their new school at the beginning of term in their new uniforms, bright eyed and willing to learn, a future full of hope before them. They were placed in mixed ability classes. By half-term they had all been assessed and were reassigned, some to the top two streams, the majority to the middle band, and the rest to the bottom streams. These last were going to be the non-achievers, at least academically, and they knew it. The light would go out of their eyes. They had been rejected and from then on they began to behave accordingly. I suppose given the political and social pressures and the scarcity of resources it is asking too much of schools to see education in broader terms than the purely academic. But the political and academic spheres comprise intelligent people and we ought to be able to see that such narrow educational goals are not helping children to realise their potential. Not even the so-called bright ones. We had a PhD student lodger once who, apart from pure physics, had less general knowledge than our teenage children. 

But this is getting away from the point. I suppose what I am groping towards is an understanding of a theology of failure and waste – at least understood in conventional terms.  To his contemporaries Christ was a failure. It was only in retrospect, after the Resurrection, that his disciples began to understand what Paul called foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block for the Jews. On several occasions Jesus went out of his way to point out that seemingly insignificant human lives had a spiritual and moral resonance that far outweighed anything the religious establishment of the time could offer. By looking with conventional eyes, by seeing only the surface, we are missing most of the picture. But how can we get to see the greater depths, to see what lies beyond material appearances? Perhaps ‘seeing’ is the wrong word and something like ‘feeling’, or ‘intuiting’ would be better. My immediate response is that we need to get away from the habit of reifying, of seeing only objects and what can be measured materially, and become more responsive to relationships, of the relationship process and that in effect we are each of us more a nexus of relationships than material bodies. We need to begin to live not in ourselves, nor in others, but in the aidagara, in the betweeness of people and of things.

Thinking about the discussion with — the other day it occurred to me that one of the reasons why conversion is so difficult is because it means giving up autonomy. The person for whom God does not exist can, at least potentially, be completely autonomous. S/he can, in fact must, decide for themselves how much weight they are going to give to social obligations, moral codes and the demands of others. Their attitude can range from total subservience to the will of others to complete idiosyncrasy. Once one acknowledges the existence of God (I do not mean here mere intellectual assent to a belief but the awareness of an existential relationship however dimly or unthematically felt) the second option no longer applies. They now know, however unreflectively, that their being is inextricably intermingled with the being of God and consequently with the being of others also. Autonomy was never an option. It was once an illusion, a desperate attempt to assert the reality of an independent self, a self that could be possessed.

Possessive quality is found in the conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.  The individual is seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself.  The individual is free, it is thought, inasmuch as he is the proprietor of his person and capacities.  The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession.  Society becomes a lot of free equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they acquired by their exercise.  Society consists of relations of exchange between proprietors.[Macpherson C.B, The Political Theory of Political Individualism, Penguin 1962]

Of course we are not all possessive individualists but so many have the implicit belief that ultimately, ‘I am myself and I can decide what I am going to do with myself.’ Belief in God, however, entails the loss of even the illusion of independence.