The Glow in the Heart
05 \\ November 2023
Welcome to the last newsletter of 2023!!
We’re heading into the holiday season, which means very little else matters but travel, food, and relationships. I hope you have the chance to enjoy all three safely and kindly. And if that’s not the case, know that I’m holding you in spirit with the hope that you’ll find moments of respite where you can.
With that in mind, here’s two things I’ve really been mulling over this month.
Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
I’m specifically looking here at Chapter Three, Explorations in True Self: Intimations of the Soul.
What is this about? Palmer establishes and affirms the perspective that humans beings all have a true self (whatever we wish to call it—soul, inner light, divine spark, identity), and that this true self is inherent in us from our beginning. That we have—or are—this true self is an objective reality; it means that we cannot be reduced to raw materials or a compilation of biological/mechanistic systems. We arrive with this true self into the world, and immediately begin to experience deformation from external and internal forces.
We can ignore or deny this true self through fear or societal training, such as secularism (blank forms that are socially constructed) or moralism (attending to the self is selfishness), but doing this long enough results in harmful behaviors (consumerism, ideologies, etc) or spiritual suicide (depression, nihilism). We become deadened, like petrifying wood—we lack resonance or connection with the world, with others, with our selves.
Attending to our true self means that we stay connected to who we are, to who we are in relationship with others. Listening to our true selves reminds us of the connections we have with the world around us, and it cultivates our own “aliveness” as well as aliveness for others.
What can we learn? As I’m thinking about this concept of self, I’m also reading Self Made by Tara Isabella Burton, which traces a cultural history of identity creation (or self construction). Our current denial of self-ness comes to us through a long series of choices and moves made long before we came on the scene, shaping the water in which we swim. Such moves slowly dismantled the various boundaries of family, social hierarchy, religion, etc., which often provided a sense of self or identity. Charles Taylor covers this in greater (exhaustive) detail in A Secular Age and Sources of the Self, and Andrew Root explores various aspects of this in The Church After Innovation. (Just in case you’re curious enough to go reading on your own.)
While I have no desire to return to a pre-modern social structure that leaves little room for financial or social mobility (because it’s entirely likely I’d be a peasant and who wants that?), the trade-off for such moves means that every aspect of our lives is up for debate and construction. We are, like the Database, fluid and contingent.
(Clearly, I don’t think this is an unalloyed good, but as an Ennea4, I appreciate the opportunity to live as authentically as possible.)
What does this mean? Honestly, I’ve shorted the insights of Chapter 3 (and book) so much. But lemme give you some spoilers: part of the journey toward an undivided self lies in the tension of moving from interior work to exterior relationship.
We are selves only by engaging in community. We cannot become ourselves by ourselves.
Which is a really frustrating and true thing to put into practice.
I’ve been playing around with different types of long-form and short videos on my YouTube channel this month. I’d love for you to check them out and let me know what you think!
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Russell Almon, “The Postmodern self in theological perspective: a communal, narrative, and ecclesial approach.”
(I think this is only available via academic databases, sorry!)
What is this about? I attended (and was on staff at) a seminary in which many of the elder statesmen of the institution used “pomo” like a four-letter word. They really, really did not like post-modernism. I made the observation once in a meeting that, whatever era we lived in now, it was no longer post-modernism, since you can only label things once they’re complete. That went over like a lead balloon.
This is apropos of little else but to continue our discussion on the self with a brief genealogy of the inward (Western) turn toward self-creation and determination. Russell Almon traces the evolution of this “inward turn” from St. Augustine to Descartes to post-modernity, observing the shift from God as a/the source of happiness and identity to the individual as the self-source of meaning, values, and everything else. Specifically, Almon notes that the self-created individual now exists above, and before, and possibly even without relationships.
Almon goes on to weave together Stanley Grenz and Paul Ricoeur in order to address potential “sources of the self” in post-/most-modernity. By understanding the modern self as a priori, centered, and thoroughly self-sufficient, post-modernity reacts by positing the self as decentered, contingent, and socially constructed.
Almon develops Grenz’s embodied and communal self together with Ricoeur’s hermeneutical and narrative self to cohere in the incarnational and ecclesial self. This incarnational, ecclesial self lives within the eschatological tension of living an embodied story within present reality. This self then interprets that story in light of eternal reality together in community with others in an earthly mirror of the social Trinity.
What can we learn? I’ve been reading a bit lately on research conducted by sociologist Jonathan Haidt on the rise of anxiety, depression, and loneliness since 2012 since smartphone/social media usage became ubiquitous. Since I don’t know a lot of younger adults and teenagers, I am way behind the 8-ball in understanding how so many of them (though not only that demographic) feel alienated and isolated. Haidt contends that this is an epidemic that will only continue to expand, as so much of contemporary life assumes a society of digitally mediated and self-sufficient individuals.
Almon points out that, because humanity is made in the image of the triune God (if we take Christian theology to be true), this means that “we are made for and in community because God as Father, Son, and Spirit is the definition of community.”
We find community to be such a strange and inconvenient notion these days. It often feels like an optional activity that we shoehorn into a schedule optimized for productivity (or in between shuttling small humans to their activities, anyway).
I think we often forget, or don’t realize, how much work structural and geographical proximity does in “finding community.” And if our immediate environments require us to drive any length of time to actually get to a community in which to participate, well. #Ain’tNobodyGotTimeForThat
What does this mean?
Every time I find myself getting super-annoyed by the lack of a “self-serve” option in a store or customer service, I think about how this attitude can transfer over to so many other areas of my life. Why am I so anxious to avoid connection and relationship?
Busy, stressed, selfish: any and all of the above.
When I think about the types of relationships in my life, they seem to fall at two extremes: absolute strangers and intimate friends and family. There’s almost no one in the wide expanse between those two poles, and I find myself wondering what connections, what community makes sense there.
How do we move from strangers to friends? What do those relationships look like? And where do we find them?
I’m afraid I have more questions than answers here, but I think they’re worth pursuing. Good relationships are the source of that little glow in the heart that reminds us that we are connected, known, and loved.
May that glow find you this holiday season.
Shalom,
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