I'm fixing to smush a couple of posts into one here. Two things are going to happen here, first I want to talk about humility and competition in a roundabout way like Mr. Bell might (for one of my previous impersonations of him look here), then I will discuss what I think he is doing by going about things in the way he does. Don't look at it as having an extra long post to read (or not), look at it as getting a little lagniappe, like getting snow two years in a row South Louisiana (maybe). Oh and before I continue you might as well just read Mere Christianity as what I will write here, because that's where I stole most of it from.
I don't have an alarm clock in my room.
I.
Like.
It.
This.
Way.
(perhaps that's going a bit overboard on the po-mo formatting, sorry)
Anyway I have found that this is the best way, for me at least, to set things up. See, I'm a really light sleeper. Any noise is liable to wake me up and because of this I have often found myself waking up in the middle of the night. Previously, I had a clock nearby, so everytime I woke, I looked to see what time it was. No matter what time it happened to be, I found myself dissatisfied with having woken up at that particular time. After I while I realized why this is the case.
There is no "right time" to wake up in the middle of the night.
If I woke up at say 2am, I would think to myself, "Crap. I've been asleep for like an hour and half. That's like a nap. Now I'll never get back to sleep." Or if I woke up later at 5 or so, I would think to myself, "Crap. There's like an hour til daylight. Now I'll never get back to sleep." If I split the difference and woke up 3:30, I would think to myself, "Crap. It's 3:30. I need to pee. Now I'll never get back to sleep." No matter where I was at, I wasn't satisfied.
And that's kind of like our lives isn't it.
We can't be smart enough, or popular enough, or handsome or pretty enough, or whatever enough. We aren't satisfied with what ever our place is because we put it in competition with others. We don't want to be good-looking, we want to be the best looking man in the room. We are quite content with our own humor, but when someone else is funnier at the party, we think them to be chasing after attention too much.
Humility and self-deprecation are not the same thing however. Too many pretty girls go about trying to convince themselves and others that they are really quite plain; too many talented or intelligent men go about dismissing the abilities that could serve others. This often leads to a sort of falseness in revealing and acknowledging our abilities. It has come to be expected that the musician, when asked to perform in some private setting should act bashful, dismiss his skills, and perhaps even decline to play a few times before he begins; knowing all the while that what he would most like to do at that moment is perform, perhaps not even for selfish reasons, but because he knows the others will enjoy it as much as he. Humility is not a process of denying the blessings one has been given, or if privately acknowledging them, doing one's best not to let others no that this is the case. Instead, the humble man acknowledges his own quality, thanks God, and then does not think much more about it. Pride can't exist in a vacuum. It feeds on competition with others. When I find someone else superior to myself in whatever it is I take pride in, this pride is capable of producing hatred of the other. And hate of course is tantamount to murder, because it wishes the other did not exist.
Humility is not like this, it is often a sort of happy indifference. The kind that helps you sleep at night.
Shifting gears a bit, I would like to talk about what I think Rob Bell does when he does things like this (albeit much better than I just did, not that I'm jealous). Now some folks think I don't like Rob Bell because I've voiced some pretty strong disagreements I have with some things he said in the past. This post, with it's tongue-in-cheek absurd illustration probably only reinforced that perception. But in fact, I like what he does. He seems like a cool enough guy too, if a bit metro. I can't see him coming along on one of the famous "man night" bbq and action movie nights of the undergrad days, but I think we'd probably get along alright. Furthermore, I like what he does and I'm going to tell you why. In a new paragraph.
Rob Bell reverses the typical ADD non sequiturs that typify alot of amateur writing. If for instance, he start talking about church and his vision of Christianity and then all of sudden said, "By the way, church reminds me of jumping on a trampoline" (to use an example from Velvet Elvis) his editor would hopefully cut it, and may start to reconsider giving him a book deal. Instead he opens by talking about trampolines, or music, or something like that and relates this to some aspect of Christianity.
Going about it in this way gives his metaphors the effect of revelation. When he finally comes around to it, one says, "Ah, trampolines. They're bouncy. Alot like Christianity with a pretty generous, non-exclusionary orthodoxy." This has, at its far end, the effect of redeeming the secular world for the religious life for, if nothing else, a source of inspiration in understanding religious life. Ideally, this split would not exist, and as Luther said, "Milkmaids [would] milk to the glory of God." But there is a split. Rob Bell with all his far-fetched, creative, and sometimes tenuously connected metaphors helps re-introduce the religious life into a secularized day-to-day.
And so I'd like to tip my hat to him.
Metaphorically.
No comments:
Post a Comment