This post is a little long and rambly, but I think I’ll leave it. A few days ago I posed a question for Christians: “How would you square a belief in the inherent dignity of honest work with the idea that hard work was the curse of God on Adam?” I got some good responses, which you can see in the comments to that post. Caleb’s response, in particular, sent me back to the recent Plough issue on “Why We Work,” where I found a helpful piece by Alastair Roberts.
Nothing original below. To the contrary, I’m trying to remember that less alienated era I grew up in. Some of these I’m doing and some I’m working on. Please suggest additions. Don’t talk about politics or religion. Never bring it up yourself and if the other person brings it up, redirect the conversation. The only exception to the above is local news. This encourages engagement with the concerns of the community, which actually affects your life.
One of the good things I learned from my upbringing in the Holiness church: going it alone. I keep running across people looking for validation in their spiritual path. I get it. We all love validation. We want someone to help us along, encourage us, tell us we’re not crazy. At the same time, there’s a valuable lesson in “I’m gonna pray if I pray by myself; I’m gonna stand if I have to stand alone.
There is wisdom, even kindness, in concepts like “householder” and “laity.” Broadly speaking, these ideas represent an understanding that the capacities of someone devoted full-time to spiritual practice are very different from the capacities of someone with family and “worldly” responsibilities. I say there is kindness in these concepts; someone could just as easily see it as a spiritual caste system. That absolutely can be the case! Here, though, I want to emphasize the wisdom of these concepts in a time when they seem to have been forgotten.
From the latest essay by Rhyd Wildermuth: Again, worlding is what we do and is not dependent on what we believe. This make the question not “what is true?” but rather “what do we include?” We already live in a world full of gods and spirits, but for the disenchanted mind, these are so distant in the background and so excluded from our consciousness that we can say “they don’t exist” without any feeling of falsehood.
If your baseline assumption is that the universe if meaningless, you will of course find no meaning there. If, on the other hand, you look for, inquire after, draw up the meaning in your circumstances, you will find meaning. Does that mean it’s all “just” in your head and therefore false? Of course not. By embracing the meaningfulness of the cosmos, you are co-creating that meaning alongside it. You are performing the human role of making conscious the interrelatedness of all things.
The men who live in my memory had work to do. That work had a purpose: to feed their families. They were not career men with five year plans and KPIs. The men who live in my memory did not worry about what it meant to be a man or whether they were good at “adulting.” They knew that whatsoever their hands found to do, must be done with all their might.
Some of us children of empire are rightly worried about further damage to colonized cultures. We try, therefore, to build walls around these cultures and call any breach of those walls “cultural appropriation.” The fear of cultural appropriation, though, is itself a product of empire. Such a fear attempts to freeze those cultures at a moment in time, specifically the moment when the colonizers “discovered” those cultures. Only an imperial mind would make the mistake of ignoring a culture’s entire history, pretending that it had sprung into existence only when noticed by imperial eyes.
Following up on my post about rational abstraction. That mode of thinking is an acquired skill, taught mainly at universities. It is a technical ability needed for certain types of work; its the equivalent of the knowledge of accounting rules for accountants. Because of the self-involvement of the elites educated in such environments and employed in such jobs, it has been generalized into a skill thought to be a base requirement for functioning humanity.
I came across this in my notes from two years ago. I don’t recall if I planned to do more with this or not, but it seems okay to me in its current form. My political action plan: Our political and economic system is a world eating monster with an unalterable hostility to life. Until the powers that be get serious about killing that monster, I’ll continue assuming they are emissaries of the monster and accord them all the respect that position is due.