Thesis #2 On Church Unity

2. Scripture is our light in discerning the truth: not because it answers every question that we wish, but because it contains all the words known with certainty to come from God and from Christ, and because no disciple is above his master.

Again, while it is tempting to add some of the more obvious corollaries to that, at this point they might introduce less clarity instead of more.

Thesis #1 on Church Unity

1. Visible, acknowledged unity of all the followers of Christ is desirable: not because the See is infallible, but because fellowship is indispensable.

So tempting to add more right now, but here and now I want to focus on only this thought. 

Thanksgiving: Foretaste of the Feast

My thoughts are turning to next week's Thanksgiving celebration, and to which favorite dishes I might prepare, or someone else might. One thing is sure: those of us working in the kitchen sample the food as we work. Anticipation is part of the celebration, and we take a foretaste of the feast to come.

Communion, or the Lord's Supper, is said to be a foretaste of the heavenly feast. As we come together, as we remember Jesus, we have one watchful eye turned toward the feast to come: the table and the gathering guests and the festive preparations. The wait is so long. We gather for a foretaste now, and next week, and again the week after ... like we did the week before, back for our lifetimes. The wait lasted through our parents' lifetimes, our grandparents', back into generations where the names are dim memories. The great saints of prior ages took the same foretaste as we do; we are joining them. The chain goes back unbroken to that upper room that Passover long ago: our Lord, on the night in which he was betrayed, took bread and gave thanks and broke it and gave it to them all. He took the cup and gave thanks and gave it to them all, and said he would not partake again until the kingdom of God had come.

The Lord has been gone a long time. It is tempting to adapt the Jewish Passover refrain: "Next year, in the Kingdom!" It is hard for us to imagine "forever", a kingdom which never ends, and never fails. It is hard for us to understand "eternity" in a way that is possible for God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal. I think we can get a glimpse of the feast to come, and the depth of time in "eternity", when we realize how many lifetimes have come and gone in the time that it takes for preparation.

May I remember to anticipate, and not grow tired of waiting. Anticipation is how the joy of that celebration is drawn forward to brighten the holidays, so that they are not just a day but a season. 

Objective Morality and the Narcissist

Awhile back, I was introducing a short series on reasons why I believe the concept of morality (a right way to treat each other) is intrinsic to our existence, and why I believe morality has an objective foundation in the value of life itself.

In the comments section, Kevin -- one of the neighboring bloggers who knows how to have a good conversation -- brought up a counter-argument that he'd seen. I'll post parts of it here for reference; if you'd like to see what else is in the longer version, that's in the comments to the post mentioned earlier.

There is only one question pertinent to the discussion of intrinsic morality: Do you believe everyone else's life is as valuable as your own? When we're born, the answer is simply no. ... We're all born narcissists. ... The one question, though, we must answer before we can talk about intrinsic morality is, "Is my pain more important to me than anyone else's?" If the answer is no, then all morality is intrinsic and we need no laws. If the answer is yes, no morality is intrinsic and every law is a tool to give the weak a fighting chance in this dog-eat-dog world. 

It's interesting how deeply we disagree from square 1. In this view, there is "only one question pertinent"; on my view, I'm not sure it's a relevant question. I don't think my life should be as important to you as yours is to you; I don't think my children's lives will ever be as important to you as your children's lives are to you, and I don't think they should be. To make sure my point is plain: I think it is right that you value yourself and your family more than you value acquaintances or strangers. It doesn't make you immoral, it means you have skin in the game. (We'll be back to a related point on that before we're done with this post.) For now, the opening point is that there is a self-care and self-responsibility that, far from being immoral, is actually our job. I don't expect my life to be as important to you as it is to me; but I do expect you to have it cross your mind that my life is as important to me as yours is to you.

... [Early childhood development] The world exists to help and hurt me. People exist to feed and train me. Everything is my toy or my obstacle ... Along the way those pains may open our eyes and we may begin to figure out that other peoples' hurts are as important as our own. If this happens, we may become caring people in place of our native narcissism.

You may know that I belong to a support group for people who were raised by addicts. I know some clinically diagnosed narcissists. I come from the opposite end of the spectrum, those of us raised with so much neglect that we have trouble developing a sense of self. On this end of the spectrum, far from thinking that everyone else exists to serve our wants, we have made ourselves nearly incapable of recognizing our own wants, and dissociate ourselves from the awareness of wanting or feeling in general. There's a lot of dysfunction in the world, but it's not one-size-fits-all. Recognizing both our own humanity and others' humanity are normal stages in healthy human development. I'll grant you that there are plenty of us who miss those normal stages of healthy human development, but I wouldn't want to argue from a narcissist to the lack of real morality, any more than I'd want to argue from a blind man to the lack of real sight.

The picture painted above, viewpoint of the narcissistic child, is very ... zombie-chic, with a post-apocalyptic feel. It ignores every redeeming human experience. In this omni-bleak world, nobody has ever curled up next to another for warmth, or shared a clean laugh, or traded stories over a cup of coffee. No one has ever basked in a moment with the kids, or enjoyed working with a friend on a project, or high-fived each other over a shared success. No one has ever shared a genuine human connection and enjoyed it for its own sake. Our narcissistic child never met up with love, or the desire for meaningful companionship. Even some deeply dysfunctional childhoods have more warmth than that, every now and then. (I've heard it said that narcissists don't have relationships, they take hostages. That's not a meaningful relationship. Think Beauty and the Beast as a tale of someone outgrowing his narcissism to become human. And "human" is defined in terms of being able to enter a meaningful relationship: when the beast understands that -- apart from whether the other person is useful to him -- the other person is valuable in a way that is worthy of celebrating, and that there is pleasure in valuing someone else's goodness.)

Is my pain more important to me than anyone else's?

Perspective. If I hold up a quarter just so, it can block out the sun. I've been in enough pain that it has blocked out the sun. We are finite, and the number of other people is (for practical purposes) infinite compared to us. So I believe that your pain should be important to you, as mine should be to me -- not in a way that is heartless towards others, but in a self-compassionate way that prevents "morality" from being an excuse for being heartless towards ourselves by losing us in a sea of other people that we haven't even met and don't even know.

Does it threaten morality that the speck in my eye -- or quarter, if you'd rather -- blocks out the sun? Well, it certainly carries a risk ... not only because some people are narcissists and sociopaths, but because we're all capable of being overwhelmed by our own pain (or desire or anger or ego etc), and because what's close to us will always look larger than what's at a distance.

... every law is a tool to give the weak a fighting chance in this dog-eat-dog world ... 

Let's go with that as a premise. That means, whenever a society adopts laws, it means we want to give the weak a fighting chance. We want a level playing field, and hope for the weak, and people signed up to advocate for them and give them that fighting chance. We have a streak of decency in us. The zombies haven't won.

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Do not do to others what you would not have done to you. - Confucius
Do unto others what you would have them do to you. - Jesus

What if it's healthy when we are infants that we start with just our own perspective? What if that's just the limit of our mind at that point? What if healthy development, and healthy morality, leverages that perspective -- not in a way that makes us lose connection with ourselves, but in a way that makes us gain a connection others?