Jesus is Magic
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:date: 2006-05-09T00:00:00
:category: research
(I really don’t know anything about `the movie`_, I just saw its poster
in the window store and the title looks barely OK for what I want to
write about.)
It is about magical thinking. One of the most interesting people I met
in the last couple of months was Mario Bergner, episcopal priest whos
ministry is in the inner healing. He had a talk to us about magical
thinking and about persistence and staying in pain of unresolved
suffering. He explained his thoughts on Romans 5:
>>>3 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that
suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and
character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because
God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which
has been given to us.
The point of this is, how do we live with present suffering. And I am
not talking about high-level stuff, like being in the concentration camp
or things like that. No, he was talking about everyday suffering caused
by unfulfilled desires and hopes—what is the God’s calling for my life,
how to finish my PhD thesis, and so forth. We have two major bad ways
how to deal with this issue. One is obvious and well known—just ignore
or try to persuade the problem that it doesn’t exist. When it is
possible, great! But most of the time, it is not possible. Or variant of
the same, we can decide, that acutally we don’t care about the
resolution of this problem that much—“whatever”. Unfortunately, the
problem is real and so we cannot just avoid the resolution.
The other possible solution could be, what he calls “magical thinking”.
The problem is very well known, but the pain of being in the unresolved
situation is mitigated by the unfounded hope, that the solution will
somehow “resolv itself”. A boy looking for accquintance with a girl, may
just hope that somehow a girl will find him without any of his effort
(and just to emphasize, I do not mean effort to find a girl by his own
means; just an effort to live in the place, where God can bless him with
her). Mario Bergner mentioned that he has a number of friends who are in
their fourties coming through a mid-life crisis and dreaming about being
a priests themselves. His answer is simple—“just go and apply for the
study in seminary.” But that is for most people not enough. They want
solution **now** and hopefully without any of their effort. So they
don’t do anything and they get nothing.
However, this need to act on the basis of God’s calling for something,
doesn’t mean legalism and dependency on our own effort. There is a third
pitfall to avoid (mentioned by other of my pastor-friends). He called it
“Christian unbelief in God”. The problem is that although most of the
full and healthy solutions for these problems is in the God’s power
only, and it cannot be replaced by our efforts, it looks plausible, that
we could at least make our pain more bearable. Unfortuantely, it doesn’t
work this way. Once we decide to resolve the pain and suffering on our
own and “as if God was not alive”, we shut-down his ability to heal us.
Moreover, practically, our own solution where we ourselves found today
is absolutely from the situation we will find ourselves couple of
months, or maybe a year or two. Therefore, the solutions we create
today, may not be applicable or may be outright misleading us from the
way the God has prepared for us in some time in the future.
You ask, my dear reader, why is this rant in the category `research`_
and not `faith`_? I believe that this problem on the personal level
can be very well transformed to the similar problem which plagues most
of social sciences and political practice on the level of whole society.
There is something in our environment, which is not what we like it to
be—for example, people are killing each other and we want to persuade
them not to do it. Or they have other people as slaves.
There are in my opinion many bad reactions to these realities. The most
important problem with most of them is that we focus on this **problem**
(I am now using thoughts of `Dorothy Sayers`_ in “\ `The Mind of the
Maker`_\ ”). And instead of really understanding of what’s going on we
use any methods and tools to get rid of the presentation of the problem
as fast and as easily as possible. And the problem is not presenting
anymore in the appearance we defined as the problem, we claim that we
have managed to resolve the underlying causes of the problem. So, when
the fastest way how to eliminate slavery in the United States is to
raise a very blood Civil War with subsequent long history of racial
hatred and segregation, be it—Lincoln could claim that he had removed a
problem of slavery (accepting for a sake of this example, that removal
of slavery was among reasons for waging the war). And, to get finally to
the topic of my research, when the murder rate of the Boston youth (or
especially of the Boston youth) has decreased dramatically, everybody
congratulated themselves how much **they** removed the problem of the
crime wave.
My point is that all such “problems” are usually just very shallow
presentation of the real problems in the structure of human society (or
maybe they are not problems at all—if James Fox is right and crime rate
in Boston could be largely predicted by the changes in demographic
variables, then they are mostly natural events as hurricane waves;
“hurricane prevention” anyone?). And if we wanted to help black
Americans in slavery or another set of black Americans killing each
other in our times, we need to get much deeper and develop much
long-time oriented strategy and then persist to keep it running until
real problems in the society are resolved, even when it could take fifty
years of continuous effort (and spending of taxpayers money).
.. _`the movie`:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0422528/
.. _research:
{category}research
.. _faith:
{category}faith
.. _`Dorothy Sayers`:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Sayers
.. _`The Mind of the Maker`:
http://worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/isbn/0060670770
