Spikey Truths & Wayward Stories

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I remember starting my studies in Rome, and someone telling me how great Roman universities were because, rather than provide the breadth of materials and processes with which one can engage in critical thinking, they took a didactic route to education and simply told you what to think, thereby saving lots of time and angst that would have been spent thinking for yourself, and preventing the difficult pastoral situation of having people thinking differently.

I decided to smile politely. For the record, this was not my experience of the Roman university.

I hope this is just my imagination, but it seems to me that, in the face of a growing cacophony of opinions, there has emerged a desire for clarity among the Christian faithful. The only difficulty here is that, rather than the kinds of clarity that would have produced a Thomas Aquinas, it is the kind of clarity exhibited by Fleabag in that now infamous confession scene, where the titular character (who prided herself in her being free from the strictures of faith and tradition) breaks down and begs her confessor to simply tell her what to believe.

Give me the command and I will believe it. Tell me what to think and I will think it. Tell me who I am, and I will be it. Then and only then, will we be free to cut through the miasma of confusion, so goes this trend.

Two dimensions of this trend concern me.

The first is the willing surrender of agency in thinking that has come with the tsunami of discourses produced by the knowledge economy. In a manner that parallels the observations of Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man, we have become increasingly passive as our identities and patterns of thinking have now become completely framed by the products of mass society. With the rapid rolling out of knowledge products, it has apparently become far too tiring to sift through the merits and pitfalls of every claim and simply acquiesce to being shaped by a particular faction vying for discursive dominance.

The other dimension that concerns me is that there seems to be an impression that if one were to simply give the teaching in stark crystalline form, some might call it “telling it like it is”, people would simply accept and internalise it. However, one thing I am gradually learning through my work that militates against this conversion by clarification is a psychological phenomenon known broadly as “resistance”.

Essentially, resistance is the refusal to integrate something about yourself that you might not know is there or do not want to acknowledge is there. Against the backdrop of resistance, the drive to convert via clarification runs aground precisely because the clearer something is made to me, the more I resist the claim. And the more something is being made to me that is true of myself, the more aggressive my refusal will be. Indeed, I may end up projecting what I am resisting onto others, arguing - not without great clarity - that it is THEY that have the problem that I am resisting.

A way around these discursive obstacles, then, is with resort to stories. Indeed, James KA Smith in his Desiring the Kingdom, suggested that for every knowledge claim we consciously accept, there are far more that we also accept unconsciously. More often than not, these claims are fed to us through stories. In an episode of The Episcopal Podcast, Angela Schumann made use of the example of the prophet Nathan’s use of a parable to bring home to David the reality of his adultery. The narrative got round David’s cognitive resistance (which paradoxically can be seen in his response that it was THAT wrongdoer that should be punished for his crime) and he was able to accept his responsibility only after the parable was told.

The converse is also true. For all our intellectual rectitude, it is possible for us to come to affectively accept certain stories about ourselves that are not packaged into a claim. It can come in the form of patterns of treatment by others, or even unconscious tales we allow to seep into ourselves through our consumption of various media or immersion in the institutions of postmodern culture. These can seep into our person far deeper than any didactic claim. Indeed, we might even be able to espouse the claim and “tell it like it is”, as a shield to distract others from the stories that we really have come to accept.

Origen once said that the fruit of sin is multiplicity, and in our modern day, this multiplicity is manifested in a lack of integration of the self. This is a condition that affects each and every one of us. Tainted by multiplicity, we will always suffer from resistance one way or another. This is a wound of sin. Therefore, part of the Christian life, is a constant referral of this fissured self to the Lord who binds up all wounds.

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