In between drop off lanes at the schools this morning, the following thought popped into my head:
Years of spiritual bypassing and emotional stonewalling have brought us to a crisis of ideological fracturing that’s dependent upon self-deception in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance that’s been created because of a lack of spiritual and emotional resources that are needed in order to grapple with the hard realities of the world.
In other words, we’ve chosen to turn a blind eye to suffering or squarely place the blame for suffering on “other people” because we are fiercely committed to ignoring the darkness in our own hearts. Instead we paint over the darkness with platitudes of “Hope” and “Unity” in an attempt to suffocate the very real cries of people who are SUFFERING.
This has shown up in all kinds of ways in my own life. When I start to perceive the pain of another, I can only sit with it for so long before I start to go off on some kind of whim that will help me escape the landscape of suffering.
Whether it was the knee on the neck of George Floyd that caused me to sit with anguish but then rush to start looking at the ways that system has failed and allowed such a thing to happen, I’m too quick to rush to fix-it mode.
Or maybe it’s the news that the collective planet woke up to today that Russia has begun bombing and invading Ukraine because a Tyrant and his sycophants have labored under such an evil, self-deluded, narcissistic idol of power that they now feel that this kind of action is merited for the greater good. (Let’s be honest: When someone in a position of power takes action that inflicts harm on others, that “greater good” usually extends to the entire diameter of the mirror that they are looking into. Grandiosity is a hell of a drug)
The rest of us are watching our phones trying to make sense of it all.
The two options I'm most likely to run for are:
A) Spiritual bypassing.
Those of us in faith traditions may be likely to quickly seek out the latest eschatological prophet who can give us a rough map of how this scenario of invasion fits into the book of Revelation, therefore proving it’s inevitability and rendering us innocent bystanders while people die. We will tend to overspiritualize this whole thing because dealing with the temporal realities of embodied people who are being bombed, is just too painful.
Or we will commit to prayer. And we absolutely should. But this kind of prayer is more than just the Facebook-ready "I'll pray for you" kind of prayer. This is the kind of prayer that begs God to intervene and then perhaps moves us to act in an embodied way that puts to work the mental faculties that God gave us, in the form of educating ourselves about these kinds of geopolitical conflicts, why they happen, and how our voting habits here in the states might be contributing to instability for our brothers and sisters in Ukraine. To say that this is all complex, is quite an understatement, and we all have different capacities for how much time we can give to understanding global issues. But I think it's incumbent upon us as members of a country where we DO get a say in policies and power-brokers with our vote.
Many of us will choose the second option:
B) Emotional Stonewalling.
Relying on our handy coping mechanisms of nationalism, and the insular society that we are privileged to inhabit as Americans, we will largely dismiss the conflict as something happening “over there”. Grappling with the scenario in such a way that we put ourselves in the shoes of someone who won’t be able to sleep tonight for fear that our home will be shelled while our children are tucked in bed, is something that is just too emotionally expensive.
We will choose the luxury of carrying on with our lives, choosing our new paint colors for the walls of the houses we live in that won’t be getting bombed anytime soon, and stressing over the schedules of our families lives which go about unencumbered by fear of a tyrannical dictator blowing us up.
Unfortunately, both of these techniques have turned us into the most marvelous of liars.
We lie to ourselves in order to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay. If we acknowledge the hardships, we must sit with the pain, find ourselves in the story, and reckon with how we have contributed to a world that is so broken.
For many, this is simply a bridge too far. There will be conversations about “strategy” and “national sovereignty” and “political ideology” that are framed as a mere difference of opinion.
There will be blame-shifting and many attempts to pin responsibility on all kinds of different people and entities.
When something is wrong and you know it, and someone else tries to tell you a different story so that you believe the wrong thing is not actually wrong, you begin to feel as though you may be crazy, or unable to interpret reality correctly. This is called gaslighting.
We’ve been part of a collective gaslighting experiment for quite some time now and the results are disorienting. We are all staring at each other thinking “You believe WHAT?!” There are many forces at play in this collective effort of narrative manipulation that leaves us all so uncertain. Fake news, misinformation campaigns, are the easiest to identity. But the more sinister side of this, is the doggedly persevering part of ourselves that causes to continue to choose sin, evil, and death, in order to protect ourselves and our power.
Powerlessness is not something anyone wants.
Acknowledging what’s true and good often requires that we relinquish some of our power in order to serve another. We have become masters at skating out of this in language cloaked with bible verses or political rhetoric (or some marriage of both).
So my plea to you and to myself today is this:
Don’t look away.
Don’t believe convenient lies.
Don’t fall for the idea that some humans are more valuable than others.
Don’t circle the wagons of power in order to preserve a narrative.
Look for what’s true.
Sit with the pain.
Allow yourself to get pissed off about the injustices of the world.
Tell the truth, even when it’s not what people want to hear.