January 2022 – Paul's Blog

Do You Think I Have To?

We recently potty-trained our two-year-old. He is fairly independent now. Sometimes, though, he will come to me and ask, “Do you think I have to pee?”

This is, of course, hilarious, and also illustrative of a fascinating human dynamic. There are things that only he, over the course of a life, can know and do only as an individual, as a subject. For example, only he can attend to his inner life. Only he can have his relationship with God. Only he can live into his vocation. (And, of course, only he can know if he has to pee.)

And this is true for each of us. Certainly, I need companions on the journey, for the most important things, but only I can make my most important decisions.

Too often, we externalize responsibility onto things outside of ourselves regarding those themes that only we can know and decide. We look for someone or something to follow instead of listening to our distinct call of how to live in the world.

Better to attune to our experience and make the next best decision.

Memory and Freedom

A sign of interior freedom is the ability to recall one’s past with clear-eyed honesty. This, I think, is true as an individual as well as a collective (as a Christian or an American, say).

The honest recollection of failure is particularly useful. If we resist whitewashing or banishing our failures, they can teach us to live gracefully into the future. This recollection helps us take ourselves less seriously and ask for help more readily; that is, to live in freedom.

And on a lighter note: If we recall with clear eyes the power and tenderness of being accompanied by God and friends of God, we have the strength to live with interior freedom even in the moments when this accompaniment seems distant.

The Sincerely Held Fiction

A fiction is, by definition, not true.

A sincerely held fiction is not true, but is held so tightly that it can appear (to the holder) to be a truth. Rooted in this clinging, social trouble grows.

When we see another person clinging to a sincerely held fiction, it is tricky to communicate with them about. (It is their “truth” after all.). One thing to do, though, is to get curious. How did this person come to cling to this sincerely held fiction?

Trickier still is seeing the dynamic in ourselves. We are blind to our blind spots.

So then. What do we do in order to get perspective on our own sincerely held fictions?

Cultural Ballast

In a large ship, ballast is the stuff (usually water) loaded into the very bottom of the ship intended to provide balance and stability. Ballast can be taken on (to make the vessel more resistant to outside conditions) or disposed of (to make the ship more responsive).

As our culture steams ahead into the future, it is worthwhile to consider: what is our cultural ballast? That is, what have we picked up along the way (in the name of stability) that is making us less responsive to the demands of our time?

We can let go, individually and as a culture, of the things that hold us back. Ballast provides stability, but if stability is not what our times call for (or if it is an illusion) we do well to eliminate it.

One more related point. Biologically, discharged ballast water can have unintended consequences. For example, in 1991, zebra mussels hitched a ride in the ballast water of a cargo ship headed to New York, were released in the Hudson River, and began to dominate its ecosystem.

So, when we eliminate something we need to let go of, how can we do so in a way that avoids harmful, unintended consequences?