June 2023 – Paul's Blog

Mistakes Were Made but Not by Me

Mistakes were made (but not by me) is a delightfully devastating book chronicling the human tendency to avoid responsibility, to self-justify, to make ourselves look good.

Seen in one way, it lays bare our compulsion to try to control our own sense of goodness.

Holiness, by contrast, consists in coming to realize that:

(1) we are, truly, not any better than anyone else and are quite capable of petty and destructive behavior.

(2) we are, in fact, very, very good… much more so than we could ever manufacture by ourselves, and that unique goodness is a wildly extravagant gift.

Seeing this frees us to avoid the exhausting dead end of a life lived out of the “mistakes were made but not by me” mantra.

So freed, we are able to see that (and talk about how) we participate in a system that is not functioning as well as it could. And then we can ask: “How can I help?” “How can I show up in generosity, bravery, and love to participate (better) in this system?”

The answer to these questions may likely consist in doing less things, but seeing more deeply.

The Blitz

From September 1940 until the following May, in a period called “the Blitz,” German bombers dropped thousands of tons of explosives on the city of London.

Eight million Londoners moved in shelters and subway stations to avoid the destruction of these raids.

And from that time, there is data to suggests that mental health in London improved.

“Not only did these experiences fail to produce mass hysteria, they didn’t even trigger much individual psychosis. Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down. Emergency services in London reported an average of only two cases of “bomb neuroses” a week. Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids. Voluntary admissions to psychiatric wards noticeably declined, and even epileptics reported having fewer seizures. “Chronic neurotics of peacetime now drive ambulances,” one doctor remarked. Another ventured to suggest that some people actually did better during wartime.”

Tribe by Sebastian Junger (pages 47 and 48)

Wild, right?

So, certainly, the paragraph above does not describe everyone’s experience of violence. War is not a good time.

It does make me think, though, that meaningful, communal struggle actually does make us happier, in the long run, than lives oriented around individual comfort.

Instead of constantly rearranging our lives to make them more pleasant, let’s seek lives of responsibility and active love.

Children Are Capable of Depth

My life is blessed with ample evidence of the depth of the interior life of children, and I know that I want to center the recognition of this reality in my life. And yet! It is easy for me, in the daily churn, to forget this depth and / or to act like I haveContinue reading “Children Are Capable of Depth”

Ticker Watching

Have you ever seen one of those cable news finance shows with the stock ticker running on the screen? They are tough to watch for any length of time. There is a LOT of information (paired with emotion-laden narratives spun from that information).

XYZ is up! (But for how long!?)

ABC is down! (Catastrophe! And then HIJ said this thing about LMNOP!)

Sometimes, we do a similar thing with our inner lives, “ticker watching” how happy we are at any moment. We survey and analyze everything that happens through this narrow “happy” lens until we are so exhausted we cannot find the happiness we sought in the first place.

Better to suspend this hyper-analysis, orient our interior life to a longer time horizon, and live more deeply into the experience of active love.

This will lead to places that do not look “happy” at first glance, but ultimately to a deeper joy, more durable contentment, and lasting peace.