Turn on the Inproability Drive full blast….
Published by Amy under Disability Stuff, Jesus, Missions on January 21, 2007Has anyone ever been overwhelmed by the magnitude of something?
Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time to talking to people who are very passionate about social issues. Between my own interests and all my time overseas. It has come up a lot.
I am like a magnet for impossible, unsolvable social and medical problems. Like I don’t think I have single professional or academic interest in something easy or solvable. Sometimes I really wish my life goals were to plant a nice flower garden or vegetable garden, cook excellent food and take long walks. These would be much more achievable and much less impossible when you compare them to my general desire to end injustice particularly in regards to the disabled, the chronically ill and children in addition to being two steps from an activist. I want to be a doctor who works with these same people who in most cases have incurable congenital and or acquired diseases that are hard to diagnose (especially considering I want to do this in the developing world), often hard to manage and basically impossible to treat in many cases.
Every once in a while I have to step back and think about how ridiculous I must appear to most of the rational adult population who encounters me. Gimpy kid who wants to save the world from general evil, injustice and ignorance. Gimpy kid who despite losing the genetic lottery has an impossible faith in what any decent literary critic or anthropologist could write off as a Graceo-Roman myth. Its a miracle no one has set me down yet and tried to talk some sense into my hard little deformed head.
And then I begin think with horror that I am basically one of those beauty pageant contestants who always answer…WORLD PEACE except shorter, less blonde and much more awkward looking.
If you are going to be socially conscious, there is no way you can equally and passionately care about every cause, every justice issue, every war, every detail of your theology/ideology. A. you will never sleep (ok so none of us sleep anyway), B.. you won’t ever know much about anything because you will spend your whole life jumping from one thing to another and C you won’t get anything done.
Ok so that is the practical side, theologically, if we read the New Testament we are sort of off the hook and sort of not. In one way, if we take take scripture in its entirety, there are a lot of demands on us to fight for the helpless, promote peace, justice, Jesus, real relationships, community, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, freedom for the captives, care for widows and orphans, I could go on for another 10 pages… On the other hand, we also told we are gifted for different things which kind makes us all go Woo off the hook…except for our area…or are we? Does every person have an equal responsibility to care about all of that?
I don’t know the answer to that exactly…I am slightly afraid of phrasing an answer at all because I feel like so much of the church in the US outside of couple of crazy people finds a way out of this entirely and that can’t be right. But at the same time we can’t be expected to contribute to everything. It is also impossible to be entirely informed about everything you should care about as a Christian/decent human being/etc. I fear being pelted with a long lecture about the total depravity of humanity and TULIPS and being written off as just another crazy liberally educated heathen.
But even though I don;t know HOW MUCH to care or HOW TO CARE that much. I don’t think Christianity was ever supposed to be about talking about how bad humanity is at least not without dreams and hope that things could be changed and different. I kind of feel like the dreams are dying in so many ways in American Christianity. Much beyond sending people to convert others who may/may not be physically starving, dying of a treatable illness, being oppressed, etc afterwards we sit around and talk about the end of the world and how bad the media/president/church down the street/Duke Basketball/etc is. It easy to not care when you think the world is ending. And frankly you hear a lot more about the end of the world, then the beginning of the kingdom in American churches.
I prefer to focus on the later…as impossible and overwhelming as the task is.
I’ve always liked this letter by Thomas Merton. In my own (limited) experience of activism, it strikes me as being very true:
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.
You are fed up with words, and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean. It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right.
The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.
The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.
The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion. . . .
The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand…
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