Unselfing

I have odd reading habits. I either basically inhale books, reading them in the course of a few days or a few sittings, or pore over them for months (sometimes years) letting them seep into me, bit by bit, piece by piece where and when I need them. One of the books i've been poring over at increasing length lately is a wonderful meditation, of sorts, called "Where Your Treasure Is" by Eugene Peterson. Thus far, it has been very instrumental in reminding me that i'm not the center of the universe. The subtitle of the book is "Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community." [Now that's an intriguing theme, if there ever was one.] In the course of the past week, i've read and re-read a particular section that speaks well to this theme and i'd like to share some of it. Rather than posting a commentary, i'll let the piece speak for itself:

Things are not going very well these days. As a matter of fact, they never have. It is most odd. We live in the midst of extravagant beauties. The earth beneath us and the heavens above us contain shapes and sounds and colors that take our breath away. We ourselves are a marvel of staggering proportions: there is no end to the exuberance of poems, photographs, stories, landscapes, portraits, concerts, machines, tools, buildings, gardens, bridges, engines, dams, lyrics, sonnets, mosaics, sculpture, pottery, and fabrics that human beings make. The American government has been, many people think, the most successful combination of political freedom and responsibility that the world has yet seen. Given the wildly beautiful and awesome land that is our home, the high intelligence and marvelous sensibility of men and women, and the conspicuous success of our political experiment in democracy, why are things so lousy? Why don't things work better? After all these centuries of lectures and sermons, symphonies and legislation, revolutions and railroads, why aren't we all scholars and saints? Thomas Hardy's epitaph is curt and cynical: "After two thousand years of Christian mass/We've got as far as poison gas."

Is there anything to do about it? Most people think that there is. True, there are days when it looks like the race is between bigotry and apathy, between the people who blame all our ills on a hated enemy and the people who have succumbed to the nothing-can-be-done disease. But in fact an enormous amount of energy is poured out each day to make things better: care for the environment, compassion for the hurt, concern for the poor, diligence in government. Great armies of people are out there teaching, healing, legislating, guiding, comforting, rehabilitating. Evil in both its obvious and subtle forms is being fought.

But the impressive number of people committed to doing something about what is wrong with the world does not always bolster hope. A close observation of the lives of those who are trying to do something about the mess around us and an unsentimental look at the results of their efforts are not always heartening. Why, for instance, do people who do good so often behave so badly? Doing good brings out the worst in some people. Why do they become so bad-tempered, so abrasive, so self-righteous? Why do so many impressively launched crusades run out of gas so quickly? Why do so many vigorous moral causes have such short lives? Why does so much well-intentioned, righteous fervor dribble out into sentimentalism? Plunging into the battle does not always bring the intended results. Sometimes our efforts make things worse. Sometimes they make us worse.

...Amitai Etzioni, an immigrant Israeli sociologist, has set forth with urgent passion what he calls "an immodest agenda" in an effort to do something about the precipitous decline of civilization in America. He has abandoned the cool objectivity of his academic discipline and is making a fervent appeal to Americans for a commitment to our common good as a society and a nation. He is convinced that such a commitment must not come from a new social plan or legislative program but from widespread unself-centering. He writes, "It is my thesis that millions of individual Americans, the pillars of a free society and a vigorous economy, have been cut off from one another and have lost their effectiveness....The need to rebuild the economy, national security and the community calls for a social philosophy and an individual orientation that are much less ego-centered." He argues that America must be restructured from the ground up by leadership that demonstrates that the self-centered "me-ism" and other pop psychologies of the past decade will not work over the long American haul.

It is an immodest agenda. But not nearly as immodest as the one Christ set for his followers, who acquired a reputation for turning the world upside down...(and he goes on)

(Peterson 35-36, 46)