The Cultured, Willful Self

Posted on June 26, 2012 by PaulVK

The Most Adaptive Creature on the Planet

The scope of human programmability is astounding. People have figured out how to live in tropical jungles and arctic regions. People have developed cultures where a deity requires the ceremonial sacrifice of incredible numbers of human beings as well as cultures where the taking of even one life is considered wrong. The variations of cultures and norms for this one creature across the globe and throughout history is breathtaking. The Egyptians with ancient tools and methods expended massive amounts of money and man power to build the pyramids. The Chinese at the cost of thousands of lives built the great wall. The Inca built an enormous civilization high in the mountains with intricate stone work that survives in tact to this day. Thousands of tribes and people developed unique yet interconnected ways of relating to one another in groups, ways of raising children, ways of establishing communal harmony and order, ways of enforcing these norms, ways of cooking, ways of praying, ways of securing resources, ways of making sense of the earth, the waters and the sky. One creature has done this all so successfully as to dominate the planet in a way like no other creature. Continue reading →

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Seeing Multiple Selves in Time

Posted on June 25, 2012 by PaulVK

We can’t see our selves

People can’t see themselves. Our eyes are in our sockets and unless we have a mirror we see outwards, not inwards. Just like with our physical bodies we require a mirror to bounce the light off our skin, onto the mirror and back to our eyes in order to see ourselves, so also with our selves we require relational mirrors to reflect back to us a vision of our selves. Just like with a physical mirror any distortions, imperfections, smudges, or flaws will impact the image we see reflected back to us, so also everything we use to view our selves through relationship with will impact the reflected self that we see mirrored back to us and given the sticky nature of our selves may in fact become part of our selves.

Self consciousness

Self-consciousness is something that develops together with the self in the process of development.

We just added an adorable puppy to the family named Mookie. The first night Mookie was in the house he saw his reflection in a sliding door and immediately growled and barked at it. We of course thought it was adorable. “What a silly dog that doesn’t understand that it’s seeing its own reflection in the glass.”

We don’t think about why Mookie can’t recognize his own reflection. Mookie isn’t self-conscious. Mookie doesn’t mind walking around naked, having its bodily functions in plain sight or doing anything at all wherever it wants. Mookie is in this way like a human infant or a very small child.

You may not know this but infants can’t recognize themselves in the mirror. Psychologists study this and believe that a child becomes self-conscious around the time that they begin to recognize themselves in a mirror. This is also probably around the same time that they begin to develop a conscious self and begin to create a self sufficient to collect consciously retrievable memories and begin to construct the story line that we associate with our lives. The child has become a self the child itself can recognize and begin the lifelong task of relating, mirroring, associating, constructing, evaluating, and participating at a whole new level to the broader, social and cultural story of humanity. This small being already at a very young age will be a culture maker and will already start to contribute to something much larger than her self, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves in our own story here, back to the child.

When I lived in a tropical climate and my children were very small we would let them run around naked. They loved it. Like Mookie they simply lived freely, without hot and restrictive clothing, they peed and pooped wherever and whenever they felt like it. It was Eden.

At some point, of course, they began to realize they were naked. Then they started to cover themselves up, close their bedroom door when they were changing. They became self conscious. From that point on the world was not the same. Their conscious interactions with the world didn’t just involve the world, even though all the while they were unconsciously developing a reflected sense of self, they were not self conscious actors or characters in their stories. They were certainly selves and actors in my story, but they didn’t at that point have a storyline within their own heads that they played within. After developing a conscious self they would reach back and appropriate the self that they were, but could not know at that time in their development into their selves, but prior to the capacity for maintaining a conscious self they couldn’t host it.

Multiple selves once again

This of course brings us back to a question we faced in the introduction. Are we one self or are we multiple selves? There is the self that others see, complete with the necessary accoutrements and filters of identity, and there is the self that we see ourselves as being and the imagined true self that we imagine and very much desire to have, to be, to know and to see.

Before we know our own selves there is the self that our parents and others around us know. There is something there as any parent can attest to. That body is simply not yet capable of hosting its own self. That self is not only dependent upon its body and its brain as critical medium of its own self, but it is dependent upon a group of observers and other selves within its relational network. It is a self, distinct and identifiable in itself, but it is also dependent upon a web of selves in relationship with itself to exist. Those relationships are defining it, helping construct it as it constructs its own self while that cloud of selves carries it along until it can grow up and develop enough to be a much larger actor in the development of its own self along with the broader story and culture that the larger group is creating.

Glimpses of a larger world

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here, but I do want us to pause and note how selves require observers and relaters to create additional selves and the broader work of selves which is culture.

We will soon get into discussions about selves, the physical world are a part of, the world that is the host for our relational world, and the ways that our selves bring them together, but we should note how our selves bend time, space and existence by the work that they do.

Before a child can host a self that self exists and is sewn into a web of selves and of culture that will imprint not only the coming relational world but also the coming physical world. Just as a child’s mother hosts that child before that child’s body is ready to face the world more independently, so also the parents and relational network around that child host that child’s self until the self is prepared to be a self at a more independent level. The parents and relational network around the child help construct that child’s self, providing to it a world of assumptions, morals, norms, that will become as much a part of that child as the DNA within the body, much of it unconsciously all the while shaping that future self.

We should note that this process involves a certain amount of transcending time. While the conscious self will very much travel through time in the way we all experience, that self exists hosted by others selves in its relational world around it before that self knows itself to exist. A shadow, reflection and disembodied self will in fact continue to exist after its physical host is no longer able to support it. As a pastor I hear people talk this way all the time. “He’s not gone, he’s still in my heart.” Again, we’ll take a closer look at this later.

We should note that past selves continue to exist in a diminished form even when the self in time has changed. Parents fondly remember their pre-self-conscious children even after the child has developed a conscious self. Loved ones of Alzheimer’s victims desire the self that the body is now both changing and in real terms destroying.

These selves are all real to us even if no longer hosted or in development, diminished but still a part of the broader relational network and project of culture making. As long as there is someone or something to host the memory, record or consequence of a self, that self in some for endures. The hosting of selves is very flexible in that way, and as we will see later, this is something that should give us hope. Time and the ravages of decay may not necessarily govern all things, but we have a lot more work to do before we explore the question of multiple stories further. For now we should note that while selves travel through time, they are themselves not completely subject to it.

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The Sticky Self and the Reflected Self

Posted on June 25, 2012 by PaulVK

Earlier I wrote about identity and the self. If we imagine the self to be a house, then identity is the space and the medium through which we see the house, the walls that can be painted, the front and back yards where things can be placed or removed, where there are private and public spaces within the boundaries of the property. Identity is how that self is seen, how that self is located by others and by itself. In our language we sometimes use identity and the self as interchangable. Sometimes we see them as distinct. Some items of our identity are like items on the lawn that can be moved or re-arranged. Some items seems to be more like paint on the house, something so tightly bonded to the self that we can’t help but see them together.

Human selves are sticky selves. It is as if we are covered with glue, or velcro, or tar. As we go through life all kinds of things stick to us and become aspects of our selves.

Another helpful imagine I think for our selves is a body of mass in space. A body of mass in space by gravity attracts other things to itself. Think about the earth floating through space. The earth attracts to itself all kinds of space debris that get caught in its gravitational field. Some of these things plunge down to earth, make a crater, and themselves become part of the earth. Other things don’t fall but rather stay in orbit around the earth like the moon. Other things are launched from the earth and travel to distant places or stay in orbit around the earth, like satellites.

The self is sticky, like a hairy little dog that walks through the field picking up burrs, ticks, dry leaves. It stops to nibble on bugs and other things left in the grass. It accumulates items as it travels. Some of these things will remain with it for a time, other things will become a more permanent part of it.

The self is like a body with gravity that attracts other things to itself.

Most of what the self collects is not physical, but relational and social. We don’t collect these things so much through touch, but we collect them through sight and relationship. We encounter “things” around us many which are not physical at all, and we take them in, making them part of our location and appearance, or even more deeply part of our very selves. These things begin to define us as we often define them. As these things are imprinting upon us, we are labeling them as good, desirable, attractive, evil, objectionable, hated, taboo, and sometimes important, or indifferent. The self is deeply connected to its environment. We might argue there is no such thing as a human self apart from its environment.

How do we collect these things? Through reflection.

The Reflected Self

A thought that changed my life was in David Schnarch’s book “Intimacy and Desire” where he observed that our first self is a reflected self.

Normal people depend on others for their sense of identity, self-worth, and security. We do so because we are generally at a common modest level of personal development. A reflected self is the first self we have. Many people never develop much of a solid self and engage in borrowed functioning all their lives.

Schnarch, David (2011-07-01). Intimacy & Desire (p. 46). Beaufort Books. Kindle Edition.

We’ll get into a lot more of this later on but for now I want us to reflect on this idea of our first self, our sticky self, the process by which we develop a self is through the vehicle of reflection. This is not to say that we don’t through our genetics bring something into the relationship, we certainly do. Our genetics create the eyes to see and the initial structure we’ll use to do all of this mirroring and reflecting. Even the reflecting of past generations may be inherited by us through our epigenetics. The development of a self is a unique interaction of the creature we are, received by the union of sperm and egg with the genetics, epigenetics and the interactions prior to birth, with all that follows.

As I said before our selves don’t need to come into physical contact to attach to other things in our universe, like gravity they just need to come into relational contact. We’ll get into the question of physicality and ontology later, but what we’ll see here is that relationship although not a thing that can be studied like the gravitational forces of physics that pull the planets together, shapes our selves in ways that are just as real and subject to their own laws as the laws of physics shape the planetary bodies that float in space. We develop relationally through the other bodies in play through our relational space around us.

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The Pre-Self You

Posted on June 23, 2012 by PaulVK

Being Born

Growing up when and where I did shaped my self and my identity. Most of us feel this way. While we recognize the nature/nurture puzzle most of us admit that both our genetics and our experiences shape us.

Another one of the interesting people in my father’s church was a woman named Sheila. Unlike Pat, I don’t remember much of her, but I do remember one thing about her. She claimed to be able to remember being born.

I always found this to be a fascinating idea both because I thought we should remember being born, and because she was the only person that I had ever heard of make to make that assertion.

In his book “The Self Illusion” Bruce Hood addresses this question.

There are always the odd few (and, indeed, they are odd) who say they can remember being born—passing down the birth canal and being slapped on the bottom by the midwife. Most have no memory of self before their second birthday and, even then, the memories from around that time are fragmented and unconnected. It’s not that you have forgotten what it was like to be an infant—you simply were not “you” at that age because there was no constructed self, and so you cannot make sense of early experiences in the context of the person to whom these events happened.

Hood, Bruce (2012-04-25). The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (p. 76). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

We know that even preborn babies can form memories. Babies after they are born can recognize music and the voices of their parents from their time inside the womb, but they have no “self” to hang those memories upon. The memories exist in their brain, but the yet to be developed conscious self hasn’t begun the job of cataloging and archiving memories which will make them accessible.

How are Google and other web search engines able to retrieve so much information on the Internet? They have spider bots that constantly crawl the web to catalogue and copy the information they find in the network. Until that spider bot is developed, information can be stored, but it won’t be accessible to other parts of the brain.

The You Above Your Pay Grade

When something breaks and I don’t want to pay for the labor and expertise of another to fix it I often try my own hand at being repairman. My average isn’t great. I’ll try to take the thing apart and see if I can somehow guess my way through to get the thing working again. So far I haven’t injured myself or my family and how-to videos on the web have been a great aid, but most of the time I need to humbly admit I am no expert and should stick to the things I know about.

In his book “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain” David Eagleman explores the parts within you your brain doesn’t let you know about. We imagine that we are the bosses of ourselves and that being in charge means full and free access to all that we are. It seems this is not the case.

Our conscious selves ride atop a much larger, locked down, controlling brain that wisely restricts access to a variety of mission critical systems that we would be foolish to tamper with. Much of the mundane functioning of our bodies is run by our brain completely apart from our conscious selves. If we suddenly stopped breathing because we forgot, or if our heart stopped beating because we weren’t paying attention, we wouldn’t live for long. The brain and the body together have all kinds of deeply, interconnected systems shielded from the conscious brain. Our mind and our body wisely don’t trust us with our selves. This is vitally important for infants who have no conscious self with which to entrust.

Baby Work

If you watch infants and small children you see that they in fact are constantly working. They are working to figure out about their self. They learn how to operate hands and feet, where they end and other people begin, both physically and relationally. Beyond the physical the development of their self is one if their central projects. Our minds are wired for relationship and it is in fact in relationship that the self develops.

It seems that we are in fact hard wired to learn and learn through relationship. It is not the case that we are simply sponges taking in random information, we learn our world through relationships. If there isn’t a relational element to the learning, we ignore it. We implicitly trust that the other selves around us know something valuable and we are able to smartly read into this and learn from this. As Bruce Hood notes we do all of this without the help of our conscious selves.

To be able to copy others is one of the most powerful skills with which humans are born. From the very beginning, babies are sophisticated people-watchers, following adults around and copying their behaviors.

This is because humans have been programmed to imitate. If an infant watches an adult perform some new action on a never-before-seen object, a 1-year-old will remember and copy the behavior 1 week later.68 The child knows what the goal of the action is even when the adult is thwarted by some problem. In one study, a female adult looked and smiled at 14-month-old infants and then leaned forward to activate a light-switch on a box by bending over and touching it with her forehead. When presented with the light-switch box, the babies produced the same bizarre movement. However, if the woman had her arms wrapped in a blanket and did exactly the same movement with her forehead, the babies did not copy the head movement but activated the light-switch on the box with their hands. The babies must have reasoned that, because the woman’s hands were restricted, her goal was simply to press the switch. When her hands were not bound, however, babies must have reasoned that using your head was important for activating the light-switch.

Many animals can copy but none does so for the pure joy of being sociable. Copying is not an automatic reflex. Babies do not slavishly duplicate every adult action they see. If the adult does not smile and get the babies’ attention from the start, then babies don’t copy. Also, babies only copy adults who seem to know what they are doing. Initially, babies will copy the actions of an adult who is wearing a blindfold. The baby does not know that the adult cannot see. However, if you give the baby the blindfold to play with, then she doesn’t make the mistake of copying the blindfolded adult again. Babies know that a blindfolded adult can’t possibly be looking at anything worth paying attention to. In other words, babies will only copy adults when they are led to think that something is worth doing.

Hood, Bruce (2012-04-25). The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (pp. 62-63). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

What we see through this is that we as people, even before the development of our conscious selves seem to be built for creative, social, joyful learning and development. We are built to learn and do and create and grow and develop and to do all of this in relationship with other selves. We do this even before we know our self and we do it for joy.

We Want What We Want

You may have also noted that this tiny creature, which has not yet developed the self that you and I experience and assume, wants. Every parent knows this. Mothers eat something and have a sense that the baby liked or didn’t like it. After the trauma of the birth passage the newborn wants the warmth and consolation of the breast. Infants express themselves clearly to their attentive parents communicating different things through different cries. This creature that has not yet developed a conscious self wants and has definite opinions about a whole variety of things.

My sister was trying to be a good mother by keeping her precious daughter from sugar. My mother didn’t share in this doctrine of sugar prohibition and on one hot summer outing introduced my niece to ice cream. The result was dramatic and predictable. Her eyes light up, she knew that she liked it, and she wanted more. My sister’s cherished ideals were bested by a frozen dairy product. Once enjoyed, my niece’s world was changed. The world was better with ice cream no matter what Mama said.

It’s not just food that drives us, of course. The process by which we are attracted so some things and not others is mysterious and often locked away from us by our tyrannical brains that refuse to explain themselves. We are attracted to things and we don’t know why. Some of our attractions are easy to understand, many others are not. As we begin to explore the construction of our selves and our identities these needs and wants will become foundational, and remember, they happen, as we saw, in relationship to the needs and wants of others.

We live in a formative triangle between our selves, the things that we want, love, need, or find powerfully attractive, and the other selves in our relational world. It is within the dynamics of these triangles that the stories of our lives, our purpose, our meaning, and joy and fulfillment, or despair will be found.

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On the Identity and the Self

Posted on June 22, 2012 by PaulVK

“I am the REAL American Beauty!”

Northside Chapel was a lively place to be raised as a boy. The small racial reconciliation church planted by my father in Paterson’s poor first ward was filled with characters with enough interesting stories to fill his book. It was a place where white and black, sober and drunk, clean and high, clear and confused could find community, hope, respect, and a bit of help when needed.

Prayer request time in the service gave this motley crew an opportunity to express themselves and on one particular Sunday morning Pat stood up to declare that she was indeed the “real American beauty”.

Although Pat was not necessarily a homely woman, few of us would have suspected she had ever been a beauty queen, or was even in the running for such an award.

Her declaration was not merely an announcement, it was a vigorous assertion. In her mind some apparently within the relational network of this small congregation, possibly prompted by the appearance of the guest pianist that morning, doubted her beauty credential and she was determined, in the joys and concerns portion of the worship service, to set the record straight. The more forceful she attempted to drive her point home, the more difficulty I, as a boy, had to keep from laughing.

Identity

This would become a story repeated by many in the church for years to come punctuated by the declaration “I am the real American beauty!” This was an aspect of her identity that she clearly wished to have validated by those around her. When we remembered Pat, we remembered this story.

Identity is important. Identity fills out the self, gives it distinction, affords room for attributes. Identity creates a space, a facade, a front and back yard if you will, where public and private aspects and attributes are attached, stored, displayed, recognized affirmed or denied.

If the self is the core thing that is you, identity becomes a space for expression and a meeting space around the self where the possessions of the self are accessible both to the self and to other selves.

For Pat, being the real American beauty was an important item in this space and she wished that those around her, those who had access to this public/private space would recognize, affirm and respect her credential.

Identity and the self in Community

The identity is a space around the self, with both private and public parts, some of which is under the control of the self, and some of it was not. Some of the items in that space we consider to be hard, public facts, and other items are we consider to be softer, thinner, weaker, more open to debate.

Had Pat really won a beauty contest? Most of us who saw her had our doubts. Whether or not she had was a matter of historical record. Either she had or she hadn’t.

It may be that she entered a contest but had not been awarded the prize. According to Pat she rightly should have won that contest, but due to the judgment of other persons, she was deprived of the victory. The pianist that Sunday morning apparently reminded Pat of the person Pat thought had robbed her of her crown and quite possibly this prompted the public declaration of this cherished piece of her identity.

Pat’s assertion of her credential, of this cherished token of her identity held within it an appeal to ideal standard, an ideal scenario, and ideal narrative where she would, in her opinion, measure up to this ideal and be awarded by others who would know this ideal, this prize of being the real American beauty.

In the space around her self, that we call her identity, a good deal of exchange would be happening around this subject. The award of being the real American beauty would change the image of her self, both as viewed by her self, and as viewed by others seeing her self through this identity.

Identity can also be seen as clothing upon the self. Clothing creates identity and confers on the wearer status, it can express something of the self, or not. How it is seen by others depends greatly upon other items within that community.

Pat’s Identity in the Story

I have in just a few paragraphs through the vehicle of story created in your mind an image of Pat. I have said very little about her, it is quite likely that your mind has filled in the story with things from your own life. You have probably filled in the story with items from your identity space. Pat has become real to you, in a very small way, just by reading these words.

A few dozen people, some of which will read this book, actually knew Pat. They knew her as a young, African American woman struggling with schizophrenia in Paterson’s north side. Having now named “schizophrenia” the image of Pat for many of you changed wildly. Perhaps you have a family member or a friend with schizophrenia. Now the story of “the real American beauty” sounds more doubtful, less real, more sad.

There are more stories of my mother trying to discourage Pat from bathing in the bathroom sink of the church, or my father trying to encourage her to take her medicine, of the church folks keeping the phone number of her father handy so that he could come and bring her home when she would get too disruptive even for the commonly chaotic Northside Chapel.

Now many of you are feeling sympathy for Pat and her family. Pat would die young, never experiencing relief from her mental illness. Initially you might have seen her, as I saw her as a boy, as a comic figure, but now you and I together see her as a tragic figure. There was, behind all of that identity a self just as real as our own, and we somehow through the story feel a connection with that self.

We have an intuitive sense that that self existed, because we exist. Does that self still exist? Does it exist only in this story that now populates this page and still resides in the minds and hearts of those who knew her? How does that self relate to those items of her identity? We have more to explore.

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Paul in Philippi Joyfully Bears Jesus’ Substitutionary Cross and Shares in his Vindication

Posted on June 21, 2012 by PaulVK

Trouble Finds Him

Paul having released the slave woman from her bondage to the python spirit now has to face her earthly masters. According to Luke, Paul and Silas are physically assaulted by the her owners and brought before the authorities.

Paul has been in trouble with the Jews in previous cities, now he’s in trouble because he’s a Jew. The woman’s masters as we might imagine are crafty political and social operatives and they know how to spin things to get the outcomes they want. Xenophobia is engaged and Paul and Silas are presented to those entrusted with public peace and security as a threat. They are foreigners who are trying to subvert the Roman way in this Roman colony and now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their city. Very quickly a mob mentality takes hold, Paul and Silas are publicly stripped of their clothing (public shaming, echoing Jesus’ public stripping) and severely beaten with rods.

The officials in charge pretty quickly summed up the score. Someone had to pay for the spoiling of the profitability of the slave girl and the quickest, easiest way was with a beating, a night in jail, and giving the bum’s rush out of town. Paul and Silas are turned over to the jailer to receive the jail’s most secure hospitality. Their feet are set in stocks on the floor, legs spread apart.

Diverse and Incongruous Excellencies

In the previous story we saw Paul being frustrated by the repeated, ironic cries for help of the slave woman. Her persistent misrepresentational of Paul’s mission gets under his skin. Luke uses a word her only found twice in the Bible, the other time also by Luke in Acts of the Sadducees in their annoyance at Paul and John’s preaching the resurrection and also in the Greek Old Testament of God’s sorrow at how his created humanity had turned out in Genesis 6:6. Paul wheels around in frustration and delivers her.

We might imagine that Paul on the floor, in painful stocks, with untreated wounds from his recent beating would be filled with more frustration. We might imagine him to be bitter, angry, ready to quit. Not too long before he had been stoned outside of another town. Now he was unjustly assaulted, beaten by the town officials and imprisoned. What do we find he and Silas doing of all things, singing praises to God.

We don’t get the sense from the story that Paul was singing imprecatory psalms looking for revenge from his enemies. We more get the image of a joyful suffering. Paul, like Jesus, was fully subject to frustration and pain, yet there were also resources by which he could forgive enemies and rejoice in suffering. It’s an amazing image.

If you read commentaries about this chapter mental illness usually will come up with respect to the slave woman’s python spirit. Although there are other descriptions of demon possession in the Gospels that look like mental illness, she doesn’t qualify. Ancients were well aware of what mental illness looked like, the king of Gath upon witnessing David’s act of lunacy in the book of Samuel mutters “haven’t I enough crazy people already in my town, why add this guy?” The ancients wouldn’t have shelled out good money to hear the ravings of a crazy person, I’m sure you could get that for free in Philippi just like you can in Sacramento.

What is stranger still than the woman with the python spirit is the behavior of Paul and Silas in prison. This is a kind of insanity we all wish to possess. It would seem rational to be bitter and vindictive, but they are forgiving and joyful, praising and praying in the midst of their unjust suffering.

Jesus doesn’t take away our suffering, he makes it like his own as he is making us like him.

Earthquake

While Paul and Silas sing, and the other prisoner’s wonder at the strangeness of this, an earthquake hits the jail and the doors open and the chains unlocked.

Don’t forget that Luke is having Paul mirror Peter in this story. Peter was miraculously sprung from prison and now Paul will be.

The jailer comes out, asks for light, and in panic and despair reasonably assumes the prisoners will have flown the coup and he’ll be held accountable for them, his life for theirs. Paul here again, substitutes his own well being for that of another and tells the jailer that all are accounted for, especially Paul and Silas.

Sacraments

The next scene is beautiful. The wounds Paul and Silas have endured in his unjust beating are now washed by the jailer and he invites them into his home for a meal. Paul and Silas had been welcomed into Lydia’s household, and shared her table. Now their former enemy turned newly ransomed sets a table before Paul and Silas.

The jailer washes Paul and Silas’ wounds, and Paul and Silas wash away the jailer’s sins and the sins of his family. There are now at least two baptized households in the town of Philippi. They share baptism, and they share the meal.

Why not use the “get out of jail free” card? 

The next day Paul and Silas are summoned to be given the bum’s rush out of town, but now Paul springs on the city officials that they are Roman citizens. This turns the tables of Roman law and reveals the injustice of the previous day’s events.

Many wonder why Paul and Silas didn’t prevent their mistreatment the day before when they could have. Were they unable to present their credentials as Roman citizens? We don’t really know.

Perhaps Paul would not use his prerogative as a Roman citizen to prevent his humiliation, just like Jesus wouldn’t use his prerogative as God’s son to prevent his humiliation. Paul and Silas in their humiliation were bearing witness to the new believers what the cruciform way actually looked like. Paul and Silas were free indeed, free enough to sing in suffering, yet not free from the cross of Christ.

One person who I’ve never seen mentioned at this point in the story is the slave girl. She has been freed from the python spirit but she is still bound in her slavery to her masters. Now no longer possessing a marketable capacity for divination what service would this woman now need to provide to make some money for her masters? Would she cook, clean, watch children, work in the fields, or provide sexual services? All of which would be expected of a slave. Part of me wonders if Paul suffered for her.

Paul and Silas, at the cost of their own flesh and blood bought her freedom from the python spirit, and now at the cost of their freedom bought the rescue of the jailer and his family as well.

Vindication

Perhaps the drama that concludes this story mirrors the vindication of the resurrection. Paul and Silas now reveal that they suffered voluntarily for the servant woman and the jailer’s household. They didn’t need to have been beaten or imprisoned, but they did so freely, willingly, happily for the redemption of the others. Paul and Silas wanted this publicly known probably to publicly correct the misleading proclamation of the slave woman and to publicly demonstrate who and what Jesus was to the people.

Paul and Silas in this story follow in the footsteps of Christ. They shared in his ministry of freeing the bound from demons. They shared in his ministry of freeing the prisons from their chains (Luke 4). They shared in his ministry of suffering and humiliation. And now they share in his ministry of vindication.

Who and what is a Christian, even in the context of a Roman city that had little knowledge of the Jewish story? Christians are substitutionary people who willingly suffer for the wellbeing of even their enemies.

The world lives by the logic of “my wellbeing at your expense.” This is exactly what the life of the slave woman was. Paul and Silas live by the opposite equation “your wellbeing at my expense.” The do so freely, happily, voluntarily, and joyfully. In the process a woman is no longer a caballo for a spirit, and a jailer and his family find new freedom from the Roman way of retribution.

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The Philippian Slave Woman casts Paul as the Unjust Judge of Luke 18

Posted on June 21, 2012 by PaulVK

Here Comes Trouble

After Paul accepts Lydia’s benefaction and he and his party (Timothy, Silas and Luke) are received into her home in the city of Philippi.  As seems to be the case of Paul if he isn’t causing trouble then trouble finds him all by itself. On his way to the place of prayer, which we assume was the river spot where he met Lydia and the other women in their al fresco synagogue of sorts, he met another woman, this one a slave.

Slaves were not unusual, of course, in the Roman empire. Slaves were people owned to generate income for their masters. This slave had a special power, apparently, that made her quite valuable to her masters. She was known to have a spirit of divination or as Luke calls it a “python spirit” probably associated with the python of the fabled oracle of Delphi. I assume she was a fortune teller of sorts, giving advice to paying customers about the future. Apparently she was popular because her masters were making a good living from her.

This slave woman with the python spirit once she saw Paul apparently couldn’t get enough of him. According to Luke she followed him for DAYS crying out “These men are slaves of the most high god, who proclaim to you the way of salvation!”

Hearing Words Through the Audience

Christians of course read this passage and hear similar stories of Jesus’ life reverberate. These two stories come from Luke’s telling of Jesus’ life as well. In Luke 4 there is a man with an “unclean” spirit who calls Jesus “the Holy One of God” and in Luke 8 the spirits “Legion” in the famous Gerasene Demoniac call Jesus “the Son of the Most High God”. Christians commonly hear validation in this demonic outcries and some of that is what Luke intends, but it is important to ask the question “how would the onlookers in Philippi understand this woman’s proclamation?”

In this passage in Acts it is easy for us to hear Christian code talk both in the cry of the slave woman and later in the despair of the prison guard. We should pull back from these assumptions and at least pause a bit to explore how these words would have been understood in that particular historical context, to the best we can imagine.

We already know that the world story of the Jews has likely not deeply impacted the mind-share of Philippi. The ladies interested in Yhwh, unable to must enough men for a real synagogue are forced to pray outside the city by the river. This slave girl was likely a sort of a public figure in the town where clearly the wealthy and the powerful pay her masters to hear her revelations. In Paul’s wake she’s handing out samples and these samples would have been understood within the cultural framework of the audience.

Undermining Her Own Market

What market place did this divining slave woman operate within? She was a slave of the Python spirit as well as her earthly masters and the trade she plied was “salvation”. People don’t pay large sums for parlor tricks very often, but in the ancient world, and even today, they will dig deep for insider information.

Just as everyone in our world KNOWS that the insider information revealed by material and social scientists expose the inner workings of the universe and people’s minds, and with enough skill such people can make predictions about the course of the future. Everyone in Paul’s time KNEW that the spirits were one step ahead of us in knowledge and power and if you could find one willing to deal in the coin of our realm you could procure insider information from the spirit world and get a leg up on your competition. This leg up offered the buyers of this information a strategic advantage in the hopes of securing for themselves favorable political, social and economic outcomes. It was kind of like getting tomorrow’s newspaper today so you could pick the winning stocks and lottery numbers.

This transaction with the spirit world of course came at a price. I don’t know much about ancient divination but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed much in 2000 years. Divination is of course practiced in most parts of the world today, more quietly in secular regions like our own, but the transactions are simple. The spirit that we hope to offer the insider information agrees to cough up something of value if the spirit can borrow carnal enjoyment from the host. In the Dominican Republic this usually involved smoking, drinking, music or perhaps something of a sexual nature. The spirit gets to use or “ride” the “caballo” or “horse”, which is the medium, and in exchange the medium gets cash from the person looking for the data. In this case of course, the slave woman does the time, and her masters get the cash.

This woman’s market value is in her ability to sell “salvation” as would have been understood by the people of the city of Philippi. Now she is walking behind Paul and his friends announcing freely, giving it away for nothing, clearly apart from her master’s supervision, that Paul has better stuff than even her own. While she’s a slave of the python spirit, Paul is a slave of the most high god (they wouldn’t have known the name of Yhwh of course) and he is offering a way to salvation from that god. Paul’s got better juice and she’s going around publishing it!

Paul’s Dilemma

Now we might imagine that Paul would be flattered by this. Paul IS a slave of the “most high god” offering a way to salvation, but the terms mean something very different from what the Philippians would have understood.

If you remember the story of Paul in Lystra in Acts 14 he was confused with Zeus himself and Paul didn’t care for that. Despite the potentially lucrative marketing this woman is offering for free she is giving exactly the wrong impression of what Paul is about. It seems Paul tolerates this for a few days and then just can’t seem to take it anymore, turns and commands the spirit to come out of her in the name if Jesus, and it goes.

Now there are ironies to this passage. On the first day when Paul met this girl he didn’t say “oh my, look at this poor creature in bondage BOTH to the python spirit AND to her masters, I’m going to release her.”

Paul seems to be keeping his head down, and his mouth shut and focusing his attention on working with the group of praying women at the river. He’s not looking for a fight or looking for trouble. He’s minding his own business.

A Cry for Help

It is interesting here in this story that the person crying out for help in this very unusual way is the slave woman. She is, in a sense, using the python spirit to undermine it’s own mission and it’s own end. The woman is seeking help and she will not be deterred.

In a strange way she like Lydia is asking for help and challenging Paul to come to her rescue. She is like the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7 and Matthew 15 whose daughter is tormented by a demon. The disciples put her off and she even has to talk Jesus into helping her.

She is like the persistent widow of Luke 18 who simply will not be denied. However mission focused Paul is she will simply NOT be deterred from seeking and securing her freedom from this spirit so she will pester Paul until he finally relents, not out of mercy, but out of sheer frustration, again like the unjust judge of Luke 18.

Substitutionary Sacrifice

God loves making great stories, and he usually casts his servants in uncomfortable roles. Paul frees the slave woman from her python spirit, but not from her earthly masters. We don’t know whether or not they cut her loose after she lost her market value to them, once she was no longer a profitable horse for their patrons to ride, but they would now exact a price from Paul for the deliverance he gave to their golden goose.

Deliverance from bondage usually requires payment, and Paul would pay to set this woman free with his own blood. Her masters would use the wealth, connections and power afforded them at her expense to pass the charges onto Paul. In God’s strange economy, however, the blood of the substitute just keeps freeing. More in the next story.

Posted in Devotional Reflection, On the way to Sunday's sermon | 1 Comment

This Book is about You

Posted on June 20, 2012 by PaulVK

This book is about you.

You probably imagine that your life is a story and you are the character this story is about. I doubt that most of you can seriously imagine your life in any other way. You naturally relate to people and things around you. You make decisions about your life. You have feelings about all kinds of things. You want to be happy. You don’t want to suffer. You’d like to manage your life in such a way that it is filled with meaning, importance, happiness, and beauty.

You have also got fears and hopes. Hopes that things will work out well for you and those you love. Fears that they will not. You make decisions based on these hopes and fears trying to influence the people and things around you so that your story goes well.
At the center of all of this is you. Whatever happens around you, the one true thing that you don’t seriously doubt that you are in the story.

Rene Descartes, a 17th century French philosopher uttered the one line of philosophy that nearly everyone seems to get “I think therefore I am”.

He believed this truth to be the solid foundation upon which the rest of the world could be known and he tried to justify his knowledge of the world based on this one incontrovertible assertion. Whatever else you know or don’t know about Descartes, you probably share this idea with him. There is a you and you are the vital concern of its self.

You and the self

At the heart of the you you know is what we usually call the self. The self is the third person perspective on the you you know and can’t imagine being without. You live the story from the first person. We see the self from the third person. This book is about your self, my self, the self itself. You will notice me breaking up a lot of the self words throughout the book to add emphasis to the self because in the English language we are always talking about the self.

Self-Advice

You are regularly given advice about your self. A lot of this advice comes from your friends, your teachers, your parents and others who care about you or at least have ideas they would like to share. Think about how often you hear these phrases about your self:

“be true to your self” or “to your self be true”
“believe in your self”
“be your self”

This advice is supposed to also be simple and obvious to all. You are supposed to know your self and the admonition of the advice is to only do things in alignment with that self that you are.

When we are offered this advice, as individuals or as a group we usually nod in agreement and the specific application of the admonition is left up to the self to follow through. Surely the self must know how to apply this advice because how could someone not know their own self?

In my experience this is kind of a social game we play with each other to encourage each other, but it doesn’t really come to much. There is a lot more strangeness to this self-advice than we wish to publicly admit.

“I was not my self”

After someone does something that they later regret it is common to hear them say “I was not my self”.

What this means of course is that they have an idea of who or what their self is, an established pattern by which this self should or does behave, and that this one incident or a series of incidences are not in accordance with that self or their established pattern of behavior.

When we say this of our self, we are usually expressing regret, shame or embarrassment. Sometimes when we say it of others they we are thinking that they have broken with the pattern of behavior we know them selves to be. Sometimes we say it of others because we know that what they’ve done is exactly how they normally behave, but they don’t know their own self well enough, or they are dishonest with others about who or what their self really is.

Despite all of the admonitions about your self you may quickly realize that actually knowing this self as a singular entity is more complicated than the admonitions suggest. Many people in fact recognize that even though they know themselves to be one you or one self, there are many selves within that one self that are experienced and known.

The self that others know

We all know that we carry around in our minds ideas about who the other selves are that inhabit our own stories. These selves have identities that we have constructed either through direct interaction or stories about these other selves. We also know that others possess these ideas about our selves, that they have in their minds ideas about who we are, how we behave, what we believe and how we feel.

We also know that there is disagreement between how we see our selves and how others see our selves. I might think myself honest, trustworthy, responsible, loyal and good, while others may see me as duplicitous, irresponsible, disloyal and evil.

The part of my self that is out there for public view, subject to the judgments of others we often call our reputation. We understand that this is a reduced copy of our self, knowing our self to be more complex, more nuanced, deeper and more profound than our reputation, but hopefully somewhat in agreement with it.

Each of us naturally believes that we know our self better than anyone else. We live with our self in our waking and even our dreaming moments. We know our secrets. We know our hopes, our dreams, our fears. No one else could possibly know our own self the way we do. Or so we think.

Even though we think we know our own self better than anyone else could, we have doubts about each other’s capacity to know their own selves.

We recognize that each of us have what we call bias that distorts our view of our own self.

We recognize that our bias towards our own self is usually slanted in favor of our self. Many of us think highly of our own self, more highly than others think of us. While we think we know our own self better than anyone else, we imagine our self to be the exception to that rule. We imagine that we can see others more clearly than they can see their self. We imagine we know their self more truly than they know their self because of their bias. What a strange thing this is.

The First Impression and the Intimate Stranger

To make matters worse, this dynamic impacts us all unevenly. It would be nice if we could say that public knowledge of our self increased simply with additional information about that self but that isn’t true.

We all know what a first impression is. It is that tiny image of the other’s self that we create in our minds when we first encounter that other self either in person or by reputation. We instantly form an impression of that person and we all know that this impression endures and shapes any subsequent information regarding that person.

Let’s imagine we have met someone new, and we have formed that first impression probably based on how they look, what they are wearing, what they are doing when we first laid eyes on them, or perhaps on a shaped telling of their reputation told to us by someone else. The more we get to know that person the first impression is either confirmed, challenged, or nuanced. The experience we have with that person the more the deeper our knowledge of their self becomes for us. We feel like we are getting to know them better and better.

Again, we would imagine that this knowledge would simply compound and become broader and deeper and higher and truer, and that person’s thoughts, words and behaviors would become more and more predictable to us, but it isn’t quite that simple.

The more we get to know that person, the more we begin to realize that although our image of that person has gotten more and more accurate and detailed over time, we also begin to discover how much we don’t know about this person. We begin to realize that this other person is in fact a person, which means that their self is more multi-faceted, more nuanced, more complicated, more unpredictable, more free, more wild than our mental image of that person could ever be. They are alive, living apart from the image we have constructed of their self. We actually begin to know them AS a self, like our own self.

The True Self

Once we begin to admit that our own self is complicated, and that we inhabit this story with other selves which are equally complicated and mysterious, then we begin to desire simplicity, clarity and certainty. We know that there are selves, and that they are complicated and challenging to know, but we also insist that there must, beneath all of this confusion be a true self, a unified self, a self which is knowable, unchangeable (more on this word later) and definite. Beneath all of this there must be a definite me, and a definite you.

All of the “self” admonitions in fact appeal to this true self.

“To your self be true.”
“Believe in your self.”
“Be your self.”

There must somehow be one self, beneath all of the confusion, that both exists and is somehow knowable. This quest for this one self has energized religions, philosophies, quests, and pilgrimages throughout human history.

It is asserted and assumed that knowledge of this true self is worth all the sacrifice, all of the suffering, all of the deprivation that men and women have willingly endured for its attainment. There are rumors of those who have attained knowledge of it, and mastery of it, and millions have devoted themselves at one level or another to follow in their footsteps.

This book is about you, and me and the selves that we are and the quest to find, to know, to become, and to be that true self forever.

Posted in book writing | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Self Book

Posted on June 20, 2012 by PaulVK

It’s a book

Some of you who know me know that I like to write, a lot. I like writing a lot and I like writing a lot. Many of you have suggested that I write a book. Part of my challenge is that I am such a fitful, haphazard, undisciplined writer. I write what I feel like writing, not always what I should be writing about.

Yesterday I met with Len Vanderzee of Faith Alive and we talked about a book idea that I’ve been kicking around in my mind for the last few months. I don’t know if anything will come of it but I decided to give it a shot.

As yet I have all the work to do, the proposal, the contract, etc. Nothing is done and so it may in fact become the truth that nothing will get done, so all I have right now is intention and hope. We’ll see.

I’m actually writing this in the hopes of shaming myself into some form of discipline to do the sucker. The shame can’t be too great because I know the analytics of this blog. (Tens of people will read this post, at best. 🙂 )

What’s the book about? 

I want the book to be about the self. I’ve got a lot of long winded, fancy reasons to write about the self and if you read my blog my hope is that you’ll hear them. I’ll be trying out ideas on my blog, and maybe even drafts of chapters for the stuff that I want to write. It’s very much a project of discovery for me and we’ll see how I do.

Every writer I know is different. Some work in private, others blog every little thing. I’ll probably be towards the latter. It helps me to hear from people to know what they are hearing. I may not like what I hear, I may disregard it, be encouraged by it, or despair because of it but at least I’m getting a message from out there into my self.

The Reflected Self

If you really want a teaser you may check out the posts under the tags of the reflected self. David Schnarch turned me onto that idea and I’ve found it to be seminal in terms of shaping my theology and my pastoral understand of the divine selves and the other selves I share this world with.

I’ve also created a tag called “the self book”. I hope I remember to click it when I write something pertaining to this.

My goal is that the book be philosophical yet accessible, theological yet open enough for my atheist and non-Christian friends to enjoy, and pastorally practical, so that the reader can find pathways to greater joy, happiness and shalom even in times of struggle and loss.

A Christian Writer

Despite our reputation (and mine in particular sometimes) I believe Christians should be the most optimistic of people. I believe that our universe-narrative is the most optimistic that can be conceived, for the planet, for humanity, and for each of us as individuals. I know many of our doubt or disagree with this perspective, but I hope that in the course of what I write I might open your minds to it. I believe the world was made not our of chaos but out of joy, and our final destination is a cold, dark oblivion but a joyous, eternal symphony of culture and goodness. My hope is that the book will reflect this joy and invite myself and others more deeply into it. pvk

Posted in book writing | Tagged | 5 Comments

The Self Illusion or the Author and His Story

Posted on June 19, 2012 by PaulVK

You are not what you think you are

In Christopher Nolan’s psychological thriller Memento, Leonard Shelby attempts to avenge his wife’s murder. During the murder, however, Leonard suffered a blow to the head that left him unable to create new memories leaving him haunted by his final permanent memory, his wife’s death. The plot line of the movie moves in two directions so that the audience is nearly as unable to make sense of the story as Leonard. Leonard through a system of Polaroid pictures, tattoos and notes, attempts to paste together a coherent story in an attempt to kill his wife’s murderer. In his 2012 book “The Self Illusion” Bruce Hood suggests that we are all Leonard, not necessarily trying to avenge a loved one’s murder, but rather constructing our selves from a series of random experiences. Our selves themselves, are meaningless fabrications of a highly evolved brain that derived an appreciable survival advantage by this ability.

If he is right, what does this mean for you? There is no YOU beyond the neuro-pathways in your brain created by the series of sensory impressions that you call your life.
In a similar book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain David Eagleman suggest that what we call choice may similarly be illusory. Our conscious selves sit atop a vast matrix of systems upon which it depends, but of which it has little control nor knowledge. The hard wired portions of our brain are far too wise than to leave the conscious self in control. There is important work to do to keep the bodily systems going, to protect us from threats we consciously are ignorant of. The consciousness is a story teller that fills in gaps and tells a tale that makes sense of the data entering in relationship with memories and the constructed self fabricated over years. Medical cases show that people who have lost their sight continue to assert that they can see. People who have lost their limbs continue to feel pain in those limbs.

Eagleman goes on to argue that that choice itself is likely illusory. Our conscious selves, in the project of the preservation of the conscious self has invented the notion of choice to give itself meaning, purpose and a sense of control over the future of the self. What is really going on, suggests Eagleman, is that the deeper places of our brains are calling the shots leaving the conscious story teller to make up their own stories about all of this.
This is all science you know, so you must believe it. This is not the hokum of religion, projecting a sky god who has emotions, and feelings, and a will. We are in the golden age of brain science, just beginning to understand the physical and chemical reasons why we do what we do, that is if course, if there really is a “we” that is a self that we can say “does” anything at all.

“To Your Self Be True”

If the brain scientists are telling you that there is no real you, just a need to tell yourself a story about you, the Lord of Cool Technology and the Providers of Happiness are telling you exactly the opposite thing.

Steve Jobs in his 2005 Commencement address so perfectly expressed and so poignantly embodied the ethos of the culture of expressive individualism that he set down the doctrine to be propagated by commencement speakers for a generation. Teens and twenty somethings are admonished to let nothing stand in the way of that self within you getting what it wants. Your self is your guide. Be true to your passions. Don’t let anyone stop you from becoming the you you are most excited to become. Take chances, make mistakes, but above all may the self within you guide you and if you are true to that self THEN what you do will mean something, will change the world or even save the world.

Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Pixar, the company whose salvation saved its partner company Disney through Woody and Buzz, was taking a page from the previous generation’s icon, Walt Disney. Nearly every apparently non-religious Disney movie preaches the secular gospel of “believe in your self”. Everything will work out just as you want it to if you would only believe in your self.

This message has of course become the stock admonition of our public school systems. It is the catechism of expressive individualism repeated by adults to the children until they can recite it themselves.

Next to one of the most distressed high schools in my city, on the light rail bridge over the busy road through abandoned retail stores, large letters cry out to the drivers who pass underneath “If you can dream it you can do it”

I would have thought the dreams of the now abandoned Florin Road Automile would have included bucking the trend of disposable communities in the boom and bust California economy. Steve Jobs dreams came true, at least until the cancer returned. Walt Disney’s dreams came true, once they secured and more permanent partnership with Pixar. Are we not paying attention?

The Brain Scientists Vs. the Wizards of Entertainment

So who is right? Jobs and Disney instruct our youth to lean into and rely upon the self in order to navigate their story lines. The brain scientists assert that the story line is illusory, as is the self we imagine is the subject of the story. If the story teller is an illusion fabricated by the survival necessities of its meaty host, and the story is an illusion, then why should we care about any of it at all?

The cheery physicist on public television tells us that one day the sun, upon which all life depends in this world will run out of fuel. In fact, the universe itself is like a wind up clock and that it too will at some point grow dark and cold. The good news, however, is that you will die long before that happens. Your illusory story fabricated by your illusory self necessitated by its meat host will have long since rotted away.

So what should we do? I guess we should put all of our marbles in our illusory selves and to these made up stories be true.

Can’t we all just get along?

As if things couldn’t be worse. What we find in this world is not really so different from Christopher Nolan’s Memento. It seems that all of our individual story creating selves have real difficulties keeping our stories in sync. We are all creating selves along the way that are in conflict with other meat hosts and their creative and created selves.
David Brooks, America’s official translator between the red state, blue state language barrier, explains in a recent New York Times opinion piece that Democrats don’t understand Republicans and visa versa because they have very different visions of this shared reality. Republicans believe the modern, Western, welfare state is ready to collapse under its own unsustainable weight while Democrats believe it just needs a bit of fine tuning and it will continue to provide stability, security and wealth for us for generations to come. In other words, not only do we have individual selves that are concocting individual story lines to make sense of the data, we also have collective story lines created by communities of meat hosts and the collective stories of others seem just as illusory and out of touch as the individual narratives of those around us that we disagree with.

The good news is that in terms of evolution our capacity to create collective stories has been a key accomplishment that has afforded our species an advantage over competing species. The bad news is that there is no guarantee that this advantage will continue to pay out on the survival dividend it has offered in the past.

In fact, what happens if in fact we really start to believe that both the individual selves and stories and the collective selves and stories are simply illusory and arbitrary, in the service of survival? Doesn’t this mean that in fact the most enlightened among us (those who best appreciate and most fully live out the reality of consciousness of the arbitrary illusion that we are alone and together) will be at liberty to engineer a collective story that will put themselves at the greatest possibility of having a pleasant story for themselves and their loved ones? If knowledge is power, then the knowledge of the arbitrary nature of all human story is the ultimate power.

Might there actually be a story teller outside the system?

It seems that increasingly people today are left with a choice of perspectives, either there is an author God who is constructing, underlying and maintaining this narrative story that gives existence to each of us, or story itself is a meaningless experience that will vanish once the physical systems that sustain it is extinguished. I see no third option.

Posted in philosophical reflection, theological | 1 Comment