There was a blip on Ernest Becker in my 300 psych class, which fascinated me anyway. Along with Terror Management Theory, which has been taken into the lab. This is fascinating. If you remind folks of death, they behave differently. Beck writes about several experiments of this kind in his book. *Go, if you wish, and read it. It is technically an apologetic using Freud and James as a pushing off point, but for psych fans/lovers/enthusiasts, it'd probably be really informative and...fun? As fun as this discussion of mortality can be.* (SHAMELESS ENDORSEMENT)
And then, I discovered, Beck who writes in great detail on Becker (strange coincidence of names, no?). Since I read the Authenticity of Faith, it seems existentialism (or at least, talk-of-death) has cropped up everywhere.
I go by Anna Joy which seems more and more ironic. You might not find me the sunniest person of late. But, that's because of stress and school and "Pastor" Worley. This, too, shall pass.
What is even more ironic is how freeing this concept of denial of death is.
Basically, Becker says that all cultures are edifices of the knowledge that we will die. Religion. Work. School. Love. In "first world" countries, our main task, the buffer we often chose is self-esteem. But, in essence, the mask each culture wears is a specific and particular buffer against knowledge of our finitude. Our ultimate...smallness and briefnessgand relative insignificance. Or, as Psalm 103 says, we are like the grass, "the wind blows over it and it is gone."
In Ecclesiastes "everything is meaningless! Meaningless, says the teacher. A chasing after the wind!"
Why, then, is this so liberating for me?
At least, for me, growing up in evangelicalism, it was really intimidating to hear of Almighty God (hehe. Or, El-Shaddai. The All Sufficient One; Godde of the mountains, or, the interpretation of the name I relish most, the Godde-with-breasts. See my past hundred posts... :-P ).
When I was teen, I read Max Lucado's "It's Not About Me" and John Piper's "God's Passion for His Glory." And, these left me feeling cold. Not that I necessarily thought it should be all about me (though at a certain level we all think it is, or should be). But, the way this insecure girl perceived the words left me with this image of a distant, gray headed patriarch (much like the God on the Cistine Chapel), barking out orders, who really didn't give a rats ass about humanity. We were just cracked pots or...props in a grand Cosmic Puppet Show. Not people Godde really cared for, intimately, truly without self-interest. If we lived or died, it mattered not, as long as Godde won glory for Goddesself.
(That was before, well, I realized that Godde's glory was Jesus on the cross and later at the resurrection. Talk about one hell of a theology of glory...Poor Jesus, man!)
What does this have to do with death? With impermanance and vastness and incomprehensibility?
Simply, it means that we are not responsible for making meaning of our lives. At least, not on our own. In one sense, it really, really matters how we live. It matters that we love and care and resist the urge to punch someone who says something really mean in the mouth (are my anger issues surfacing again? Oh darn), but in another sense it relativizes our accomplishments. In fifty or sixty years after our deaths, we will be remembered perhaps as "my great great something or other." If we are one of the lucky ones. Somewhere there may be a plaque over a grave...In a completely existential sense, in this vast, vast universe (or multiverse) our short lives have little value. In a very real sense, it is not about us. There is a great likelihood we will not be remembered for very long...unless we're Pastor Worley (couldn't help it).
Thank Godde.
In the way Christians see it, though, Godde values each and every human life. We do not have to earn our value, buy it, be pretty enough or wise enough or...anything enough. We do not have to have the right theological answers or the right politics. We don't have to write blogs about our meaninglessness to prop up our self-esteem (guilty), or to have a 4.777777777 GPA (I WISH)...
I AM is WHO I AM is. Whatever that means, I suspect it has something to do with our relativity and Godde's immanance. And Godde making us meaningful, our hands off the wheel (sorry for the Carrie Underwood reference) and our utter dependence. On Godde. On others. On the Earth itself. On our interdependence with and all things...
Contingency, from this perspective, is the best thing in the world.
The paradox I am left with is that because "nothing in the world matters," Everything in the world matters to Godde.
When I figure out what the heck I mean about all this, I'll let you know...
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