Some quick and not necessarily coherent thoughts. C.S. Lewis, in The Problem Of Pain, says “There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of a creature by itself as a ‘self’, can exist except in contrast with an ‘other’”, which is a much better way of putting some of the ideas in my previous post. Combined with the idea that a choice-driven society, by reducing frustration of desires, reduces our ability to relate to or even conceive of the ‘other’, it’s not an enormous step to suppose that living in a consumer society leads to the erosion of the self, and that such erosion is shown through features of contemporary culture such as identification with celebrities in an increasingly cultic fashion, a makeover culture that focuses on constant renewal and reinvention of the self through possessions and environment, and a paradoxical presentation of violent and erotic objectification as both abhorrent and universally pervasive.
The other idea that I’ve been thinking about, motivated partly by discussions on Luke in our small group, is the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven. What does this mean? How does it differ from ideas about heaven as a place we go when we die? Well, the Kingdom of Heaven is a phenomenon that produces both an affective and a behavioural response – like someone finding treasure in a field: they change what they are doing with their life (they go and sell everything they have to buy the field), but they do this related to an emotional response. This isn’t a business decision, made with an eye to the balance sheet. This is a sequel to an emotional response, to a feeling that is literally life-changing. Lots of parables talk about rejoicing and throwing a party as the normal response to the Kingdom of Heaven impacting on your life. And just as an aside, how often does evangelism try to reason people into Christianity, as if the response to finding a lost possession was to sit down and think “Hmmm… I reckon that this is worth throwing a small-to-medium sized party”? And how often is joy the defining characteristic of Christians?
Crucially, it seems that the Kingdom of Heaven is something that changes us profoundly, at an identity level, yet also remains separate from us. It is a “present-but-not-fulfilled” entity, an essentially ungraspable fact. Living in the Kingdom requires that we be perfect, as God is perfect – that we strive for the unattainable. Living in the Kingdom means that I am made in the image of the Other; that my identity is derived from that which is ultimately unknowable, that I find myself as I grow closer to the Other, rather than finding the Other as I look more closely at myself. Living in the Kingdom requires that we love our enemies, pray for our persecutors, forgive those who hurt us; not because these are sensible things to do, but because they are precisely the things that are most likely to produce a response of “It’s not really me”. It means that the more intimately I become involved with and connected to that which is not-me, the more I discover myself, until one day I become one with all that is not me, and I become truly who I am.
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