Question Our Assumptions

“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”

― Wendell Berry, "The Long-Legged House"

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Dear Kate,

If reading my last letter caused you impatience and maybe even bewilderment, you must be assured I felt your pain.

I was in search of a Word that is already spoken, and if I have yet to learn how to in turn speak it well, it was already speaking to me, about me, and for me, to make me well often without my acknowledgement, throughout a day on the tangent of my awareness.

Like today.

So here I am again, trying to talk back.  First to say sorry, that I've been ignoring the Word with steadfast, full-on disrespect.  Second to say I am not sorry, that I shall continue to question and protest out of a vocational duty commissioned by the Word Himself. It's a conversation.  It's a wrestling match. It is the first and foremost human thing to do, today or any day.

What's your point, Alex?  I can hear you ask.  Today and any day, you make so many points and none points to anything--useful things, stuffs we can practice straightaway and make the goods happen, things that we can put into action and have a glass of lemonade by sunset upon accomplishing the suggested servings.  Goods--ain't that what we are aiming to do, especially when something as big as God is in the mix of our ambitious proposals?

I am afraid and sorry I have not been helpful.  The same way Jesus' being hung on wood wasn't helpful or reasonable or particularly useful until we have formulated neat and small theology to master and subdue and deny what shall forever exceed our grasp.  My comparing my speaking to Jesus' dying is meant to make you sick as it did me.  It is a homesickness, if you do pay attention to your longing.

Still to answer to the suspicion that my speech is evasive or even obscure, I shall now make one point that is unambiguous: Question your assumptions.  No, I am not laying an exhortation on you, in no position to do that.  I am saying in my conversation with the Word that's what I heard, and His voice was resounding and unequivocal.

Take what my hero Wendell Berry said here: "We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world."

It is a calm statement about the most violent matters, rapes and pillages, self and world destruction in that order.  It makes sense to us what Berry said here, when we are downing a glass of lemonade watching a sunset that's perfectly distancing herself from us, burns us not, freezes us neither, just right.  This world runs like clockwork, a cosmic Rolex, we are told by scientists, brilliant, brilliant people who for whatever reason avail themselves only one metaphor, and if the world ever fails to serve us well the way it has always been, then, before any deeper philosophizing, we must first fight our way back to the Garden, where we belong.  Sure, there might need to be mild adjustments and temporary inconvenience on our parts, but the overarching narrative is that our show must go on.

How many assumptions have I made in the last paragraph?  And guess how many of them are so ironclad, beyond questioning in the folklore of our self-making mythology that we have already lost our human faculty--and duty!--to call out our own most ludicrous storylines?  We give weird names to what caused us dis-ease, like COVID-19, an escaped prisoner that we must shoot down to bring peace back to town.  But the snake, the one in the Garden, did we also fulfill our human vocation to name it too?

Søren Kierkegaard wrote like a fiery demon for 15 straight years to race against sunset, his own and humanity's.  One day in 1843 he published three works.  Why the rumpus, brother? we ask.  You would learn to know every facial feature of Death when 5 of your siblings were no more by the time you turned 22 and you being the youngest to have each death burned into every stage of your growing consciousness, your already terribly frail physique.  He died a very painful death at age 42: "I told me so."  Some sort of spinal disease.  The show couldn't go on, the showman knew that all along, didn't commit the hubris to think otherwise.  Great writings, towering theology he left us, but terribly useless to most.

This is my second piece today.  It is not a hobby or habit that I want, like crying, which I detest seeing myself doing in the mirror of my mind.  I don't think it is noble.  I just couldn't help it, don't know what else to do playing out this tragicomedy alongside all them characters with weird names sharing the stage.

Yours, Alex