Breaking the Spell

"A supposedly liberal society which assumes absolutely that it has the resources for producing and sustaining moral motivation independently of the actual moral or spiritual commitments of its citizens, is in danger behaving and speaking as if the only kind of human solidarity that really matters is that of the state. Programmatic secularism, as a shorthand for the denial of the public legitimacy of religious commitment as a partner in political conversation, will always carry the seeds, not of totalitarianism in the obvious sense, but of that 'totalising' spirit which stifles critique by silencing the other."

Rowan Williams, "Secularism, Faith and Freedom"

********

Dear Kate,

What are the most despairing moments in your life?  And why did they devastate you so?

Really, think about that before you move on.  Try to recollect the moments and remember how they ran rampart in your entire being.

We can put the two questions together and ask only one: Why do these moments have such speaking power in our life?

Why "speaking," you asked, didn't the bad things actually happen for me to be undone by my experience of them?  Of course they did.  But many bad bad things are happening this very nanosecond, and why do they have no, again, "speaking power" over us?

Oh, so you are talking about how objective reality is being subjectively felt? you asked again.  I am afraid the matter is not so readily reducible to that, but let's try going down that path.  Yes, we were so properly devastated because we didn't objectify the character in the story.

Consider a car accident.  Consider a car accident that you've experienced.  Consider a car accident that you've experienced just now.  It did happen, as anyone there could see---"objectively."

"This time you really messed up," you are saying to yourself.

Why are you saying that?  Maybe you are under-insured?  Fearing how this might derail your career and retirement plan?  Maybe the accident is not your first this year?  Maybe you were texting?  Maybe you were thinking about some other troubles in your life and thus weren't paying attention to the road?  Or maybe the one your car ran over was a mother, carrying her newborn.  Or maybe you are speaking to your left hand about 4 feet away on what seems to be your car's dashboard.

The devastation did happen, but you are speaking it into existence, within the context of a story ongoing, your story.  What happened before and what you can foresee happening after speak about your very present.  And you cannot jump out of the experience and "objectify" it.  It is not "just a story," like in a movie.  You are the very subject of the words you are speaking, right now.  Earth quakes, forest burns, people suffer, but these are more like "stories" we could sit back, relax, and "consider."

You, minus a hand, are speaking desperately now, wanting the world to pay attention to your story, your particular telling of human despair.  But no one is paying you any attention, not even people in church who claim to know what "love" is, not even people you think were always "on your side."  And when they pay attention to you you find their particular brand of attention condescending, which is worse than inattention.  Some, you could hear already, are speaking a different story about you, your driving skill, your moral character, and how they know God must have, pardon the very cruel pun, a "hand" on your undoing.

Now you might think I am not writing about Williams' quote above.  Not directly, yes, a few refractions removed, but I am.  Devastation in our life is so devastatingly so because it has a speaking power so totalising that it silences, among many things, hope.  Our hopelessness tells on us, speaks the most about who we think we are.

Hope is the breaking of such despairing spell.  Hope is God speaking about who we really are.

Yours, Alex