![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jenny_islanderI am reading only the introduction to the study guide today.
To review, Foster sketches the Good Life as having the things we need, knowing where and with whom we belong, and being at peace with ourselves--all in ways that allow everyone else the same. It's easy to describe, but hard to live. Why? The answer is endemic, pervasive, and perennial sin.
So what is to be done? Or what is the point of the disciplines outlined in these books--what are they pointing toward?
Willpower, perhaps? Willpower can carry a person through horrific adversity. But that's not the level Foster is writing about. The Good Life is made up of daily moments, from waking to sleeping, every one an opportunity to refuse the evil and choose the good. We can't consciously will our way through our entire lives in ninety-second increments. We collapse if we try.
What if we tap collective willpower instead? What if we make laws that cover every way that human choices can go wrong, and hold one another to the consequences? The rule of law is basic to modern society, and one of the primary reasons why (in times free of tyranny) most people can rest easy most of the time. Everybody knows that we don't do A, or else B will happen--so people don't worry about the disruption or danger of A.
So laws have their place. But they do not change human nature.
Law can fall short of its purposes even when those purposes are good. If the rich never have to pay a fine that actually hurts, if the cost of seeking justice is too high for the poor, if someone simply does not care about consequences, if people who should enforce a law lean back instead, the law falls short. Laws can also be used as mechanisms for sin. They can, to borrow a phrase from Frank Wilhoit, be set up to constrain but not protect the people without power, while protecting but not constraining their oppressors. Law alone cannot save us from sin.
What if we remove the constraining element and rely instead on force of habit? What if we invent rituals that reinforce right behavior? I do not mean only religious rituals. Politeness is a ritual. Applauding a child for bravely tackling three bars of music at their first school concert is a ritual. Wearing an "I Voted!" sticker on voting day is a ritual. We are really good at filling our daily lives with rituals! Surely we can create enough rituals that our natural tendency to make them into habits will carry us past all occasions of sin.
If only.
Like law, ritual can go wrong. A ritual can legitimize the infliction of pain and fear in the guise of jolly togetherness. Or a ritual that began as good can be hijacked: refuse to participate because the people who now claim to own the ritual are creeps, and they will accuse you of being a bad person, pointing to the history of the ritual as evidence of your anti-social ways. On a less fraught but more common level, rituals can be used to paper over a lack of community--a polite collection of selfish sons of sehctib, as someone said.
If sheer willpower can't get us to the Good Life, is there any hope? Are we just stuck gnikcuf up and gnikcuf each other over in this dekcuf-up world?
"Take heart," says Jesus. "I have overcome the world."
These words appear at the end of the 16th chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus has just been explaining to His disciples that terrible things are going to happen to Him and to them. Not long after He says these words, He goes to meet Judas. So this can't mean that the Good Life is right around the corner, or that Jesus is going to make all the bad people stop.
"Take heart. I have overcome the world." That's grace. When your willpower fails you, turn instead to the unfailing wellspring of the power of God. But making that decision over and over is a hard thing to remember and to do. The disciplines Foster summarizes in these books are a collection of thousands of years of observations of what helps us to that decision. Call them expressions of spiritual laws if you like; call them directions for beneficent rituals; call them a list of good habits--they are all that. But they began, not as theories or ideals, but as daily practice and discussion by people who wished to live in the real world around them.
Foster concludes, "Our work--our only work--is to place ourselves in the way of Christ and invite Him to work in our lives, individually and collectively." The disciplines help us in that.
To review, Foster sketches the Good Life as having the things we need, knowing where and with whom we belong, and being at peace with ourselves--all in ways that allow everyone else the same. It's easy to describe, but hard to live. Why? The answer is endemic, pervasive, and perennial sin.
So what is to be done? Or what is the point of the disciplines outlined in these books--what are they pointing toward?
Willpower, perhaps? Willpower can carry a person through horrific adversity. But that's not the level Foster is writing about. The Good Life is made up of daily moments, from waking to sleeping, every one an opportunity to refuse the evil and choose the good. We can't consciously will our way through our entire lives in ninety-second increments. We collapse if we try.
What if we tap collective willpower instead? What if we make laws that cover every way that human choices can go wrong, and hold one another to the consequences? The rule of law is basic to modern society, and one of the primary reasons why (in times free of tyranny) most people can rest easy most of the time. Everybody knows that we don't do A, or else B will happen--so people don't worry about the disruption or danger of A.
So laws have their place. But they do not change human nature.
Law can fall short of its purposes even when those purposes are good. If the rich never have to pay a fine that actually hurts, if the cost of seeking justice is too high for the poor, if someone simply does not care about consequences, if people who should enforce a law lean back instead, the law falls short. Laws can also be used as mechanisms for sin. They can, to borrow a phrase from Frank Wilhoit, be set up to constrain but not protect the people without power, while protecting but not constraining their oppressors. Law alone cannot save us from sin.
What if we remove the constraining element and rely instead on force of habit? What if we invent rituals that reinforce right behavior? I do not mean only religious rituals. Politeness is a ritual. Applauding a child for bravely tackling three bars of music at their first school concert is a ritual. Wearing an "I Voted!" sticker on voting day is a ritual. We are really good at filling our daily lives with rituals! Surely we can create enough rituals that our natural tendency to make them into habits will carry us past all occasions of sin.
If only.
Like law, ritual can go wrong. A ritual can legitimize the infliction of pain and fear in the guise of jolly togetherness. Or a ritual that began as good can be hijacked: refuse to participate because the people who now claim to own the ritual are creeps, and they will accuse you of being a bad person, pointing to the history of the ritual as evidence of your anti-social ways. On a less fraught but more common level, rituals can be used to paper over a lack of community--a polite collection of selfish sons of sehctib, as someone said.
If sheer willpower can't get us to the Good Life, is there any hope? Are we just stuck gnikcuf up and gnikcuf each other over in this dekcuf-up world?
"Take heart," says Jesus. "I have overcome the world."
These words appear at the end of the 16th chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus has just been explaining to His disciples that terrible things are going to happen to Him and to them. Not long after He says these words, He goes to meet Judas. So this can't mean that the Good Life is right around the corner, or that Jesus is going to make all the bad people stop.
"Take heart. I have overcome the world." That's grace. When your willpower fails you, turn instead to the unfailing wellspring of the power of God. But making that decision over and over is a hard thing to remember and to do. The disciplines Foster summarizes in these books are a collection of thousands of years of observations of what helps us to that decision. Call them expressions of spiritual laws if you like; call them directions for beneficent rituals; call them a list of good habits--they are all that. But they began, not as theories or ideals, but as daily practice and discussion by people who wished to live in the real world around them.
Foster concludes, "Our work--our only work--is to place ourselves in the way of Christ and invite Him to work in our lives, individually and collectively." The disciplines help us in that.
