I went to visit a woman who had been found on a park bench and brought to our shelter by the police. A shelter worker became her advocate, and helped her get the five years of social security back pay that she was owed by the government. The worker helped her find a small apartment, and when I went to see her she was living there with her little dog. It was February, and the glass patio door was open. I and the little dog shivered, but the woman seemed immune to cold. She smoked and the smell of burnt tobacco mingled with the cold air. She was taking her medications, and in recovery, but there was something eerie about the chilled stillness of the room. Within months her illness would reassert itself and she would begin attacking her friends, full of anger and paranoia.
As I sat with her, part of my unease was for myself. I saw her relapse coming, and I recognized it in myself. I have not suffered from mental illness, but I have attempted multiple resets of my life, all of which have failed to a greater or lesser degree. Incrementally I’ve gotten better, become more peaceful, less compulsive. But compulsion is still there, waiting for my weak moments. Old habits have force, they awaken and overwhelm, and in my weakest moments I don’t put up much of a resistance.
When Jesus says that the unclean spirit returns to a swept house and finds no resistance, he is speaking simple psychological truth. This is what makes real amendment of life so hard. We know what we want to banish from our lives, but we don’t know what we want to fill our lives up with. So we banish the bad things and then sit within empty, cold rooms, doing nothing, until our banished brokenness returns.
Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to exorcise our demons. Jesus is harsh to those who question the effort, reversing his previous stance and saying that, in this matter, whoever is not for him is against him. We have to make the effort of amendment. But it can’t just be scattering. The emptiness that our demons leave behind has to be filled. We need to invite the divine into our empty houses.
How? By turning the eye into a lamp, so that we can look out at an enlightened world. By looking sharply and distinctly, and inviting the things we see to move us. By taking on new habits, new practices of attentiveness, that let the blessing in. By listening hard to people as they tell us about their lives, and not sitting in judgement on them. By honestly mourning the people we loose along the way, and celebrating the people we find.
David Brooks started his March 1st New York Times column by saying that
In the 19th century, there was a hydraulic model of how to be a good person. There are all these torrents of passion flowing through you. Your job, as captain of your soul, is to erect dams to keep these passions in check. Your job is to just say no to sloth, lust, greed, drug use and the other sins.
He went on to contrast this to an emerging model of human behavior (I won’t call it morality) built around habit formation. For years psychologists, sociologists, and advertisers have studied habit formation, discovering tools for the manipulation of behavior that we can use and that others can use on us. It seems that most of us respond automatically to a three part cycle of cue, routine, and reward. Charles Duhigg, who just wrote a book about this, uses his own cookie eating habit to describe how this works (see video below). Every day at around three-thirty he would feel the urge to eat a cookie (cue). So he’d go to the cafeteria, buy a cookie (routine), and spend about ten minutes chatting with his friends (reward). But before he started thinking about this process, he didn’t really know what cue he was responding to or what reward he was truly seeking. He discovered that the cue was time – he always began his trip to the cafeteria at around 3:30. The reward was harder to figure out. He tried varying his routine. Maybe he just wanted to stretch his legs at 3:30. He tried walking around the block. That didn’t work. Maybe he was hungry. He tried eating an apple. That didn’t work. Finally he realized that the reward he was seeking was the chance to socialize after a long afternoon working at his desk. So instead of trekking down to the cafeteria at 3:30, he would stand up, survey the office, find someone to talk to, and after about ten minutes of chit chat, return to his desk. And this worked. He lost eight pounds.
These unthinking habits account for about 45% of our daily choices. We like to think that we’re morally alert, judging and weighing every decision, but the truth is that we’re morally awake for less time than we are actually awake every day. And knowing this has to effect the way we think about the Ten Commandments. Some of them are so stark that only psychopaths and nymphomaniacs would habitually break them. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. But some of them can be broken habitually. Advertisements often attempt to train us to covet our neighbors’ cars, clothes, even cleaning products. Its easy to fall into habits of neglect and not honor aged parents with visits, or not so aged parents with phone calls, or into habits of annoyance, where we visit and call our parents, but only to criticize and berate them (and if you don’t think this is habitual, think of the most tense relationship you have with any other person, and ask yourself why you fall into sniping and arguing with that person so easily). Misusing the Lord’s name is often habitual. And idol making is probably the most habitual thing we do. For me the main idol is my own sense of self-importance, which causes me to check my e-mail every time the little bell dings and to constantly check to see how many hits I’ve gotten on this blog.
If we sleep walk our way through our transgressions, what chance do we have to change them? I don’t think that the 19th century model that Brooks describes is the right way to go – those captains of their own souls in the Victorian era also managed to exploit child laborers, cudgel poorly paid workers, sanction domestic violence, and lynch African Americans. They trusted to their own wills, and the human will is a very untrustworthy shipmate.
I know that there are strong advocates for the idea that community ethics should guide personal ethics, that in a Christian community individuals will act in keeping with that community’s ethics because they love the community and don’t want to damage it by behaving badly. But when, in all of human history, has this ever succeeded? Consider Ananias and Sapphira, who in Acts 5 break the community’s ethic by refusing to share the proceeds from some property that they’ve sold. They drop dead when Peter confronts them with his knowledge of their actions. Shame certainly works to right the wrong. But it doesn’t work to prevent the wrong. It didn’t work to keep the Puritans on track, it didn’t work for the Oneida community or any other attempt at utopia, and it doesn’t even always work for the Amish. And love of community, and the shame that comes from failing in that love, can at times be a bad thing. The people who resisted the Nazis chose a greater moral good over a love of community. So did abolitionists who lived in the slave states in this country. Communities, even those that claim to be Christian, are sometimes wrong. And it’s foolish to claim that such a model would work in the ideal Christian community, because that community doesn’t exist. You end up sounding like the mid-twentieth century radicals who kept claiming that communism would work if it was only given a fair chance. Ways of life that require ideal conditions to prosper won’t help us in the here and now.
So what chance do we have to actually be moral? I think that the main error that those 19th century captains-of-the soul made was to believe that their own willpower would suffice. What is important here is not our own will, but God’s. There’s a reason why God comes first on the list of commandments, and that loving the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul is the first clause of the Great Commandment. The first step in acting ethically for a Christian is to humble oneself before the Lord and submit to the will of God. And in truth, aligning oneself to this morality is very simple. You simply ask God to enter into you every day.
About a month ago, I was reading a book about ancient forms of prayer (Rodney Werline’s essay “The Experience of Prayer and Resistance to Demonic Powers in the Gospel of Mark,” which can be found in Inquiry Into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Christianity). The author suggested that, for the Jews of Jesus’s time, the soul was a battleground where God engaged in struggle against the world’s many demons. To pray was to invite God onto this field of battle, to invite God into the soul. I realized, after reading this, that my form of prayer has always been something akin to a visit to a high school guidance counselor. I would lay out my problems and worries and ask for guidance, but in the end I would retain my right to choose. My will was still the abiding concern, and God was just there to occasionally nod and make quiet suggestions. But what if I tried praying in this other, more ancient way? I began to spend just a minute or two in the morning, inviting God to enter into me and engage in my daily battles. And I began to find that I had much more resistance to all my usual sins. Because I couldn’t pretend that I was making choices by myself anymore. I couldn’t pretend that I was alone in those choices, and safe from prying eyes as I made them. If God has really entered into me, and is really present during the day, then there is no place that I can go to hide from God. Some of this is about shame. But a lot of it is also about joy – knowing that God loves me and is willing to inhabit my soul, even though that soul is vastly imperfect.
A self and a world that is inundated with God calls us to action. The psalms describe this world, although we don’t often think of them as poems about morality. “The fear of the Lord is clean and endures for ever; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold, sweeter far than honey, than honey from the comb. By them also is your servant enlightened.” (Psalm 19) These are songs about setting one’s own will aside, and accepting God’s will. In the end, that is the habit that Christians must try to cultivate. That’s why Jesus put it first, when he gave the Great Commandment. “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The second clause is dependent on the first. To submit to love of God is to submit to love of neighbor, because if God loves us in our imperfections, God loves our neighbors in their imperfections, as well. If we are to think of the world in terms of habit, this habit of daily enlightenment is the one that matters most. Love God and feel grateful for the world and the life that God has given you (cue). Invite God in to fight on the battlefield of your soul (routine). Find yourself acting morally as you go about your daily life (reward).
KPB Stevens 