If I were using my skills to stir up the passions of
- hatred
- bigotry
- pride
- lust
- greed
- war
- camp
- competition, and
- entitlement,
I would be in high demand and would probably live in a very nice house by now.
But I’ve been trying instead for many years to stir up the passions of
- justice
- righteousness
- love
- honesty
- rationality, and
- responsibility—
Learning them myself as I go (some faster than others, I freely admit). And for the record, I do not live in a very nice house.
In fact, I find so few takers as to give serious pause on the question of whether it is worth the time and effort even as an avocation—not because I cannot see the good in it, but because of the ever-present lonely disappointment of it all. I have striven again and again to set a rich table of God’s good things, and can find hardly anyone to sit down and partake.
And on that note, I have wondered from time to time whether I should even consider it my responsibility to try to do this. And in support of that question, I offer up the line (that some of you will know): “They’ve got Moses and the prophets; let them listen to them.” (Except in my case, I’d put it this way: “Well, don’t they already have all this information in the scriptures? So if they’re not going there to get it, what makes you think they’d ever want to get it from you?”)
Jesus was so right about that wide gate and narrow gate business,and it has not changed since he said it! To this day, the narrow gate is so seldom tried that not even in the churches can one find reliable support for the godly passions that God and Jesus have always espoused. And of the few who see this problem, almost none are willing to do anything new to solve it—and especially if that were to mean they had to leave their existing churches. By tolerating it in their camps as they do, they perpetuate it—becoming the bulk of the problem themselves, even as they continue to complain that it needs solving! This is the trap, and I have certainly wasted too many of the years of my own life trapped in it.
Because so few are really seeking anything better, I have no option of making a vocation of stirring up these passions, for I must eat, and there’s no living to be earned from it. Perhaps with a benefactor to fund the promotion of my material to a wide enough market, I could find enough support to make a living from it. But barring that, I must trade away far too much of my time for the empty necessity of money in a culture that understands little more. And this means that I can spend even less time learning about and documenting these things.
And getting no more support of any kind than I do from others, I often have no motivation to keep going, other than the one that got my started in the first place: to keep learning it myself.
This has often proved to be the thread onto which I keep clinging—though I do regularly find motive in the hope that I could facilitate the efforts of others who are learning it for themselves. (For they certainly aren’t learning it at church.)
So I keep working on this understanding, improving it as I go, and trying to promote it in a market that is so filled with cheap fakes that easily satisfy inauthentic people, that it is hard for the authentic ones ever to find the real deal amid all the chaff. And no, I’m not certain I’ve got it all right myself. In fact, my big epiphany from 2012 was this, and I still believe it:
But I find precious few people who continue to work the puzzle, rethinking it as necessary until they can get all the kinks worked out. And one might expect that I’ve have a huge network of like-minded friends along that journey by now, but it is actually very small. There are just too many appealing exits to allure one off the highway of learning.
Here’s a diagram of the principle I see at work as people go through life, on what is supposed to be a journey of finding the truth. (It should expand if you click on it.)
It seems there’s a preacher at every exit, offering some unvetted philosophy that promises to encompass the whole of what needs learning. And too many people are suckers for this sort of pandering. Being “cognitive misers” (as Cognitive Science has labeled it), they lack the mental energy to stay diligent in learning. And being “moral misers”, they lack the energy to care about their cognitive miserliness.
But I have kept going (so far!), and frequently wish I could win a lottery so as to be able to hire a research staff to help me keep learning (and publishing) faster and faster. This is my passion. But it has little place in this world. “And this is very sad indeed,” he sighed, as he continues to look for a new career to pay the bills.
We could do so much better, and still stay well shy of the perfection to which so many are so averse.
