Book 1 - Introduction (1 of 3)

(I intend to post my whole book on Steemit in the upcoming months. This week, I will post my introduction in three parts - the first of which follows this note. When I share my book with others, I always tell them, "This is part 1; part 2 is your thoughts." I hope to hear from you and welcome your insights, critiques, and affirmations on the book's contents. I'm also open to your feedback on how the posts are formatted and ordered; I am new to blogging/social media and am basically making this up as I go.
peace,
Dave)

INTRODUCTION

I have been teaching theology for sixteen years. While I am truly grateful for this experience, in many ways this period has been defined by struggle and search. Conventional wisdom suggests that the role of a teacher is to provide students with answers. Religion is the source of many people’s most basic answers, yet the years I’ve spent teaching theology have taught me that I do not have “the answers.” I question, doubt, and sometimes even disbelieve, but I continue to search.

As a teacher and a parent, I feel a strong need to find answers that can lead my students and my own children to happiness and peace in spite of life’s difficulties. As a social justice teacher, I spend significant time thinking about, researching, and mourning the problems in the world. Admittedly, I feel inadequate in these areas and unable to offer grand solutions. Nevertheless, I believe that all of us should try to do our small part to make the world a better place for those with whom we share it and those who will come after us.

Perhaps my error is looking for salvation in an answer. Many of the great religious leaders were not as answer-oriented as we have made them. Jesus and the Buddha invited their audiences to follow them and adopt different paths than their societies endorsed. They challenged their disciples to wake up and see the world and their fellow creatures. The Buddha invited followers to embark on the 8–fold path. Jesus challenged his disciples to take the narrow road and follow him along the way of the cross. It is a constant struggle for modern followers to discern what their paths and contexts ask of them.

Both practitioners of Taoism and the early Christian community described their spiritual tradition as the “way.” Perhaps these traditions indicate that the solution is not more people with the answers but more people on a journey. Because a journey is unpredictable, it requires openness and clear vision. It also demands awareness that our perspectives and judgments are not always reliable. Our vision can become distorted. As a result our sight frequently needs to be re-calibrated. Anthony de Mello, SJ, an Indian spiritual writer, observed:

"Seeing is the most arduous thing a human being can undertake. For it calls for a disciplined, alert mind, whereas most people would much rather lapse into mental laziness than take the trouble to see each person and thing anew in present-moment freshness."

He further asserted:

"That is why the most painful act the human being can per-form, the act that he dreads the most, is the act of seeing. It is in that act of seeing that love is born, or rather more accurately, that act of seeing is love."

De Mello reminds us that seeing is more than just physically opening our eyes. It is a process that takes work. Answers offer a finality that seeing does not. Seeing is a lifelong journey of attentiveness and conversion, while answers give us the comfort and false assurance found at an apparent destination. Seeing demands that we respond to what reality asks of us; answers, on the other hand, can allow us to ignore reality’s inconvenient challenges. A focus on answers does not leave the space for us to identify our real problem. This focus does not require that we journey inward to grapple with what many spiritual writers have identified as our basic struggle and a source of our distorted vision — our ego.

As I will use the term, unlike the way it is defined by many psychologists, ego is the part of us that believes we are the center of the universe. In this sense ego, which keeps us stuck on ourselves and our limited interests, is the opposite of love, which is other-oriented. Love exists when we value ourselves and can see “the other” apart from the distorting, self-serving, and objectifying lens of ego. For ego other people’s value is not experienced as intrinsic; instead, it is determined by their ability to fulfill our self-centered desires and by the degree to which a relationship with them is advantageous to us.

While grappling with our ego may not represent a complete solution to our personal or social problems, there are strong reasons to think it is a sensible place to start.

I offer this reflection as a humble addition to the work of many wise people who have tried to bring humanity’s attention to the problem of self-centeredness because I am convinced that the first step to solving a problem is realizing that it exists. Perhaps if a critical mass of humanity is able to recognize and struggle with this problem in ourselves, we will be able to make progress in solving our specific problems.