Losing Our Souls

I have it on good authority that many church-going Christians don’t care for the liturgical season of Lent, which began this year on March 2.

The reason? I think it has to do with Lent’s emphasis on repentance. Yet what is repentance? Isn’t it bad? And isn’t it just a holdover from the church’s unenlightened past?

Well, no, it isn’t. A local pastor years ago, writing in his church’s newsletter, likened Lent’s call for repentance to periodically changing the oil in your car, to remove all the gunk that prevents it from operating at full efficiency. It’s the same for us. To repent serves as a prerequisite to experiencing life at its fullest, and in a godlier way.

Repentance, therefore, is aspirational. It involves giving up something that diminishes life in order to embrace something that enhances it. And don’t we all want that?

Repentance requires that we attempt to see ourselves not just as others see us but as God sees us. Christian doctrine, in fact, teaches that one day we will all stand before the Holy and see ourselves, for the first time, in God’s unsparing light.

Lent, therefore, is a time for self-reflection, to look deeply into our souls and honestly see what’s there. For our true self, the one God created us to be, is not the one our culture requires or the carefully crafted self we present to those around us. It’s not even, most of the time, the one we deceive ourselves into believing we are.

We choose denial instead, ignoring whatever insights challenge our self-image or perceived sense of security. It’s just too awkward, too painful. Besides, what are we supposed to do with such an awareness once we’ve arrived at it? It’s just too negative. Best to think positively and charge forward, stay busy. That’s the American way, isn’t it?

Perhaps, but it’s not the Christian way.

Lost in this form of denial is the simple fact that God is eager to forgive, if only we’d fess up. Dredging up the gunk in our lives, rather than a negative, is actually the way we relieve ourselves of its toxic burdens. Carrying around unresolved and unforgiven sin and guilt only robs us of a grace-filled life, one freed from the unnecessary impediments to joy.

Again, cars run better and last longer when we regularly change the oil.

And if this phenomenon of denial applies to us as individuals, imagine how it affects nations, entities far less capable of self-reflection or change.

Writing about the current push for war among our nation’s leaders, media figures, etc., internet blogger Richard Fernandez writes this:

“Once you get an ideological bureaucracy in Washington, the more militant it becomes, the stupider it gets because it relies on groupthink and not expertise to reach decisions. Critical feedback is absent and it becomes just as blind as Putin’s inner circle.

“They are genuinely bewildered by everything blowing up in their faces because they’ve double checked the infallible ideological calculations and it’s all apple pie so failure must be a fluke. Let’s try again.

“You need an external point of view to unstick a bogged down ideological bureaucracy the way you need holdbacks, pulleys and a recovery vehicle to get a tank out of the mud. Without real intellectual diversity a civilization can languish indefinitely.”

It needs to repent, in other words.

In his classic 1998 book, The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington offers a remarkably perceptive view of current geopolitical realities as seen from 30,000 feet. As mentioned in a recent post, he delineates the changes that have resulted from the end of the Cold War – that we no longer live in a bi-polar world, much less an American-dominated Westernized unipolar world, but a new and emerging multipolar one.

As the old order fell apart after the fall of Communism, countries that once had to sidle up to one superpower or the other (either American or Soviet) embarked on a process of what he calls “indigenization,” the explicit move away from these two erstwhile powers and toward recapturing and consolidating their own unique civilizations.

Foremost, he insists, this process involves a rejuvenation or restoration of religion, as well as each civilization’s unique culture, history, traditions, shared values, group affiliations, and solidarity with similar, like-minded peoples.

For instance, the resurgent Sinic civilization (think China/East Asia) is increasingly defined by the values of Confucianism, values which consist of “order, discipline, family responsibility, hard work, and collectivism,” to name a few.

In contrast, the Siinic civilization views America and the West as defined by “self-indulgence, sloth, individualism, crime, inferior education, disrespect for authority, and ‘mental ossification.’”

These are, needless to say, significant differences, ones almost completely ignored in the West. Instead, we blithely assume everyone thinks the way we do, or at least wishes to. We assume our values are “universal,” yet such a thought is both disdained and resisted by much of the non-West. In their eyes we’re simply arrogant and lacking in self-awareness.

Huntington lists a few of our misguided assumptions: The West stresses “democracy,” yet works against those democratically elected officials of whom we disapprove. The West champions the “free market,” forgetting that the rest of the world rightly sees this as masquerading for our economic domination. We tout “human rights” but again, as with democracy, often dismiss such lofty rhetoric when it goes against our global or economic interests. Same for the “rule of law.”

Huntington characterizes America as a “missionary nation” which naturally assumes all the world should “commit to its values.” To the non-West, however, what we consider “universal” is merely a camouflage for naked imperialism. Yet we have been lulled into believing that U.S. interests are the same as those we used to call the “free world” but have since updated to the “world community.” To the non-West these phrases simply grant “global legitimacy to Western interests.”

Another point of confusion is our belief that the value of the nation-state is universally shared, though to much of the world it is a Western invention. As Harrington points out, in the non-West people tend to define themselves less by national borders than along religious, historical, and cultural lines (consider the Russia and Serbia alliance or the unity among geographically disparate Muslim peoples).

We might use Ukraine as a case in point. In significant ways its people identify more along historic, ethnic, religious, and cultural lines than boundaries drawn on a map. The eastern, Russian-speaking provinces are, for instance, Eastern Orthodox while the western, Ukrainian-speaking population worships various forms of Christianity that look to Rome for authority. (This is but one of many significant cultural differences that help explain the fact that the country has been wracked by a violent civil war since 2014, with tensions going back decades, if not centuries.

As I see it, a big part of our apparent failure in Ukraine (and elsewhere) is due to both ignorance and arrogance, each rooted in our inability and/or unwillingness to critically assess how others see us, much less how we see them. Introspection and self-awareness seem in short supply.

As victors in the Cold War, we unthinkingly assumed the world was there for the taking, for its own good of course. Such willful blindness caused us to miss the evident resurgence of other civilizations and cultures, as well as our own moral, spiritual, and cultural dissolution, which, among other things, has led us to blunder into unnecessary conflicts and entanglements.

I would even go so far as to suggest that the current lust for war is evidence of lost prestige, moral and spiritual rot, and the general stagnation within Western culture, an arrogance driven by insecurity, false bravado, and fear.

As Richard Fernandez’s comments above suggest, as a culture we seem to have run out of steam, resting on our laurels, confident of our righteousness and unwilling to admit our failings, and thus to change or grow.

What’s needed, in other words, is the kind of repentance Lent freely proffers.

As a culture, we seem to have peeked. Oh, we have our shiny toys and technological diversions, but our vision is clouded, our sense of reality as distorted as peering through Meta’s (Facebook’s) “augmented reality lenses.”

We seem to be, as First Thing’s editor R.R. Reno puts it, “treading water” as a culture, no longer moving forward. Here the status quo dominates, everything geared toward maintaining a failing arrangement.

Even Silicon Valley, once celebrated for its “start-up” culture, with unconventional pioneers inventing the future in their garages, today seems all but stagnant. As has been noted, most inventions these days are derivative. The newer start-ups create warmed over products, as if rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, with the singular purpose of being snapped up by one of the huge tech conglomerates at a massive profit.

Part of how the elite status quo is maintained is through a managed culture of fear (constant crises) and division (divide and conquer). Rather than facing life’s challenges, which are formidable in every age (ours is hardly unique), we are urged to cringe in the corner, afraid, and, increasingly, alone. Our glory days are past, and we had best accept it and let the system manage our decline.

Thus, in a curious sense, the sudden burst of energy for war and the concomitant push for Western hegemony seems a doomed-to-failure attempt to reassert a now lost but once valiant power, one formerly based on sacrifice, moral clarity, and noble intent.

It’s hardly a secret to those outside the Western bubble that we have become secular, materialistic, bored, fearful, and weak. What we need rather than hollow bellicosity is to repent of our sins, to receive God’s mercy and forgiveness, to move forward again, humbly yet confidently.  For there is much in our culture that is worthy. Sadly, we’ve allowed our souls to atrophy and to turn inward (sin being defined as “the self curved inward”).

St. Francis of Assisi used to instruct his disciples, prior to entering the various town squares to evangelize, that they should “preach always; if necessary use words.”

If we were to take this to heart, rather than employing bluster and brute force on the world stage, we might strive to set an example that is real, genuine, compelling, and, thus, attractive to others. Arrogantly foisting our corrupt culture on others hardly seems wise or effective.

Sadly, I have witnessed over the years this same phenomenon in our churches. There seems to be this irrepressible urge to tell others what to do and how to live, as if we ourselves have it all together. Yet, as our churches crumble and fall into irrelevance, perhaps it would make more sense to get our own house in order before we lecture others.

In the end, Lent presents us with a choice and an opportunity. We can either choose God and God’s ways or we can muddle forth in moral confusion and spiritual blindness.

With God, after all, there is always a second chapter, always a second chance. And always, as well, the prospect of a miracle.