ahhhh...RANT!

You might notice, if you stare into my chocolate-brown eyes for too long, that one appears to be quite smaller than the other. The rather simple reason for this is that the perscription for my glasses is hideously off-balance. While my right eye requires virtually no correction, my left eye is so severely nearsighted that it is not actually correctible to "normal" 20/20 vision. I did not get glasses until my second semester of college--living eightteen years sheerly on the power of my right eye. I didn't realize that I was not normal until well into my teenage years, when I realized that not everyone else could switch eyes like I could and make everything really, really blurry. I still have the ability today to swith dominant eyes, watching everything pop into a different perspective.

The difficulty with this is that I also developed a phenomenon known as lazy eye. My eyes don't work together--usually I use one or the other, and only after getting glasses and doing eye training exercises am I able to use them both at the same time. To this day, when I am tired or under stress, people do not understand why i do not look at them when I am speakint; their dominant right eyes are looking into my left eye, which really isn't paying attention...it's wandered off somewhere over their right shoulder while my right eye is dutifully fixed on their face. Some people get the strangest twitches when my left eye begins moving independently of my right when we're talking. No, I am not demon posessed. Thank you.

Something that I haven't realized until now is how much my depth perception is affected by this little lazy-eye problem. Using one eye, hold two pencils or pens out in front of you and attempt to touch their points together. Without a binocular perspective, you have no depther perception and thus no ability to accurately judge the distance of objects. Now I understand my complete lack of ball throwing, hitting and catching skills as a child.

It's become pretty clear to me recently that the Christian community in America has become affected by some strange myopias (myopii?). For instance, when in a great moment of postmodern angst I asked "Why do so many marriages fail in America today?" what I was really struggling with was whether the values, institutitions, language, and symbolism for getting married in America are intelligent, consistent, practical, and functional, especially as a self-professed outsider.

My father, the good Christian and father and ever the practical one of us two, saw the questions in terms of individual behavior and answered thus: the failure is the result of a personal failure. One man and one woman do not keep their commitment to each other.

Robert Jervis, in his "Hypotheses on Misperception," wrote "Decision makers tend to fit incoming information into their existing theories and images. Indeed their theories and images play a large part in determining what they notice...actors tend to percieve what they expect." He then goes on to discuss visual phenomena, where a sphere the size of a golf ball at a set difference, a sphere the size of a basketball at a greater difference, and a sphere the size of the Epcot center at an even greater diffence are difficult to tell apart without little clues (like trees and buildings and rollercoasters and tees and golf clubs and men in funny looking plaid pants carrying sticks, all to measure the spheres against). It's even more difficult to tell them apart without depth perception--without both eyes.

Dallas Willard writes of one of the famous quandries of the spiritual life: who is the better Christian, the mystic or the social worker? The mystic considers the social worker "impious" and "shallow," and the social worker counters with the epithets "uncaring" and "irrelevant."

The tendency of the modern church, steeped in modern culture long enough to lose it's identity, is that of the mystic. So we have the charismatic and fundamentalist movements, with their focus on worshipping God, confessing individual sins and purifying our lives. We stand on our doctrinal correctness and our standards of behavior and condemn the liberal, social gospel types who can't wait to get out of boring church services and Bible studies and start soup kitchens.

The modern Christian mindset (so casually referred to as "The Christian Worldview" in a senior seminar last night) is tremendously individualistic. It views the root of evil and sadness and broken marriages in the actions and choices of individuals and societal behavior as individuals interacting with other individuals. It also veiws religion as the beliefs of individuals.

My cheerfully postmodern mindset views the individual not as a rational actor, but a subjective actor who is irrevocably a product of a social, economic and political environment. The root of evil and sadness is a broken world that traps helplessly ignorant, confused and despairing people into making poor decisions between the percieved lesser of two evils, often decisions that they do not even consciously think about.

So with my left eye I lament the system that gets so many people married who really made poor choices guided by a very dysfunctinal system--and I'm not talking about dating vs. courtship, but a more fundamental issue: the very ingrained patterns of social behavior which tend to be completely inconsistent with our expressed values; the way we gravitate to situations, even abusive situations and stunted relationships, which are comfortable; the things we are taught to consider attractive; the wired-in system of flirting and valuing certain social skills; the fear of honesty and the continual presentation of self; the attempt to have the kind of relationship that everyone else has; the establishment of a long-range commitment on a compatibility achieved in a transient, artifical, and highly-structured environment...all these things.

In the same way, I approach the problem of fruit companies cutting ethical corners on the use of pesticides from an institutional approach: we need to change the economic system so that the executives in those companies can do the right thing. As the system stands, it's a matter of fact that someone out there without scruples will cut ethical corners and put me and all my employees out of business if he doesn't, so we can't really expect him to be stupid and shoot himself in the foot and all his employees for no better reason than feeling good about himself.

Others, using their right eye, focus on the individual. Marriages do not hold together because people do not do what is right. They should change. Fruit company executives do not do what is right because they are evil and self-serving greedy bastards. They should repent and stop using pesticides that kill/main/cause birth defects and cancer in the poorest of the poor, the migrants who work the fields.

So the debate rages on. Dr. Walters and the class on spiritual formations, and the importance of the personal relationship with Christ, meet a very vehement Dr. Perkins and the Evangelicals for Social Action. Is a prostitue a sinner or a trafficked human being trapped in poverty and exploited? How much sympathy do you give a heroin addict? Is a homosexual suffering from a perverted mind debauched with sin and in need of repentance, or is he suffering from a lifetime of abuse, socialization, alienation and abandonment?

Left eye. Right eye. Depth perception. Is it a golfball located relatively close, in the actions of an individual, or an Epcot center radiating lines of control from the distance of this socially constructed world? Who is the actor, and who is the receptor?

I'm with Dr. Perkins. As surely as the individual is shaped by society, so the individual shapes society. It is within our power and our mandate as Christians to make institutional changes. To make the economic, social and political situations in our world just. To heed Cheryl Winter's reminder: justicia means both justice and righteousness in Spanish, and the entire Bible reads differently when the just man lives by faith.

And, being a good postmodernist, I'm also with Dr. Walters. The individual cannot change society without first being changed by God through the long, experiential, mystical process of spiritual formation. And the individual is responsible before God, in some strange way, for his or her actions relative to the social conditions and understanding in which he or she exists.

It's an oddly hopeful view; for it confirms what I have always expected, that people are not really the ogres Calvinists make them out to be. And it gives hope that man is more than people and situations make of him: we are not hopelessly trapped in this horribly ruined world.

There is so much myopia out there. So many people who think their pet spiritual specialty, whether playing the piano or writing economic policy or setting broken bones or painting beautiful pictures, is the answer to the world's problems. St. Paul, the original postmodern, has a challenge for us: we are the Body of Christ, one family with many perspectives and many gifts. Let not the Evangelical for Social Action look down on the Kansas City House of Prayer Prayer, nor the angst-ridden postmodern Christian look down on the self-absorbed modern Christian, but let them work together, live together, and maybe teach each other how to be more than one kind of Christian.



of course, to believe this you kind of have to be a postmodern yourself, but i've already written wayyyyy too long and it's dinner time.