"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom"

A very famous line. Though not untroubled by modern concerns. The critical word, obviously, is "fear." 

Let me confess that it can be a bit wearying to constantly rehabilitate the Bible in response to the Oedipal anxieties of progressive Christians. And yet, it is understandable. If a person was raised to fear God, and this fear has curdled into internalized shame and guilt, it needs to be dealt with. But the fear of God as experienced in conservative and high-control sectors of evangelicalism isn't the same fear that is being described by the Psalms. 

As we all know, or should know, by "fear" the ancient Hebrews meant something like reverent awe. True, that awe is tinged by anxiety. Not for fear of getting zapped. Just the simple animal response of being in the presence of an unimaginably huge power or facing a vast mystery. 

Why is this experience of awe the beginning of wisdom? 

In The Shape of Joy I describe how awe creates what psychologists call a "small self." When we encounter a reality greater than our own we resize our egos. Our tendencies toward self-absorption expand the territory of the self, the imprint of self-regard upon the inventory of my cares and concerns. The ego grows large and outsized. As the ego inflates, the concerns of others and the world are displaced, shoved aside by the expanding territory of the self. 

In the encounter with a reality larger and other than my own, my growing self-preoccupation is checked. The boundaries of my ego are pulled back so that I might accommodate myself and find my place within a greater whole. This is why I'd prefer to call the "small self" the "relational self." 

In The Shape of Joy this discussion about awe and the small self is connected to a conversation about humility. This connection with humility is what Psalm 111 sets before us. Humility is the first step toward wisdom, a proper understanding of how the self relates to and fits within the Real. Humility isn't about self-denigration, it is, rather, a recognition of our glad dependance upon God. 

Living within this glad dependence, the fear of the Lord, is the beginning of wisdom.

Yesterday I reflected upon "stress tests" related to the virtue of humility. One of those tests concerned how we treat people of lower status. Humble people treat persons of lower status with respect, concern, and care. People lacking in humility treat persons of lower status with dismissive superiority. 

Pondering this, I was reminded of a post of mine from 2007, one of the first viral pieces I ever wrote, about Robert Sutton's book No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. In that 2007 post I shared how I used Sutton's book to lead a Bible class at my church. Sutton read the post and went on to mention my Bible class in the updated edition of the book. Bob and I shared some cordial emails about my inclusion in the revised edition and he shared an advanced copy of the book with me. 

 

In 2004, Sutton was a Stanford business professor. When asked that year by Harvard Business Review to contribute to its annual edition of "Breakthrough Ideas" Sutton submitted what he called "the no asshole rule" as a guide for leadership, hiring practices, and corporate culture. Upon publishing the rule, Sutton received requests from around the world asking for more detail and sharing stories of about the toll assholes exact in the workplace. He also received confirmation that companies who had implemented some version of the rule experienced boosts in their corporate culture along with their bottom lines. All this inspired Sutton to write The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. The book became a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Businessweek bestseller, and has been translated into over twenty languages. 

But the most noteworthy thing to know about The No Asshole Rule is that it is the only leadership book I have ever read. 

What is "the no asshole rule" and why did it come to mind in light of yesterday's post about stress tests of humility? Again, a stress test for humility is how we treat people of lower status. And that is precisely the topic of Sutton's book. The No Asshole Rule is a meditation on the pernicious effects of hierarchy upon social relations, with a particular eye on how corporate hierarchies create nastiness and abuse in the workplace. For example, how do you identify an asshole? Sutton proposes two tests:

Test One:

After talking to the alleged asshole, does the "target" feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?

Test Two:

Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful? 

Test Two is what came to mind in light of yesterday's post, how we treat people of lower status. As should be obvious, the hierarchical corporate org-chart means that workplace settings are suffused with humility stress tests, as you're constantly dealing with people above or below you in regards to status and power. And it's failures of virtue within this status hierarchy that can make workplaces so oppressive and abusive. Sutton’s "no asshole rule" urges organizations to attend to the toxic relational dynamics that emerge at the intersections of power and status differentials in the workplace.

In many ways, organizational hierarchies are a massive and chronic stress test for the virtue of humility. As Sutton summarizes, "Power breeds nastiness." Consequently, our virtue is tested and revealed within these hierarchies. As Sutton shares, "The difference between how a person treats the powerless versus the powerful is as good a measure of human character as I know."

As I've shared in this space, the virtue of humility plays a featured role in the story I tell in The Shape of Joy about mental health and well-being. 

One of the more interesting conversations in the research literature concerns if humility is primarily an egoic or relational virtue. Most people, when they think about and describe humility, consider it to be an ego-focused virtue, an internal stance we take toward ourselves by way of self-perception, self-focus, and self-absorption. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, humble people have an accurate (rather than distorted) perception of themselves, are hypo-egoic (self-forgetful), and are other-focused (rather than self-focused). 

But humility can also be described as a interpersonal capacity, what is called "relational humility." This view is also called the "social oil" theory. Humility, as a relational capacity, is a social lubricant that reduces interpersonal frictions, irritants, and conflicts. Relationally humble people get along well with others, and this is humility's social magic. 

Relational humility has implications for measurement and assessment. The ratings of others are privileged over self-report. If you want to know if I'm relationally humble you need to ask my family, my church, my friends, my co-workers, and my students. 

The other implication for measurement and assessment is observing relational humility in situations where the virtue comes under stress. In the humility research psychologists have described the following locations as "stress tests" of humility:

• Seeking control, influence, or power within a group
• Interpersonal conflict
• Receiving praise or winning an award
• Sharing credit with others for accomplishments
• Receiving unfavorable or critical feedback
• Admitting and discussing one’s failures
• Taking ownership and responsibility for mistakes and hurtful behavior
• Apologizing to others
• Learning from others, being taught
• Interacting with those of lower status

You might think of other situations where humility is put to the test. The point here is that these are the relational locations where humility either shines or fails. Our behavior in these moments becomes either oil or sand in the relational gears of life. Humble people share power, resolve conflicts, accept praise with modesty, spread credit, welcome critical feedback, admit failures, own their mistakes, quickly apologize, willingly learn from others, and treat people of lower status with dignity, care, and respect. Humble people pass the relational stress tests. People lacking in humility, by contrast, grasp at power, exacerbate conflict, bask in the limelight, hoard credit, get defensive facing criticism, hide their failures, avoid responsibility, fail to apologize, aren't teachable, and treat those of lower status with dismissive superiority. 

True, at the root of these relational capacities are some egoic virtues. As I recently wrote about, humble people are amazingly healthy and grounded people. Humble people are practically saints, which has caused me to think, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, that there is more than "humility" going on here. Regardless, the point is clear that the truest tests of humility aren't egoic but relational. 

To wrap up, what I, personally, like about the stress tests of humility is how they provide me with an inventory of locations where I can do some good self-examination. Instead of asking myself "Am I humble?" I can reflect upon how I behave, and have behaved, in very specific situations in my life. When it comes to relational humility, do I pass the tests?

Last fall I did a series entitled "A Theology of Everything" in a personal attempt to gather and harmonize some theological commitments concerning creation theology, theodicy, soteriology, and eschatology. None of it was particularly original. The goal for myself was smoothing out locations were I felt there were some frictions in my own suite of convictions.

One of the big points I made was that the human predicament is both moral and ontological. It's an important insight as this twinning is often missed. Or, at the very least, one side of our predicament is emphasized at the expense of the other. For example, soteriological visions like penal substitutionary atonement tend to reduce salvation to human guilt and forgiveness. This moralizes salvation, which leads inexorably to moral influence views of the atonement. Salvation becomes "being a good person." Full stop. Jesus "shows us how to be human." And that's all he does.

To be sure, salvation concerns human guilt. And salvation also concerns sanctification, becoming more and more conformed to the image of Jesus who is "the Human One." But what is left out of this picture are the ontological effects of the Fall. Our vulnerability to death and the groaning of creation. For the church fathers this ontological predicament was front and center.

And yet, some read the ontological concerns of the church fathers over against the juridical vision of salvation, to the point of denying any juridical content in either the Bible or patristic tradition. This is also a distortion. To be sure, the law and order imagination of modern Christians is very different from the covenantal imagination of Scripture. Still, the Torah contains the category of law and covenantal infidelity and infractions create hazards and consequences, the Deuteronomic curses among them, that demand cultic attention and atonement. To erase the categories of sin and mercy from our soteriological vision is to dump much of the Biblical imagination into the trashcan.

So, sin and death go hand in hand, the moral and the ontological are braided together. Salvation concerns the whole of it.

A clear and concise picture of the dual aspect of the Fall are the two trees in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life concerns the ontological. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil concerns the moral. Sin enters the world when Adam and Eve eat of the the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is the moral catastrophe of the Fall which introduces shame, guilt, and hiding from God. The moral fall has ontological effects. Adam and Eve are separated from the Tree of Life. This introduces death into our lives along with the groaning of creation. 

In short, the Fall involves two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One tree symbolizes sin, the other tree symbolizes death. Salvation, therefore, involves both trees. The moral and the ontological are twinned. 

Out at the prison we were in the book of Numbers. 

(We're going straight through the Bible. We've done this once before and it took us almost ten years. But having reached the end we've gone back to the beginning and are doing it again.)

In Numbers 20 the Israelites come to the desert of Zin and find no water. They complain. Moses makes an appeal to God. The Lord tells Moses: "Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink.” After chiding the people for their lack of trust, Moses strikes the rock. Water flows forth and the people and animals drink.

In the New Testament Paul makes reference to this event. In 1 Corinthians 10 Paul writes:

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.

What does Paul mean when he says the rock that gushed forth water in the desert of Zin "was Christ"? 

Scholars will point out that 1 Corinthians 10 is an example of Paul's typological reading of the Old Testament. Paul regularly looks back upon the stories of the Old Testament and finds symbolic correspondences with the new reality revealed in Christ. In the passage above from 1 Corinthians 10 the Israelite passage under the cloud and the Red Sea parallels Christian baptism. The mana they eat and the water they drink in the desert provide spiritual sustenance, the same way Christ, who is the Bread of Life and the Water of Life, provides us with spiritual sustenance. Another famous place where Paul deploys this typological reading is in Galatians 4 using Sarah and Hagar as symbolic types of Law and promise.

Paul's typological approach has been much commented on. And it provided a model for the church fathers who frequently applied typological readings to the Old Testament. In fact, Ambrose's typological reading of the Old Testament was one of the big factors that facilitated Augustine's conversion to Christianity. Augustine had been struggling with the Old Testament. Ambrose's typological interpretations of the Old Testament stories gave Augustine a way to read the Old Testament that satisfied is intellectual and moral doubts. Given all this, it's curious how unfashionable typological readings are today. Paul read Scripture this way. Ambrose, Augustine, and the church fathers read Scripture this way. But modern pastors, preachers, and teachers avoid typological readings. Modern readings of the Bible, as taught in most seminaries, are governed by (and I'd say terrorized by) historical-critical methods which are rooted in an Enlightenment epistemology. Word studies and historical analysis are the norm today, not searching for symbolic correspondences. 

You could argue, though, that people like Jordan Peterson are reintroducing typological approaches to Scripture. Peterson reads the Old Testaments stories as Jungian symbols and archetypes, windows into psychology and the human predicament. Which is a critical difference. The typological readings of Paul and the church fathers were Christological. The symbols pointed to Christ. Peterson's readings, by contrast, are psychological. Paul says, "This story is about Christ." Peterson says, "This story is about the hero archetype."

Having said all that, the point I made out at the prison took us in a different direction.

Specifically, yes, you could say that the rock of Numbers 20 was a symbol and foreshadowing of Christ. We can establish a typological correspondence. But what if we read the correspondence ontologically? That rock was--literally--Christ. 

There is Biblical warrant for this ontological claim. All things were created by Christ and in Christ all things hold together. This would include rocks. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, Christ plays in ten thousand places. Given this stronger ontological understanding, how was the rock in the desert of Zin Christ? Well, the rock saved them. The rock was a mediator of grace. The rock didn't just symbolize Christ, the rock was Christ because Christ is always saving and sustaining us. We can look back upon our lives and see how we've had many saving and sustaining encounters with Christ. Perhaps it wasn't a rock, but it was something. 

In his book Unapologetic Francis Spufford describes a moment of conflict, shame, and despair in his romantic relationship. Spufford was the guilty party, and he describes feeling stuck, relationally and emotionally. Mired in these feelings after a bitter argument he finds himself in a coffee shop. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, the middle movement, the Adagio, begins to play. And the music saves him, becomes a mediator of grace. Here is Spufford describing it: 

If you don’t know it, it is a very patient piece of music. It too goes round and round, in its way, essentially playing the same tune again and again, on the clarinet alone and then with the orchestra, clarinet and then orchestra, lifting up the same unhurried lilt of solitary sound, and then backing it with a kind of messageless tenderness in deep waves, when the strings join in. It is not strained in anyway. It does not sound as if Mozart is doing something he can only just manage, and it does not sound as if the music is struggling to lift a weight it can only just manage. Yet at the same time, it is not music that denies anything. It offers a strong, absolutely calm rejoicing, but it does not pretend that there is no sorrow. On the contrary, it sounds as if it comes from a world where sorrow is perfectly ordinary, but still there is more to be said. I had heard it lots of times, but this time it felt to me like news. It said: everything you fear is true. And yet. And yet. Everything you have done wrong, you have really done wrong. And yet. And yet. The world is wider than you fear it is, wider than the repeating rigmarole that is in your mind, and it has this in it, as truly as it contains your unhappiness. Shut up and listen, and let yourself count, just a little bit, on a calm that you do not have to be able to make for yourself, because here it is, freely offered. You are still deceiving yourself, said the music, if you don’t allow for the possibility of this. There is more going on here than what you deserve, or don’t deserve. There is this, as well. And it played the tune again, with all the cares in the world.

The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that’s exactly how I experienced in 1997.

Let us say, "That music was Christ." Not symbolically, but actually. Christ plays in ten thousands places. And if that is so, we come to see, with dawning recognition, that Christ has been saving us our entire lives. 

Paul looked at a moment of grace in the story of Israel and declared, "That rock was Christ." 

In your story, as well, those rocks exist. 

“Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool”

Psalm 110.1 is one of the most quoted lines in the New Testament. The Davidic promise made in this psalm becomes a messianic expectation fulfilled in Jesus. Peter cites Psalm 110.1 in the very first proclamation of the gospel:

God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said,

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

Psalm 110 also sits behind descriptions of Christ's cosmic victory:

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. (1 Cor. 15.20-25)

In his book Saved By Allegiance Alone Matthew Bates makes the point that Christians often fail to tell the whole of the gospel story. We leave the narrative incomplete. We never reach the final chapter. 

Specifically, we generally tell the story of the gospel by recounting the Incarnation, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus. These events--birth, life, death and resurrection--are the Good News.

Bates argues that this truncated telling of the gospel, ending with Easter, leaves out the final, climatic moment of the story. The culmination of the gospel is the Ascension, the moment envisioned by Psalm 110, Jesus being seated as Lord and King and coming to reign over his enemies. The entire point of the gospel story--as the culmination of Israel's story--is Jesus being enthroned as Ruler over the world and cosmos.

If we fail to finish the story, argues Bates, we never arrive at the definitive confession of the Christian faith, that Jesus is "Lord of all." And if we miss this, we miss the heart of the Christian life and community, confessing and swearing fealty and allegiance to the one, true king.

Preparing for the class on Celtic Christianity I recently taught in Ireland, I spent some time looking around online for a map and timeline that I could use to introduce my students to the history of Irish monasticism. I couldn't find any that worked for me, so I made my own.

Here's the map I made (PDF download here):

Some of the specific sites and events noted in the map are peculiar to the outings and visits we made as a part of the class. And other things have been left off. But most of the map gives you a nice timeline and visual about the rise and decline of what is called "Celtic Christianity." 

To start with some pre-Celtic history, we visited the burial mounds at the Hills of Tara and Newgrange, neolithic sites that pre-date the Celts in Ireland or, rather, the rise of Celtic culture in Ireland. 

The origin of the Celts in Ireland is a matter of scholarly dispute. The original Celts were from Gaul (modern-day France, Belgium, parts of western Germany, and northern Italy). The Celts of Ireland and Britain are connected to these European Celts for two reasons. First, the languages of Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland are in the Celtic language group. Also, the artifacts of the Celts from the Isles show influences of the La Tène culture of the European Celts. For these two reasons, language and La Tène influence, we describe the peoples encountered by the Romans in the British Isles as "Celtic." These linguistic and cultural features show up in the British Isles between 800-100 BC. So, the neolithic sites of the Isles, like Stonehenge or the burial mounds at Newgrange, pre-date the Celts. 

There is some debate about this Celtic "arrival." Was it a migration or invasion of the Isles by the European Celts? Or was it a case of cultural transfusion and change? Historically, the migration/invasion hypothesis was favored. But recent genetic evidence has cast doubt on that theory, pushing scholars toward the cultural change hypothesis. And if that is true, then the peoples of the British Isles were not genetically "Celtic" but became, rather, culturally "Celtic." Either way, the British Isles are recognizably "Celtic" by about 100 BC.

Rome makes it first invasion in 55 BC and eventually comes to establish itself in Britain for a little over four centuries. The Roman impact on Britain remains to this day, from the Roman baths at Bath (shout out to all Jane Austen fans) to the fact that the Brits still drive upon roads laid by the Romans. 

Christianity follows those Roman roads to the Isles, making its way to Britain around 200 AD. The faith soon starts to spread. In 300 AD St. Alban dies as the first Christian martyr in Roman Briton. 

Roman and Christian influence never fully penetrates to the edges of Briton. Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland remain largely pre-Christian and Celtic. The Romans never invade Ireland, leaving its Celtic culture wholly untouched by Roman culture and the Christian faith.

The Romans leave in 410 AD. After the Roman departure, the Anglo-Saxons begin their migration into East and Southern Briton, effectively taking over the same areas once controlled by the Romans. The Anglo-Saxons arrive as pagans, but they are evangelized by the Christians they encounter. In the Northern parts of Briton, many of these Christians will be the Irish monastics who come from Ireland.

 

The dawn of Celtic Christianity happens when St. Patrick, around 400 AD, goes back to Ireland to begin his missionary work among the Celts. I say "goes back" because, as a young boy, Patrick had been abducted and taken as a slave to Ireland. Patrick's mission is wildly successful. Christianity spreads through Ireland, and Irish monasticism takes hold in places like Glendalough with St. Kevin, Clonmacnoise with St. Ciarán, and Kildare with St. Brigid. As I noted above, the Irish monks become missionaries themselves. St. Columba establishes the monastery at Iona in 563 AD. In Iona the Book of Kells begins to be created. St. Aidan goes from Iona to Lindisfarne in 634 AD. St. Columbanus goes to France in 600 AD, establishing monasteries throughout Europe. As he travels, Columbanus brings with him the peculiar invention of the Irish monks, the illuminated codex. This impact of Columbanus upon medieval Europe, the monasteries he established with their illuminated manuscripts, is how, in the words of Thomas Cahill, the Irish "saved civilization" after the fall of Rome.

The decline of Celtic Christianity was slow and marked by three main historical events. The first was the Synod of Whitby in 664 AD. One of the aims of the Synod of Whitby was to bring the Irish monasteries under Roman Catholic control. Next, the Vikings began to raid the British Isles around 800 AD. Both Iona and Lindisfarne were eventually abandoned due to Viking plundering. Because of the Viking threat, the Book of Kells was taken away from Iona and brought to Ireland, where it remans to this day. Finally, the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 AD and Ireland in 1169 AD brought significant Irish influence upon Western Christianity to a close. Given all this, "peak Celtic Christianity" lasted from St. Patrick to the Synod of Whitby, about 250 years. Though distinctive aspects of Celtic Christianity persisted in Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland for another 500 years. 

So that's the story, told in a single map I made for my students. For more about my take on Celtic Christianity check out Hunting Magic Eels and the chapter on "Celtic Enchantments."

In the last post I described how acquiring emotional dispositions involves narrative. The stories we tell shape our meaning-making processes, how we construe the world and where we locate our concerns. Dispositions are formed through a top-down process that directs how we see the world and where we place our values. 

These observations can be sharpened through what is known in the psychological literature as sanctification theory. Sanctification theory, developed by Kenneth Pargament and Annette Mahoney, concerns how aspects of life—such as relationships, roles, activities, objects, or events—can be perceived as sacred and imbued with divine significance. My favorite example of sanctification theory comes from the volumes of Every Moment Holy published by Rabbit Room Press. 

A perusal of the contents of the volumes of Every Moment Holy reveals how the prayers are directed toward a host of mundane and daily activities, jobs, experiences, and chores:

• For Domestic Days
• For One Who Is Employed
• For Those Who Employ Others
• For Laundering
• For the Preparation of a Meal
• For the Washing of Windows
• For Home Repairs
• For Students & Scholars
• For Waiters & Waitresses
• For the Changing of Diapers
• For Those Employed in Manual Labor
• For One Who Cares for an Infirm Parent
• For Mechanical Repairs
• For Unseen Labors
• For One Who Works the Nightshift
• For Yard Work
• For Getting Dressed
• For Dropping Off a Child at School
• For Those Anxious About Air Travel
• For Nursing Mothers
• Before Shopping
• For the Paying of Bills
• For Those Who Cannot Sleep
• For the Ritual of Morning Coffee
• For a Sick Day
• Before Teaching
• Before a Job Interview

Most of these activities don't feel very holy or sacred. These are moments in our lives were we experience fatigue, apathy, boredom, dread, anxiety, irritation, or dissatisfaction. But if we sanctify these moments, if we can connect them to sacred and divine concerns, we begin to infuse life with transcendent emotions. Boredom or anxiety is replaced with gratitude, hope, joy, wonder, and love. Consider, for example, the Liturgy for Changing Diapers (free download here):

Heavenly Father,
in such menial moments as this—
the changing of a diaper—
I would remember this truth:
My unseen labors are not lost,
for it is these repeated acts of small sacrifice that—
like bright, ragged patches—
are slowly being sewn into a quilt of
lovingkindness that swaddles this child.

I am not just changing a diaper.
By love and service
I am tending a budding heart that,
rooted early in such grace-filled devotion,
might one day be more readily-inclined
to bow to your compassionate conviction—
knowing itself then as both a receptacle
and a reservoir of heavenly grace.

So this little act of diapering—
though in form sometimes felt
as base drudgery—might be
better described as one of ten thousand acts
by which I am actively creating a culture of
compassionate service and selfless love to shape
the life of this family and this beloved child.

So take this unremarkable act of necessary
service, O Christ, and in your economy
let it be multiplied into
that greater outworking of worship and of faith,
a true investment in the incremental
advance of your kingdom across generations.

Open my eyes that I might see this act
for what it is from the fixed vantage of eternity, O Lord—
how the changing of a diaper might
sit upstream of the changing of a heart;
how the changing of a heart might
sit upstream of the changing of the world.

Amen.

This prayer is a profound and moving illustration of sanctification theory, how an unpleasant chore can become suffused with transcendent wonder, beauty, and grace. Following from the last post, notice how the prayer is engaged in shaping, in a top-down process, our concern-based construals. In the act of changing a diaper a perceptual stance is being adopted that brings sacred concerns into view and thereby imbues the mundane with divine significance. The act of changing diapers is re-narrated and this story allows holy affections to flow. 

Now, if sanctification can be done on a case by case basis, every moment becoming holy, step back and take a wider view. We can sanctify our entire life story. Given that our identities and self-conceptions are narrative in nature, we can sanctify that story. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, Pamela King calls this a "transcendent narrative identity." Acquiring a transcendent narrative identity involves telling a sacred story about your life, construing your life from a sacred perspective and locating your concerns in the divine. 

When we sanctify our lives our treasures are located in heaven and not on earth. And as Jesus said, wherever we place our treasure, there our heart will be also.

The point I made in the last post is that spiritual formation must involve moving from emotions to dispositions. Rather than waiting on external, situational, and environmental events to bring about or elicit emotions of gratitude, hope, joy, wonder, or love we must work at becoming more grateful, hopeful, joyful, wonder-filled, and loving. Acquiring dispositional gratitude, for example, brings more thankfulness into our lives. Transformed into dispositions emotions become virtues. 

How does this happen?

It happens at the level of meaning-making, how we construe, interpret, and make sense of the world. Cognitively, dispositions are controlled in a top-down fashion. Dispositions, we might say, dictate our emotional responses to external events rather than our being reactive to and triggered by circumstance. 

For example, in The Shape of Joy I use Robert Robert's description of joy as a "concern-based construal." Joy can be a positive emotion, an experience of gladness and delight in response to some happy event. But dispositional joy, joy as a virtue, is more consistent, stable, and enduring. And most importantly, dispositional joy creates capacities for joy even in difficult circumstances. In The Shape of Joy I make a contrast between triggered joy (joy as emotion) versus transcendent joy (joy as disposition). This triggered-to-transcending shift happens, following Roberts, by noting how joy is a construal, a way of seeing and perceiving the world. Joy as a process of meaning-making. And continuing with Roberts, this meaning-making process is "concern-based," having to do with our cares, values, and investments. As I put it in The Shape of Joy, joy is seeing the world through what you care about.

Knowing this about joy we have two levers to pull. First, there is perceptual work, how we see and interpret the world. We can change or alter our perspective. We can reframe and reconsider. Second, we have control over our concerns, where we invest and place the weight of our lives. We can locate our concerns in places that provide deeper and more constant anchorage in the storms of life. As Jesus says: 

Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Summarizing, we can gain greater emotional autonomy through perspective-taking and the considered allocation of our concerns. How does that happen?

It happens at the level of narrative. Meaning-making is a storying-telling process, how we plot and narrate our lives. Our story is what dictates how we construe the world and our story expresses where we place our concerns. In telling our stories, we give shape to our emotions, forming them into dispositions. You can tell a story about your life that makes you more grateful. You can tell a story about your life that makes you more hopeful. You can tell a story about your life that makes you more loving. You can tell a story about your life that makes you more hopeful. And you can tell a story about your life that makes you more open to wonder and awe. 

To conclude, meaning-making is crucial to cultivating holy affections and virtuous emotional dispositions. Your story--how you construe the world and where you locate your concerns--creates capacities for emotional autonomy and transcendence.

One of the biggest research questions in positive psychology concerns the contrast between emotions and dispositions. Sometimes this is described as a state versus trait distinction.

For example, my doctoral research concerned anger management. And in the anger literature there's a contrast between state anger and trait anger. State anger is the emotion of anger and is triggered by angering events. Something happens, like someone cutting you off in traffic, and your anger flashes out. Trait anger is your predisposition to anger, sometimes called hostility. If you have hostility toward someone or something you might not be feeling state anger at the moment, but your hostility will make you quick to anger when you are exposed to or think about that to which your hostility is directed. 

State experiences, like emotions, are temporary and situational. Traits are more consistent and enduring. Anger can come and go throughout the day, but hostility can persist for years, decades, and a lifetime.

Closely related to the state/trait contrast is the distinction between emotions and dispositions. Emotions are transitory affective states. Dispositions are habitual tendencies that create a proneness toward certain emotional experiences. Where "trait" can refer to genetic tendencies, like with the Big Five personality traits, dispositions highlight volitional and attitudinal aspects, like what we see with virtues. You might be born with given traits but you can work on changing your disposition. 

Of course, the lines here get blurry. Is hostility, for example, a genetic trait or an acquired disposition? Obviously, it can be a bit of both. All of us possess innate emotional tendencies and those tendencies are affected by how we live our lives, pushing against these tendencies or allowing them to etch deeper grooves into our attitudes and emotions. 

Okay, back to positive psychology. Many of the things positive psychologists study can be examined as either a state or a trait, as an emotional response or an enduring disposition. Some of the big emotions psychologists have looked at are gratitude, awe, hope, and joy. We can feel grateful, hopeful, joyful, and struck with wonder and awe. As emotions, psychologists study the environmental and situational triggers of these states. For example, what triggers gratitude (receiving a positive benefit from another) is different from what triggers awe (an encounter with something vast, a reality larger than oneself). Psychologists also study the phenomenological content of these emotions, making distinctions between them. For example, sometimes awe can be elating and wondrous, but sometimes awe can be tinged with terror and fear. Joy can feel peaceful, calm, and serene but also exhilarating, exuberant, and ecstatic. 

Lots of research is devoted to these sorts of emotional investigations. But given positive psychology's interest in virtues, attention has also been devoted toward how these emotions can become dispositions. For example, what about dispositional gratitude, dispositional joy, dispositional hope, and dispositional awe? That is, who are those people who are predisposed to feeling grateful, joyful, hopeful, and interrupted by wonder? And the critical piece to note here, like with my example of anger and hostility, is how dispositions bring more of the emotion into you life. You feel more grateful, more joyful, more hopeful, and more interrupted by wonder. 

And so it's here, with this question of emotional dispositions, where a conversation shows up about virtue and spiritual formation. Spiritual formation needs to focus upon this emotion-to-disposition shift. Spiritual formation must engage with our emotional lives, helping us make holy affections less fleeting and situational and more stable, constant, and enduring. 

Gratitude, joy, hope, and awe, to name a few examples, must become habits of the heart.

"he did not think to show kindness"

Psalm 109 is one of those infamous imprecatory psalms. Curses--quite a lot of them and very detailed!--are called down upon a wicked person. 

Not surprisingly, I find reading through the litany of curses in Psalm 109 uncomfortable. The most famous imprecatory psalm is Psalm 137. Psalm 137 cuts like a knife, slapping you across the face with its final line. Psalm 109 is different. Rather than a sudden punch to the gut, Psalm 109 is a slow cumulative build up. Woe is piled on top of woe, and you find yourself wincing as it goes on and on. 

I do find it helpful, though, to bring the wicked person into view. Here's the description: 

For he did not think to show kindness,
but pursued the suffering, needy, and brokenhearted
in order to put them to death.
He loved cursing—let it fall on him;
he took no delight in blessing—let it be far from him.
He wore cursing like his coat—
let it enter his body like water
and go into his bones like oil.

So, not a nice person. And we've encountered people like this. People like this hold influence in the world, from corporations to politics. And as we've witnessed their impact upon our lives and the world, we curse. 

Well, I curse. I don't know about you, but that's what I do.

I should unpack what I mean by cursing. Cursing is different from profanity. Profanity is uncouth, inappropriate, and vulgar talk. The f-word is an example of profanity. Cursing, by contrast, is an imprecation.  Like "Go to hell" or "God damn you." That's what Psalm 109 does, it curses. 

But while we are emotionally sympathetic to Psalm 109, we have some moral anxieties. Progressive Christians, especially, love to concern troll the Psalms. Which is ironic, this pearl clutching, given their own rage against those who perpetrate oppression and injustice. Apparently, modern victims are allowed to curse. But ancient victims? Not so much. 

The point here is that the Bible is exquisitely attuned to the impact of evil on the world. Noteworthy and particular in this regard, revolutionary and unprecedented in its time and place, the Bible cares what victims experience and feel. 

And most importantly, the Bible lets those victims speak.

Some thoughts about prayer.

The content of prayer is need, gratitude, and praise.

Help, thanksgiving, and doxology.

But the act of prayer is the finite reaching toward the Infinite,

created being seeking the Uncreated,

the temporal touching Eternity,

the mutable and transitory bridging to the Unchanging.

Contemplative prayer turns from content to act.

Ecstatic longing of the heart

desiring its Source and End.

Enstatic awareness of dependency,

attending to the Stability beneath fragility. 

Respiration between intrinsic need and eccentric gift.

The argument I've made in this series is that the empirical research into humility opened up a doorway into the healthy ego, but that positive psychologists conflated health and humility. To be sure, as we've described over the last two posts, the healthy ego is humble, but it's health that is producing these ego effects. 

If that is so, what is the health at the source of humility? What makes an ego quiet, other-oriented, small, self-forgetful, and non-reactive in the face of ego threats? In the last two posts I've pointed toward having a secure, stable, and grounded identity. 

But what does it mean to have a secure and grounded identity? In The Shape of Joy I point to mattering, an unshakeable conviction of our value and worth. This was Brené Brown's big discovery concerning how mattering, feeling oneself to be worth of love and belonging, was the only variable she could find that conferred shame-resiliency. Brown's observation about the link between mattering and shame converges upon what we've reviewed over the last two posts. Shame is triggered by ego threats. We feel unmasked and exposed by our faults and failures. That fear of exposure causes us to hide from others and ourselves. But if one possesses mattering, a durable and unshakable conviction of worth, one can "dare greatly" in allowing our mistakes, faults, imperfections, and fallibilities to show. And it's precisely this willingness to be imperfect before others that gets described as a characteristic of humble people. So you can see the linkages here: Mattering, shame-resiliency in the face of ego threats, and the humility to let others see your faults, failures, and imperfections. It's all connected. 

And yet, isn't this a bit of a chicken and egg problem? 

Mattering is the antidote to shame, but isn't shame the feeling that you don't matter? As Brown describes, shame is the feeling that "I'm bad," the very opposite of mattering. If so, how do I get to mattering in the midst of shame? I highlight the psychological circularity between shame an mattering in The Shape of Joy to raise the crucial question: If not from our self-assessment, what is the source of our mattering? In the face of my shame, where does this conviction that we are worthy of love and belonging come from?

The argument I make in The Shape of Joy, following where the arrows of positive psychology are pointing, is transcendence. Mattering is a metaphysical conviction. Which is why psychologists describe mattering as cosmic significance or existential significance. Mattering is an ontological truth. Which necessarily pushes us into faith and spirituality. Just like it did for Brené Brown. As a transcendent truth, mattering isn't available to material or scientific observation. Our cosmic significance must be simply asserted and claimed in an act of ontological faith. This is what separates mattering from self-regard. Self-regard is subjective, self-generated, and self-referential. This makes self-regard both unstable and exhausting, in constant need of attention, maintenance , and rehabilitation. Mattering, by contrast, is objective, what I call in The Shape of Joy an "invisible fact." As an ontological conviction mattering is constant, stabilizing, and grounding. 

This is the story I tell in The Shape of Joy, how mental health is inherently a spiritual journey, away from self-referentiality toward transcendence. As described in this series, humility flows out of a healthy ego, and a healthy ego is grounded and stabilized by a transcendent source of unconditional value and worth.

In the last post I suggested that what positive psychologists are describing as "humility" is really mental health. For example, in the literature humility is described as having a secure and grounded identity. But this is backwards. It is, rather, that secure and grounded people are humble. 

This is important to get straight, as I described at the end of the last post, as telling insecure and unstable people to be humble isn't going to be helpful. The first thing that needs to happen is to stabilize the ego, and from there capacities for humility with follow.

That said, humility has been a remarkable and fruitful entry window onto mental health. What has the research on humility revealed to us about a healthy ego? In The Shape of Joy I gather the research into a hexagon, six different but related windows that reveal the heath of our egos. Here's that figure from The Shape of Joy:

So, the six windows onto the ego are volume, focus, investment, stability, valuation, and size:

Ego volume: Ego volume concerns if the voice in your head, your self-talk, is "loud" or "quiet." Cycles of negative self-talk create a "loud" ego, what Ethan Kross calls "chatter," where the self is drawn inward by the critical noise of the inner self. By contrast, a "quiet" ego doesn't generate cycles of inner self-criticism.

Ego focus: Ego focus concerns the degree to which the ego is focused inwardly upon the self versus outwardly toward others. Where are the "eyes" and attention of the ego directed? At the self or at others?

Ego investment: Ego investment concerns the degree to which ego is self-absorbed versus self-forgetful. Psychologists describe a self-forgetting ego as "hypo-egoic." As the odd adage goes, humility isn't thinking less of yourself, it is thinking about yourself less.  

Ego Stability: Ego stability concerns how reactive the ego is to ego-threats. Ego-threats are situations or experiences that challenge our self-concept, self-worth, or identity. Examples include failure, criticism, rejection, and social comparison. Ego reactivity concerns our emotional (anger, shame, defensiveness, anxiety), cognitive (rationalizations, denial, blame-shifting, denigration of others), and behavioral (avoidance, argumentation, overcompensation, aggression) reactions toward ego-threats. Healthy egos are stable and non-reactive in the face of ego-threats. Unhealthy egos are unstable and reactive.

Ego Valuation: Ego valuation concerns the conditionality of our value and worth. When the value and worth of the ego is tied to metrics of success or failure ego valuation is conditional. When the value and worth of the ego is cosmic and existential, fixed and constant no matter one's successes and failures, ego valuation is unconditional. 

Ego Size: Ego size concerns the perceived sense of self-importance and the boundaries of the ego in relation to the world. A "large" ego is self-important and stands separately and autonomously in relation to the world. A "small" ego sees itself in relationship with the larger concerns of the world and fits itself into and identifies with those larger concerns. A "large" ego is all about Me. A "small" ego is all about We. 

Stepping back, you can see how the research on humility has provided an excellent entry point into an investigation of mental health and the healthy ego. Humble people have quiet, self-forgetful, and small egos. Humble people are other-focused rather than self-focused. Humble people aren't overly wrapped up in metrics of winning or losing. And yet, when you look at our hexagram tour of the ego the vision we have is larger and deeper than what the word "humility" is capturing. We'll turn toward that issue in the next post.