WHAT IF GREATNESS ISN’T GREAT?

WHAT IF GREATNESS ISN’T GREAT?

MÜLLER-LYER ILLUSION – What do you notice about the relative lengths of the two red lines? The arrowheads and arrowtails alone may affect your perception of the line length. In this image, those lines are extended to create a dimensional drawing of walls, where the red line in the far corner appears to be full wall height, while the closer red line is not. But the red lines are actually the same length.

Okay, so maybe you’ve seen this or one of many other optical illusions before and realized that perception turns out to be “make believe reality.”   It happens.   Our eyes fool us into thinking something that’s not quite true.

This post is not about the phenomenon we call “gas-lighting,” where we come to believe what someone else sees or says instead of trusting our own eyes or ears to tell the truth. Rather, I’d like to try and make this about the risk we take when we deny objective truth in favor of someone’s……anyone’s…..subjective bias.  

Full disclaimer: there’s no way for me to write this piece apart from my own subjective bias.   This is about my opinion about opinions, if you will, and it’s about my own beliefs.   Your own take-away is on you. 

What I do put on myself is this: at the ripe old age of 79 I’ve known my thinking to shift away from what we may call “intuitive” to a more “counter-intuitive” belief system.  Much of this is informed by my repeated reading of that 66 book library we call the Protestant Christian Bible.  

By nature, as well as some degree of nurture no doubt, I’ve come to take a rather big-picture approach to life.   My wife can assure you I am nearly an expert at overlooking details.  I miss the hint or pass by the small stuff as if it doesn’t exist.   I know it does, but I’m looking for something bigger than a breadbox so can’t see the bread itself, so to speak.   We can’t all see the same thing or all have the same skill set, but I’d say where even the interpretation of a narrative is concerned I am good at seeing the big message but forgetting the clever one-liners interjected by the narrator.   I play to my own brain’s strengths to compensate for its weaknesses, I suppose.

Where my reading of, say, the Bible is then concerned, I look for the literary whole and easily put aside perhaps too many syntax from original languages that seem to translate poorly.   I’m more of a “just forget it and move on” kind of reader where some biblical verses are concerned.   I take far more meaning from the whole than from the part.  

The whole of the biblical story, in my humble opinion, seems to be about the human condition as differentiated from the divine condition we call God.    It states boldly that the human species is not life’s ultimate being.    There’s something higher than humanity that seeks an open relationship with us.  This higher "other" is relating to us people with our own best interest in mind, seeking to empower us and elevate us to a higher level of functioning.  By analogy we picture a creator working to improve upon its creation.   Maybe taking something that’s still wrong and making it right, something broken and doing the work of repair.   

The creation metaphor or analogy makes sense to me, but it then challenges me to better find out what it is in humanity that is broken and in need of restoration or improvement.   What’s wrong with us that needs help from beyond ourselves to become right?  Where are we sick and in need of healing? This latter question is rather soundly implied as the secondary metaphor in the scriptural narrative.    The divine character in this entire big picture drama is first Creator and then Healer in relation to a broken humanity whose sickness becomes healed if we, in the fullness of this analogy, are compliant patients in following the doctor’s orders.

As new questions then emerge within my own thought process, I begin to wonder what makes for a good relationship between not so much creature and creator, where the latter has seemingly all the power, but rather between patient and physician, where power is transferred to the former for the purpose of healing some dis-ease.   How can this metaphor then inform our mission as what we call the Church in moving forward?   Can we make the mission somewhat more effective and efficient by applying the biblical disease/healer relationship more than the disciple/disciplinarian one?  Can we maybe try to make patients instead of disciples for a change?   

I ask these questions because of the futility I have noticed by my own errors as a healthcare provider when wearing my therapist’s hat instead of my pastor’s hat.   Blaming the patient for the disease is perhaps the ultimate futility if one’s mission is to facilitate the healing process itself.   Anecdotally, I find healthy outcomes most likely when the patient repents of shame and self-loathing and learns self-love in its healthiest of manifestations.    A sinner and savior relationship stifles, in my experience, any actual health to follow.   To the contrary, it often solidifies the disease process in itself.   Nothing, as it were, is more toxic to the soul, mind, and body, than a belief in original sin.    Translation: God doesn’t make junk.

Well, okay.   But.  

What does this have to do with the entitled question, “What if greatness isn’t great?”  

Perhaps we sometimes think of greatness the way a patient thinks of a physician.   Perhaps we think of an almighty state of absolute truth and authority and certainty and control. Greatness becomes the object of our total faith; no doubt about it.    Great makes might and might makes right.  

Imagine this exchange at the doctor’s office:  

(Physician) So what’s going on?

(Patient)   I don’t know.   That’s what I’m here to find out.

(Physician)  I understand.   But what seems to you to be the problem?

(Patient)   I don’t know.  You’re the doctor.   I was hoping you could tell me?

In the interest of time, this physician may skip the conversation entirely and begin the physical exam.   Yet at no point in the relationship does the doctor cease to be the source of greatness and total control.  Which then leaves the patient still with a belief in the illusion of his/her own powerless/helpless position in the course of treatment.

I wonder if our human prayers aren’t sometimes like this imagined exchange at the doctor’s office.   You’re the Almighty one.  You fix me.   I don’t know anything.   That’s why I’m here.   It’s all up to you, God.                                                                                                                                                       

Thomas Jay Oord, PhD, has become my favorite author and pastor in the last decade because of his work in making me a better patient in partnership with God, the divine character as portrayed in the Bible.  He and Dr. Jurgen Moltmann have been like therapists to me in conveying a theology that best strengthens my own spiritual weakness.  They’ve helped me see that God is great not because of any greatness at all.   God is great because of God’s absolute goodness.   The Great Physician is first a Good Shepherd, to further mix the biblical metaphors.    And the best “fix” for a broken humanity comes when the Creator empowers the creature to join in the healing work of empowering other creatures to help in the healing work of empowering other creatures, ad infinitum, forever and ever in eternal perpetuity.  

The biblical bottom line is the same length as this: might does NOT make right but rather right makes might.   Greatness does not make good, but goodness makes great.   Goodness is great.   Love is more powerful than fear.   Influence is more powerful than control.  Or, borrowing Dr. Oord's own words: Amipotence is more powerful than Omnipotence.

Counter-intuitive?   Perhaps.   The Gospel of Jesus as contained and expressed within the Bible is counter-intuitive to a humanity whose judgment is typically no better than the Muller-Lyer Illusion depicted above. 

I will close this out, then, with a quote from Andrew Reed and James Matheson, who visited the United States in the 1830s. In their 1835 book A Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches, they wrote, "America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud".   

May our ears hear and eyes see that which is real and true, and may God bless America in the healing of our prior optical illusion.