The Sin of Stagnation
“Riposo a casa” said the banner hanging from the balcony on Via Goito in Parma. “I rest at home.” The world on hold. Annoying, disturbing, disruptive, perhaps deadly, we experienced the results of a pandemic of fear. Isolation is not a fundamental human condition. In fact, enforced isolation is a method used in torture. Brené Brown notes: “We are hard-wired for connection—it’s what gives us purpose and meaning to our lives. The absence of love, belonging, and connection always leads to suffering.”[1]
“ . . . the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.”[2]
Perhaps this explains why the restrictions we are all experiencing as a result of this pandemic could only be enforced with an overwhelming threat to life. The only way governments can get people to act against their basic instinct for connection is to make connection a vehicle of death. Of course, enforced isolation is just another less obvious kind of dying, but it doesn’t show up in hospital wards or on vital statistics reports. Nevertheless, every day of isolation we die just a little bit more. That’s why it’s so uncomfortable.
The initial symptom of death by isolation is boredom. We used to live busy lives. Plenty of interaction with others even if it was just bumping into people at the mall. Video conferences and online chats are not real substitutes for human face-to-face connections. They are deadly to the soul. If ninety percent of human communication is non-verbal, imagine what happens to the remaining ten percent when it is reduced to plasma images and keystrokes. Is any of that really personal? Have we been duped into thinking that we are connected when all that really happens is a stream of indifferent electrons? Why do we accept such banal substitutes for genuine touch, breath, sight? Because we have been made afraid of each other. Perhaps we need to revise the popular religious motto, “Love conquers all.” In these days it should read, “Fear is my closest friend.”
It seems to me that there is a spiritual parallel to this “new normal.” Isolation breeds stagnation. My mind stops creating because my world is reduced to me. I no longer confront the bump and grind of real living. I “rest at home,” safe and stupid. Perhaps we’re ready to accept the enforced isolation of fear because we are already used to spiritual isolation from the Creator. We’ve spent centuries exiling God from humanity. Now we are encouraged to exile each other, the next step in human devolution. All that’s left is The Matrix.
I would like to suggest a different approach. If we can’t stand together on the beach because “we all might die!”, then let’s defeat the death of isolation by standing in awe no matter where we happen to riposo a casa. Standing in awe is a deliberately chosen attitude, but it’s not the same as contemplation. Heschel notes:
“When we stand in awe, our lips do not demand speech; knowing that if we spoke, we would deprave ourselves. In such moments talk is an abomination. All we want is to pause, to be still, that the moment may last.”[3]
There are some difficulties. First, we can’t really control these moments. We don’t get to choose them. They choose us. I believe they are readily available, but, as the Chinese proverb suggests, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Attitude doesn’t necessitate delivery, but lack of attitude guarantees “Return to Sender.”
Second, the desire to prolong the moment of awe reveals something basically about mankind. All of this isn’t really under our control, and when it happens, it still isn’t under our control. Awe is serendipity. But the very fact that we long for it is a sign that we know where our real connection lies. “Man is meaningless without God,”[4] wrote Heschel. Connection begins in the spiritual realm if it is going to make any real difference, and it has to start with awe.
Isn’t that what we really need? Life and death are not in our hands anyway. Of course, we don’t want to be foolish, but isn’t fear foolish? Aren’t we acting against our own humanity by cowering before the WHO’s daily report? What we need, it seems to me, is a very big dose of awe, of the mystery of being alive at all, of the sense that there is more than survival at stake here.
“The objection may be voiced that a psychological reaction is no evidence for an ontological fact, . . That objection is, of course, valid. Yet what we infer from is not the actual feeling of awe but the intellectual certainty that in the face of nature’s grandeur and mystery we must respond with awe; what we infer from is not a psychological state but a fundamental norm of human consciousness, a categorical imperative. . . That sweep of mystery is not a thought in our mind but a most powerful presence beyond the mind.”[5]
What I need, perhaps what you may also need, is the sweep of mystery, the sense of presence. If I can’t have the touchy-feely nourishing of your real person, I can still find myself before God. I can still behold the majesty of being. I can still be enticed, encouraged, wooed by Him. But I’ll need some adjustments. I’ll need to remember, and apply, a few basic changes.
First, I need to take seriously Hsechel’s remarks, “Concepts are delicious snacks with which we try to alleviate our amazement,”[6] and “ . . . explanations are merely indications of greater puzzles.”[7] I’ll need to rein in my penchant for Western causality, you know, that interior demand to analyze and clarify in order to make the experience fit my current paradigm (or any paradigm, for that matter). In other words, I’ll need to let go of control.
Second, I’ll need to absorb Anthony Bloom’s insight:
“It is very important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or on God. The fact that God can make Himself present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this live and real relationship. If we could mechanically draw Him into encounter, for Him to meet us, simply because we have chosen this moment to meet Him, there would be no relationship and no encounter.”[8]
Just like the first adjustment, I’ll need to let go of my desire to control God too.
Finally, I’ll have to fight the need to feel good about all this. “Only those who live spiritually on edge will be able to go beyond the shore without longing for the certainties established on the artificial rock of our speculation.”[9] In other words, since I have to let go of all my control attempts, it’s going to feel very uncomfortable. I’ll need to be on a spiritual ventilator to survive. There will be plenty of times when I won’t be able to breathe on my own. I might feel mentally ill, or more. I’ll have doubts. I’ll be confused. I’ll feel scared. “Endless wonder is endless tension, . .”[10]
And it doesn’t matter.
You see, it’s not up to me. Oh, my attitude can prevent spiritual connection, but it can’t stop God caring. If I’m in the least ready, when He arrives I’ll know it. It might not be nice, but it will be significant. What I won’t be in this encounter is stagnant and lonely.
Wouldn’t you rather have uncomfortable connection than emotionless indifference?
“Endemic to all traditional religion is the peril of stagnation.”[11]
[1] Brené Brown, Daring Greatly, pp. 10-11.
[2] Miller, J. B. and Stiver, I. P. The healing connection: How women form relationships in both therapy and in life (Beacon Press, 1997).
[3] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 26.
[4] Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 74.
[5] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 27.
[6] Ibid., p. 7.
[7] Ibid., pp. 30-31.
[8] Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray, p. 26.
[9] Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, p. 58.
[10] Ibid., p. 69.
[11] Abraham Heschel, A Passion for Truth, p. 87.
