Who’s at the center of everything?
[E]verything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
David Foster Wallace in his 2005 Kenyon College graduation speech, This Is Water
There is a way to undermine your deep belief that you are the absolute centre of the universe:
Wow! That was soooo not about me!
One woman’s reaction to her first experience of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy as reported by her host — Frederica Matthewes-Green, I believe.
The Liturgy, in a way I never remotely experienced in any Protestant worship service, puts God at the center of things.
I heard the “testimony” of a man about how he came to Orthodoxy from deep within Evangelicalism. Hearing that several of his children were attending Orthodox Churches, he read up on Orthodoxy, his hostility growing most of the time. Finally, he and his wife agreed to go to a Liturgy. He left Liturgy with his hostility fully intact, and arguing with his kids about it afterward, he turned to his wife for reinforcement: “What did you think about that service?” Hesitantly, she told the truth: “I feel like I just worshipped God for the first time in my life.”
Our self-centeredness goes all the way back, I think, to the Fall of Adam and Eve and it’s not quickly or easily shed. (I have more thoughts about that, but they’re not ready for prime time).
Liturgy as Combat
[U]sually when people first come to an Orthodox Church, they aren’t really able to articulate all of the emotions and ideas that are coursing through their minds; usually, they simply think something along the lines of, “I don’t understand what is going on here, but it is clearly different from anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
You see, Orthodox worship at its heart, which is nothing less than the Biblical worship that stems from the religion of the Apostles, is designed to combat the very thing we have been doing our whole lives: worshipping our passions.
Orthodox worship, the Divine Liturgy, the Akathist services, the Paraklesis, and more, are intentional in every tone, phrase, and prose; where so much else in our life is designed to gratify our flesh and encourages us to worship our passions, Orthodox Christianity provides a template for worshipping God alongside the Saints who are worshipping Him in heaven, and when this prescription is followed, we finally begin experiencing a release from the stranglehold our passions have on us.
Speechless
I’ll never forget standing with family and friends around the deathbed of my father, moments after he breathed his last. We had all just seen something profound: a man’s soul leaving his body after a long life. What to say? None of us were Shakespeare. I began reciting a Psalm I had committed to memory. The ancient words of King David allowed us mourners to rest, to be carried by the sacred lines, to focus on the man who had just passed from our midst, instead of rifling through our own minds in search of the appropriate things to say — because who among us ordinary people could possibly spontaneously produce words adequate to the enormity of that moment? It’s like that every Sunday, with the liturgy.
…
When we discard prescribed ritual, thinking that making up our own ritual is more authentic, we make ourselves prisoner to our own thoughts and passions.
Rod Dreher, Byung-Chul Han On The Importance Of Ritual (emphasis added).
Years before I discovered Orthodox Christianity, I was sometimes called upon, as when we had a guest pastor, to lead the congregation in what we called the Pastoral Prayer. I sure wasn’t going to try that spontaneously, or without something to channel my prayer, so I consulted higher-church Prayer Books (probably the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer).
Eventually, I stumbled onto Orthodoxy which immediately corresponded to some inchoate sense I’d carried for decades. I fairly quickly realized that at least part of that correspondence was that I needed to be formed by the Liturgy more than I needed to get my emotional batteries recharged or my frontal lobe stimulated.
Something’s in the air
To love is not easy, and mankind has chosen not to return God’s love. Man has loved the world, but as an end in itself and not as transparent to God. He has done it so consistently that it has become something that is “in the air.” It seems natural for man to experience the world as opaque, and not shot through with the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of thanksgiving for God’s gift of a world. It seems natural not to be eucharistic. The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
The disappearance of symbols
The disappearance of symbols points towards the increasing atomization of society. At the same time, society is becoming increasingly narcissistic. The narcissistic process of internalization develops an aversion to form. Objective forms are avoided in favour of subjective states. Rituals evade narcissistic interiority. The ego-libido cannot attach itself to them. Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence. They depsychologize and de-internalize those enacting them.
Byung-Chul Han On The Importance Of Ritual via Rod Dreher.
Another advantage — or maybe more another way of describing the effect — of liturgical worship over attempts at spontaneity, contemporaneity, seeker-friendliness or the like.
Mystery
In the East, on the other hand, a mystery is an area where the human mind cannot go, where the heart alone makes sense—not by knowing, but by being. The Greek word mysterion leads you into a sense of “not-knowing” or “not-understanding” and leaves you there. Having arrived, all you can do is gaze and wonder; there is nothing to solve.
Fr. Meletios Webber, Bread & Water, Wine & Oil: An Orthodox Christian Experience of God
A popular poet, recently deceased, had her own version of this wisdom:
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.
Mary Oliver, Mysteries, Yes
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
