diacrisis

I've been bothered ever since I started Foucault's The Hermeneutics of the Subject, in which he says, almost offhand:

We will call "philosophy" the form of thought that asks what it is that enables the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject's access to the truth. If we call this "philosophy", then I think we could call "spirituality" the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth.

Sigh The more I think about this, the more I come to the conclusion that Western Christianity has abandoned "spirituality" and valued only "philosophy". That is, our churches have become so focused on the objective truth (which we call "theology"), that we have forgotten that discipleship requires subjective transformation. We have come to the conclusion that being a good church member depends on what we know (things anyone and everyone can know equally), not how we ourselves have changed (in ways that not everyone can change equally, since not everyone has the same history). I keep seeing "church life" made up of classes, seminars, and sermons, with only lip-service to testimony, repentance, and discipleship.

I was reminded of this in yet another context today, when our senior pastor mentioned he had seminary professors that actively encouraged their clergy students to foster a distance between themselves and their congregations--don't play favorites; don't make "friends". What a difference from the life of Jesus, who favored three and especially loved one of his disciples.

Why do we do this?

I think we've been duped. We've had "objectivity" hammered into our brains at every opportunity: education, science, business, parenting, law, social interaction, war, markets, fashion, even art and poetry. We've been taught to manage everything, to the point that even our nuclear families are now all chiefs and no indians. Having conflict with your boss? Manage it! Having a fight with your spouse? Manage it! Your child? Manage it (together)! Anger issues? Manage it! Boredom? Manage it! And by "manage" here I mean we are told to step outside ourselves and objectively analyze our lives as if we were an slightly-interested observer. But there are dangers to applying management techniques too often and too strongly.

I recall a recent meeting of church leaders where the question was asked, "why do we want more people in our Sunday morning services?" The answers were all management answers: "we want more trained parishioners to help run all of our cool programs." Nobody said, "we care about all people and want them to meet Jesus and become mature in him." Too many chiefs and not enough indians.

I'm going to cut this short so I can publish it now. More later. This is a capital-T Theme for me these days.