Tyranny of the Immediate, part I

I am sure, like me, you have felt at times pressed and stressed by a variety of situations.  Sometimes the circumstances of life can feel overwhelming.  At other times the endless string of events in life produce not anxiety but boredom.  Routine, patterns and well tread paths can form another type of stress, a thirst for significance.  Either way, we often suffer from the tyranny of the immediate whether experienced in terms of stress or boredom.  These two horns of our immediate dilemma, I believe, require two different yet unified solutions.  In this first part I only wish to deal with the issue of boredom or that sense of meaningless produced by the routine and rote of life.

            I am a big fan of the Star Wars trilogy.  I have to clarify two issues that last statement presents.  First, when I say fan I do not mean a “dress up like your favorite Star Wars character and stand in line for hours upon hours to be the first to see the next installment of the trilogy” fan.  Second, when I say trilogy I mean A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.  I very much enjoyed episode III, but it is nothing without episodes IV, V and VI. 

ANYWAY, I loved these movies as a kid, and I still do as an adult.  As a kid I wanted to be Luke Skywalker.  I think many of the kids seeing that movie wanted to be Luke, and there is a reason he is the protagonist of the film.  He is everyman.  He is the simple, ordinary person that just happens to be in the midst of extraordinary circumstances.

And much like us, Luke Skywalker finds himself in circumstances very much out of his control.  We meet him early in A New Hope, and the only word to describe his state of being at that point in the narrative is bored, farming, fixing droids and doing other chores for his uncle.  He is in the midst of an existential crisis, longing for meaning and something bigger.  He longs to be free from the tyranny of the present that is chaining him to the routine. 

He thinks this freedom will be found by flying off into space and having great adventures, but Luke will not find freedom from the tyranny of the immediate by engaging in great adventure.  Once he does find great adventure, curing his boredom, he only exchanges boredom for stress, the other horn of our dilemma.

Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar, in Texts Under Negotiation: The Bible and Postmodern Imagination, provides an interesting remedy to the tyranny of the immediate we all face.  He suggests that our imagination must assist in grounding us in our past.  Our origins, he suggests, are half of the solution to the tyranny of the immediate.

Being a Christian, Old Testament theologian, Brueggemann sees the only founding moment, past or story of origin that matters is Creation.  Whether you believe the Creation narrative takes place within 6 literal days or over the course of 60 gazillion years is irrelevant and misses the point of the narrative.  There was nothing; then God said, “Let there be” and there was.  Creatio ex nihilo.  Humanity was placed in the midst of Creation to be the image (idol) of God; we were to be his agent to rule over creation on his behalf.  This is our founding moment, our story of origin.  This story of our past can help liberate us from the tyranny of the immediate by giving context to the present.

How does this story do this for us?   We were given a charge and an identity in the Garden.  We were created to have dominion, as kings and queens, over the realm God created.  We were told to be fruitful and multiple, essentially become co-creators of God’s world.  Not creators in the same sense as God, ex nihilo, but creators in the sense of using what God had made to make new and different creations.  These charges were our work, and they remain our work today.

We were also given an identity in the Garden.  We were created differently from all other parts of creation; we received the breath of God to make us the idols, representations or images of God.  We are God’s agents toward creation. 

When we experience the boredom and meaningless of life, I believe, it is because we are unconnected from our founding moment and are ruled by the tyranny of the present.  In the day-to-day matters of life we get lost; we often lose our sense of self and identity.  Who am I, is not an uncommon question that cries out when in the throws of the roteness of life.

Laundry, dishes, commuting to work, shuffling kids to ball games, making dinner, cleaning the dishes, making the boss happy, making the client happy, paying the bills often seem like task masters, willing us toward one activity after the next with no sense of purpose, direction or meaning.  I suspect that this feeling overcomes us because of our lack of imagination.  We fail to see what cannot be seen and to experience what cannot be touched.  Our imagination can vividly bring to mind what is not metaphysically present; our imagination can connect our present to our creational past, contextualizing the present reality.

The imagination (not necessary fancy or fiction) can evoke our founding moment, our creational past to bring meaning to the present routine of life.  Laundry is no longer laundry, and a sale at work is no longer a sale at work.  The events and tasks of life can be seen as executing our creational mandate to bring order (a kingly ruling metaphor) to creation.  In the seemingly mundane task of the present we can rightly, truthfully imagine that we are the kings and queens God created to rule over these tasks on his behalf, bringing order and glory to Him. 

Additionally, these tasks do not in and of themselves bring us a sense of identity; we all know they cannot by the emptiness we experience when we try to make them do so.  I am not a teacher.  I am not a father.  I am not a husband.  I am not a homeowner.  I am an image of God with a mission.  This time, this place and these events are the space in which I have been set to carry out the mission and be what God made me to be.  Simply, God is pleased and worshiped when I am who He made me to be and do what it is He has set before me to do.

Remember when Luke first confronted the poster boy for cosmic evil (Darth Vader) in The Empire Strikes Back?  The two tangoed in a furry of death and light saber desvio.  Darth Vader told Luke, famously, “I am your father.”  That shocking cinematic moment was Luke learning of his founding moment.  Realizing he was Darth Vader’s son suddenly brought context to the events of his life.  He was no longer just a simple, poor farm boy stuck doing meaningless chores; he could understand those events in light of his creational reality.  He was hiding, being protected from a cosmic evil that sought to destroy him.  That farm and those chores now had meaning; he understood why he was where he was.  He also had an identity.

Now don’t press the Star Wars analogy too far.  For Luke his creational origin produced enormously negative emotions.  Our creational origin does not.  It’s just an analogy.

            While our creational past, rightly imagined, can begin to provide context to our present, invading our present and freeing us from the tyranny of the immediate and routine.  Creation is not the whole story or total solution to our present dilemma.  Even if we have a mission and an identity that provide us meaning, what do we do when life is not merely boring but it is chaotic, filling our time with suffering?  This suffering is the other horn of our present dilemma, and it will require another response, another moment and other blog.