Maybe It's Good, Maybe It's Not

We left you last chapter with a question: you may wonder if McLaren is too negative about Western civilization. Is there nothing that Western civilization and its values – even Christianity - have produced that has benefitted the world?

Some of us are wired to focus on the amazing gifts given to us by civilization: scientific progress, rich art and philosophy, medical advances, political theory, technological developments etc. etc. Others of us are wired to focus on the huge cost of all this development to people and our environment: enslavement, death and war, environmental destruction, extinction of species, economic oppression, the growing gap between rich and poor, even in America. And we think not only of the past but also of the future: the dark future that lies before us as a result of what we have done and continue to do.

“Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not is another way of saying maybe good and bad aren’t the best or only categories to lump everything into…Maybe in the end, our simplistic binaries like good and bad, right and wrong, wonderful and terrible have been calibrated by the habits, values, and structures of our current civilization.” (pg 131)

The ancient Sufi poet Rumi urges us to move beyond the simple binaries:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’

Doesn’t make any sense.”

(pg 127)

Even our traditional (western) Christian tradition has led us down the path of binaries. We speak of “good/bad, orthodox/heretical, biblical/unbiblical, saved/damned, heaven/hell, and so many more.” (pg 132) We are the “good guys” and they are the “bad guys”. God is a God of love and a God of wrath. (I will note that the Bible states that God is love, but it never states that God is wrath.)

McLaren proposes that what he calls the “bipolar God”, moving between unconditional love and devastating wrath led to a culture that “saw themselves as the exceptional beneficiaries of God’s blessing…and those they conquered killed, enslaved, and oppressed as the target of God’s (damnation).” (pgs 132-3)

As we face doom, brought about to a large extent by this kind of binary thinking, perhaps we can move into a perspective we might call “wisdom” – through which we meet each other and our world as Rumi describes it: lying down in the grass meeting each other.

“If we live within wise ecological limits, if we don’t take more from the earth than she can provide and if we don’t pump out more waste than she can detoxify, we will experience nature as a loving and generous parent…showering us with bountiful sunshine, rain and harvest. If we don’t live within wise ecological limits, if we consume too much of the Earth’s bounty and produce too much pollution, if we consider ourselves exceptions to the laws of nature, we will experience nature as an angry, punishing parent.” (pg 133)

Perhaps we could begin to think about our world and our lives not exclusively or primarily from a theological perspective, but from an ecological and sociological one. “Maybe the God stories (of indigenous peoples) were (among other things) the cultural container for their highest and deepest indigenous wisdom about how the mysterious universe works.” (pg 133)

Wisdom doesn’t think in binary terms; she calls us to “venture out beyond…to a place of bafflement that looks a lot like wonder…a place of ‘maybe’ that looks a lot like humility…a place of unknowing where something in us sings.” (pg 136)

Or, as Wendell Berry puts it:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

We have come to our real work

And when we no longer know which way to go,

We have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

(pg 136)

For all posts in this series on Life After Doom, click here or on the Life After Doom box below)