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Lent 2023 | Week 5: Imitation

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Imitation is the Real Deal

Throughout the season of Lent we have been thinking about the theme of desire. Last week we took a detour to discuss the importance of contemplation. This week we’ll look at one particular question we need most to contemplate which is, “Who am I imitating?”

Who we imitate is inextricably tied to the question of what we desire. Working off the keen insights of the French thinker, René Girard, we have seen that our desires are mimetic. Simply put, our desires mimic the desires of others. To help us answer the bewildering question, “What do I want?” we look to others to give us an answer. So when we scroll through Yelp to figure out where to eat, we filter for those restaurants not just with the highest rating, but with the most reviews. We don’t know what to eat so it helps to let others decide for us.

This happens in all phases of our lives. For better or worse, it is just how we are wired. At its best, mimetic desire is what makes it possible for the development and flourishing of human cultures. It is what allows us to learn to speak a language, to come to agree on basic values that hold us together and to live toward general goals that we hold in common. At its worst, mimetic desire turns us against one another. It fragments us into hostile rivalries, turning our neighbor into an enemy to be overcome because we know they want what we want and they know we what we want they want. If this kind of enmity is not held in check, jealousy and envy can quickly turn into violent aggression.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. For now, we want to recognize that we often look to models to help us navigate the question, “What do I want?”. When we are born, our parents are our primary models. And then in school, our teachers become models for us. As we grow up, different people come into our lives like coaches, counsellors, advisers – all of whom we may call mentors – who guide and shape our desires in various facets of our lives.

Advertisers know we are always in search of models and they are more than happy to provide us with some. And of course, with the rise of the internet, we now have a new category of model – social media influencers. It is big business to help steer or manipulate our desires in certain directions.

The point is not to say we should not have models. As we said, for better or worse, our desires are mimetic and therefore, we are drawn to models. So the question is not whether we will imitate someone. Rather, the question is, “Who to imitate?”

As we head toward Holy Week and Good Friday, we want to start considering what all this talk about desire has to do with Jesus’ life in general, and his death on a cross in particular.

One way to see Jesus’ life is to receive it as a model. Jesus is our exemplary model. The human model par excellence. Jesus, in short, is God’s answer to the question, “What do I want?”.

You don’t know what to want?

Try Jesus. I think he may have more followers than Justin Bieber.

Show Me What I’m Looking For

One of my favorite songs, the title of which, I think, is one of the best prayers we can pray. Given our time and place, in which we are bombarded with desire upon desire placed on top of desire and there are more models than we know what to do with, it is not a bad idea to pray this simple prayer daily, “Show me what I’m looking for, oh Lord.”

Interestingly enough, as I was looking up this song, the YouTube algorithm suggested a song I’ve never heard of entitled the American Dream by the Federal Empire. The song automatically played and well, turns out, it captures to a “T” all that we’ve been talking about in terms of desire gone amuck. Check it out:

The song reminds me of an old blog post Timmy wrote on desire years ago (Lent 2016!). You can read it here.

Faith and Imitation, Imitation and Faith

Christianity is a believing and a very particular kind of existing corresponding to it—imitation. We can put faith first and imitation second, inasmuch as it is necessary for me to have faith in that which I am to imitate. But we must also put imitation first and faith second. I must, by some action, be marked in some measure by conformity to Christ, and thus collide with the world. Without some kind of situational tension, there is no real opportunity of becoming a believer.

— Søren Kierkegaard

This is a wonderful quote by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard on the relationship between faith and imitation. I think we intuitively get what it means that imitation follows faith. As we have been saying, we must have faith in and desire that which we are to imitate. But what would it meant for imitation to precede faith? Kierkegaard talks about the need for faith to “collide with the world.”

  • What do you think Kierkegaard means when he says, “Without some kind of situational tension, there is no real opportunity of becoming a believer”?

Scripture

It might help to think of Kierkegaard’s quote in terms of the Scripture passage we have been looking at throughout Lent: Matthew 20:20-28

As we looked at last week, James and John, ask for these positions of power next to Jesus even after hearing Jesus teach them about how actually things work in God’s kingdom. Namely, that the last will be first and the first will be last.

And yet they still seek to be first.

What Jesus does in response to their question is to present them with a “situational tension” (in verse 25), where what James and John believe (but not yet truly) is set to collide with the way the world works. Jesus means to provide for James and John, as Kierkegaard puts it, the opportunity of becoming true believers.

Sometimes we don’t know what we believe until we our imitation of Jesus collides with the world. It is only in those moments of collision that we are able to come to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a believer.

  • What are some moments in your life where imitation to Jesus caused you to “collide with the world”?
  • Would you say it helped or hindered your belief in Jesus?
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Lent 2023 | Week 4: Contemplation

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What Does Contemplation Look Like?

I have long been enamored with this scene from the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. The movie explores the difficult and complicated relationship between trauma, fear and desire. In it, Matt Damon plays the titular role of the troubled and misguided Will Hunting. Early on we learn that Will is a natural genius yet he chooses to work as a janitor, cleaning the halls walked by lesser minds at MIT. As the story progresses, we come to find that not only his choice of profession, but almost every decision he makes, is dictated by the extreme trauma he experienced as a child. Will’s parents died when he was young, and as a result he was passed on from foster home to foster home, suffering severe physical abuse — burned with cigarettes, beaten with a wrench, nearly stabbed to death — at the hands of his caretakers.

Needless to say, Will develops a deep seated mistrust of authority figures. Enter counselor and psychologist Sean Maguire, played by the late Robin Williams. Through his own encounters with trauma, Sean sees some of himself in Will. And from this place of shared experience he is able to build trust with Will, who over the years has erected thick barriers to protect himself from having to face all that was done to him.

In this climactic scene, we see those barriers finally start to come down.

This scene reminds me of what we so often need.

To come to a place where we can hear.

Really hear.

For Will, what he needed to hear was, “It’s not your fault.”

And when he finally hears it (really hears it), it is a cathartic moment. Everything that had been stuffed inside for so long comes bursting out. As he is sobbing in Sean’s embrace he says, “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

This all seems very Christian to me.

Translated into the language of faith, “It’s not your fault,” becomes “You are forgiven.”

To know that we are forgiven, allows us to face all the ugly parts of ourselves. This is the logic of the gospel. It is not that we confess in order to be forgiven. Rather, we confess because we already have been forgiven.

Like Will, we know all of this.

And of course, like Will we need to hear it again and again and again because that which we have come to know is always a partial knowing. And so it must be made known to us again and again because we need to know it more and more, until that day when we will fully know even as we are fully known.

All of this to say, this is what contemplation looks like – to hear what we already know again and again so that we may know what has been made known to us more deeply and more fully.

If we come back to Will, by hearing what he had known for years, he is finally able to step out from under the defense mechanisms he used to protect himself for fear of abandonment. Rather than getting the jump on others by discarding them before they get a chance to discard him, Will, in the final scene, is able to “go and see about a girl” (if you haven’t seen the movie, this line is much more poetic in the context of the film).

I suppose this is why we need to continually hear what we already know. We know about grace, but we need to continually hear it. When we don’t our lives so easily come to be defined by what we fear. And fear, if we can define it this way, is a distorted, grotesque form of desire. Fear is the cancerous result when our natural desire for safety and security multiplies uncontrollably and pushes out all other desires. The cure is not simply to suck it up and summon some strength from within to face our fears.

What is given to us in faith is to listen for a word that comes from outside of us.

This word is the word of God spoken to us in Jesus. Whatever word God has to say to us, God says to us in Jesus.

May we hear this word again and again and again. And in so doing, may our fears shrink and our desire to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly flourish within us.

Contemplation and Boredom

On the way to contemplation we will have to fight our aversion to boredom because to contemplate requires quiet spaces of stillness and for many of us that pretty much is the definition of boredom. For some of us we’ll also have to fight that feeling of “I know this already” (like Will). For others of us we’ll have to the fight the opposite feeling of “I don’t know what to think!”.

In this blog post entitled, Let’s Get Bored Together, C. Wess Daniels, who writes about spirituality and theology from a Quaker perspective, asks the question, “What if we saw boredom, or a regular, sustained stillness as a practice of resistance that could reclaim our lives and attention and perhaps our sanity?”.

In the post, you’ll find some helpful books you can read on the topic as well as some activities to try. One thing to note is that contemplation does not have to be about total silence (although it can include it). “Quiet spaces of stillness” in the way Daniels talks about it is more about a prolonged engagement with one thing in contrast to the frenetic and fragmented way we engage so much of our time online.

  • What’s one way you can learn to be bored this week?

Car Radio

I find myself coming back to this song a lot. You can read an old reflection on it here.

  • Take a listen and maybe as a way of prolonged engagement, write down some thoughts that this song may bring up for you.

Scripture

Matthew 20:20-28

It is interesting to note that James and John, who are center stage in this passage in Matthew 20 were also present at Jesus’ transfiguration back in Matthew 17:1-13. The whole point for them to witness Jesus’ transfiguration was so that they could hear the voice of God say to them, “This is my Son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”

Then in Matthew 18:1-5 we have a scene where the disciples ask Jesus, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus replies, “Whoever takes the lowly position of [a child] is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Now in Matthew 20 they come to Jesus and ask for, in their estimation, the highest positions available in all the cosmos – those found at the right and left hand of Jesus. Jesus replies by saying, “You don’t know what you’re asking.” Meaning, if the kingdom works the way Jesus says it does in Matthew 18 (the lower the greater), then what James and John are asking for is actually the opposite of what they are hoping to get.

This is not to single out James and John, but to simply highlight the common struggle at the heart of Christian discipleship. It was there with the original disciples and it is most certainly here for us trying to follow Jesus some two thousand years later.

It is what prompted former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to say this about contemplation:

Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.

  • What do you make of this statement? Is it an overstatement to say contemplation is a deeply revolutionary matter?
  • What might contemplation look like for you?
Formation

Lent 2023 | Week 3: The Life Giving Magic of Tidying Up Our Desires

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The Multiplicity of Desires

Throughout this season of Lent, we have been looking at the role desire plays in the Christian life. In particular, we want to answer the question, “What is it that I want?”

Part of what makes this question so difficult to answer is the multiplicity of desires that we find competing within us. We want many things and often times we don’t have any criteria to help us order or rank those desires. Our lives end up being overrun by too many desires.

One rubric we have introduced to help tame our desires is to categorize them as thin or thick. Thin desires are those that are here today gone tomorrow. They are attached to things we want that are short-lived, transitory, fleeting. Our closets are filled with the pursuit of our thin desires.

Thick desires, on the other hand, carry more weight. They have to do with the things that really matter to us. They matter more but are harder to quantify. Here we have in mind things like giving ourselves for the sake others, of caring for the least of these, of loving God and neighbor.

To have faith in God is to say that these thicker desires are the desires awakened in us by the work of the Spirit through the ministry of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. In short, our deepest desires are addressed by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

When our thin desires out pace our thick desires this is what Jesus calls living on bread alone. It is what so much of our capitalistic economy is based around. Chasing after bread. Bread in all its forms. So many it is hard to count.

Ours is a culture in which our desire for bread is multiplied to a dizzying degree.

Lent is a time to do some spring cleaning. Like our offices and homes, our hearts, the seat and sanctum of our desires, can get disorganized and overrun by over-accumulation. And so it would do us well to take a look at all the desires that have accumulated in us and take stock of how, perhaps, our thin desires have run amuck, leaving little or no room for our thick ones.

The Christian name for this kind of tidying up is the life-changing magic of renunciation.

Renunciation

Take some time and read this short blog post by Christian psychologist Richard Beck. In it he talks about renunciation and why it is necessary in terms of fulfilling our thicker desires – namely, to love God and neighbor. The big question for us is:

  • What are the desires in our lives that need to be renounced in order to free us up to love?

Scripture

We come again to Matthew 20:20-28. It is interesting to note that Jesus, here, does not eschew the disciples’ desire to be great. To be great, in a sense, is to be exceedingly good. And this is a good thing.

The problem is not our desire to be great, but the multitude of visions of what greatness (or goodness) looks like. Which brings us back to the multiplicity of desires in our life. To believe in a crucified God is to have a radically singular vision of greatness, which provides us criteria to help tidy up (renounce) the many competing visions of greatness constantly being sold to us.

None of this works, however, unless we see faith and desire as more or less synonymous. To have faith in Jesus is to say everything that is worth wanting is found in Jesus. This is the logic of verse 28, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” We serve others “just as” Jesus did. But this “just as” holds no power unless we have found it to be true that all our deepest desires find their fulfillment in this one who came not to be served, but to serve.

If our faith in Jesus does not hold our desires, then everything that Jesus asks of us will feel like duty and obligation. Following Jesus will amount to the never ending frustration of our desires.

  • Does the Christian life feel like a constant frustration of your desires?
  • As the great theologian Marie Kondo says, “The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.” How might tidying up your desires help you see that what you truly desire is found in Jesus?

Idolatry is Always Polytheism

Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.

Pope Francis

Can you relate to the experience of feeling like your life is a “myriad of unconnected instants”? I can’t think of a better way to describe the experience mediated to us through social media. Scrolling through Instagram is pretty much scrolling through “a myriad of unconnected instants.”

The alternative is to find ourselves part of a journey. A journey is one in which our wandering is given a direction and end; a “fundamental orientation” as Pope Francis puts it. The irony is that many of us probably feel the same about our faith as we do about social media. It too feels like a path “leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth”.

  • Brass tacks: Do you experience your faith as a journey or as “a myriad of unconnected instants”?

Part of my own journey, I think, has been to identify how limiting the lesser forms of Truth, Goodness and Beauty (facts, legalism and entertainment, respectively) are to the Christian faith. Moving beyond facts to Story (a truthful story), beyond rules to Character (the character of Christ) and beyond entertainment to Beauty (the beauty of a crucified God) is what helps us find some kind of unifying vision for life. This work of moving “beyond” is not easy. It is one we all embark on together. It is for this work that God gave us the community we call church.

Formation

Lent 2023 | Week 2: Where Do We Look To Figure Out What to Want?

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Mimetic Desire

Last week we asked the question, “What is it that you want?” We might like to think that what we want is unique to us. Our desires are our own and fulfilling them is what sets us apart from everybody else. But what if desire works differently?

What if what I want is not singular but mimetic?

Mimetic is a technical word coined by the French social theorist René Girard to describe the nature of our desires. We can hear in it the echo of the word ‘mimic.’ To understand desire as mimetic is to recognize that what we want often mimics what others want. We see what someone else desires and then adopt it for ourselves. It might be hard us to swallow, that we are imitative creatures, because it works against the high value we place on personal authenticity and self-expression. Imitation, we judge, is for lesser life forms: Monkey see, monkey do.

We are not monkeys.

But if we can have the humility to see how it is so often the case that our desires ape the desires of others we will be able to see the mimetic dynamics at work in our lives.

As Girard points out, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire.” It is not to say that when we are hungry we don’t know to want food. Or that when we are cold we don’t know to want shelter. We are not working at the level of instinctual desire. To say that we are creatures who do not know what to desire has to do with those higher level, more abstract longings particular to being human. Who am I? What is my meaning? What is my purpose?

These questions do not have obvious answers. It isn’t clear to us what we ought to do to fulfill these desires. We can’t just go to McDonald’s and order some meaning. So what do we do?

We look for models. Not fashion models (though they are included here), but those things which model for us what is worth desiring. Not just clothing, but the whole gamut of desires.

We don’t know what to desire so we look to models of desire.

Take Netflix or PlayStation. What is going on when we binge a show or a game? In part, I think what makes us want to keep watching, or keep playing, is the intoxication of desiring what these characters desire. The most powerful stories not only make us feel or think, but also to desire. We don’t know what we want so we go to movies, shows or video games to be told, if for only an hour or five!, what to want – to get the girl/guy, to move a boat, to level-up, to save the world.

Of course, the big elephant in the room when it comes to mimetic desire is social media. What are we doing when we endlessly scroll through Instagram or Facebook (is Facebook still a thing?). A lot of things are going on, but the best (worst?) social media sites, have spent billions leveraging the power of mimetic desire. We scroll because we want to want something. In part, we are looking to and for models of desire.

What do I want?

I don’t know. Let me scroll some more.

Social Media Addiction

Social media can be seen as a mimetic playground. Author Luis Burgis explores some of how these dynamics play out when we engage with social media. He gives us some categories to think about models of desire (internal and external) and how social media can distort the influence such models can have in and on our lives.

  • What are some of the external and internal models in your life?
  • One way to think about desire is that desire comes from a place of lack. We want what we feel we lack. How might your time on social media help you put a finger on what is it that you feel you lack?
  • Burgis encourages us: “We have to know when our models are enflaming us with a desire that will bring real fulfillment or whether it’s going to bring a dopamine hit or allow us to fantasize about a life that we’ll probably never have and even if we did have would probably make us miserable.” How might this help you discern what is going on when you engage with social media?

Scripture

Take some time again this week to sit with Matthew 20:20-28.

  • In what ways are external and internal models at work in this passage?
  • How have your desires been shaped, for or better or worse, by the various models in your life?
  • Is it strange to think of Jesus as a model of desire?

Let Us Not Falter in Desire

“When Christ appears, your life, then you also will appear with him in glory.” So now is the time for groaning, then it will be for rejoicing; now for desiring, then for embracing. What we desire now is not present; but let us not falter in desire; let long, continuous desire be our daily exercise, because the one who made the promise does not cheat us.

St. Augustine
  • Take some time to sit with this quote.
  • Read Colossians 3:1-4.
  • What does Augustine think we ought to be desiring for?
  • How are we prone to falter in desire? What would it look like to “let long, continuous desire be our daily exercise”?
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The Sugary Sweetness of Idolatry

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Idolatry Playlist: Build Me Up Buttercup

Is it weird I have a playlist called “Idolatry”? Strange or not, I’d like to share some songs off that playlist as a way of exploring what the Bible calls idolatry.

As philosopher/theologian James KA Smith points out idolatry is less about false beliefs as it is about misplaced desire. We aren’t drawn into the control of an idol through by some compelling intellectual argument. Rather, idols work at the level of our wants — and what we want is something that often escapes our purview. We don’t always know what we want even when what we want is what animates our lives.

And so this series will explore this relationship between idolatry and desire.

The first song off the playlist is Build Me Up Buttercup.

If sugar had a melody, I think this would be it. The song was brought back into our collective consciousness a couple years back when Geico ran a series of commercials featuring the song:

Build Me Up Buttercup is the perfect sweetener to make something so bland as car insurance somewhat palatable.

While the tune embodies the feel-good quality of sugar, the lyrics remind us of the crash that comes after the high.

Why do you build me up (Build me up)
Buttercup, baby
Just to let me down? (Let me down)
And mess me around

If idolatry is like an addiction (the natural consequence of our misplaced desires), then sugar would be the gateway drug. We get drawn in by our immediate senses. The taste and the high keep us coming back for more even when we know the letdown is coming (not to mention the pounds!).

And then worst of all (worst of all) you never call, baby
When you say you will (say you will) but I love you still
When you say you will (say you will) but I love you still
I need you (I need you) more than anyone, darlin’
So build me up (build me up) buttercup, don’t break my heart

That last line is telling.

While the chorus begins with the question, “Why do you build me up?” in some ways naming a plea for things to change. By the end of the chorus it becomes, “Build me up buttercup.” It is not an interrogation anymore. Now it is almost an appeal for the very thing that was at first questioned.

This is how idolatry works.

The name we give to this process of building up and letting down in our day and age is consumerism. While we may not literally bow down to golden calves anymore, idols have simply morphed into any thing and every thing.

It’s that feeling of anticipation when Amazon promises delivery at 10, but then there is a delay and it won’t come until the next day.

“I’ll be over at ten,” you told me time and again
But you’re late, I wait around and then
I went to the door, I can’t take anymore
It’s not you, you let me down again

This is all part of the building up.

And we may think that the letting down is a glitch in the system. It is not. It is a feature.

Idols have this remarkable ability to promise happiness through possessing it only to have it end up possessing us.

You were my toy but I could be the boy you adore
If you’d just let me know

The genius of idolatry, if we can call it that, is that our being possessed by the idol comes through the very means of our being let down. This is how the Bible describes it. When an idol doesn’t come through, the idolators double down on their devotion, believing that increased devotion will lead to the eventual fulfillment of whatever hope has been placed in the idol.

The way this plays out in our consumeristic economy is rather than double down on any one idol, we simply move on to the next one. There is always another thing; another product that attracts us, that builds us up. We feel that tinge of excitement, of anticipation. So we order it. And then we get it. We possess it. And there is some satisfaction, some amusement. But then inevitably we are letdown. So we move on to the next product. There is always the next product; the next thing that builds us up with anticipation. And the cycle repeats….on and on and on.

What this does is trap us in a kind of static state. We move up and then we move down. And we are tricked into thinking this repetitive movement, the constant building up and letting down, indicates some kind of development or progression. But really we are stuck in the same place.

This place is what Jesus calls living on bread alone.

Bread, like sugar, like many of the products that fill our closets, is not evil. It is good, but only to a certain degree. What we need to recognize is that there are deeper desires at work within us. Transcendent desires. Desires which we might name as our longing for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful — what Scripture calls “every word that comes from the mouth of God”.

What idolatry does to us is promise the Good and the True and the Beautiful in the form of bread alone. It keeps our focus on things that cannot and were never meant to satisfy those deeper longings. So instead of looking towards a nutritious meal full of proteins and greens idolatry says eat some more gummy bears.

This is the danger of consumerism. It ruins our appetite for the things that can feed the more substantial and weighty desires in us.

In the end, idols build us up, let us down and ultimately break our hearts.

Like sugar, Build Me Up Buttercup eases us into the dynamics of idolatry. As we continue on in the playlist we’ll see how things can get darker and more sinister.