Shrugging Off Selfishness

Spirituality Column #237
May 24, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Shrugging Off Selfishness
By Bob Walters

Hang with me for a minute … this is a book / movie review, sort of.

I’m old enough to remember the economic malaise of the late 1970s and no, the Disco era was not an adequate off-setting cultural pick-me-up.

I was just out of college making $10,000 a year as a sportswriter. Gas was a dollar a gallon, unemployment was high, American automobile quality was low, inflation hovered near 9 percent, home mortgage rates chased 20 percent, gold prices were astonishingly north of $800 an ounce, President Jimmy Carter was cheerless, and the nightly news – still with Walter Cronkite – offered “the Misery Index” (unemployment rate plus inflation rate) instead of hope.

With institutions failing us, we maturing baby boomers constructed a self-absorbed culture that appropriately became known as “The Me Decade.” Certainly in my mind, the world revolved around Me; I was unmarried, unchurched, unbelieving and unconcerned with salvation, damnation, justification, sanctification or glorification. I didn’t own a Bible, and even my old Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (a gift from my dad when I was confirmed in 1965) was out of sight somewhere in a dusty box.

Please understand, I was “a perfectly good person,” I just didn’t need all that Jesus jazz. I had friends and an interesting job … what else was there? I knew the church “story,” but it wasn’t worth getting out of bed for on Sunday; there wasn’t anything at church about “Me.”

In the late 1970s I read a book that unveiled for Me many comforting mysteries of the Me life: “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, first published the year I was born, 1954.

Rand (1905-1982) was an atheist, ardent anti-communist, “objectivist” (her word) and, if her TV interviews are an indication of the woman, a very, very bitter human being. Our highest moral duty, Rand taught, is to care for ourselves. Service to others is a self-immolating charade. God is an empty promise wrapped in ultimate disappointment. Jesus Christ, Rand wrote, presents an unsolvable contradiction; subordinating one’s ego and soul to the needs of others is impossible.

I bring this up because Atlas Shrugged, recently released as a widely-panned movie, often carries near-scriptural authority for unchurched political conservatives.

Play some defense. Understand. The May 2011 issue of “First Things” magazine offers a brilliant Christian review of both the book and the movie (free access at www.firstthings.com).

Don’t ever shrug off Jesus.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) wrote about Rand and atheism April 8, 2008, column #74 at this blogspot archive site.

Feelings, Faith and God

Spirituality Column #142
July 28, 2009
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Feelings, Faith and God
By Bob Walters

“What’s the difference between feelings and faith?”

George, my scholar friend and neighbor, posed this seemingly simple question recently to an advanced Biblical studies group that included pastors, orthodox priests, teachers, a psychologist, a Biblical counselor (therapist), a couple of physicians and some other high-functioning lay people.

No one had a ready, sure answer. Nor did I, upon hearing the question later.

I’ve written about George before. He is a Bible translator, a renowned church historian with a PhD from Cambridge, an expert in classical languages and world religions, very nearly became a monk, is a former priest and longtime university lecturer, worked as a paramedic with the Red Cross during the Mideast civil wars of the 1970s, is a trained psychotherapist, and today lives a gentle, quiet life with his wife and their many friends in the northern suburbs of Indianapolis.

I recap George’s qualifications to underscore his credibility, and as an antecedent to presenting his elegantly simple parsing of “feelings” and “faith”.

Feelings begin in our ego and return to our ego.

Faith starts in our ego but finishes up somewhere outside ourselves.

“Ego” is one of those words that seems antithetical to Christianity. The ego is about “me,” the “self,” and aren’t I supposed to “die to self” to become an obedient Christian? Isn’t the ego the root of evil since it is the root of our innate, earthly, sinful self? How can the ego be the root of faith, when I want to “kill” my ego in order to be a better Christian? Hasn’t my ego caused the sin and shame of my past life?

Surveying the Cross, the Apostle Paul instructs (Romans 6:6) that our “old self” was crucified, not killed; freed from sin, not enslaved. “In this Christian sense, ‘to crucify’ is an act of love, while killing is an act of hate,” George explains. “The ego isn’t to be destroyed; it must be redeemed and made alive.”

What about killing our ego? “That’s more a Buddhist belief of emptiness, not a Christian belief of creativity,” George notes. “Christ created us, and The Holy Spirit gives the ego life so that we can discover our abilities and creativity. If we kill the ego, we can’t do that; we can’t be human.”

So, be careful what you try to kill. Without our self, we can’t reach out to God.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), for simplicity’s sake, will leave the Freudian id-ego-superego troika alone.