On Redemption
In this first post I’ll have a crack at establishing a foundation for why I’ve called this site “Redeeming Dave” and why I’ve set it up. There will be a mix of technical and personal stuff, so I hope if you read it you won’t be too bored or find it irrelevant to your journey.
Basically I’m working out Where I am, How I got here and what if anything is next.
RD
The first thing I want to clear up is that despite my many rants against the church and Christianity in general, I consider myself to be a Christian person. I’ve often wished I didn’t and have at times said publicly that I cannot in good conscience call myself a Christian. That’s mostly a reaction to what I see as an unhelpful and at times even destructive force in Christianity, a force that I would identify as the Conservative Evangelical Movement. I’ll drift in and out of why I think this as I write future posts, but for now the very basic reason is they are, in my observation all about rules and the rules are mostly influenced by a kind of Middle-Class Morality. Along with that the other major reason is the way this kind of religion tends to use the bible. They see it as absolute, and many say they read it as literal. Again, I’ll mention more as I go but for now it just seems, at least to me to be intellectually and spiritually dishonest.
Redemption is not a religious experience to me
RD
It took a long time to arrive at how I now understand Redemption, including what it is, how it happens and who’s involved. I think we hear things while we’re growing up and unless there’s a compelling reason to question those things, we pretty much take them on as truth. I suppose they’re stored in our brain unconsciously, framing everything that happens as we get older. The Framing or Framework starts being constructed very early on, pretty much at birth although I reckon it’s possible that even the experience of being born contributes to some extent (more on that some other time).
What is being Redeemed: I think Descartes might have kicked off the idea of “The Self’ way back in the 1600’s with his famous assertion “I think therefore I am”. Monty Python updated that in their The Philosophy Song to ‘I Drink therefore I am’ performed by a group of guys all called Bruce. I digress.
Over the years the general consensus is who we think we are is not the same as who we really are. We’ve all seen the person at Karaoke who thinks they’re a great singer belt out a painfully bad version of Wind Beneath my Wings! That would be a trivial example of the “False Self”. It works the other way as well. The person who believes they are a bad singer but in fact has a pretty good voice. Unfortunately, these examples are not as deep as it goes. I wish they were, but the fact is our “False Self” goes far deeper and is potentially far more limiting than an embarrassing night out with friends at Karaoke. The False Self has me tangled up and worse has caused hurt to many people around me and of course, caused great damage and limitations in my own life.
My “True Self” or “Real Self” has been developing my entire life, even now at 57 I am growing, learning, and even changing. My False Self however, kind of gets to a point when it stops growing. In other words, my False Self gets stuck and then acts as a kind of overlay making life very difficult and even preventing me from knowing my True Self or who I really am.
As simple as I can say it, Redemption is the process of discovering my Real Self and allowing the False self to gradually become less intrusive and more transparent.
RD
On Psychology
I have come to believe that I live with a mixture of both my True and my False self and depending on current circumstances, I’m influenced predominantly by one or the other. In a lesser known work by the late Professor S.I. Hayakawa he posited that we have three parts to what he called the Self Concept. In basic terms, he thought we have 1. A Real Self, always developing, growing, and changing 2. A Self Concept that knows a fraction of our Real Self, is rigid and mostly stays the same and 3. An Area of Illusion that while part of the Self Concept is factually and provably false. I don’t really want to go too deeply into this, I’m more just setting up a little bit of common terminology to help me reflect on Redemption. To me being redeemed is discovering and embracing more and more of that Real Self as well as the reduction of that Illusion.
On Religion:
Many religious people embrace a basic concept of sin and hell. In simple terms they believe people are fundamentally sinful and that when they die, that sinfulness will send them to Hell unless, before they die, they ‘accept Jesus as their saviour’. If these words are uttered, then Heaven awaits their arrival. These days, hell has become a less popular concept among many Christians, but you’d be hard pressed to get them to say it out loud probably for fear they’d be seen as a heretic. This Sin, Hell, Salvation and Heaven framework has been the driving force behind most ‘Evangelism’ and has been quite successful in scaring people into the ‘accepting Jesus as their Saviour’ thing.
Let’s face it, who would rather spend eternity in a ‘Lake of Burning Sulphur” when by simply uttering a few correct words they get a ticket to a heavenly afterlife. It sells itself. I have no real interest in debating the rights and wrongs of this, I’ve tried many times only to find myself in an ugly and futile debate and me behaving in ways I honestly do not want. What I am most interested in is the misunderstanding of a person’s ‘Self’, including the True and False Self and the impact of these in our day to day lives, including among other things, our experience of Faith. The focus on the whole Sin, Heaven and Hell thing has led many of us away from what I believe is the purpose of Faith and towards an ‘us and them’ religion that increasingly struggles to find its place in an ever-progressing world. I do not believe the purpose of Faith is about getting a ticket to heaven and escaping the fires of hell. The purpose of my Faith is experienced in the here and now, the purpose of my Faith is to become a complete person and live a complete life. When I say complete, I don’t mean perfect I simply mean an honest life, free from the need to cover up things we are ashamed of, embarrassed by or afraid of.
The Purpose of Faith is to become a complete person and live a complete life
RD
Complete v Perfect
An old friend of mine had been a builder his entire adult life and one day I asked him if there’s any such thing as a perfect house. He said of course not and that led to a conversation about the difference between perfect and complete. Every house he’d ever built had imperfections, some more than others. Those imperfections were unavoidable, and some shonky builders would cover them up without addressing the problem with a fix of some kind. The good builders would see the problem and if they could, pull it down and rebuild that section of the wall or floor or roof or wherever the problem was. Sometimes that was just impossible because the build was way too advanced and the cost of pulling down would be prohibitive. In those cases, good and honest builders would call the owners in and show them the imperfection, explain the plan to fix it and then, assuming the owner agreed would go ahead and do the remedial work to ensure that while the imperfection was still there, the ‘fix’ would more than compensated for the error and the house, while not perfect would be complete and do the job a house is supposed to do. Over time I discovered this is a really constant thing in the building industry and those negotiations with the owner are sometimes referred to as ‘Variations’. Variations are caused by lots of things including mistakes, unforeseen problems like rocky ground when they thought it was softer and easier to dig the foundations, you name it and if it slows things down or requires a fix or a change of plans each time there’s an extra cost and more work involved for someone. Sometimes the builder wears it, sometimes the owner, but who ever does and however much it is, there is always cost to Variations.
This is exactly how I think of the potential to live a complete life. I have many imperfections in my “Self” including physical and emotional and I also have character flaws. Some of these imperfections or flaws happened so far back that a ‘pull down and rebuild’ of my ‘Self Concept’ is virtually impossible. If I am to be a good and honest builder of this ‘Self Concept’ then I’m going to need to identify the imperfections and develop a work around that doesn’t include covering it up or to put it another way, denying there’s a problem. The thing about denial that should scare us into action is that denial can have catastrophic outcomes especially down the track as more and more weight is brought to bear on the ‘Self’.
Emotional Scaffolding
It’s possible, even common for people in their 30’s, 40’s and older to begin to crack under the weight of the years trying to hold their Self together, to suddenly collapse under the weight of their circumstances in their job, their marriage, mental and physical health to suddenly find themselves no longer able to function effectively. They leave their job or marriage in search of perhaps a lighter load. Sadly, many who experience this may never really understand why this is really happening. However, due to our very human need to know why things happen, this person may project blame on to others, their boss or their partner or God, anything that relieves them of the unbearable hurt from the weight their “Self” was probably never developed to carry.
My partner introduced me to the idea of how we all develop a kind of Emotional Scaffolding that holds our Self together enough to remain functional. This scaffolding allows the ‘building of the Self’ to continue and kind of holds us up. When Sal told me about this it was like a light going on for me. Suddenly, I could name all the scaffolding I have had in place over the years , sometimes more than others and some of it more or less healthy in the long run. Even the less healthy in the long run stuff still provided some security, some help to allow me to continue day after day year after year.
In the end I have come to believe my Self is as strong as the materials I build it with.
Stress Rating
One day after seeing a heap of building timber arrive on a site, I noticed each piece of timber was stamped with a letter and number. F7 was common but it seemed to have others as well. Curious as always, I asked a builder friend about it and he explained the stamp correspond to how strong that piece of timber was. F8 is a lot stronger and can carry more stress than F4. He went on to say some parts of every house will never really carry much weight or stress while others will bear enormous stress and, it’s a small percentage of most houses that are ‘Weight Bearing’. As a matter of fact, and this blew my mind, if there is not enough weight on some parts of the houses frame then the house won’t hold together as it should. Those parts of the house, when the correct strength materials are us actually need the right amount of stress to function well.
I’m sure by now you’ve figured out why I loved these discoveries but just in case, let me explain.
Through our life our Real or True Self is constantly growing. However, our False Self or I’ve come to believe I am developed to a point but pretty much stopped somewhere in our youth. Once I became aware of this, I had a choice to make. Would I begin the process of identifying the imperfections, the mistakes and the things that are simply false? In other words, locate the bits of my Self Concept built with the wrong F rating to carry the weight it would need to through my life and, if I did do the work of finding these things what was I going to do about it? Knock down and rebuild, find a fix, paint over it and hope nobody notices, use more of the wrong materials?
Redemption to me is the process that happens the moment I find myself reviewing this picture of myself I have developed over the years. Whether I begin the process of Redemption isn’t a religious question and it isn’t about ‘Hearing Gods Voice”, if that happens, if you really do hear voices then I advise getting immediate professional help. Hearing voices is a serious and well understood illness. No joke or attempt at being funny here. I’m bloody serious.
An auditory hallucination, or paracusia, is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus. A common form of auditory hallucination involves hearing one or more talking voices, and this is known as an auditory verbal hallucination.
To begin the process of redemption the only voices we need to become aware of is our own voice and the voices of trustworthy terrestrial based human beings. I do believe most of us have ‘voices’ in our head that don’t always feel like our own voice but that’s far more interesting than thinking it is ‘God’s’ voice rattling around in there. In short, they are the ‘voices’ of my past, my memories, my hurt and pain and also pleasure and joy. (To be clear these are not out loud voices so much as thoughts). They are my own voice and the voices of others all stored, probably forever in my memory. Sorting those out, learning which ones are good and healthy and which ones are bad and lead us to places we don’t want to go is part of the process of Redemption. That is why I need trusted people, experienced, and committed friends. Not bloody Facebook Memes.
Redeeming Dave is a selfish project where I’m going to attempt to work my way through my own Redemption and my hope is if I do it well, it may trigger a few other people to begin or continue their own process of Redemption.
As I said at the beginning, I am a Christian person with deep and active Faith. Some of that might turn up here and there but I have no interest to convert anyone to my way of thinking. Some religious people believe they have found ‘The Truth” and like those incessant pre-scripted phone salespeople will be laser focused on talking you into believing what they believe and ‘make a sale’. I know this because I’m genuinely ashamed to say I’ve done it, and often quite successfully. (More on that some other time if I can bear the very mixed feelings).
On occasion one of my children have asked me if they have to be a Christian or words that roughly mean the same thing to me. My answer has always been, roughly, “All I want for you is that you search for truth, if you’re doing that then there’s no higher calling in anyone’s life”.
Finally, for this first, long post, an effort to give a Foundation to Redeeming Dave let me leave you with my current favourite quote.
“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.
FALLING UPWARD. RICHARD ROHR