More Important Than Learning How To Live

Memes float around the internet with pithy sayings that feel like they are Christian in nature. I am not talking about those joke memes that function like modern day comic strips. Rather I am speaking of those that usually come in one of three variations: sweet, angry, or ironic. Be it a kitten “hanging in there,” or chunky red text framing an angry animal, or Kermit drinking tea at sunset, these images flood inboxes, news feeds, and text messages. Most of these are harmless little notes of conventional wisdom passed from one person to another.

What binds these memes and sayings together is an understanding that “common sense is not so common.” These often are little notes passed from one person to another to remind or teach us how to live. Like self-help shots of wheatgrass for our minds that will help us in understanding how to live. Learning how to live It is one of the key virtues of self-help. It does not make self-help bad, but it does make self-help limited in what it can do because there is something more important to learning how to live.

That is where religion stand in contrast to self-help. Christianity, at its best, teaches us how to die more than it teaches us how to live. Christianity teaches us how to die, before we die. We cannot experience or have resurrection, new life, regeneration or new life, until we first die. Perhaps it is not a shock that self-help is more popular to pass around.

The irony of course is that only in learning how to die do we learn how to live abundantly, faithfully and eternally.

Before we go off thinking about how to live, perhaps take some time (years perhaps) to learn that which is more important.

Another difference in self-help and spiritual formation

The self help industry is a huge monster of a thing that is a weird mix of accurate and pseudo versions of different disciplines. One of those disciplines that is in the mixture of self help is the discipline of spirituality. 

I would like to point out Christian spiritual formation is different from many expressions of self help. This is not to say that the self help world is wrong or inaccurate in the many claims made. Rather, it is more of a philosophical difference that I would like to bring to the surface. For instance, the difference Christianity and self help has with cracks and imperfections. Still others have written on how each Christianity and self help understand happiness differently.

Another difference that in Christianity and self help is how each of these philosophies understand vision.

The self help world understands vision like much of the academic world I encountered, which says something like this: Everyone sees the world through a set of lenses. You were born with a set of lenses that you see the world through and as we grew our lenses changed some but we still had these lenses on our eyes that colored the world as we experienced it. Thus the goal of education and self help is to teach us to examine these lenses so that we might see how it is our vision is different from others who see the exact same world.

Now this is not an inaccurate metaphor for how we see the world. However, what makes Christian spirituality different is that we do not think that we have lenses, but in fact that we are blind and cannot see. This is why the spiritual life is one that embraces humility, because we cannot see. Paul said that we see through dark glass, but he only said this after he was literally blinded. It is only when we come to the reality that we cannot see that we then can take the steps to admit that all the lenses we wear are dark at best. 

Yes we have lenses we see the world through and it is important to examine those lenses. However, the first step in Christian formation is to have our eyes opened, then we can clean the lenses.