Find the Image

Today's post may be a little controversial, but bear with me.

There's a game I play on my phone called Polysphere. Each level starts with a cloud of polygon shards, like shattered glass. The goal is to find the image in the shards. You rotate and twist the shards over and over until they line up and the image pops out. Very addicting.

I think the discovery of truth is a parallel effort. Sometimes, you're given a thought or a statement that doesn't make sense or you disagree with. You can stop there with the disagreement and just call it wrong. Totally acceptable thing to do. Or you can view it as a learning opportunity. A chance to experience an idea that's not your own, to chew on it and look at it from different aspects with the goal of not condemnation, but understanding.

Let's take a concrete example. The church I've been sitting in on is going thru the apostle Paul's letter to the church in Ephesus. Paul's goal is to provide instructions on behavior. They are covering a verse that's created no shortage of anger.

Ephesians 5. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord... Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church.

This verse is rough. It's been used to propagate misogyny and subjugate women as inferior. This is a picture of what's wrong with Christianity.

So what are we to do? We could throw out the Bible as ancient patriarchal nonsense that holds back women. Definitely one approach. But we'd be missing out on an opportunity to understand our past and grow into our future.

Here's what I've discovered. First off, I believe the Bible is a spiritual book and is best understood spiritually, not literally. Literal interpretations lead to all kinds of conflict with science and common sense. Literal interpretation stunts the imagination and prevents growth. You can't learn new things and be surprised when you take things literally. It's just... flat.

So, is there another way to intepret this? I think so, but it requires some abstract thinking. We live in a world of contrasts. Black and white. Light and dark. Inside and outside. One of the contrasts is male and female, or masculine and feminine. Traditionally, marriage has been seen as the joining of a male and female, or more abstractly the masculine and the feminine.

Give me some latitude and grace as I try to lay this out. Gender and sexuality are dicey topics in today's polarized culture (again, another aspect of contrasts). I think we need to make a distinction between sex and gender. Sex is biological and can be traced to things like chromosomes and gametes. Sex is science with rigorous definitions. But gender is more qualitative. Gender relates to the expression of feminine or masculine traits. 

Both sexes exhibit masculine and feminine traits. On the whole, males tend to exhibit more masculine characteristics and females, more feminine. Each individual is unique in their composition. You can have biological females that exhibit more masculinity than femininity and visa versa. But essentially, we are all a mix of both characteristics.

These characteristics are tied to certain aspects of our personality. The feminine has been more associated with passion and emotion, while the masculine with pragmatism and rationality. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying females are emotional and males are rational. Remember, we are each a mix of masculine and feminine and a mix of the emotional and rational. One is not better than the other. Both are needed to be a complete person.

In the Bible, marriage can be symbolically thought of as the union between both the masculine and feminine. Passion and emotion can be thought of as love and pragmatism and rationality can be thought of as wisdom. So, marriage symbolically is the joining of love and wisdom.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Wives are symbolic of love and husbands are symbolic of wisdom. Marriage is symbolic of a unified person. To become unified, you need the correct relationship between love and wisdom, or passion and rationality.

And what does is the Bible say about love's relationship to wisdom? To be healthy, emotions need to be brought under the guidance of wisdom. Experientially, I think this makes sense. I've been in therapy for over 10 years. A large part of the process is bringing emotions to the surface so they can be inspected. Non-understood emotions can cause consequences that may not be helpful, especially the more isolating emotions like anger and fear.

There's a quote I use: Anger is good kindling but poor fuel. Take the anger one may feel over misogyny endorsed by the church. One can feel anger towards the institution, label them all as evil and be done with them. But, that doesn't seem to do anything to reduce misogyny is the church. What is the goal of anger? To merely express a sense of injustice, i.e. get it off your chest? Or is the goal to reduce injustice?

Arguing with passion may not be the best approach. I've rarely seen angry conversations lead to a changing of the mind. In fact, I think it causes people to dig into their position, shuts off empathy and furthers the divide between people and groups.

If you really want to stomp out injustice, it takes rationality. You need to think critically over the issue and strategize how you want to go about making change. That's why I ask what the goal is. If the goal is express outrage, go ahead and vent. Express indignation. But if you want to change hearts and minds, you have to look past the raw feeling.

There's also a danger with too much rationality. Getting stuck in your head can atrophy your heart and make life lose its zest. I work with a bunch of engineers and I can tell you, dry science can kill your soul. 

So we need both. We need to feel our feelings and then use our minds to decide what to do with those feeling. We must work to never get bowled over by emotions, but also not drift into a dead soul.

Anyways, I hope this post wasn't too anger-inducing. If anything, it's a different view from one that I grew up with. And I like this one better.

Down 4 lbs.