By Leo Campos
As someone who wears black robes regularly I can tell you I attract all sorts of people to talk with me. The most interesting effect is that the robes become a projection screen of the speaker’s own assumptions. Some approach me and automatically assume that I am a defender of “traditional family values”, others assume that I live an “alternative lifestyle” and thus am a defender of experimentation.
I am less interested in discussing my own personal opinions than I am in being a generous listener. Usually people’s positions fall within the same rough outlines: all positions are based on some understanding of the issue which in turn is a response to personal experiences within an ecosystem. You and I and everyone else have opinions which come from some amount of reflection on what has happened to us.
Our phenomenological hermeneutics (interpretation of events) does not occur in a vacuum, of course. Our own “tribe” sets much of the context for events. Very few people are able to transcend such tribal context and pursue an individual approach. I am not even sure such a thing is desirable, let alone possible – we all have “tribes” even if they are a tribe of “rational hermits.”
My concern and my constant work (both personal and with directees) is to become more aware, as aware as possible, of the context for my understandings, because not all of them are positive, life-affirming and charitable.
I think it a sign of spiritual maturity when someone is able to cogently demonstrate awareness of the contexts within which they are operating. You know you are at the beginning of your spiritual walk when you say things like “they just don’t get it” or “he just doesn’t understand.” The work then is to help you question whether maybe, just maybe, the other does not share the same context, even while sharing the same symbols (language, faith, culture).
Your understanding may be consistent within your ecosystem, but it may be woefully maladapted for a different environment.
To indulge this conceit further, we should look at other cases of transplantation which are not so beneficial to ecosystems, though the creature itself may be quite successful. Just a little up north from my home, in Maryland there have been stories of the snakehead fish. The oysters of the Chesapeake Bay are being seriously damaged by the Japanese veined rapa whelk (a type of predatory sea snail).
But there are literally thousands of invasive plants, animals, bacteria and viruses which are brought here via air and sea and which some estimate to have caused damages of up to $137 billion (these numbers come from the National Governors Association). In their new environment these foreign species have no natural predators and are free to multiply quickly, eat up all resources (food, native animals) and spread their own diseases to livestock, and even humans.
Most of our conversations have been no more than the throwing snakehead fish at each other’s waterways. We have created mental “organisms” (dare I say memes?) who are perfectly suited for living in our favored mental environments. But when we try to transpose them to a new environment they perish. And we don’t understand – they were so healthy over here, how come they are not over there?
My focus is to develop (and help others develop through the use of spiritual “technologies”) an irenic heart-space. First, life is always an approaching – both in the sense of bringing together as well as a calculus where we get closer and closer but never quite reach. This realization alone goes a long way in removing the cancer of blind faith in our understandings. We must, therefore leave space in our hearts for the other, the strangers we meet on the road.
Second, we absolutely must live into Philippians 4:5 if we are to have any positive impact. Or, to say it another way, if anything good and noble and healing is to come from your life, gentleness and a spirit of peace is to be firmly established. Remember Jesus gave us his own spirit of peace, the peace that is beyond all understandings. Aha!
So here’s an appeal – spend some time with your spiritual director doing some work in identifying your thoughts. Also go ahead and identify the health of your mental ecosystem. How are the pollution levels? Do a serious analysis of all heavy metals and nitrates. What kind of impact are you having in the broader environment? Are you a toxic wasteland? Are you blissfully introducing snakehead fish into new environments?
There are countless reasons why a person’s mental ecosystem developed the way it did – and introduction of new ideas, willy-nilly, without respect for the indigenous life, is simply intellectual imperialism, and I will say it, un-Christian.
Brother Leo Campos is the co-founder of the Community of Solitude, a non-canonical, ecumenical contemplative community. He worked as the “tech guy” for the Diocese of Virginia for 6 years before going to the dark side (for-profit world).