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Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.
It’s not about you! If you’d just get your head out of your ass and worry about others, you could do some great things.
This is not only one of the most helpful pieces of pastoral advice I ever received, but it’s probably the most important piece of life advice in my forty-whatever years.
No Really, It’s Not About Me
As someone who’s only ever had my one perspective, I’ve always wanted a button to press allowing me to live in someone else’s body and experience life from their precise perspective for about ten minutes — and though I’ve frequently wished that I had someone else’s resources, I’ve never wanted to be anyone else. But that’s the reason I’m always poking and prodding, pushing against and pulling at people’s thoughts and opinions. I’ve always had an intense desire to have genuine empathy — firsthand lived knowledge — of what another person is thinking, feeling, and experiencing.
Though I spend a lot of time in my own head sorting through my stuff, I haven’t ever really thought to express that the reason I do this isn’t to understand myself as much as it is to gain understanding of who I am through another person’s lens. I’ve always had this sense that the only self-knowledge any of us possess is too intensely biased to have any real handle on what it’s like to be around ourselves, to be friends or partners with ourselves.
…It’s About You. Really.
Now, I’m fortunate to be married to a woman with a preternatural ability to describe what I’m like to live with — sometimes in vivid detail, and with pictures of her experience when I hypothetically leave something sitting somewhere it shouldn’t be for the fifty-eleventh time. Even so, my desire to be in her head is more about this sense that I’d learn so much more about her by seeing through her eyes than I’ll ever have when she offers her ever-so-vividly-described experience of living with me.
This depth of understanding is the unsolvable mystery of my life, and in all honesty, perhaps one of the most significant reasons I became a pastor. I want so badly to see life through your eyes.
No seriously, you.
Whether I know you or not, whether we’ll ever meet or speak or mutually communicate or not, I have a desire to understand other people’s lived experience that’s sometimes distracting and absolutely, definitely, not bordering on mildly obsessive. In fact, the reason I say this is (perhaps?) one of the most significant reasons I became a pastor is that I bear an unquenchable curiosity about the experience of being God. I don’t — and I am not making this up — I do not desire to be God, though, as before, I wouldn’t hate having God’s resources at my disposal. What makes me so curious is the perspective.
What’s it like to look at an expanse of whatever is or isn’t prior to the creative intent?
Is prior to even a condition of God’s existence? (Spoiler alert, I suspect the answer is, “No.”)
What must it be like to be so close to, yet so removed from, the work of identity — or if not an identity, the act of Being the Manipulation of Energy Itself — with or without a consciousness as I confess and believe?
See that’s what I mean when I say this isn’t about me, but about you.
I don’t want to be or decide for God or anyone else, but when I think of One Thing I Would Wish For Above All Other Things, it’s this.
What are you really like?
Heaven Meets Earth and Vice Versa
There’s a sense in which we’re all doing this all the time.
I don’t really care — or more accurately, need to approve of — what you believe, though if you’d like to tell me about it, click here. It’s more that my life has been defined by a longing for a deeper perspective than one life can ever provide.
In some odd way, I think this is the heart of the Christian faith.
God can create. God can cause All Things to exist. God can design and artisanally brings into being literally every thing that exists. Yet, can God be Not-God? Though I’m not much into defining limits and always more interested in broadening understanding, I do wonder whether the Incarnation of the Word is also, in some ontological way, the answer to a curiosity somewhat similar to my own.
I know what it is to love what I’m doing. And, I’m dying to know what it’s like to be part. of. it.
In the space of incarnation, we have an occurrence that’s at once unique and eternal. What is not Of this place became Part of this place.
Hope — floats?
In the space of the as-yet-uncreated, there’s really not anyplace to stand or rest until something IS. It’s funny, persisting in this place isn’t floating, or standing, or anything else really. And the problem is that once you’re there in this space of the as-yet-uncreated, Something That Was Not Now Is — and not on account of the act of creation. It’s in the very act of observing nothingness that something has come into being.
At the end of the day, this is what I think my desire to understand you — yes, still you — really is. There’s a space in my forced first person perspective that I’m always acutely aware is lacking. I wonder what it is to float in someone else’s waters, to know the feel of the wind on a face that isn’t mine.
In some small way, this is what it means to find home, or something like it.
We can’t ever know precisely what it’s like to live in someone else’s lived world, but as we accompany each other through spaces that only we ourselves or only another person can inhabit, and as we share their joy and sorrow, pain and renewal, we come to an imagining of it as close as we can ever get to experiencing it.
And at its core, I wonder whether this is something along the lines of what God offers to Moses and Abraham.
Walk with me awhile. I can’t let you see through my eyes any more than I can see through yours, but I’ll teach you to see through my heart while I hope you’ll teach me to see through yours.
Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]! To learn more about Eric and his writing, visit his blog at Love Sees Color.
