Devotion for Cultural Creatives: Part Three - The Elephant in the Room
Cultural Creatives Avoid Surrender, even to God
There is an elephant in the room filled with cultural creatives who find some affinity for evolved versions of Christianity. And hardly anyone is noticing it. Or, if they do, it is either too embarrassing or too difficult to talk about. This elephant is the gigantic clash of postmodern rejection of all hierarchies and the obvious hierarchy of surrender to God. Even more distasteful is devotion to a personal Jesus as someone who is more advanced than we are and invites us to die to our constructed self and follow him.
While surrender may be a long-standing practice of many religions, postmoderns tend to see the intense shadow side of abuse that religion has done with it. Religion has so often used God to maintain and increase its power over people. From the Roman Catholic Church’s direct involvement in the power structure of the state down through the centuries to Evangelicals today, threatening damnation and eternal hell for any who don’t surrender to their idea of Christianity. Cultural creatives—to their credit—have developed a keen sensitivity to patriarchy, homophobia, environmental destruction, and other oppressive hierarchies.
Postmoderns tend to view history, society, culture, and language as dominated by oppressive power structures. God, understandably, gets put into that mix as the tool of oppressive institutionalized religion.
Postmodern cultural creatives have an intense sense of mutuality and equality. We love real democracy and shared community. We have a new sense of empowerment as individuals. We are sensitive to the disenfranchisement of any person or group and will work to change that. We like authentic partnerships. We generally don’t like people telling us how to be or what to do.
Part of the suffocating baggage of traditional Christianity can be groveling before God —“O God, I’m such a terrible sinner.” That line is a part of the foundational requirements for becoming a follower of Jesus for some groups. Confession of sin is a weekly, non-negotiable part of the church service or religious practice for many sin-obsessed traditional Christian groups.
Many who have worked their way through and beyond this weaponized shame are especially sensitive to putting themselves “under” anything again. They had to work so hard to find their individual power and worth and they don’t want to see others have to go through the same thing. So the answer many postmoderns end up with is to seemingly make everyone equal by eliminating hierarchies altogether.
Natural versus Oppressive hierarchies
When postmoderns declare “all hierarchies are oppressive,” they fail to see the distinction between natural hierarchies and oppressive hierarchies. Hierarchy is oppressive when it is reduced to simple power over others. But there are also forms of hierarchy that involve power with, not over. This is a natural hierarchy. A natural hierarchy is one where the higher benefits the lower and exists to nurture life with its more expansive gifts.
Natural hierarchy can be wise and healthy when seen as a signal for when to defer to others. Good hierarchies signal the right kinds of deference; oppressive hierarchies demand the wrong ones. Natural hierarchies produce nurturing, healthy deference. Deference to greater expertise and excellence is not only being smart, it is also freeing.
We want a doctor who is smart and has studied hard to treat us—we don’t have to learn all that ourselves! We want teachers who have developed in their craft and understand education, not just anyone. Of course it’s not just learning and education. We want to watch athletes who are more biologically gifted and skilled, yes who have also worked hard to grow and develop. We want national leaders who have developed in socio-political awareness, who are working for greater good and progress. And yes, also we want spiritual leaders who have grown in their journey further than we have ourselves.
Mutuality without deference breeds mistrust, because the final say always comes down to my own perspective and opinion. Yes, we don’t want to submit ourselves to forceful hierarchies that require coercion and compulsion of others in order to exist—these are illegitimate. But voluntarily acknowledging natural hierarchies can healthily release us from the tyranny of endless self-referential living.
(For more on this, see Stephen C Angle https://aeon.co/essays/hierarchies-have-a-place-even-in-societies-built-on-equality)
Maslow’s Revised Natural Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow (1908 – 1970) was an American psychologist best known for creating a model of psychological health known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—a natural hierarchy. He amended his famous model near the end of his life. He argued that there is a higher level of development, what he called self-transcendence. We achieve this level by focusing on things beyond the self like altruism, spiritual awakening, liberation from egocentricity, and the unity of being. Here is how he put it:
According to Maslow, “Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.”
Notice that placing self-transcendence above self-actualization results in a radically different model. While self-actualization refers to fulfilling your own potential, self-transcendence refers literally to transcending the self. Self-trancenders often have what Maslow called “peak experiences,” in which they transcend the individual ego. In such mystical, aesthetic, or emotional states one feels intense joy, peace, well-being, and an awareness of ultimate truth and the unity of all things.
Transcendent Surrender
The crux here is that you cannot truly transcend your ego without acknowledging a natural hierarchy of something—or someone—greater than and beyond you. For Christians, this is God. God is the ultimate natural hierarchy. But not a god dictated by the oppressive hierarchy experienced in so much of religion. It is the God directly experienced in mystical knowing through 2nd person, intimate presence. Ken Wilber speaks of the crucial need for this as part of our integral, Three Faces of God spiritual approach:
In today’s “new paradigm” spiritual movements, we usually see a complete loss of Spirit in 2nd-person. (italics his) What we find are extensive descriptions of Spirit in its 3rd- person mode, such as Gaia, the Web of Life, systems theory, akashic fields, chaos theory, and so on. This is coupled, to the extent there is practice, with Spirit in 1st-person modes: meditation, contemplation. [Big I, Divine Self, I am divine] But no conceptions of a Great Thou, to whom surrender and devotion is the only response.
In emphasizing either a 3rd-person conception of Spirit as a great Web of Life, or a 1st-person conception of Spirit as Big Mind or Big Self, there is nothing before which the “I” must bow and surrender. The ego can actually hide out in 1st- and 3rd-person approaches. I simply go from I to I-I, never having to surrender to You. Spirit in 2nd-person is the great devotional leveler, the great ego killer, that before which the ego is humbled into Emptiness. Vipassana, Zen, shikan-taza, Vedanta, TM, and so on, simply do not confront my interior with something greater than me, only higher levels of me.
But without higher levels of Thou [God-Beside-Me] as well—the quadrants go all the way up!—then one remains subtly or not-so-subtly fixated to variations on I-ness and 1st-person. That is why the merely 1st-person [God-Being-Me] approaches often retain a deep-seated arrogance. It’s understandable why so many individuals abandoned the mythic-amber God, usually when they reached college and switched to orange and green worldviews. Abandon the mythic God they should—but not abandon Spirit in 2nd-person!
The Postmodern cultural creative worldview is passion-driven, and there is only one over-arching passion worth our devotion – devotion to God. If we give up on relating to God in personal devotion, we remain trapped in our own limited self. “Take up your cross” is not often seen as a call to transcendence, but that’s exactly what it is.
“The rewards of life and devotion to God are love and inner rapture, and the capacity to receive the light of God.”