advent conspiracy 27

Today’s post is from Chris Goan https://thisfragiletent.com

Photo by The Humantra on Pexels.com

I hope you have enjoyed this little ‘conspiracy’ as much as I have. It has been lovely to share this space with different voices whose words took me places I would otherwise not have gone. Thanks so much to Bob, Graham, Steve B, Yvonne and Steve P for your thoughtfulness and companionship.

All of which made me think about how we encounter other voices, other thinking. It occurred to me that our social-media-shaped brains are increasingly inoculated against other views. Rather than freeing our brains for exploration and encounter, the internet seems to have set us up as oppositional avatars, whose purpose is to find the error in the ways of the other, not to listen and learn. Even when I try to NOT do this – to not engage – my brain still falls into familiar comfortable groves, thrilling to the failure of my intellectual/religious/political enemies…

…who are mostly not enemies at all, just people with different perspectives, doing their best to make sense of the complex broken world in which we live.

Advent could easily be a version of the same in which we wait only for what we know, from those who are from our tribe. This would certainly be a comfortable experience, but it seems to me that this would not do justice to the radical disruption that always seems to happen with the coming of the light.

An aurora blankets the Earth beneath a celestial night sky by NASA Johnson is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

I was thinking too about the head/heart thing.

Increasingly I appreciate how an encounter with anything that matters is whole-body. In other words, when I am fully engaged, I feel it in my bones, my gristle, my heart. This is a very different kind of engagement than an intellectual titillation, in which I strengthen my own ego by bolstering my sense of intellectual agency.

In my limited experience, these kinds of embodied encounters are typically about two things:

1. Compassion – when we feel deeply drawn to the heart of another

2. Mysticism – when we sense the undefinable mystery that I will call ‘the divine’

Head and heart. I often find it difficult to go beyond the first, but I am getting better at the second.