Reading Freely

I was going to post this on Sunday, but then I realized it’s the Feast Day of St. Patrick, and I’ve something else planned. So, here you quotes, quotes on idolatry and mindfulness for your Saturday.

The human heart craves attention and love—love is the common longing of our lives. We may search for a career, or wealth, or status, but the desire to be loved and valued is usually at the root of our strivings. Finding this kind of love can be difficult. Giving love can be more difficult still. Sometimes, discouraged or impatient in our search, we chase illusions and yearn not for the give-and-take of a lifetime of sacrificial love but the fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol once predicted everyone would enjoy. Lacking loving relationships, we yearn instead for an audience.

Our feelings, desires, and convictions become our gods and, exactly as strange gods are wont to do, they lead us astray, down circuitous paths that appear to be taking us somewhere but are forever leading us back into the dungeon of ourselves.

No idol is constructed in the act of murder. Rather, the murder is, at its end, an offering to an idol. The real idol is the enlarged anger within us, and it forms through our willingness to sustain an idea about our righteousness and, therefore, an idea about ourselves. We cling to resentment or feed jealousy until it grows into something we burnish daily with our justifications. We get it to glitter in our minds like something alive, like a genuine force outside of ourselves. We go so far as to proselytize our grudges to others through spin, gossip, and even lies—see my anger, my resentment, my jealousy, and my spite! Acknowledge it with me; let us have communion in our shared umbrage! Worship me with me! The great evil of murder, then, is the fruit of the idolatry that is first an idea, and the idea is almost always about the self.

One thing that can hinder growth is our willingness to attach labels to ourselves and adopt identifications, particularly with groups, to whose ideas we’ve become attached. In doing so, we cease to ponder, cease to wonder, cease to think. Remember Saint Gregory of Nyssa: only wonder leads to truly knowing. When we over-identify with an idea or hermetically seal ourselves within the seemingly safe cocoon of groupthink, we stop knowing much at all. 

It shows us that the Internet, particularly social media, serves our idolatry by assisting in our fascinated pseudo-engagement with others. Or more precisely, the Internet assists our obsessed engagement with ourselves by disguising it as a fascination with others who—either by offering opposition or validation—keep us fixated on the self. All those social media friends who confirm our every thought, all those tweeting followers who make it seem like our ideas matter in the grand scheme of things, are like so many shiny trophies and mirrors, reflecting back at us what we think of as our best and truest selves.

What I have chosen to call “super idolatry” grows out of ideologies too well watered. A super idol is not one but two steps removed from God. If all idolatries contain elements of self-enthrallment, the enthronement of a collection of our ideologies ramps things up by endowing the ego with a heavy veneer of moral authority. Dress up tribal identifications that accompany one’s participation in a party or a movement, determine that the opposition is not merely wrong but evil, and suddenly mere ideas become glittering certainties. These certainties give us permission to hate and tell us our hate is not just reasonable but pure. If simple idolatry blocks our view of God, the super idol—because it is so highly burnished—makes us think we are seeing God in our hatred. 

We all do that from time to time; we get caught up in our cause, and we become careless with our words. Sometimes that’s about busyness and distraction, and not idolatry. But when we catch ourselves being thoughtless (or when someone points it out to us), we should consider the first commandment and ask ourselves if we have not elevated the object of our enthrallment to that position where it blocks God.

“[….] the Church is a giant and eternal urging toward yes to God —whose ways are not our ways and who draws all to himself, in the fullness of time—rather than a yes to ourselves.”

Justice and mercy are the right and left sides of the horizontal beam of the crucifix, upon which a near-constant tug of war ensues. Pro-justice tugs right, and pro-mercy tugs left, again and again. They both move farther away from each other and away from Christ, the centering balance who is all justice and all mercy.

Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols of Everyday Life, Elizabeth Scalia