"The chief act of the will
is not effort
but consent."
Thomas Keating uses these words as he talks about comtemplation, and what to do when confronting difficulties in prayer: Will I accept (consent) difficulties or will I fight (effort) them?
I wonder what would happen if we took this approach to life in general. Certainly there are particular things we should not accept, perhaps letting the crisis in Darfur go on or preventing people from getting emergeny food or housing assistance.
Yet far too often we are prone to disagree with people and as a result remain stagnant in our own preconceptions. Nicholas Kristof's recent article does a wonderful job explaining how people tend to interpret the same information to solidify their positions and buttress their preconceived notions... often with the effect of reinforcing prejudice.
What if we were more inclined to accept the difficulties in understanding one another, rather than reeling out of control with every bump in the road?
This past weekend I had a wonderful retreat with my Trinity community house members. As part of our time together, we made an "affirmation circle," where we chose one person at a time to affirm, giving them positive feedback to what they mean in our lives and to the life of the house. It was an incredibly powerful and moving time... and without criticism.
Let us be more prone to consent to the things we cannot change, and use effort only when their is a clear injustice. In this way, let us promote unity rather than disunity, and peace rather than conflict.
3 comments:
What I'm hearing here is not consent, but trust. If I consent to difficulty, that means that I have trust as a precondition, in prayer/life or in relationships. I'm not necessarily going to consent to difficulty if I have no reason to trust someone - I'll just leave them alone. And its a lot harder to consent to difficulty in life if I don't have some kind of trust that the difficulty will have an end, or might be redemptive.
As I think about it, consent also requires agency. That is, if my "no" isn't respected, if it doesn't matter, then my "yes" doesn't either. Without thinking about agency, one might be caught in thinking that someone who is oppressed but isn't actively resisting is consenting, when really, oppression dulls their agency so that they can't consent meaningfully.
Just random thoughts. Which, you know, feel free to ignore :)
Evans, my friend, the time has come. You have been challenged!
I think trust and agency are very important themes, Doug (sorry for ignoring this post for so long!). Without them, our consent IS meaningless. Our society is based on trust as much as our economy is based on credit - without either, the whole thing comes tumbling down. I recently finished David Dark's, "the Gospel According to America," an excellent meditation on the current state of American society. If we are not listening and really hearing each other, treating each other as competent agents, we won't be able to fully trust or consent to much of anything, let alone friendships and relationships.
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