lifeasmission

Emotional Culture

August 11, 2007

Emotions are tricky little buggers.

I want to tell 2 short stories and try to weave them together into a theological reflection.

Dodger Baseball. Or, What Sporting Events Have In Common With Hell

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to go to a Dodgers game where Barry Bonds was expected to tie to break the home run record – I am not a huge baseball fan, but I thought it’d be cool to be a part of that sort of history. I was jolted almost to tears when Barry came up to bat for the first time and the group of 25 or so 10 years olds behind me were led in refrains of, “Boooo. Barry sucks. We hate Barry.” My first thought was, “My God, we are teaching these kids to hate for no good reason – just flat out hate people completely indiscriminately.” It was sad in the truest sense of the word and I’d venture to say that this is very much what we might expect Hell to be like – unbridled, shallow hate.

Enslaved to Emotions

Last night I was hanging out with my good friend Ryan and we were talking about the ways people tend to engage one another. Ryan pointed out the tendency we have to either build people up or tear them down in our minds based on our emotional reaction to who we understand or perceive them to be. By that I mean, we have emotional responses to peoples ethnicities, religious or political stances, their social status, or just the way they look. And it’s out of these emotional (and therefore supercharged) starting points that we tend to look for things to confirm our emotional perceptions. For example, if I initially have a negative emotional response to someone, for whatever reason, not only will it be easier for me to point out their character flaws, but I will associate those flaws with my initial emotional response. It works the other way too. If I begin with a positive emotional perception of someone, I will be more inclined to notice good things about them and attribute those things to my positive emotional perception of them. All this leads me to the conclusion that in different ways, we are slaves of our emotions.

An Emotional Sanctification and an Emotional Culture

I don’t for a second consider this a detriment or a bad thing. Quite the opposite, I think that in much the same way as Paul implores communities of faith to become “slaves of God,” we ought to aim for a sort of “emotional slavery” that is actually liberating and filled with joy. Christians ought to be those who are seeking, not the abdication, but the sanctification of emotions. Sanctified emotions are those which are brought into harmony with the character of God in Christ. Feeling love toward enemies, feeling a righteous jealousy for the good of others, feeling passion for justice and righteousness, these are some of the things I mean by sanctified emotions.

Like anything else pertaining to the cultivation of a particular way of living life and engaging others, this is a matter of communal practice. These sanctified emotions do not materialize out of thin air and they are not brought about (thought perhaps helped) by individual prayer, study, and reflection. Just as our emotional responses are what they are on account of our upbringing, experiences, and cultural conditioning, it is as we live out a particular vision with others in specific contexts that our emotions come to be sanctified. It is to this end that I think churches are quite justified (and responsible) for attempting to create a certain kind of “emotional culture” as they seek a holistic discipleship which encompasses the emotional dimension of what it means to be human. Maybe it’s better to say that, in fact, all church communities already do this, it’s just a matter of awareness, intentionality and vision.

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