I love Rick Warren’s advice about having an Annual Abandon. Right now I’m on my Annual Abandon in beautiful Switzerland. There’s not much better for restoring the soul than beautiful scenery, good friends, and lots of unscheduled time. (Gorgeous pool on your doorstep helps, too!) Looking back, even the last week before I headed off was a whirlwind: my book was launched with a great collaboration between CTS and Signs of Life; and I went back to my home diocese of Clifton to give a keynote which you can listen to here.
In the quiet of Fribourg, I’m reading again the philosopher Charles Taylor. He has a description that he uses for the “self” in the medieval social imaginary. He uses the term porous self to designate how the self in premodern times was open and vulnerable to the enchanted “outside” world, susceptible to outside forces such as grace or possession. Modernity and disenchantment, the eclipse of the transcendent, have changed the way we see ourselves (our social imaginary). As meaning has shifted from things themselves into the mind, the self has becomes insulated in an interior “mind”, no longer vulnerable to the transcendent. To describe this way of seeing ourselves, he uses the term buffered self. (A great introduction to Taylor is James KA Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular.)
At work, life is managed, controlled, order is applied to everything, risk is assessed and mitigated against. It is peak “buffered self”. Really, Taylor argues, our whole lives are lived as “buffered selves” because this is simply how we see and understand, it is the air we breathe.
Let me share something with you. I am a real “buffered self” person. I’m reading Taylor, and I’m like, “This is me!” I like ordering, managing, mitigating against risk. Perhaps I am a self-professed child of the Enlightenment, and if so I’m fine with it, because spreadsheets are my love language ☺️ I know that according to Taylor this means embracing the immanent sphere in which we find ourselves, closed to the divine and protected against the supernatural. I know that modernity has brought with it what he calls the Modern Moral Order, where polite civilisation, discipline and mechanistic order has replaced unpredictability, dynamism, chaos and openness to the supernatural. But I quite like order, predictability, and controlling my life, thanks very much!
If this is what I’m like naturally, I know exactly the power of God in my life, because it brings with it unpredictability, epically abundant life, wild propositions, extraordinary miracles. (I described this a little in my last post here.) Not much of this can be managed on a spreadsheet, however much I’d like to try (and still do because c’mon, Lord, work with me). To me, it seems like there are areas in our lives when we come closer to a “porous self” experience. This is the first one and it is supernatural. It is when the Holy Spirit sweeps us off our feet. When our tidy if slightly grey immanent sphere is blown open to reveal the glorious, starlit canopy of transcendence. The experience of God being real and active.
What I’m discovering is that we can easily believe and go about the practice of our faith without having our comfortable immanence exploded open in a wildly inconvenient way. To some extent, we keep retreating back into our “buffered self” reality because there is only so much exposure to the sheer power and extraordinariness of God that we can bear.
Mission life – the Holy Spirit filling our sails – is one example of this “porous self” experience, but there is another one, too, I think, and it is on the natural level: family life. I’ll say more about this in part 2.
