Recently, a couple of things that I've known for a while have made a few changes.
My church has a new senior minister, which is good. And he's changed a few things up a bit; one of the things we used to do in night church was take communion by sitting in a circle together, because we were always a pretty small group. But now, we're back to the seats. It's partly a time decision, partly a numbers decision (because the former is getting precious and the latter is increasing) so it's understandable. As well as this, in the church weekly newsletter now, there's a little economic update on how the church is going, and the new senior minister is regularly encouraging people to give financially to the church, calling it part of their weekly offering to God. Which is right, in a sense, but the way he says it almost makes it sound like an obligation.
There's also a website I've been following that's just had a major overhaul. It's now looking very neat and clean, efficient, new, that sort of thing.
Each of these things, in and of themselves aren't bad; most of them are good things, or are based around good ideas.
The problem lies within this: each of these different things, like clean, efficient, economic, neat, etc, I all associate with business. And I'm afraid, in my mind, business has a heck of a lot of negative baggage that it lugs around. (Which is quite possibly due in no small part to Hollywood, which loves to portray the bad guys as business-like.)
And so I face a thorny issue. These very negative feelings I have about business clash with very positive feelings that I have about both the church I go to and the website.
I actually do a psychology elective, and this has come up in it. However, usually one of the things that clashes is your view of yourself, and it's usually resolved subconsciously. I don't get it that easy. Usually, this is resolved by one of two things: classifying either one as the other (that is, either calling church and the website 'bad' or business 'good', neither of which would sit right with me), or filing those things into a subcategory (that is, filing neat, efficient, economical etc, into a subcategory under 'business' [which has bad connotations] which is labelled 'good business' - but it's still under business, which is still 'bad').
I'm still attempting to figure out a way to reconcile the two ideas. The best idea I've had so far is putting those things into a completely different category, but I don't think it would work. Anyone else got any ideas?
Yes, I know what you mean about obligation to tithing. Seems as though it feels a bit…obligatory? Hahaha. Let's just say I agree.
ReplyDeleteSounds like you have a classic Cartesian Dualism complex. (Or that's what I'll call it). The best thing I can suggest is to take Heidegger's approach (I've pretty much absorbed that philosophy book) and just say that there can be things which don't fit. If you pigeon hole everything into essentially 'black' and 'white' you ignore the 'grey' in between…might be a good idea to start accepting the grey?
I think church, business, school, university, cars, pretty much anything, have great capacity for good, but also, because humans are involved, will have an inherent 'badness'. They are fundamentally bad things, but can be used for good. Again, the grey space starts to seep in, and these things hover in between the two.
*shrugs*
Yah. We didn't have that before, though.
ReplyDeleteAh, but grey be only a mixture of so much black and so much white that is just that much more annoying to separate..
Thing is, a lot of those things are inherently 'good' for me, I guess. Church I always loved, it's always something I looked forward to, it never felt like an obligation or anything. Similarly with uni, it's just a place I love to be. The others not so much, though there's good aspects of each. But yes, I see your point. :)