Let’s do a visioning exercise together. Pick a place that is near and dear to your heart that connects you to a specific group or organization. You are sitting where you normally sit there. It doesn’t matter what the organization is, and it doesn’t matter where you’re sitting. It could be your specific “spot” at church, it could be where you are likely to be found hanging out at Thanksgiving, or it can even be where you are often sitting at a work conference for a professional organization that you’re part of … it just needs to be important to you personally.
Close your eyes and put yourself there. Who is around you? What ideas are they talking about? What do they all seem to care about? You are seeing this place now with new eyes and hearing what you hear around you with new ears. Instead of just saying “yeah, so what, I’m at church, no big deal” I want you to ask “What are we doing here?” Is everyone here for the same reason? Is there such a thing as a good reason or a bad reason for someone to be here? Are there some reasons that are better than others?
Ask yourself why you are there. Do you know why you come to this place? Do you know why it exists in the first place (ontology) or the lens through which it teaches you about the world (epistemology)? Does it make you happy, or sad, or mad, or afraid, or something else to be there? Who does this place connect you to? More likely than not you value being connected to specific people, and also value the connection with something or someone that is a unifying entity.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are you to being at this place for the rest of your life? What are some factors that could bring that number down? What is meaningful about these factors that makes them essential things that you cherish about this place? Reflect on to what extent these factors are in your control, in someone else’s control, or just kind of stuff that seemingly happens without anyone doing anything.
To what extent is this place shaping your identity as a person? The place you are in is a dynamic entity that changes with time, and you are a dynamic entity that is changing within this place. Are you growing closer, or are you growing apart? Is this place influencing you in a positive way towards mutual growth, or in a negative way that eats at your soul? Go back to asking yourself why you are there, and cycle through the questions in this exercise sequentially as many times as you find helpful.
<aside> 😮💨
I don’t know about you, but that visioning exercise takes a lot out of me. Powerful emotions come up for me, both positively and negatively. Either way it takes me to a challenging place that invites me to stop and do some box breathing, meditate, or pray an arrow prayer silently. Feel free to do one of these things if you are feeling unsettled. If you do them and still feel unsettled, you may be one of the many people, like myself, who benefits from mental health therapy to help process these feelings.
</aside>
This visioning exercise helps us to identify what personal connection we have to any given place that we consider to be important to us. We may go to some places that we don’t really care about that much, and If it Doesn't Matter, it Doesn't Matter. However, if something matters to us then investing time into it has a reciprocal relationship on our core values. We spend time on what we love, and we grow to love what we spend time on.
When we ask ourselves the final question in the visioning exercise above ("to what extent is this place shaping your identity as a person?”), we are examining whether this community we are examining aligns with our values in God's Eternal Present. The places we inhabit aren't static entities, and neither are we. This dynamic relationship requires the principles of coherence, consistency, and balance that guide good decision-making in our lives and shape our complex relationships with each community that we choose to be a part of on an ongoing basis.
Just as the three pillars of Orthodox understanding (Patristic, Biblical, and Liturgical) must work in harmony, your personal identity and its connection to the communities you invest yourself into should form a coherent whole. When they don't, you might find yourself like that soccer player watching someone in football gear carrying the soccer ball into your goal - experiencing confusion rather than growth.
I can do whatever I want is an article on defining one’s telos and appreciating the telos of others. I encourage you to read it because your telos, or desired end, is most likely you have taken for granted and have assumed that others share. Why wouldn’t they? It makes sense that something so fundamentally important to you would be important to everyone. This is definitely not the case, and it only leads to frustration when we assume others share our telos.
We must grow to accept the reality that different people with different desired ends will see the same information, process it differently, draw different conclusions, and make different decisions. In a suboptimal system, we must also grow to accept that decisions are often made with the wrong telos in mind. Rational decisions are mistakenly made democratic, financial decisions are mistakenly made democratic, and relational decisions are mistakenly made financial.
How do you survive in a broken system? Do you have a tendency fall to the one extreme of open rebellion, or the other extreme of resignation and complacency? My hope for myself and others is that we learn the art of Holding Eggs so that we can not just coexist with the dysfunctional, but rather use it as an invitation for personal growth and co-creation with God. As Jacques Philippe says in Interior Freedom, “It may be that in various parts of our lives we shall have to follow the path—possibly a difficult one—that leads from rebellion or resignation to consent, and ends finally in ‘choosing what we did not choose.’”
This is the gift of living in Community with others. We are forced to grow. We cannot just say “this is who I am and you have to deal with it.” I know what you’re thinking: “of course you can, this is exactly what [so and so] does.” This is not healthy for the community and this is not healthy for [so and so]. There is a mutual and synergistic benefit of our commitment to and our contribution to an even seemingly hopelessly broken community.
In eventually “choosing what we did not choose” we can overcome the potential disappointment of many things that we consider to be outside of our control, whether they are fixed choices that we have made in the past or fixed attributes of our lives that were chosen for us.