Our Narcissistic World

I've been working on my sermon for this Sunday. It's one of those challenging Sundays--balancing the church commemoration of the coming of the wise men (otherwise known as Epiphany) with the secular new year. Ha. I just smiled thinking how funny it would be if we made a big to-do about the Christian new year, which starts with the start of Advent. Gathered for Thanksgiving, that Saturday we all stay up till midnight, watch a television show of the Pope or a bishop somewhere...and shout "Happy New Year". Somewhere there is a high-church person who thinks this is how it ought to be. The ball in Times Square is perhaps a bit flashier though... :-)

The start of the new year, on top of all of this, is traditionally a time when Methodists turn back to our covenant with God, one we express through the Covenant in the Wesleyan Tradition (see my earlier post).

In the course of all of this, of course, we are all starting to talk about our new years resolutions.

What is striking, though, is that so often our "resolutions" involve something designed to make our own lives better. Now I'm not knocking that...completely. Losing weight, stopping smoking, etc., all of these things are good and we should do them (and shouldn't need the calendar to instigate such changes).

But doesn't it feel like in the midst of our very me-centered world, this late December time becomes quite the me-fest? Gifts, resolutions, thinking about our year past and our year to come...

The whole lot has got me thinking about how the early church fathers talked about sin...as a focus on self, what Augustine and later Luther would call incurvatis in se ipsum--being curved/turned/focus within/upon oneself.

Developmental experts tell us that babies think the world revolves around themselves (as is perhaps fairly appropriate to think when people come meet your every need). I suspect many people never outgrow that...and that, simply put, I think, is sin. Original sin, even. It's so foundational that we often aren't willing to recognize it as sin. And we come with all sorts of ways to rationalize this self-focus.

Now, let me stick a note here. I am not advocating some sort of masochistic denial of self that justifies being victimized. But come on, just a little, little bit, don't we all sometimes fall into believing (good or bad) that the world revolves around us? That others' action are motivated in response to us, and that the good or bad of a situation can be judged by its immediate affect on our emotions? Okay, maybe not just a little bit.

Psychologists call this (well, in more detailed and more nuanced terms, I am sure) NARCISSISM. And if you read the literature on it, and on Christianity's earliest definitions of sin, I'm not all that sure there's much difference. I'm sure the theologians and psychologists (let alone those trapped between both worlds) would have a field day over the similarities and differences...and whose field has best grasp on the whole thing. But, at some level, I think both hit at the same thing.

I have been even more convinced of this by watching Intervention, a documentary on A&E that follows a different addict (alcohol, drugs, etc.) and their families as the families (with the help of experts) prepare to have an intervention with the purpose of getting their loved one into treatment.

I am not in any way nearly an expert in addictions, nor do I think the show is a perfect sampling of all such situations. But it seems to me that so often, part of the codependency that allows an addict to continue living in destructive ways involve many people (or at least a few key people) reinforcing the addict's belief (self-destructive as it may manifest itself) that the world revolves around him/herself. The beginning of the healing process always involves (usually after some significant counseling for the family) the line being drawn and the conclusion being shared with the addict that, basically, the world (more specifically their families' lives) will no longer revolve around the addict. Nothing short of that will bring healing. For anyone.

I won't even go into all the theories of how a person's upbringing can actually cultivate narcissist tendencies...since I do suspect there is probably great variety of professional opinion on this matter, and at any rate, it seems to go against how so many children in the US are raised, and thus we might all naturally reject out of hand. In stark contrast stands parenting advice from the likes of Susanna Wesley, who for all her "old-fashioned" (and at times perhaps inappropriate today) advice rightly pointed out that parents can play a major (perhaps THE major) role in helping their children learn the world does not revolve around them--not by harsh means, but indeed, by loving support that allows the child, but the grace of God, to develop a greater sense of the world and each person as a valuable child of God.

At any rate, it's all very interesting, and I suspect I will be exploring the similarities and differences between these two approaches (the theological look at sin, and the psychological view of narcissism) for a long time to come.