Originally Published in the Opinion Page of the Herald-Zeitung February 10-11, 2024.
I am hearing from more friends and acquaintances their feelings of exhaustion, of depression, anxiety and even loss of life energy in their daily lives. A recent national study revealed that feelings of alienation, of being on the margins of life rather than centered within it, are causing panic attacks and disruptions in eating habits.
Friends admit that the endless rounds of news stories of violence, coercions, examples of injustice, of exclusions of large swaths of citizens on racial, ethnic or economic grounds are gaining momentum. What, I have to wonder, is assaulting the American psyche to create such conditions of scarcity, discomfort and feelings of dis-ease?
The possibilities are endless, but Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offers some worthy insights that might help us think more clearly about the current accelerating malaise. But we need a frame of history to see it.
He offers in one of his daily meditations, gathered in a volume entitled Yes, and…daily meditations, that early in our history as a species, we “were deeply connected to myth, story, and the pre-rational.” A deep connection to the natural world and close observations of its patterns of birth, growth and death, grounded us as a people in these rhythms that sustained us and allowed a shared sense of what is real to prevail. The earth’s nature and our human nature were bound in the same web of life.
With the rise of the scientific and industrial revolutions, he continues, arose “the birth of individualism—and individual consciousness.” Here is where he identifies one of the major splits that have shaped our at times skewed world today: This rise of self-consciousness was accompanied, fortunately by “responsibility, ethics, and personal subjective experience.” But it carried with it a shadow, as is true of most moments of psychic reality.
The shadow had a shape: “privatized self-absorption, ego defensiveness and mental overanalyzing. What was deleted with this new formulation that in today’s world has become so excessive in its distortions, is a deeply human involvement that takes in earth, spirit, body and stories that carry the prevailing myth of wholeness and coherence. When a myth that was once collectively believed in begins to tarnish, corrode and find itself under attack by competing myths, it can no longer sustain itself or the people who subscribed to it. Excessive attention to the individual over the collective breeds a malaise of dis-ease, of non-inclusion and deepening alienation.
Beliefs, faiths, and certainties begin to break down in such an atmosphere, one appears to thrive on gaining power, control and authority, perhaps snatched from the social body rather than earned. The result is a crippling of the social and cultural body because of assaults to its integrity and truth. Truth itself is given wide berth; in its place are fantasies, ideologies and falsehoods that further undermine a populace that has lost its ability to reflect deeply on its surroundings.
Rohr ends his reflection by offering a way forward, inward and outward: a healthy society “must combine the best of both worlds: the mythic and nonrational” that opens one to the wholeness beneath the fragmented world, along with “the critical and rational to keep us honest and humble about what we can know and what we don’t know.”
Here begins the long and arduous path to retrieve a sense of coherence, faith and honesty that no one is excluded from participating in. No one should feel unattached from participating in such an enterprise to restore wholeness to the commonwealth.